Stalls
Posted by Will Schrimshaw on July 4th, 2008 filed in UncategorizedComment now »
There is danger this going a bit “American Beauty”, if you know what I mean…
I emerged from Raviv Ganchrow’s inwound space [more on this will follow] into the end of a day at Potsdamer.
[stereo, headphones]
Prepared Fences
Posted by Will Schrimshaw on July 3rd, 2008 filed in UncategorizedComment now »
Berlin is littered with building sites that are gradually filling in the city’s gaps. The familiar metal mesh fences that surround such sites are ubiquitous. There is, however, a subtle difference to those I’m used to seeing around Newcastle: the fences in Berlin are prepared, they are fitted with rattlers, folded metal sheets that bare the contractor’s logo. In the wind or in response to impact these rattling tags give the fences an increased sustain and ’sizzle’. This makes me wonder what additional preparations could be added in order to make use of such frameworks as an audible addition to the city…
Listen (stereo, headphones work well):
Tuned City
Posted by Will Schrimshaw on June 6th, 2008 filed in I and I, artComment now »
The Little Helpers are going to Berlin as part of the Tuned City festival:
Tuned City - Between sound and space speculation is an exhibition and conference project planned for July 01.-05. 2008 in Berlin which proposes a new evaluation of architectural spaces from the perspective of the acoustic.
The project draws the traditions of critical discussion about urban space within the architecture and urban planning discourse–as well as its strategies and working methods–into the context of sound art. This expanded discussion reenforces the potential of the spatial and communicative properties of sound as a tool and means of urban practice.
At the foundations of this event are artists’ works and theoretical approaches which examine in a critical and sensitive way the given urban and architectural situations alongside their resulting socio-political implications, that re-use existing spaces or that conceive and open new spaces.
A dialogue will be built at the intersection of both disciplines which traces out the complex relations and interactions of space-sound, both presenting and testing new strategies, methods, possibilities and potentials of sound work within the artistic and applied context.
Tuned City is structured in two main segments – symposium and site-specific installations.
On the individual days the symposium will approach the topic from five different theoretical and spatial perspectives. Spaces built for the production and reception of sound or acoustically flawed or impossible spaces, public and semi-public urban space, finished and planned spaces, wasteland or cultivated spaces, indoors and outdoors – the chosen venues correspond with the individual topic of the day and offer plastic illustration and demonstration. Tuned City will try to break down the conventional conference format and to catalyse the discussion via the space in a mixture of academic talk, artistic presentation, performances, reports from working practice, demonstrations, and walks.
The five days will be accompanied by a dense workshop programme and a performance programme corresponding with the individual topics.
For the programme structure see dates.
Little Helpers will be installed in various sites for the duration of the Tuned City festival. I had planned to attend the festival even before I was asked to take the Little Helpers over, as many of the people presenting work fall within the focus of my PhD research (Edwin van der Heide, Brandon LaBelle, Mark Bain, Barry Blesser…). The festival’s focus on sound-space is of particular importance to the work I’m doing at the moment, in particular its intensive and extensive (or extimate to borrow a Lacanian phrase) properties. In my current and admittedly speculative work there is an emphasis on the impact of the former, intensive sound-spaces, upon behaviour and its role in constituting a mode of environmental interaction. I’m hoping to develop exactly what I mean by this over the coming summer months and will no doubt post excerpts up here from time to time. The approach taken to sound-spaces by the festival and its associated artists is of particular importance for its engagement with auditory environments and their contingency with regard to an immediate environmental infrastructure, an approach that (thankfully) problematizes what could loosely be referred to as an electro-acoustic approach to sound spatialization. There’s obviously at lot more to say on this, hopefully I’ll have it a little clearer in my head once I’m back from Berlin and have had a chance to let the dust settle into something resembling a coherent argument. Bearing all this in mind the programme of artists and speakers is particularly exciting.
