Songs of Milarepa #3 – Controlled Evidence, Simons Centre, NY

Controlled Evidence, Simons Centre, NY

In November 2012 I gave a lecture and performance coinciding with a show of my printed works as part of the group exhibition ‘Controlled Evidence’ at the Simons Centre for Physics & Geometry, New York, curated by Margaret Schedel.

Songs of Milarepa #4 – Controlled Evidence, Simons Centre, NY

‘The pre-eminent authority on data and statistical visualization, Edward Tufte, wrote “the commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly – to develop strategies of seeing and showing.” Controlled Evidence showcases artists working across the science-art boundary, offering new perspectives on science, technology, and society through multiple art forms including print, sculpture, interactive auditory and visual display, artificial intelligence, and video transcoded into sound. Interpreting and understanding “big data” is one of the challenges of our time; the artists in this exhibit capture, curate, manage, and process information to create compelling works which are chimeras of art and science’ – Margaret Schedel, curator.

Autotroph XCII – Controlled Evidence, Simons Centre, NY

Autotroph XCIII – Controlled Evidence, Simons Centre, NY

Controlled Evidence, Simons Centre, NY

Autotroph XCI – Controlled Evidence, Simons Centre, NY

Autotroph XCIV – Controlled Evidence, Simons Centre, NY

Controlled Evidence, Simons Centre, NY

The Autotroph Series [link to large images]

The Autotroph series of prints use programmatic simulations of the classic analogue feedback set-up where a camera points to a monitor to which its output is connected and in doing so mimic a recursive function. This computational version contains a circuit of renderers (virtual monitor screens), each passing its output (a white square) to the next renderer in the chain. A set of transformations of the video signal, as it is conveyed around this loop, generates different kinds hyperbolic and geometric tessellations with strict symmetry.

An Autotroph (from the Greek autos = self and trophe = nutrition), is an organism that produces complex organic compounds from simple inorganic molecules using energy from light or inorganic chemical reactions.

Songs of Milarepa #1 – Controlled Evidence, Simons Centre, NY

Songs of Milarepa #2 – Controlled Evidence, Simons Centre, NY

The Songs of Milarepa Series [link to large images]

The Songs of Milarepa series are generated using parameters derived from real-time audio analysis of Eliane Radigue’s electro-acoustic drone piece ‘Songs of Milarepa’. These parameters are then used to modulate aspects of a 3-d environment creating a visual representation of sound. Frequency parameters are used to modulate an array of surface textures, while volume parameters are used to deconstruct a visualisation of the well-known Superformula onto which the textures are projected.

The Superformula is a generalization of the superellipse [named and popularized by Piet Hein] and was first proposed by Johan Gielis in ‘A generic geometric transformation that unifies a wide range of natural and abstract shapes’ in the American Journal of Botany 90 p333–338. Gielis suggested that the formula can be used to describe many complex shapes and curves that are found in nature.

‘Accustomed long to meditating on the Unborn, the Indestructible, the Unchanging, I have forgotten all definitions of this or that particular goal’ – Milarepa

Photographic documentation of the Controlled Evidence can be found HERE

Spherometria Workshop, Den Haag

In November 2012 I was invited by Synegetica Studio Lab and the ArtScience Interfaculty, Royal Academy of Art, Den Haag, to hold a workshop exploring DIY possibilities for lost-cost full-dome video projection. The main method explored was the well-know mirror-sphere system developed by Paul Bourke in which a projection [from a consumer level projector] is reflected onto the dome via a hemisphere with a mirrored surface [taking into account some distortion tricks to generate images with with correct geometric properties]. The workshop coincided with the inauguration of a new inflatable multi-dome pavilion, developed by Cocky Eek, with the specific purpose of providing a space for transdisciplinary audio-visual experimentation and act as an instrument to explore the phenomena of light, sound and movement. At the end of the workshop students presented their experiments and later went on to perform at in the dome for a special set of events at Kunstvlaai: Festival of Independents.

Spherometria Workshop, Den Haag

Spherometria Workshop, Den Haag

Spherometria Workshop, Den Haag

Workshop Description:

From the lenses of our eyeballs, rushing beyond the Earth’s escape velocity, our gaze slides across the curvature of our atmospheric lens, which both magnifies and brings into focus the glowing spheres comprising the cosmos. Spheres within spheres, perhaps, ad infinitum, evoke not only the structure of space, but also the perceptual process that allows us to tune into this structure. Students will learn how to hone this feedback mechanism through various 3D spheroidal projection techniques within specifically configured inflatable architecture created by Cocky Eek.

Spherometria Workshop, Den Haag

Spherometria Workshop, Den Haag

Spherometria Workshop, Den Haag

This hands-on exploration of optical physics will be elaborated by means of curvilinear video mapping, laser scanning and projection, as well as a survey of imaginative geometric interpretations of spherical spatiality by the likes of Frei Otto, Buckminster Fuller, Bernhard Riemann and Hermann Minkowski.  Students will afterwards have an opportunity to show the artworks they develop during the course at the Kunstvlaai Festival, Amsterdam.

