Cimatics Masterclass Live A/V

Disturbed City #3

2008-08-16T11:31:00.000+02:00

to follow the detailed working process visit the disturbedcityblog

Disturbed City #2

2008-08-08T17:45:00.000+02:00

Documentation and city sample collection:

Disturbed City Proposal

2008-08-08T16:24:00.001+02:00

Group: Mattia, Michael, Olga

Project Outline:

„For more than a century, the very centre of Brussels has been the concrete subject (and victim according to many) of radical architectural and urban speculation. Regardless of the success or failure of these grand projects, we cannot negate the concrete impact of a bold believe in modernity and progress in the city of Brussels. Among the many speculations and built ideas the 'Jonction Nord-Midi' can rightly be named the project of the century. The construction of the underground connection between the former northern and southern terminal railway stations through the historical pentagon is the project that best symbolizes the early ambitions of Belgium as a nation-state. The supposedly 'derelict' medieval quarters on the trajectory have been demolished to allow a dramatic modernization of the city centre.“ (from Brussels, A Manifesto – Towards the Capital of Europe)

Taking a closer look onto the 'Scar' dividing the upper from the lower city one finds besides the monumental building projects a series of 'urban leftovers'. Fragments of demolished houses on the edge of the erased strip forming 'odd lots' - lacking use and being the by-product of a greater plan; The train stations between Central - Nord (Congress) and Central – Midi (Chapel) with hardly any passenger frequencies and trains stopping (Congress and Chapel stations are served by a limited number of trains during weekday working hours only); Crossings of the rail-tracks managed by tunnels for cars and pedestrians as well as connections between the upper and the lower city in form of stairways bypassing the height-distinction generated through the rail-road tunnels. Several “walks” along the trajectory led to a documentation of typologies of those 2nd rate places and are presented in a catalogue featuring a series of potential “stages” for urban interventions.

The sometimes very odd spatial configurations, their surreality and interruption of the common image of the city structure serve as content and basis for our appropriations. City lightening in the common sense follows mainly commercial, touristic or safety reasons and stages architectural icons. The night and it`s natural darkness puts certain elements of the nocturnal city into oblivion, disappearing in our collective memory. A series of interventions along brussels 'scar' is approaching those second-rate places within the centre of our cities in a new light and treats them as “disturbed” architectural monuments telling us from their past and possible future. A mobile projection unit serves as portable instrument for staging public space. The documentation of the 'urban acts' will be presented as an audiovisual feature video with a soundtrack by element012 (stubenmusicstudio.com) alongside a project booklet with maps and photographs. A further development wants to replace the projection mobile with site specific light artefacts. Self sustaining and fixed on location switching themselves on at a certain time and producing an obscure lightening scenario within the everyday perception of the city-night.

"Destruction as Urban Spectacle", Brussels, 1938 (close to Kapellekerk)

Ambra,

2008-06-20T00:06:00.000+02:00

We talked before about Berlin and I am still thinking on planning to study there for a while.Can you recommand me some ateliers and maybe places to stay?

I was thinking to go for 6months.Around november..

Hope to hear from you soon

CIMATICS\08AV\FESTIVAL: Call for Proposals

2008-06-10T22:26:00.000+02:00

Hi everyone... I have something that might interest you! (and it would be wonderful if you could spread the news)...the:

CIMATICS\08AV\FESTIVAL:
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

The call for submissions is now open!
Cimatics - Brussels International Festival for Live Audiovisual Art & VJing - invites all artists, creatives and producers to send their submissions for the next Cimatics festival.

Cimatics\08AV\Festival takes place from 12th - 15th November 2008
at various locations in the centre of Brussels.

The 6th festival edition will again bring an extensive overview of what's currently taking place at the crossroads of media, art, music and technology. Extra attention will be paid to the central theme 'data visualisation'.

Deadline for submissions: July 31st 2008.