Sketching Interactions
Posted by Will Schrimshaw on June 4th, 2008 filed in I and I, art, openness, theoryComment now »
I’ll be giving a presentation of some work in progress at the forthcoming Sketching Interactions workshop at Culture Lab, Newcastle. My part in what looks set to be an interesting day of presentations and discussions will be quite informal, probably looking at uses of ‘authoring’ tools such as SuperCollider, Arduino and Processing are used sketching environments, and how this often isn’t geared towards the development of a product but leads to an ongoing sketch of what turns out to be an indefinitely abstract object, a ongoing development and amalgamation of modules and concepts. I’ll probably set up some of the sound reactive oscillators I’ve been working on, and give an overview of of my practice as I most regularly see it, blurry, unfinished, open ended and collaborative….Here’s the poster and the offical invite (open to anyone interested).
Please join us at Culture Lab (Newcastle University) on the 25th Junefor the ‘Sketching Interactions’ workshop. The workshop brings togethernoted academics and practitioners from the North East and beyond todiscuss tools and methods for sketching and designing interactiveapplications and products. The day will consist of talks, demos,performances and discussions. We hope that the event will provide aforum for networking and to generate new ideas and projects. We’ll alsohave keynotes from William Gaver and Andy Boucher (Goldsmiths College)and Robert Young (Northumbria University School of Design) as well as ahost of talent from the worlds of art, music, design and computing.The event is sponsored by INSCAPE, a European Sixth Framework project tocreate a software tool for authoring interactive stories. This meansthat it is completely FREE (including drinks and lunch) and open to all,however, places are very limited so please book now. Contactmartyn.dade-robertson@ncl.ac.uk for more information or to book a placeby visiting http://www.ncl.ac.uk/culturelab/embed/inscape/ and fillingin the details.
Paolo Angeli
Posted by Will Schrimshaw on April 30th, 2008 filed in art, musicComment now »
Last week I had the pleasure of playing with Paolo Angeli again. He’s a fantastic musician to play with, incredibly responsive. We recorded a piece which will be released some time later in the year. I’ll post something up here once it’s available.
For the recording session I played the drums with him Paolo and David de la Haye (the other half of Eyes). I also played live with him and Adam Parkinson on Wednesday evening. Adam and I were doing some live sampling and processing of his guitar. I was slightly worried that our presence was going to be unnecessary, as the preparations he’s added to his guitar over the year give him access to such a wide range of sounds that I wasn’t sure what we could really add to it. There were some difficult moments in the set, which seemed to fall into three parts, but in the end things worked out nicely. Live coding isn’t the best approach to improvised music when you’re playing with a musician who has such immediate access to his sound source, but that’s what I’ve been performing with recently so I decided to stick with it. In the end I decided I could have done with some kind of interface, which I’m now working on. What I believe to best bits are compiled in a mix of the gig I’ve just finished. It’s available here: angMix.mp3 (22.7MB)
There are a few photos from the gig available here.
Archieater
Posted by Will Schrimshaw on April 28th, 2008 filed in I and I, art, opennessComment now »
Archieater is a project in its sketchbook phase that aims to push the sound of a room through its own resonant frequency. The resonant frequency is determined by generating a spectral map of a space through monitoring the distortions of white noise as it is played out into the space. Once a suitable frequency has been identified a feedback loop is established and using FFT bin shifting the sound of the room is fed through its own resonant frequency. The idea is to alter the audible perception of spatial characteristics using a space’s own properties and sonorous qualities. The analysis and identification of the rooms resonant frequency is to be constantly assessed. I’m interested to hear whether, if the system is not designed to make any distinction between the space and bodies that occupy it, movement in the room will cause distortions and alterations in what is considered its primary resonant frequency, therefore altering the frequency of the feedback loop. There are obvious conceptual parallels to be drawn with the work of La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier, as well as aesthetic links with the work of Toshimaru Nakamura. The difference between my approach an theirs is fairly minimal, which does make me question how far to take this. I’m wondering whether from a research point of view a more in-depth look at the work of these artists might yield more interesting results through writing. However, it’s experimental worth in the context of my own research has compelled me to take it this far at least.
