abstractmachine

I’m posting this a bit late, but for some reason I totally missed this video. It’s a summary of some of the sound objects built by François Parra’s students in our joint sound-hypermedia mini-course for second year students. This year we split the two-week class into two: in the first week half of the class learned Processing while the other half learned PureData and audio acoustic instrumentation; the following week they reversed roles. While the hypermedia students were making Processing Monsters in preparation for Eniarof, François’ students were making these interesting instruments.

Objects soundscape from François Parra on Vimeo.

From François’ description:

This is a short movie coming from a teaching project in Aix-en-Provence art school. Students build piezo amplified objects to compose a soundscape. They only used piezo mics, motors, a mixing board, speakers. You will see at the end the begining of a program, made to tie a string sound with generative pictures.

To be clear, I had little to nothing to do with the construction of the objects, I’m only in the video looking like the dork I am because I was the only professor present to conduct any sort of critique, which basically consisted of, « uhhh, how does it work? » followed by some random attempt at analyzing physical algorithmic phenomena. But I wanted to post the video here because it gives a fairly typical picture of the experimental method we use in our exploration of machines. Yeah, yeah, I know, plastic babies on a seesaw have that oh-so-art-school stench of ennui, but there are still some valid ideas in most of the instruments. Also, there’s some brief attempt at audiovisualisation, but on a very very basic level. I think we were far more succesful a few years back at approaching this connection, around the time of 8=8 for example, but again these are students who had only been programming for two or three days and these things go in cycles anyway.

• Installation: ^3
• Artist: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Exhibition: Les Pixels (2)
• Location: ASCA, Beauvais, France (Map)
• Dates: December 7-21, 2007

Quick post for one of the quickest exhibits I’ve ever had to prepare. I’ll be exhibiting ^3 (aka Cubed) at Les Pixels, an exhibition that opens in Beauvais today. Where’s Beauvais you ask? I have no idea, but who the hell cares when it’s THE authentic « Ville Internet @@@@ 2007 » ? (Love that logo!) It’s a tiny festival, by a young non-profit with the right attitude, so I said what the hell. Who needs sleep anyway?

This nice post over at Music Thing about my Rubik’s Cube project has lead to a lot of traffik and linking (cf. here and here, for example). I’ve been a Music Thing reader for years, so that was nice to see. But for their readers, I thought they might be interested in this video, shot by Artfuture last summer during the ZeroOne festival in San Jose in which I demonstrate — in all my true geekiness — the functioning of the first physical prototype. More will indeed follow at a later date, when I’ve finished all my current duties.

As usual, all the interresting journalists at ZeroOne were bloggers (i.e. all the interresting journalists weren’t journalists). Among them was Alexa from Art Future, who just uploaded this video she took during the festival. You can check it out here, or over at her YouTube account where she has a few other videos taken during the festival [link]. If you want more info on this system, check out the information on the following link: Cubed.

Soooooooo my demo is a little cheesy, and as usual I stutter a bit, wave my arms about a lot, and repeat myself repeat myself — but it gives you pretty much the A-Z pitch I recycled throughout the week. So now I can so now I can just point people to the video (thanks Alexa ;-). There was also another blogger who shot a longer walkthrough of the entire installation. So as soon as he gets that online I‘ll link to it here. Apparently his will be a video podcast with a lot of interviews from the show.

**Update: Lise from Arborescence just told me that they have programmed a similar Rubik’s cube performance system for this year’s festival by Artificiel, although it apprently doesn’t use the full cube as a sequencer. This probably makes it more interresting musically, but also a whole lot easier to compose/program, so less interresting conceptually. It’s always frustrating to see such similar work, but we don’t live in an artistic bubble, and ideas like this tend to appear in groups. Ho hum, I’ll try not to worry about it. I released mine in May 2005, they did their performance in May 2006 (take that!), but when you think about it Toshio Iwai was introducing these ideas way back in the early 90’s. So he’s the real master. Whatever the case, I figured it would only be a matter of time before someone else tried something like this. Here are some pictures of their premiere at Mutek : link. Different configuration, same idea, and theirs does look pretty cool.*

Here are some pictures from the abstractmachine installation at the ZeroOne Festival.

Google alerted me to this video of the Cubed installation at ZeroOne. I don’t know who took it (alt4ir?), and the sound kinda sucks (all you can hear is the ambient noise unless you crank it way up). But that has more to do with the exhibition conditions and the way I set up the installation (I designed it so that the sound would point down directly to the cube user’s ears and not to a camera’s lateral mic). It was taken with a tripod which is nice. I have somewhat better images and video (although not much better), but I haven‘t taken the time to put them online yet because I’m busy tying up loose ends, working on my thesis, and getting ready for my trip back to France. There were a lot of people filming and taking pictures, including filmed walk-throughs with me babbling on, so hopefully we’ll see some more online; and as I mentioned, I’ll have my own footage when I get the time.

