PIKSEL

We will start with a short demonstration and some introductory words on the subject of electro-magnetism. Participants will then wind their own electromagnetic coils, to be used as part of an experimental loudspeaker improvised from a found object resonator supplied by the participant.

Possible resonators: plastic food containers, buckets, drums, cans, glass… does it sound good when you tap your finger on it or speak into it? Bring it in! Bring a bunch of things because not everything will work, and that’s the experimental part.

“LITE2SOUND is a portable sensing device that explores the hidden sounds of light. Not a synthesizer at all, it is more like a microphone. LITE2SOUND reveals unusual sounds by responding to rapid but invisible changes in brightness. Beyond the ubiquitous grid hum transmitted by lighting, there are many other sounds. Near video screens, one often finds a clear pitched tone with variations depending on what model it is or even reacting to changes in the visual picture on a CRT. LED alpanumeric displays in metro rail cars create a blend of sharp singing tones, an optical consequence of lines of code executed by microprocessors. In technology- saturated spaces, musical chords hang in the air as ambient sources harmonize together. Serendipity rewards the curious with soundscapes that weren’t intended to be heard. Even nature creates content for LITE2SOUND’s reception, if one looks in the right places.

The signal level can vary from mic level to line level depending on what you’re observing, and how strongly the light source is modulated. You can’t usually judge this with your eyes; some light sources appear bright but aren’t modulated deeply. Other sources can appear dim or dark but are strongly modulated, such as infrared remotes and LED message signs. Other lights are bright but not modulated at all, like status LEDs on some electronic devices, and any LED running on DC power.” (Eric Archer)

LITE2SOUND was created by Eric Archer (http://www.ericarcher.net) and has been redesigned by him for the purpose of this workshop. The LITE2SOUND PX features a headphone/line out jack, a slider volume control and automatic gain control to compensate for different levels of ambient light.

In this workshop, the participants will each build a LITE2SOUND PX. The kit consists of a PCB and roughly 40 parts. Expected time to build the device is 1-2 hours. Basic soldering skills are helpful, but a quick introduction to soldering will be provided at the start of the workshop. After the build, we explore the sounds of different light sources, both inside and outside. Participants should each bring a pair of headphones for this purpose. We may also give a concert in the evening, where the participants perform on stage to create a sonic landscape from available light sources.

The workshop will be hosted by Hans Kristian Senneseth and is suitable for 10-12 participants. LITE2SOUND photos and schematics are provided courtesy of Eric Archer for educational and noncommercial purposes only.

The workshop is supported by the Municipality of Bergen.

Transmission+Interference is an ongoing collaboration between David Strang and Vincent Van Uffelen researching laser light as medium of sound transmission and creation. In preparation for a performance in February 2013 at the Contemporary Music Festival, Plymouth, UK. We will utilise common laser pointers and electronic parts such as photo-resistors, motors, mirrors, and basic amplification circuits to co-create new musical tools and (analog) sound transmission devices that can be used for music making or live performances. The two day workshop will be concluded by a brief performative presentation demonstrating the devices / tools that have been created by the group.

Recent work by David + Vincent on this topic has explored using laser light wavelength to transmit audio signals and using various objects to interfere with the light signal. Elements of this interference are controlled via arduino using motors and servos. We aim to continue this type of approach whilst remaining open to any other methods developed during the workshop. One element we are keen to explore is the inclusion of software in the project. The use of Pure Data to process live sounds / trigger sounds and to send control data to Arduino we believe can increase the sonic complexity of the project without being too far removed from the noise of the objects themselves.

After the workshop the devices / tools will be gathered together in preparation for the performance in Plymouth where all participants of the workshop will be credited with what was built as well as discussed. In addition David is planning take notes of the experiences in the workshop and use them to put forward a paper submission for the journal Organised Sound (Cambridge Journals) Volume 18 Number 3 ‘Re-wiring Electronic Music’ under the sub-themes of “DIT (do-it-together)” and “Sound Objects and Materialism”. This paper will discuss the processes of working and building in groups and pulling together resources and knowledge to show the potential of this form of collaboration.

