Just discovered Musician and sound engineer Nick Mariette´s blog sonic surrounds. Run yet for a couple of years, Nick has slowly but surely built up an archive on sound tech, ambisonics, coding, hardware and sound art.
For an exhibition at the Caricatura Gallery in Kassel (January-March 2008), we created a series of playful and colourful miniature interactives:
loophole | funfaircapsule | the rush | jack in the box
Instead of developing capacious installations for months, we thought it must be nice to make up interactive artworks that fit in a casket. They are based on a simple punchline or a very accessible notion, imagery or format.
Caricatura is a Gallery for Comical Art, most often showcasing the work of illustrators, satirical drawings, animation and comic strips. On their invitation, the class of New Media Design at the Kassel School of Arts and Design presented a range of interactive and electronic artworks. Contributions comment on our everyday use of technology, reverse habitual expectations towards electronic devices and make computer dreams come true.
Find out more about the other participants at jahrmarktskunst.de (sorry, german only).
Hooray! I just noticed my audio-programming language of choice recieved has significant up date in the last days. You can download it here
SuperCollider is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server.
SuperCollider was written by James McCartney (audiosynth.com) over a period of many years. It is now an open source GPL’d project maintained and developed by James and various others. It is used by musicians, scientists, and artists working with sound.
Did some fun tests today: a) Find out which sound frequencies hazelnuts like! b) Break a propeller!
The propeller is the starting point for a small series of collectables we want to make; technology bits in small caskets. And the hazelnuts… one day they´ll dance with you and maybe even massage your feet afterwards!
The orbiter is an interactive sound environment by Vera-Maria Glahn and Marcus Wendt.
It invites you to reach for the stars and play their music!
» Polar Scene A / Polar Scene B
» Solar Scene A / Solar Scene B
» Sawtooth Scene A / Sawtooth Scene B
» Kunsthochschule Kassel, Setup
» Kunsthochschule Kassel, annual exhibition 2007
» Microarchitecture Lounge exhibition at Tendence07, Frankfurt/Main
The Orbiter takes possession of all senses. It is a place for visitors to lay down and relax, watching the firmament above them. With a small gesture, just pointing upwards, the visitor can insert new stars into orbit with unique visual and musical characteristics. The player is enveloped by the instrument; the music filling the ears, the body and space.
The dream of reaching for the stars is as old as mankind itself. The mathematics of planetary orbits, the perfection of natural geometrical forms fascinates scientists and artists alike. Even music principles as tonality or phase displacement are based upon computational ideas and find correspondency in the Orbiters structure.
The music is played on concentric circles, with higher tones on the outside, bass notes nearer the centre. The bigger you let a star grow before you pull back your hand to insert it into orbit, the louder it plays. Like the stars orbit on the large ceiling screen above the player, the surround sound orbits in the room on 4 high-tone-channels, supported by a bass box and a solid bourne sound speaker underneath the player`s couch, making low basses physically sensable.
Each version of the Orbiter features various scenes with different graphics, sounds and behaviour. Some create an illusionary nightsky firmament, playing more melodic or ambient sounds. Others experiment with the possibilities of graphical abstraction and rough synths, allowing you to even play drum’n bass-like sounds.
The installation is based on custom-built software using latest gaming and computer vision technology, performing real-time analysis of a camera image of the player as well as generating 6-channel-audio and video signals. The video analysis is written in C++, instructing SuperCollider for the audio generation, Processing for the graphics.