For all information or to submit your project online, go to: cimatics.com/entries

2008-05-26T14:05:00.000+02:00

oeps 1tje teveel en zonder geluid

2008-05-26T13:36:00.001+02:00

2008-05-26T13:36:00.000+02:00

2008-05-23T19:30:00.000+02:00

Pictures of an installation using the sound of crickets

The work evolved from an idea ,more a wondering about the presents of sound in an image It is something I never payed a lot of attention on. And even if I did it always turned out in a dillema between using a composed or original sound.

The proces turned out in doiing the oposite by creating something based on a sound. Sow that the sound can form the image.

2008-05-23T19:16:00.000+02:00

2008-05-20T01:14:00.000+02:00

ya, just nodiced u don't see some things on the video.. There's also a black line wich is continuously drawing horizons.. I'll try to git it fixed! bye

one last experiment.

2008-05-20T00:55:00.000+02:00

just one more experiment I did.. Don't know what happened with the quality but I post it anyway. Me and Sarah will post more serious stuff in august en july.. Hope to still meet you all on the blog. Regards, kristof

16mm loops and loopboxes

2008-05-04T20:38:00.001+02:00

hi!! gabriel asked about 16mm loops, so here's some info for all:

last summer i did an installation with 4 meter long 16mm loops

it's called "spinners" and you can see a short clip here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/endlesswebsite

for longer loop projection there is something as a loopbox

it's just 2 custom made spinning discs that you put on top of your projector and let the film go through as a spiral.

the end of the spiral comes from the exit of your projector and the midst of the spiral goes to the beginning of your projector.

the longest one i did with it was about 6 minutes. but everything depends on how smooth the wheels of your loopbox turn (often these are wheels of an old 16mm editing table or projector)

at the bottom of this link there's 2 clips as an example of the loop boxes:

http://www.supersens.nl/index.html?/supersens/paginas/projektie.html@theanchor~sensmain

you can rent it in holland for 25 euro's per week:

http://www.super8.nl/frame_prijs_huursub.htm

also: check out the archives of the experimental film email list "frameworks".

http://www.hi-beam.net/fw.html

reflections...

2008-05-01T17:07:00.000+02:00

Further development of the idea working with mirrored (half)spheres and producing a negotiation with light between screen and space incorporates a first application in a live performance setup, the development of modular "screen objects" and a modular software patch.

The improvised live performance took place in a patio (outdoors) with a serial pattern of 8 mirrored half-spheres mounted on a concrete wall. Sound samples of Wieland Samolaks "steady state music" where transformed according to the material the light patterns where facing.

The modular Panels consist out of a set of half spheres (3x3 or 3x1) and allow different setups according to a spatial environment. To achieve an satisfying result the environment should be as dark as possible and the projection distance adapted to the light-intensity of the projector(s)...

Quotes (Michael)

2008-04-29T02:17:00.001+02:00

Pop(ular) Culture:
"Popular Culture works in the spaces in-between our controlled society - is by definition defensive, denies the control of social order - plays with it, but is always prepared for a guerilla action, for a play of tactical resistance, always aware for moments of weakness, to turn them to it`s own advantage." (John Fiske, "Reading the Popular", 1989)

Objects:
"Through objects every individual and group searches it`s or their place in a system" (Baudrillard, 1981)

Places:
"Memories tie us to that place... It`s personal, not interesting to anyone else, but after all that`s what give a place it`s character..." (A woman living in the Croix-Rousse quarter in Lyon, interview by Pierre Mayol)

"It is striking here that the places people live in are like the presences of diverse absences. What can be seen designates what is no longer there... Demonstratives indicate the invisible identities of the visible..." (Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everday Life, 1984)

“To start seeing you have to eliminate certain things.” (Carsten Nicolai)

Link to translation of Simondon book

2008-04-28T16:38:00.000+02:00

Here

Ambra's Quotes

2008-04-28T16:08:00.000+02:00

Umberto Eco

The beauty of cosmo is not only in the unity of variegation, but also into variegation of unity.

Andy Wharol

In the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes .

To say radical things in a conservative way is controculture.

