F.A.C.E. - Facial recognition

In August, I was invited to create an installation for TiLT Dance's Manifold event at the Kazimier in Liverpool.

Recently I have been working on some projection mapping techniques with General Midi of a.P.A.t.T., so this seemed like the ideal opportunity to test out some of the techniques we'd developed. The result was F.A.C.E. (the Facial Apprehension Control Experiment), an interactive installation that used facial recognition software to replace and swap people's faces.

The night was an incredible fusion of performance and installation art. A couple of particular highlights include the piece which used a live bio-sensor to control a 'light-suit' worn by a trapeze artist, and an installation by Null Pointer where paint was sprayed down a tube onto a record player as it played a record.

Uaxuctum | The Final Reckoning

Well, my residency and installation in Second Life has come to an end. It was a fascinating experience, and I got a lot of good feedback. I'd like to thank the Linden Endowment for the Arts for the opportunity, and Jayjay Zifanwe for all his help during the residency.

You can read my previous post about the ideas behind the installation. There are also a few blogs that covered it. Here are the links:

Honour McMillan
Victoria Lenoirre
Apmel Goosson
Apmel - Amphibolous gig
Apmel - AOM gig
LEA blog
Virtual Outworlding
Briarmelle Quintessa
University of Western Australia

Here's a video of one of the pieces from the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse concert I put on during the residency:



And here's a recording of the Amphibolous set I did there too:

The Geometry of Flux | UWA Centenary

The Geometry of Flux | UWA Centenary

Yesterday I entered the University of Western Australia's Centenary 3D Open Art Challenge, a prize for 3D art created in the virtual world of Second Life. A few years ago I was one of the winners of the UWA's Imagine art prize under my previous Second Life name of Snubnose Genopeak. Since then, the UWA has worked tirelessly to promote the Arts in Second Life, and I was pleased to be able to support their centenary celebrations.

For my entry, I wanted to celebrate not the UWA's past, but their future, and the work they have done to support cutting edge developments in art. My submission is a kinetic sculpture called The Geometry of Flux, and was entered under my Second Life name, Cajska Carlsson. It is an exploration of the future of form and content, a geometry that constantly evolves into ever new forms. The sound component of the installation similarly generates evolving forms in a continuous evolution. It was composed using only feedback, though this is disguised by the ethereal nature of the sound.

The exhibition will be open throughout June and July 2012. You can visit it by following this link. You will need a Second Life account, which is free.

Here is the description that accompanies the piece.

Form and content are linked together through a dialectical process in shining unity.

Constant evolution...

development...

a movement towards, but never reaching...

never repeating...

Discard the old semiotic forms of meaning, that endlessly recycle the experience of the ages.

Create a new form of sensory-motor meaning.

Meaning through direct experience : of the senses : of movement : construct a new world.

If Only...! There and Back Again

Last month I organised If Only...! with Roger Hill. If Only...! is a night of varied performance run at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. Two of my projects were included in the night, both interactive installations in which the audience would become the performers.

The first project was Inari Dive, a collaborative project with Japanese artist, Inari Nishiki, exploring the experience of diving. The project was Inari's brainchild. My part of the collaboration focused on the soundtrack. Participants would be blindfold and given wireless headphones, cutting off their senses from the outside world. They would then navigate through a labyrinth of ropes while the soundtrack played through their headphones. The track explores ideas of depth in different ways, and uses a new way of transforming sounds into each other I have been developing using Pure Data. Here is a link to the track:


The second project was The Sensorium of Sensational Scents, an olfactory-visual installation that used a range of perfumes I made from a wide variety of unusual ingredients. While smelling the scents, the participants' reactions would be videoed and projected onto the wall of the room, turning the audience into performers. I'll be releasing my range of perfumes soon, and they'll be accompanied by a free download code for my album, Oh Oca O. You can see some pictures from both installations below. The pictures are by Dan Williams.

In creating the night, Roger and myself wanted to explore the notion of performance. What is it? And who are the performers? We wanted pieces in which there would not just be audience members watching performers on a stage, we wanted to include work where the audience themselves would become performers, such as the blindfold participants of Inari Dive, navigating their way through the labyrinth. We also wanted to explore the idea of art as experience, so included projects that worked on a wide variety of senses. Sight, sound, touch, smell, equilibrium were all explored, and we finished the night with taste, as provided by Squash Nutrition. Here's a short video with highlights of the night's events:

 

Feedback Prototype Test

I've just completed the first prototype for my interactive audio-visual-haptic project, Feedback. The work uses the sense of touch to guide the audience through its interactions with the piece and each other, making the audience’s engagement literally ‘hands on’. The project extends my work in the manipulation of feedback with physical objects. Passing feedback through the surface of a beach ball, the audience can change the sound by manipulating the beach ball. The video was recorded on my phone at Red Wire Studios, Liverpool. The prototype was funded by a research grant from Frakture.

Here's a short video of the first test of the prototype.

Up the Wall, Chester

Here are some pictures from my recent installation at Up the Wall in Chester. Up the Wall is a site specific, installation and live art festival along Chester’s ancient city walls run by Chester Performs. My installation was a 49-speaker installation called Jericho's Revenge. It was created under the Noise Club name as a site-specific work.

Jericho's Revenge is an interactive sound installation that turns the biblical story of the fall of the Walls of Jericho on its head.  Instead of bringing the walls tumbling down, here, a wall is constructed from the sound of trombones, a viewer-playable, 49 strong orchestra of powerful and dissonant sounds, giving new resonance to an ancient tale.

Jericho's Revenge uses dense harmonic structures to create clouds of sound that are simultaneously static and continuously changing. Musically, the piece pays tribute to the choral music of the Renaissance; in particular, to Thomas Tallis' motet, Spem in Alium, which uses 40 independent vocal lines to create, in places, an intensely powerful wall of sound. The idea in Jericho's Revenge was to use Tallis' techniques within a modern musical idiom.

 The trombonist was Alex Scott, and my assistant on the project was Anthony Thomas.

Photos by Tamsin Drury

Here's a video of the festival as a whole, including my piece.


Up the Wall 2010 from Chester Performs on Vimeo.

Noise Club at the World Museum, Liverpool

The DIY Music Day was a co-production between the World Museum in Liverpool, music producer Ross Dalziel and the PRS for Music Foundation. There were quite a few different groups involved, from a restored vintage fairground organ to members of the band a.P.A.t.T. playing some of the gamelan instruments in the museum's collection.

Noise Club was stationed in the insect house. What a great place for making noise, surrounded by bees and ants and all kinds of crazy stuff! This was part performance, part installation, part exposition. We placed pre-recorded compositions around the floor we were on (my favourite being behind the giant model of a fly, complete with moving head), then demonstrated some of the instruments we'd been working on recently; and, of course, always accompanied by the sounds of insects from around the world.

Listen to a recording of some of the day...