Photographic documentation of the Spherometria Workshop can be found HERE

Cyclotone [Spin-up Finale]

Cyclotone was a new audio-visual work produced in 2012 in anticipation of performances for various festivals and events including Scopitone Festival [Nantes, France], The RedBull Music Academy’s ‘Cymatics, Visual Music and The Third-Eye’ [London] and Controlled Evidence [Stony Brook, US]

The work takes conceptual cues from cyclotrons and particle accelerators and alludes to aspects of particle physics, space exploration and 4-dimensional space. The work is inspired to commemorate the first wave of Russian cosmonauts including Yuri Gagarin and also the artists of the Constructivist movement who conquered space conceptually.

‘I saw 4-d geometry, 4-d space-time diagrams spinning and morphing into quasars with jets, black holes and the big bang!’ – Arthur Miller, Author of ‘Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung’

A Flickr set of Stills of Cyclotone can be found HERE

Playaround Visual Music Workshop – Taipei: Screening Session

In October 2012 I gave a set of workshops and lectures in Taiwan – Taipei and Taichung respectively for ‘Playarounds – Space Colonisation’.

‘Playaround workshop (PA12) is the forth edition of an intensely parallel and collaborative workshop of mediating open culture and DIY practices to an audience of young students and artists of diverse backgrounds. It combines the knowledge creation and open distribution of new media technologies and contemporary art practices in a socially responsible and relevant context. The theme – Space Colonization means to rethink the environment of our earth, while the survival condition is getting worth everyday, other than improving our environment, we continue to project ourself into the space, perhaps to immigrate to another planet’

Playaround Visual Music Workshop – Taipei

Playaround Visual Music Workshop – Taipei

Playaround Lecture

Playaround Lecture

My workshop unveiled aspects of visual music and live-cinema from a philosophical and technical point of view and explored possibilities using VVVV and open source/free audio software to create AV performance and installation artworks:

‘The workshop will transcend the metaphor of space colonisation in terms of interplanetary travel to speculate on space-filling algorithms in generative art, array-aesthetics of the ‘multiform’ in 3D space and the colonisation of LCD screen space via the effect of acousmatic soundscapes and beat driven sonic inputs.’

Playaround Visual Music Workshop – Field Recording Session

Playaround Visual Music Workshop – Field Recording Session

Areas covered included:

Real-time sound analysis using FFT (frequency input) and RMS (volume input)
How to synch real-time graphic with music using beat matching and beat tapping
Controlling VVVV with time-line audio software using MIDI & OSC (open sound control)
Using VST plugins for sound-synthesis controlled using VVVV
Effects, Shaders and mathematical approaches to 2D/3D video synthesis and sound synchronisation.
Fundamentals of building a time-line based visual music composition.
Philosophical and conceptual methods of video-sound and sound-video transcription to created multi-modal perceptual experiences

Playaround Visual Music Workshop – Taichung: Student Notes

Playaround Visual Music Workshop – Taichung

Playaround Visual Music Workshop Poster

Aside from the workshops I also participated in a series of lectures titled ‘Bad Art is Still Art!, but Bad Science is Not Science?’

‘In presence, we are taking notes on a diapason of situated noise from a continuum of debates, whether to achieve the consensus in realising a protocol for the establishing of art-as-research or the promotion of interdisciplinary study of art, technology and science within academia. Those debates are inevitable steams of value production and that speaking of our time being, knowledges and methods are also being transformed and recreated to serve the connecting voices and the dynamics of resonated groups; namely artist, engineer, scientist, western philosopher and/or educator. The necessity, achievements and failures of the interface of art and science are evident and to be discussed consistently’

More info can be found HERE. Flickr Sets documenting the workshops can be found HERE [Taipei] and HERE [Taichung]

Cyclotone

Scopitone is a transdisciplinary festival which takes place in Nantes, France each year involving interactive installations, concerts, multimedia performances, dance, video, visual art and film. For the 2012 edition I was invited to give an AV performance of a new work, Cyclotone.

Cyclotone

Cyclotone

Cyclotone – Sound/Vision Check

Cyclotone – Sound/Vision Check

‘Initialement conçue pour une projection hémisphérique, Rynth est une performance jouant sur la construction et déstructuration de formes géométriques, lignes, sphères, barres à l’apparence exclusivement empruntées dans une échelle de gris. Adepte du live cinéma, Paul Prudence s’intéresse particulièrement aux environnements génératifs, à la vision du son dans l’espace et à la relation entre les processus naturels et numériques (comme en témoigne son blog Datais nature)’

Cyclotone

Cyclotone

A small Flickr set of images of some of the festival performances can be found HERE. A set documenting stills of the piece can be found HERE.