• Installation: abstractmachine.v87D6
• Concept & Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Exhibition: Transvergence
• Festival: ZeroOne: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge
• Dates: 8-13 August, 2006
• Times: 12:00-24:00 Tuesday; 12:00-22:00 Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; 12:00-17:00 Sunday
• Location: South Hall
• Project information: abstractmachine.v87D6

The abstractmachine is setup in San Jose, there is a breakcore Rubik’s Cube® kicking out the jams, a programmable video mosaic recorder is open for public abuse, and the Hypertable is unleashing a non-linear interactive documentary containing a telepathic virus. We’re setup in the main exhibition hall for the festival, South Hall.

Oh, I should also mention something after having watched a few visitors this afternoon: um, hello, people out there, yes, you can actually pick up the Rubik’s Cube® and play with it. And that interactive table, yes, you can put your hands on it. Most of you reading this are probably in the know, and would find it laughable that people would fear interacting with an installation during a festival dedicated to digital art. But hey, that’s apparently America. It’s my first show in my home country (yes, that’s right) and I guess the public is just like that. I always figured that the dopey Americans who looked confused were just like that because they were tourists lost in Europe. But who knows, maybe there are just a lot of tourists showing up today.

So with that out of the way, here’s the official statement.

Through various experiments, installations, and online software, the abstractmachine project asks the question of how we as artists and users can create, manipulate, and ultimately enact digital algorithms. If the specificity of the computer comes not only from it’s digital aspect, but even more so from it’s algorithmic aspect, how does this hyperprogrammable nature transform the media we manipulate — i.e. the images and sounds we design using these machines? Amongst the many machines available within the abstractmachine project, two creation platforms will be presented to illustrate our response to these questions: one dedicated to the creation and manipulation of algorithmic cinema, the other designed around algorithmic musical composition.

« 3 », a.k.a. « ^3 », a.k.a. « cubed » is a musical sequencer integrated into a Rubik’s Cube®. By manipulating the colors on the cube, users generate different sound algorithms within the sequencer. Using specially-designed soundfonts from Jankenpopp (cf. http://jankenpopp.com), math geeks can finally become the speedcubing breakcore supernerds they always feared were lurking underneath. With ^3 we are working against the idea that a musician has to create music with audio software where building the musical algorithm and manipulating the digital algorithm are two different processes. Often, making digital music looks a lot like someone working on their spreadsheet. In ^3, all of the notes of the musical process are visible and intrinsically intertwined. Using a universally known interface, a series of simple gestures cascade into a complex multitude of musical possibilities.

Concrescence is a platform for creating and manipulating moving images outside of the traditional linear time-code. Images grow in spatialized mosaics, allowing for infinite recomposition while avoiding purely random associations. This specialized software is then projected onto the Abstractmachine Hypertable: a multipurpose interactive table which allows multiple users to interact with the non-linear narratives by simply placing their hands on the surface. For the San Jose festival, two uses of the Concrescence platform will be presented: a fully developed algorithmic narrative entitled “The Signal”, accompanied by a simplified version of the Concrescence authoring software where the public can record their own audiovisual clips and create collective non-linear patchworks.

Concrescence was developed in France with assistance from the following institutions: ARCADI, DICREAM, SCAM, and was produced by the CIREN. All sounds for The Signal were designed by Julien Hô Kim, with a narration by Keith Evans. The Jankenpopp666 soundfont can be downloaded at http://jankenpopp.free.fr/666/

This is just a quick post, before setting up tomorrow at ZeroOne. More noise to follow about this installation — I mean that literally — and how you can play with a new mix at home that we’ve prepared for the festival, and yes that’s “we”. Update soon. For now, here are some images I took before the move from my lowly garage in Los Altos to this strange tent structure.

• Concert: 8=8=Les Joueurs de cartes
• Concept + Design: Nao, TM, JankenPopp, abstractmachine
• Festival: Scopitone
• Dates: 30 June 2006 + 1 July 2006
• Times: 11h30 & 17h (2 performances per day)
• Location: Atelier & Chantiers de Nantes (+info)
• Direct link: 8=8
• Video: 8=8 demo @ YouTube

We will performing the 8=8=Lesjoueursde_cartes again, this time at the Scopitone festival in Nantes, France (don’t mind the horrid website design, they are actually really nice people). Unfortunately we will be performing in the afternoon (*update: performances at 11h30 and 17h on both days), rather than in the evening with the truly hep cats such as Coldcut, Matmos, or Birdy Nam Nam. I guess we’re still not sexy enough to play in the big sandbox.