The reason for posting this now is more of a dorky/technical/SuperCollider issue. The project is in its infancy and there is lots of automation to be sorted out. For the purpose of testing the idea out I built an interface that allows me to control the bin shifting. For christmas I got Reas and Fry’s Processing book from my brother, only after working through it did I realise that I might be able to put GUI objects in an array and access their values via their index positions! The dorkyness of my excitement about this is accompanied by a hint of frustration at how obvious this must seem to someone with any decent schooling in programming. It was a real “of course!” moment, I need to read more programming books.
The result is a nicely dynamic system that allows me to create any number of synth modules (which set up the feedback loop and bin shifting) which simultaneously sets up the necessary buffers and GUI objects (sliders in this case). The sliders then control the bin shifting for each individual synth module. The reason for doing this is that I wanted one synth module to set the frequency of a feedback loop to that of the room’s primary resonant frequency and a number of others to set up feedback loops shifted to the value of a particular partial. The array based eureka moment means that I only have to specify how many modules I’d like and the rest is done for me (like I said, painfully obvious for some but a bit of a revelation for me).
Here’s how it looks and the code for anyone who might find this sort of thing useful.
s = Server.internal.boot;
s.boot;
s.quit;
(
SynthDef(\binshifter, { arg out=0, bufnum, shift = 1.6;
var in, chain;
in = AudioIn.ar(1);
chain = FFT(bufnum, in);
chain = PV_BinShift(chain, shift);
Out.ar(out, 0.5 * IFFT(chain).dup);
}).send(s);
)
(
n = 3; //Number of FFT Synths and related GUI stuff, set to 3 in image posted above.
w = GUI.window.new(”SPATIUM”, Rect(120, 120, 170, 120)).front;
w.view.decorator = FlowLayout( w.view.bounds );
a = Array.new(n);
m = [0.25, 4].asSpec;
n.do({ |i|
s.sendMsg(”/b_alloc”, i, 1024);
i+1.do({
a.add( GUI.slider.new(w, Rect(20, 10, 160, 32))
.action_({
s.sendMsg(”/n_set”, (1000 + i), \shift, m.map(a[i].value));
(i.asString ++ “: ” ++ m.map(a[i].value)).postln
}));
});
Synth.new(\binshifter, [\bufnum, i], s, \addToHead);
});
)
Intensive Architecture
Posted by Will Schrimshaw on April 27th, 2008 filed in art, theory2 Comments »
Molly Wright Steenson of Active Social Plastic, has written a nice summary of some of Philippe Rahm’s architectural practice. His work seems fascinating and I’ve spent most of the day reading what I can online about his work. This is the first encounter I’ve had with his work, but it seems to resonate with something I’ve been thinking about for a little while now: the notion of intensive architecture. This is a decidedly raw and underdeveloped idea that is possibly developed elsewhere, and you’re always in danger when delving into other disciplines for the first time, but then this is a blog for testing out such ideas. This has been filtering into my recent practice, and at some point will develop into some more considered writing, but Steenson’s post has touched on something that compelled me to write for more experimental reasons.