Isogram

Mark Hancock recently wrote of review of my audio-visual performance projects and explored research I’ve documented at my blog Dataisnature over the last 8 years in a part interview, part article at Furtherfield: Industrial Landscapes of the Future/Past: DataisNature and the work of Paul Prudence

‘The pattern recognition part of the brain draws analogies between spatio-temporal systems found in nature and ones found in computational domains – they share similar patterns. I began to think of the forms found in natural spaces more and more in terms of the aeolian protocols, metamorphic algorithms and hydrodynamic computations that created them.’

‘The blogging process offers a chance to gather information and allow some of the artist’s own influences and present interests to manifest themselves into a rough-hewn structure. Blogging facilitates a medium for an archaeology of aesthetics, technology and conceptuality. All this fragmented information is gathered then reconstituted, and fed back into the artistic practice.’

You can read the article HERE

Parhelia [Finale]

In late May 2012 I gave a performance of my visual music piece Parhelia at Plums A-V Festival in Moscow. As with all my performances preparation for a new show includes adding new material and sections to the existing structure of a piece. One of the benefits of working with generative systems is the relative ease of adding new content and reconfiguring existing parameters to create new combinatorial sequences. A new collection of sounds were harvested from an existing bank of personal field-recordings taken from mechanical devices and used to choreograph kinetic geometric transformations.

Parhelia at Plums Festival – Paul Prudence

Parhelia at Plums Festival – Paul Prudence

Parhelia at Plums Festival – Paul Prudence

Parhelia at Plums Festival – Paul Prudence

Parhelia at Plums Festival – Paul Prudence

A Flickr set of images of the festival performances can be found HERE. A set documenting stills of the piece can be found HERE. Another video of Parhelia can be found HERE.

After the show I spent a few days exploring the Moscow by foot, using psychogeographic trajectories based on the locations of buildings such the Shukhov and Ostankino Towers and The Monument to The Conquerors of Space as well as other assorted modernist/constructivist buildings. A Flickr set documenting my explorations can be found HERE.

Thanks to Anya Intektra Ti and Kirill Markushin for the invitation to Moscow and to perform at the festival.

Lecture at the Emergent Digital Practices Department, Denver University

In early May 2012 I gave a lecture and workshop at the Emergent Digital Practices Department, University of Denver, alongside two live performances, one at the Cube (with Francisco Lopez) and another at the Gates Planetarium. The lecture included an overview of my artistic practice concentrating on generative visual music systems and multi-modal works I’ve made using VVVV.

Hydro-acoustic Study, the piece performed at the Cube, has been developed in collaboration with the sound artists Francisco Lopez. For the Gates Planetarium performance I brought along Rynth – a full-dome work originally developed for the Planetarium Artis and performed during the Sonic Acts Festival held in Amsterdam, 2010. A Flickr set of photos documenting my trip to Denver can be found HERE

Thanks to Trace Redell and Tim Weaver for the invitation to sunny Denver, and a great trip into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Störung: Sound & Visual Art [DVD+Book]

A DVD edit of my collaborative live-performance work Francisco Lopez is contained on the recently released Störung: Sound & Visual Art DVD [also including a book]. This particular 6 minute version of ‘Hydro-Organic Machine Study’ was constructed and edited specifically for DVD format and contains new elements not found in the live performance.

The full list of artists included on this release include: D-Fuse, dextro, AM [AEM], Sergio Subero, Sergio Brauer, Alan Courtis, Paul Prudence, Francisco López, Kim Cascone, XX+XY, Aleix Fernández, Asférico, Andy Guhl, Hugo Olim, Simon Whetham, elufo, Diego Alberti y Federico Monti.

A short promo clip of the DVD can be found HERE

Press Release:

Störung: Sound & Visual Art” is the ninth release of Störung, and has been published together with Cameo. This DVD+Book is available from 11th of April 2012 and contains eleven exclusive audiovisual works made by more than twenty artists from different parts of the world. It includes a book with synopses written by the artists, their biographies and selected photographs taken during the past six years of Störung.

The selection of pieces is a representative sample of various artistic tendencies that fall into the sound and image concept of Störung. The techniques employed in the pieces are very diverse and include both analogical and digital processes in their sound and visual elements. Apart from its documentary function as audiovisual file, this release is intended to inspire all people interested in art and its contemporary music tendencies.

I will perform a commissioned AV work in collaboration with the Spanish composer Ramón Prada, also know as Vittus, for LEV Festival [Laboratorio de Electrónica Visual ] on April 27th 2012 at the Teatro de la Laboral, Gijon, Spain. The work interweaves classical composition incorporating live piano and viola, with field recordings and abstract electronic tones/rhythms. For real-time video generation I used live sound analysis combined with time-line triggers – often shifting the connections between musical voices and abstract visual signifiers in the hope of creating non-predictable synchronies. These shifts are also triggered by rhythmic aspects of the composition.

Teatro de la Laboral [performance space for LEV/Vittus]

The sixth edition of LEV aims to present current work connecting visual arts and electronic music – in particular those using live cross-modal strategies to create synergetic relationships between sound and image.

Flickr Stills can be found HERE