We would like to see an open source hardware device, designed with open source tools, capable of running Linux,with a design that is easily modifiable and extendable, with a minimal component cost and which can be made in any small lab. We would like it to run an easily configurable Linux distribution with loads of tools for playing around with networks, audio, video and physical interfaces from any programming language of choice. In this workshop our ambition is to take a step towards this goal.

This hands-on workshop shows how to create 3D models in the free open source software Blender, setting up the virtual lights and cameras and render the result. Materials and animation are explained and also the realtime game engine when time permits.

Topics are

– modeling, the basic tools, subdivision surfaces
– organic forms with metaballs
– materials, textures, uv mapping
– types of lights
– animation, keyframes, curves, bones
– the new Cycles renderer

The level of the workshop will be adjusted to the audience but is meant to be an introduction to Blender. Participants should bring their laptops.

Homepage

Recent studies have shown that the electrical resistance in soil above a buried carcass has a different electrical resistivity to that of near by soil due to the decomposition of bodily tissue. The body leaves a “real”, quantifiable electrical trace when it is dead.

Following this idea that traces of the dead can be measured via electricity it may be possible that these traces can be found elsewhere such as in the electromagnetic field. Building on the work of The Scole Experimental Group this workshop will attempt to build various electronic devices which apparently enhance the possibility of communication with spirits both audibly and visibly.

Many reports of paranormal phenomenon mention balls of light materialising from the spirit world. The workshop will attempt to channel this phenomena via microwaves, water, and silicon. Devices such as the Germanium Trans-Dimensional Communication (TDC) Receptor and glass domes resembling Leyden jars will also be constructed along with other EMF detecting, emitting, and amplifying devices.

All of the constructed devices will be used in an experimental communication session which all of the workshop participants are encouraged to join.

http://nnnnn.org.uk/doku.php?id=experimental_communication

All things have a natural resonant frequency. This intriguing idea suggests a baseline connection between just about everything, but I’ll keep to the physical for now. My old car would vibrate intensely when reaching certain speeds. Our bodies have resonant frequencies. As does the stapler on my desk, as do skyscrapers, bridges, tectonic plates…

Instrumentation is an electro-mechanical sound installation inspired by resonance. The gallery installation preserves a sense of the makeshift, having evolved from studio experiments, using a limited palette of tools and readily available materials. Instrumentation is more like a framework or schematic, rather than a pre-determined finished work. Structured, but not scripted, the work contains a high level of improvisation and varies significantly from implementation to implementation.

Instrumentation has involved unlikely loudspeakers cobbled from buckets, drums, salvaged windows and hand-wound electromagnetic coils. These found-object resonators amplify other parts of the installation. For example, a plywood work-table serving as an acoustic transducer for electromagnetically activated piano wires, and as a stage for an assembly of machine ‘performers.’ Each lethargically performs a repetitive task, contributing to an endlessly fluctuating sound track of shimmering harmonics, sudden crescendos and arrhythmic beats.

By letting machines run the show, I hope to open up a temporary space for contemplation of the forces at work in the environment around us. Exploring the basic physical ‘magic’ of resonance, present within our everyday machines, structures and systems, reveals that we are subject to material laws that are fundamentally mysterious and outside of our absolute command. This elusive ‘magic’ is a worthwhile reminder that we are not in total control in a digital-technocratic world where total control seems to be a goal.

Downtime (post-domestic fiction) refers to the representation of a system comprising of obsolete electric appliances. Through hacking methodology, the redefinition of their original identity is investigated, thus giving them new uses. The post-use of existing objects extends beyond the system’s practical everyday life applications and become part of a new system. This system is a hybrid of analog and digital technologies, faces the depreciation of units not as a conclusion but rather as an opportunity to review their functional capabilities While the electric appliances are the composers which produce live audio and video, the viewer’s subjective presence is crucial for the development of the project. Through his/her interaction with the objects, his/her personal intervention to the narrative produced, provides a constant influx of new material. Thus the experience evolves rather as a perceptual than a conceptual one. The project served as a collaborative platform, through which the multilevel reading of the dynamic new system is ensured. Starting from DIY methodologies the project is completed into a DIWO (Do It With Others) ethics.