Here is the official 8=8 press kit, along with some photos Colette Stanley took of the concert last October in Marseille:

• // 8=8=Les joueurs de cartes=The Card Players
• // 8=8=TM=Nao=Jankenpopp=Abstractmachine
• // 8=8=Thomas Michalak=Naoyuki Tanaka=Pierre-Erick Lefebvre=Douglas Edric Stanley

// 8=8=Concert=Performance=Demo

8=8 is a group of 4 programmers = 4 composers = 4 VJs = 4 musicians = 4 artists. All four bring their own programming, visual and musical sensibilities to a collective instrument, the Abstract Machine Hypertable. By moving one’s hands over the surface of the Hypertable, images and sounds are generated, creating a unique opportunity for musical improvisation. 8=8 uses the Hypertable to perform singular programs/instruments in a concert=performance=demo context.

// 8=8=Program

All programs are generated by the members of 8=8. There is no distinction between performer = musician = artist = programmer. All members have been exploring computer programming as an artistic medium for several years, notably through collaborative research at the Atelier Hypermedia.

// 8=8=Instrument

Although the Hypertable was originally designed as an interface for algorithmic cinema, 8=8 quickly discovered its musical potential as an instrument. Each program is essentially an entire visual and musical software/instrument in and of itself. Some of the programs allow for direct manipulation of pre-recorded samples, other instruments generate sounds on-the-fly, while still others combine these two notions with the idea of composition taking place in real-time, on the surface of the table, and in front of the public. Some compositions=programs=instruments are visually baroque, others on the contary are minimalist. All work off the principle that image+interaction pilots the sound generation.

// 8=8=Big_Daddy

While the performers are free to improvise within each of the programs, there is also a Central Processing Unit, known in 8=8 speak as Big Daddy. Big Daddy’s role is to organize the flow of the concert itself. It switches the table from its public installation mode (see below) into its concert/performance mode, and controls the sequence of programs. There are over 10 programs currently installed in the 8=8 arsenal, and as more programs can be added before each concert, Big Daddy’s role is equally to keep things organised and working smoothly. Big Daddy is, in effect, 8=8’s stage manager.

// 8=8=Rock+Roll

Nothing could be less exciting than watching a solemn performer sitting on an empty stage behind a laptop. Although interesting attempts have been made recently to jazz up the experience — we’re thinking of recent performances by Golan Levin & Zachary Lieberman, or the excellent TopLap — ultimately 8=8 has found that the entire configuration of Raised Stage + Subservient Public has to be thrown out in order to create a more intimate and engaging relationship with the public. The public actually sits around the table, with the performers, or stands up looking down on the table (the table is only 30 cm high for this reason). Interesting configurations can also be envisioned, for example in situations where the public can look down from a balcony, depending of course on the local architecture.

// 8=8=Public

Before the concert, Big_Daddy informs the public of the time remaining before the concert with a countdown timer displayed on the surface of the table. All concerts start on-time, accurate down to the second. A small interactive program runs on the surface of the table as well, allowing visitors to explore — in a minimal/limited fashion — the technology that will run the concert. Although the original intent of this program was primarily pedagogical (= this is how the system works), as it turns out the public really takes to this little program. Consequently, two modes can be imagined for the Abstract Machine Hypertable: A) as reactive installation, B) as a concert platform. As such, several performances can be organized, with the interactive/public mode converting over to concert/performance mode at a pre-determined time. These decisions are of course dependent on local opportunities and the variable temperament of the 8=8 group.

Locus Sonus, the Aix-en-Provence School of Art’s post-graduate arts study program on art & audio, is now accepting submissions for the 2006-2007 session. The deadline for submissions is July 16, 2006. More information can be found at the Locus Sonus website: link.

I mention it here, because I occasionally intervene in Locus Sonus affairs, as my interests and those of my students often overlap with the Atelier Son. I often collaborate explicitly and implicitly with Peter Sinclair who is one of the co-founders of the project. The other co-founder is Jérôme Joy, who has been doing interesting online work for years, and was one of my rare protectors while in residence at the overtly hostile Villa Arson. I have also in the past sat in on the scientific council and participated in their think-tank sessions, so I’m more or less a part of this crazy thing which is turning out to be an interesting experiment on how research could be conducted within an art school without following the university research model. That said, we are associated with the French national scientific research agency (http://www.cnrs.org/) via the Université de Provence. It should also be made clear that while there is a lot of Pure Data explored in this post-graduate program, it is not as code-oriented at the Atelier Hypermedia, and is oriented more specifically at exploring two fundamental fields: sound/network & sound/space. My work is clearly more image-centric, despite all the noisy interfaces — hence the one-foot-in-one-foot-out participation.

If you’re interested, check out the Locus Sonus website. Make sure your French is up to par (a requirement, obviously).