Jean Baudrillard

The said things of artificial intelligence is that it's missing the artifice..so the intelligence

Quotes (Arnold)

2008-04-28T16:07:00.000+02:00

Music
"Music is everything one listens to with the intention of listening to music."
-Luciano Berio

Technology
"The opposition established between the cultural and the technical and between man and machine is wrong and has no foundation. What underlies it is mere ignorance or resentment. It uses a mask of facile humanism to blind us to a reality that is full of human striving and rich in natural forces. This reality is the world of technical objects, the mediators between man and nature."
- Gilbert Simondon (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects 1958)

Affectivity
"Affectivity is more than simply a supplement to perception (as Deleuze maintains) and it is more than a correlate to perception (as Bergson holds). Not only it is a modality of experience in its own right, but it is that modality - in contrast to perception - through which we open ourselves to the experience of the new."
- Mark B. Hansen

quotes

2008-04-28T15:57:00.000+02:00

-windkracht 4-

papier waait op, haar raakt verward, geen last van muggen meer

KMI (poëzie)

-windforce 4-

paper blows on, hair is getting confused ,no more bottering mosquitos-

royal institute for meteorological (poems)

-less is more-

Robert Browning

-Birds do not suddenly appear-

Further experiments for Flat Corner-Ambra's proposal

2008-04-18T18:10:00.000+02:00

Dear Flat Corner

here following the things I would like to try out next time within Cimatics :

Technical experiments

Projection on face profile

Projection on the person while she is smoking ( I'm curious to see which kind of meaning development and practical effects the projection of a digital face on a real face can gives while the person is smoking)

I would like to edit a long emotional or action sequence ( played with the face) in a very fast way and then projecting it to the real one (like this documentaries of flowers growing so fast etc...that you can see in National Geographic that try to show a whole flower's life in 2 min...)

Projection of different patterns on different body parts ( hairs growing, food...liquids...)

As we have done with the faces, I would like to try to project body parts of someone else on my body...( like old breast...or old hands..etc..)

Filip do you think you will be able to bring some animation stuff for the next time? Will be great!

Would also be nice to try with motion tracking again if possible,maybe with a full body images !

Then I would like to start to note all the interaction possibilities between the real performer and the digital projection.

With it I mean to write our practice in order to collect a theorethical material for our blog, which will be nice to make already in Brussels, I think it's time to have a Flat Corner communication platform, keeping it linked to cimatics blog.

Performance experiments :

Concerning the dramaturgical part,I would like to work on some topics as Lotta said keeping the base simple.

As I was telling you last time I was working on this "secrets" practice.

Turning around the idea of giving a completely different point of view to what the audience is looking just changing the contents ( in this case it can be a series of texts ) related to the same scene..

So, I was thinking that we could write and record some text, even short sentences, able to tell a story or to give an imaginary and experimenting this thing with headphones( I think we can borrow them in Cimatics).

And I think is good because will allow Lotta to produce contents even if she will be not there...

I also want to say to Lotta that you can write us experimentations and curiosity you would like to do and that we will try out there!

Then about the performance and the dramaturgical practice I was wondering about the idea of a duo performance ( like when me and Lotta we were shifting our faces on each other)in order to have some material for St.Petesburg...

So,concerning an hypotethic duo, I would be curious to work on the idea of a conversation between two persons

( in which we can play with recorded discussions...and in the real performance we can speak and suddenly shift to a weird playback...etc..).

I say discussion because I find good the starting physical position of a discussion for a duo ( sitting beside each other ).

And perhaps working onto discussion can gives the opportunity to work on text ( played in the headphones- playing with different texts - points of view and contraddictions)and it can give a kind of dramaturgical structure ( like beginning---increasing the desagreement-agreement--etc...)

This hypoethical conversation could turns about some of the topics we were thinking to start to work on : like sex-gender-age.

As the ideas flows in a discussion between two persons also the two bodys can have a metamorphosis during the discussion... exchanging sex---looking--style---age---identity

Anyway those are my buch of ideas at the moment,perhaps you get inspired by that for further changes and developments!

I think I can stop now,I'm looking forward to hear your inspirations to finally go for practice.

