Composer/performer Pamela Z creates art using her voice, samples, gesture-activated MIDI controllers (including the BodySynth), and a healthy dose of electronic processing. If you missed her solo performance at Roulette last Tuesday, perhaps you can catch one of her events soon.
Excerpts from a 2008 performance of The Pendulum are below. Stay with this one; it starts out slowly.
Jacaranda is a multidimensional sculpture created by artist Jim Jenkins. Seven automated birdies perched on the limbs of a metal tree. Their choreographed movements are directed by Arduino microcontrollers.
Virtual bird watching. No birdseed, no droppings, no hassles.
LEMUR stands for the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. It's a band of music machines. We caught the band at its Roulette gig last Saturday, performing with human composer/performer Ikue Mori, as part of the New York Electronic Art Festival.
Eric Singer is the founder of LEMUR and discusses the robots in this video.
Despite a recent tweet, this has nothing to do with balloon boy. Take a giant balloon with a video projector broadcasting images in public spaces and you have Urballoon, created by Carlos J. Gómez de Llarena.
Images can be uploaded by anyone and apparently in real time. I wonder if the organizers have an editing policy. I'm sure the borders of free speech and pornography are often challenged by this project.
Here's a video of an Urballoon event that recently hovered over Tompkins Square Park in NYC.
Don't miss your chance to impose your vision on the urban landscape...at least temporarily. Learn more about it at urballoon.com.
We visited the new Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery today to see the inaugural exhibition Textual Landscapes: Real and Imagined. Great show, though not recommended for those who prefer their art unplugged!
Especially compelling were the works of Jim Campbell -- haunting, lo-res images gliding across a grid of LEDs.
If you happen to be in Cardiff, October 22 - 24, be sure to look for Hand from Above by London artist/designer Chris O'Shea. He claims this piece was influenced by Land of Giants and Goliath. Here's a video from last month in Liverpool.
New and Noteworthy And speaking of the Big Guy, here's one that's supremely high tech and high art. That venerable news publication The Onion broke the story.
God Introduces New Bird
THE HEAVENS—In what is being described by advance marketing materials as "the first divine creation in more than 6,000 years," God Almighty, Our Lord Most High, introduced a brand-new species of bird into existence Monday. [Read complete story on theonion.com.]
Last Friday evening members of Silicon Soul attended Project Demos II, part of the New York Electronic Art Festival. Excellent presentations were made by Cindy Poremba from of Kokoromi Game Art Collective and by collaborators Stephanie Rothenberg and Megan Michalak, who presented a work-in-progress World X Diagnostics. Choreographer and arts researcher Norah Zuniga Shaw, presented Synchronous Objects, created in collaboration with Maria Palazzi (Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design), William Forsythe (choreographer), the Forsythe Company, and dancers, computer scientists, architects, neuroscientists, designers and geographers from Ohio State University. The composer/neuroscientist and the dancer/digital animator in Silicon Soul had eagerly anticipated the presentation.
Briefly, the project uses algorithmic approaches and animation techniques to analyze the choreography of Forsythe's dance One Flat Thing, repeated. Choreographic elements such as gestures, gaze, and cues can be isolated from the dance and re-presented through a dizzying number of visualization tools. By the end of the thirty minute presentation this dancer/digital animator was silently screaming, "Just show me the dance!"
We must admit, however, that the next day we had enormous fun playing with the web-based Synchronous Objects, using the such tools as CueVisualizer and the MovementMaterialIndex. Try it.
The following video presentation of the project was produced by WOSU.
Clicking the image below will take you to a promo video on the Synchronous Objects site.
For Pogophonic artist Gil Kuno rigged Vurtego high-performance pogo sticks for sound. The men in the picture below are composing. Click image to view the video of the composers in action on Kuno's unsound.com.
The pogo sticks in the Animusic of Wayne Lytle and Dave Crognale aren't real. Lytle and Crognale synthesize both graphics and music using proprietary software. Click to view animation on the animusic site.
Dialtones (A Telesymphony) was originally presented at Ars Electronica eight years ago. It was conceived by Golan Levin with contributors Scott Gibbons, Gregory Shakar, Yasmin Sohrawardy, Joris Lehner, Gunther Schmidl, Erich Semlak, Jonathan Feinberg and Shelly Wynecoop. From the artists' statement in 2001, "In the hype, hate and hypnosis surrounding the mobile phone, its potential as an ingredient of art has been largely overlooked [emphasis added]."
You decide.
As an electronic media artist, Levin has created and/or collaborated on a wide range of projects. He is also an educator and the organizer of Mobile Art && Code, a symposium to be held at Carnegie Mellon University from November 6th through 8th. The event and online community are "dedicated to the democratization of computer programming for artists, young people, and the rest of us."
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