First, a little information on why this grabbed me: The theoretical context for my recent work has more than a few dark, shadowy corners. One such corner is where the Bergsonian critique of spatiality lingers and is developed by Deleuze. I’ve yet to follow up some references suggested to me by Levi (as I’ve been on a soldering binge for a while) but either way a certain suspicion has formed regarding the synonymity of architecture and hylomorphism. Where spatiality is understood in strictly extensive terms, in the sense of things being-there, it is instrumental in the construction and maintenance of identities, that is to say, as spatial multiplicity which when divided retains its identity. I find the discrepancy between spatial and intensive multiplicites interesting, and this is where I need to get stuck into Bergson, as when I think of spatiality in Deleuzean and more idiomatic terms I tend to think of spatio-temporal dynamisms as they appear in Deleuze’s earlier texts (The Method of Dramatization in particular) and also because this seems more attuned to space-time rather than a split between temporal (durational) and spatial multiplicities. Like I say, I need to read up on Bergson but that’s not going to happen for a while, so speculation will have to do for now. The metaphorical use of architecture, abstracted from its purely industrial and commercial practice, has been of particular use to a wide range of artists and writers working with sound, Brandon LaBelle is a excellent example of this. With this work in mind, as well as the influence of architectural practice and theory upon it, an understanding of architecture built around a critique that limits it to a purely extensive practice of the organisation of matter, the maintenance of form, spatial identity, its subordination to durational and intensive multiplicity, seems overly constraining and limited to a commonplace notion of architecture in an almost industrial or commercial sense. Alternative practices within architecture and related theory (Jane Rendell for example) break this open into a much more interesting and informative field. I’ll come back to this once I’ve got onto what I find so fascinating about Rahm’s work.
Steensons writes:
Swiss architect Philippe Rahm … told an audience at Princeton last week, “When you create a space, you create a climate.” His architecture is environmental in a literal sense: he creates ecosystems and climates: by changing variables like temperature, UV light and oxygen, he experiments with new types of spaces that might be recreated…
Hormonorium, the Swiss Pavilion in the 2002 Venice Biennale, manipulated levels of UV light and oxygen in the room in order to shift hormonal levels within its visitors, making them feel less fatigued and more stimulated. 528 fluorescent tubes under clear plexiglass construct the floor, and illuminate so brightly, they make the boundaries of the room disappear. The flooding of UV light creates a decrease in melatonin level, waking up and turning on the visitors. Bringing the oxygen level down to that usually found at 3000 meters stimulates the production of a hormone that increases red blood cell count and improving physical capability. The room changes the physiology of its participants…
Rahm noted how writers like Jules Verne noted how the invention of streetlighting completely changed the experience of night and day. Diurnisme reverses this effect, shifting time by recreating the night during the day, with its many yellow-orange lamps. The effect works on melatonin production, which operates on the blue and red wavelengths of the eye but not the yellow. The room played 18 Diurnes, composed by Rahm as an inversion to nocturnes.
It’s been noted, in some of the bits and pieces I’ve found online today, that Rahm has a meteorological approach to architecture: the creation of dynamic ecosystems that make an impression upon the physiology of its inhabitants. This is architecture projecting intensity rather than maintaining extensity, woking upon embodied spatium rather than communicating form. This intensive approach, working upon the very matter of beings rather than their spatial organisation, seems to go against the critique of spatiality that Levi has flagged up. This method of architectural practice sees the creation of an energetic environment, an informative affective and individuating bubble that resonates more with Deleuze’s ‘Method of Dramatization’ than the outline of spatial critique that is in some ways haunting aspects of my work at the moment. I’m thinking of the environments constructed by Rahm as informative in the sense that are affective spaces working upon the very fabric of the body, eroding the boundary between occupant and host site, opening the individual to a more overt interactive and processual individuation. This intensive projection is nonetheless architectural, a built and meticulously designed environment, but it presents itself as a primarily intensive practice Such an architecture finds its site in embodied intensity, a projected site that undoubtedly relies upon an extensive framework to support it, but it occupies and distorts such a framework. As Jane Rendell has pointed out, architecture is always already an occupied territory, occupied by architecture itself; architectural space renders us and our movement subject to a spatial hierarchy. Rahm’s intensive environments seem to occupy and eat away at such extensive frameworks, usurping its spatial hierarchy and imposing another. This is a practice that seems to be embedded in a certain environmental noise, taking a route to the conditioning of extensive behaviour through intensive processes, providing a meteorological, chemical, etc., … , catalyst for the manipulation of environmental experience and interaction. Here architectural intent is filtered through the individuals that occupy it, distorting it at the point of its realization. This is why Steenson’s title is interesting, ‘Manipulating Environments’, suggesting the manipulation of individual physiology and experience as much as the strictly spatial and environmental aspects of the constructed site.