This installation tracks the audience movements on the gallery and translates them into a data visualization graphic that is drawn in real time, which means that the graphic will need as much time to be realised as the exhibition will be running, evolving from its own shape by audience movements to a visualization of the exhibition life itself.

One wood section which shows the growth rings of the tree from which it was extracted is an image that helps our understanding of time and change itself, without the need to operate on it. If we were able to see the creation of this image in real time and not once the process has stopped, to see it as it is created, it would force us to reconsider how we perceive our surrounding environment.

‘Whatever happened, Happened, is a machine which creates growth rings in a section of virgin wood, so that we may be part of a process which we believed before to be foreign to us, because we weren’t capable of perceiving it.

The machine engraves concentric rings in the wood surface by laser, so that the result is closer to reality than a computer-generated graphic. It is just as important that the graphic is realised slowly over time, involving external factors which could affect the process, separating us from the instantaneousness of a printer in order to understand the process that it is giving at that exact instant, while confronting the vision we are accustomed to, because we will always be able to make a comparison with the rings that it already drew at the moment of our visit.

Every day the machine begins drawing a new rings group, taking as a reference point the shape of the previous one from the day before. However, the distance of this and variation of its perimeter with be directly tied to the number of people in the hall and their movements; this will also affect the number of passes the machine makes over the ring throughout the day, thus influencing its thickness and depth.

Just as a tree takes its shape from the action of external factors and forces, with details of its surrounding environment engraved in its internal structure, the exhibition itself and its audience are the one who really create the work. The machine will produce a sheet with as many ring groups as the number of days the exhibition runs, creating in the end a ‘legible’ graphic of the changes in its surrounding environment, the hall, which will be as natural as a section of a trunk

Generative and autopoietic sound-light installation that embodies complex systems theories based on concepts and processes such as emergency and self-organization. The installation bases on models taken from various fields of science, philosophy, biology,computer science and study of the artificial intelligence (cellular automata, neural network,Cybernetics..).

The installation explores the sonic and compositional possibilities of these concepts, using a network of “modules-particles” that interact with each other and the environment. Each “module-particle” follows simple individual rules, but is able to generate more complex and sophisticated patterns when combined with the others.

RdeS {} is a project developed with the support of:

PHONOS-IUA GRANT and with the collaboration of Interaction Lab – HANGAR.ORG

The SKOR Codex is a printed book which will be sent to different locations on earth. It contains binary encoded image and sound files selected to portray the diversity of life and culture at the Foundation for Art and Public Domain (SKOR), and is intended for any intelligent terrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find it. The files are protected from bitrot, software decay and hardware failure via a transformation from magnetic transitions on a disk to ink on paper, safe for centuries. Instructions in a symbolic language explain the origin of the book and indicate how the content is to be decoded. La Société Anonyme noted that “the package will be encountered and the book decoded only if there will be advanced civilizations on earth in the far future. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about art on this planet.” Thus the record is best seen as a time capsule and a statement rather than an attempt to preserve SKOR for future art historians. The SKOR Codex is a project by La Société Anonyme.

This is one of the first, possibly the first interactive media art piece for e-reader. I am fascinated by the esthetics of the electronic ink which is different from the usual backlit color screens. After several years working with projections this is first of my artworks which needs a proper lighting. It is also interesting to work with and around the inherent limitations like the latency in the response and switching of the screen, complex animations are not possible without flickering.

!Linear (pronaunced nonlinear) is about interactive storytelling from user generated content, a mashup. Pictures are taken and processed from Flickr and their tags are displayed, user can choose from the provided tags how the next image will be searched. The selected tags combined form a sentence and creates with the images a non linear story.

To create this it was necessary to find an e-ink e-reader which is rather accessable. Amazon provides a SDK for Kindle but its necessary to write them an email and ask them. The Sony e-reader runs on Android and needs only to be rooted to access the underlying operating system. It provides a usual Android system with multitouch screen, Wifi connectivity and sound output, unfortunately no speech synthesis which was one part of the concept but it seems not to be possible. The software could be programmed as a normal Android Java application.The e-reader is meant to hang on a wall during exhibtion, together with small speaker for the sound because it didn’t have builtin ones.