My intrigue in Rahm’s approach, and the inclination to speculate on what the work’s doing, is driven by current thinking and practice (my own and that of others) working with spatial sound. The application of architectural theory towards are more nuanced interpretation of sound installation, environmental sound, auditory environments and so on, is a useful one. Sound is, however, a more dynamic and illusive material than that commonly and reductively associated with architectural practice, yet it can be seen to impact upon spatial and interactive experience in sufficiently similar ways to warrant making such comparisons. Rahm’s practice, the creation of intensive and manipulative environments that distort and transform a host site, gets close to some of the ways I’ve been thinking about the construction of sonic fields and their impact upon those that pass through them.
Cutter
Posted by Will Schrimshaw on April 18th, 2008 filed in I and I, musicComment now »
Here’s an excerpt from a performance I did in Huddersfield on 7th March: schrimshawHudders.mp3 (8.7MB / 9.5min).
Here’s what went in the programme:
The performance makes use of a variety of open circuits into which the body and performance space can enter, activating a conductive auditory field. Gaps in home made electronic devices connect the flesh to the flow of electricity, the sonic properties of the performance space are drawn into the circuit and mixed with the material being processed by incomplete code which is developed and manipulated during performance. This circuit of interconnectivity produces rich textural sound fields which are subject to aleatoric and algorithmic decision making that provides a framework for the reorganization, manipulation and spatialization of sound.
I used a homemade crackle box as part of the performance. To prevent ruining my spine by carrying an audio interface and mixer to gigs (my computer is so old that it doesn’t have a line in) I’ve resorted to sticking the crackle box speaker to the computer’s inbuilt mic with gaffer tape. For anything else this would just sound awful but the ‘recorded through a crisp packet’ quality seems to suit the crackle box.
When I got to the gig two of the contacts had snapped. Luckily there was a leatherman handy to rectify the situation. One day I’ll get round to putting this on something more permanent.
It was a good gig in a recovered church which had fantastic resonance. The high point for me was Joseph Kudirka’s set using two cheep radios to receive and diffuse the crunchy yet rich noise being broadcast from his computer.
More Helpers
Posted by Will Schrimshaw on April 18th, 2008 filed in I and I, art, opennessComment now »
There are now five Little Helpers. Two are a bit buggy but I’m getting there. In the next few weeks I’ll have 10-15.
Here’s a few images and a video clip from some tests that I’ve been doing:
1.9MBReset buttons need adding to the circuit boards as occasionally there are issues starting them up, and the power cables keep getting ripped out so I need to find a way to stop that happening without having to resort to some awful maplins housing. The code also needs changing a little so the motors, when triggered, start slowly and then pick up speed reaching a maximum level and then slow down to a stopping point again, a kind of mechanical fade in and fade out rather than just turning on or off.
int incomingByte = 0; // for incoming serial datavoid setup() {
int transistorPin = 2;
int ultraSoundSignal = 7; // Ultrasound signal pin
int val = 0;
int ultrasoundValue = 0;
int timecount = 0; // Echo counter
int ledPin = 13; // LED connected to digital pin 13
int waitTime;
//Serial.begin(9600); // opens serial port, sets data rate to 9600 bps
pinMode(transistorPin, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
}
void loop() {
timecount = 0;
val = 0;
waitTime = 0;
pinMode(ultraSoundSignal, OUTPUT); // Switch signalpin to output
// Send low-high-low pulse to activate the trigger pulse of the sensor
digitalWrite(ultraSoundSignal, LOW); // Send low pulse
delayMicroseconds(2); // Wait for 2 microseconds
digitalWrite(ultraSoundSignal, HIGH); // Send high pulse
delayMicroseconds(5); // Wait for 5 microseconds
digitalWrite(ultraSoundSignal, LOW); // Holdoff
// Listening for echo pulse
pinMode(ultraSoundSignal, INPUT); // Switch signalpin to input
val = digitalRead(ultraSoundSignal); // Append signal value to val
while(val == LOW) { // Loop until pin reads a high value
val = digitalRead(ultraSoundSignal);
}
while(val == HIGH) { // Loop until pin reads a high value
val = digitalRead(ultraSoundSignal);
timecount = timecount +1; // Count echo pulse time
}
//Writing out values to the serial port:
ultrasoundValue = timecount; // Append echo pulse time to ultrasoundValue
/*
serialWrite(’A'); // Example identifier for the sensor
printInteger(ultrasoundValue);
serialWrite(10);
serialWrite(13);
*/
// ***** Motor Stuff *****
//digitalWrite(transistorPin, LOW); // turn motor off.
//digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
if (ultrasoundValue < 2600) { // Set activation threshold
/* for loop adds a “tail” to the motors activation, so that movement continues
for a short time after it has been activated.
remove for loop to have direct maping of ultrasoundValue onto motor speed. */
for (int i=0; i < random(60, 140); i++) {
digitalWrite(transistorPin, LOW); // turn motor off.
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
delay(random(5, 25));
digitalWrite(transistorPin, HIGH); // turn motor on;
digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
delay(10);
}
}
else {
digitalWrite(transistorPin, LOW); // turn motor off.
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
delay(100);
}
}
As soon as the weather picks up I intend to try them out on a hedge in Fenham and on a few lamp posts, bus stops and railings around Newcastle. Documentation of the project will be periodically updated and made available here.
Workshops
Posted by Will Schrimshaw on March 20th, 2008 filed in art, opennessComment now »
Two great looking workshops coming up:
1) A four day SuperCollider summer school will be held at the University of Westminster, Room 206 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW, Tues July 15 to Friday 18th 2008. Both beginners and more advanced students are welcome and will be catered for. The course will culminate in a public gig for participants at Public Life in Shoreditch on the Friday night. The organisers are John Eacott and Nick Collins, who will also be the main tutors.
The course is being run at minimum costs on a basis of pay-what-you-like (you pay once at the workshops). In order to avoid time wasting, a minimum of £10 is required, and a £20 course fee is suggested as a basis for students, benefits etc (pay more if you can). However, bear in mind how much other workshops of this nature tend to cost, and you‘ll get an idea of how we’re going out of the way to make this as non-commercial a venture as possible. The tutors are accepting no fee apart from travel expenses, and any excess will go to subsidising the Friday night performance opportunity, and if we go beyond that, to a dementia charity.
The maximum number of participants we can take is 30. Please email John Eacott off list in order to register (john atsymbol informal dot org). Note also that the organisers are not responsible for finding London accommodation for international participants; travel and lodging would have to be dealt with by you.
read this thread for more information and contact details.
2) pure:dyne is an essential tool created to provide a complete, custom and ready-made computer environment for media artists.
On Saturday 5th of April we have a pure:dyne workshop at Access Space. It will run from 12 noon to 5pm. The workshop is free, but spaces are limited so please contact jake {AATT} access-space {DDOTT} org to reserve a place.
This workshop introduces participants to the pure:dyne operating system, giving an overview of what it can do, and why you should use it!
Developed by GOTO10 and friends, pure:dyne is a complete GNU/Linux Operating System dedicated to live audiovisual processing and streaming, and focuses largely on Pure Data, SuperCollider, Csound, Chuck as well as live video-processing systems such as Processing, Packet Forth, openFrameworks and Fluxus.
pure:dyne also comes with a complete friendly desktop and a vast range of classic graphics software (Gimp; Inkscape, Blender…) and Music production tools (Ardour2, Hydrogen, Audacity…).
The system provides particular optimizations at the kernel and compilation level, when necessary, to take the most out of i686 machines for real-time audio and video. As a consequence, this operating system is well suited for live performances and art installations. Its live form makes it also a perfect system for workshops or installations on locked down workstations which is the case in most universities and institutions.
The tutor for the session will be one of pure:dyne’s developers Antonios Galanopoulos.