Love

Ambra

2008-04-09T20:48:00.000+02:00

Psychogeography.. I don't know why the link didn't work. Here it is again http://youtube.com/watch?v=zVEgOiB7Bo8

Psychogeography

2008-04-09T20:43:00.000+02:00

Well I got quite hooked on psychogeography. If you liked it; here's Will Self in a google talk.

headphones

2008-04-09T20:37:00.000+02:00

This is excerpt from email to people in Flat Corner. I just thought it could be interesting also for other people.

As inspiration for sound... you remember the idea of different headphones with different messages... today I experienced a performance which was totally based on that and it was very effective. Lundahl&Seitl (they don't have a good site right now.. but here info from the stage they performed http://www.weld.se/program/lundahl-seitl-5-12-april/eng/ ) Further it most of the time took place in a pitch dark room... I couldn't help thinking about Filip's horse..

The sound/voice was giving us instructions individually and specially the transition from the ordinary room to the other world was fantastic.

We were sitting in a room and got informed that we would get headphones. Some time passed and then the headphones arrived. Quite soon after you had the headphones on, people next to you were rising and leaving the room. I was told to stay. By coincidence I was the last of 7 people to leave the room and it was amazing to see the others. I was told exactly where to go and it was kind of surreal experience that it was so exact, like somebody actually watched over me..

In the space they were playing with quite simple but effective parameters of time and out of body experiences. Simply by connecting actions that I was told to do and maybe 10 minutes later somebody did the same thing to me, the voice suggesting me that it was me 10 minutes ago (it was simple things like holding somebody's hand, lying down on the floor etc. but very precisely done). I liked it. Also with the darkness, they did simple things like having a girl lying on the floor, and few seconds later when there was light again, an old man appeared for the first time. Either than these two actors, there were 3 more people involved in creating the feeling of you being touched by yourself or someone. Also one thing I really liked was that when the girl was lying down on the ground I was told to hold her hand. A bit later to let go slowly and imagine her hand floating up. Her hand floated up. So simple but in the moment believable.

So yes! I vote for sometime in the future headphones for flat corner audience. It will be amazing. And just imagine actually being touched by someone with your face.. You look at yourself in a mirror, and from behind somebody comes that look just like you, or almost. Or like you 10 minutes ago... or like you but older (and then you feel the smell of a horse;-)

Kiss Lotta

Arnold's personal approach to the flat corner proposal

2008-04-02T16:32:00.000+02:00

For me, the experiments we do within the context of the Cimatics
Masterclass, give me the opportunity to explore different possibilities
regarding live video and sound in interaction with the moving body in a
space.

For a long time already i want to do research on this subject. By making a
space ‘sensitive’ by means of different sensors, this space can become an
organism that communicates with an observer/performer. Working with
choreographers is in this context therefore very inspiring.

On a more conceptual level, a book i just recently started reading, “New
Philosophy For New Media” (Mark B. Hansen, 2006) can give us a lot of
input, especially on the subject of the human body in relation to new
(interactive) media.

The workshops of the Cimatics Masterclass will give me the chance to do
hands on experiments and through that, our group can hopefully turn these
experiments in to a live public (modern dance-)performance.

Experiments i will focus on (and will technically ‘lead’) are:
-Motion tracking with the camera on the ceiling, making a projected face stay
on the performer's body while moving through the space.
-Sound (generated granular sounds of the body, environmental sound).
-Interaction with live sound (for instance: voice triggering
movement/distortion of video projection, movement of body triggering
sound)
-Live ﬁlming and projecting with a delay, creating ‘temporal distortions’
-Motion tracking with the camera in front.
-Color motion tracking.

Proposal Flat Corner

2008-04-02T16:16:00.001+02:00

Who

The Flat Corner is a group of 4 artists collaborating on a common interest in exploring interaction of the body with live video-projection and live (generated)
sound.
This group consists of Arnold Hoogerwerf, Charlotta Ruth, Filip Sterckx and Ambra Pittoni.

Concept

The main core of our research could be synthesized in the concept of the Digital Facial Image that acts as an interface between the domain of digital information and the embodied human experience.
In relation to this we would like to do several experiments with projecting (recorded as well as live) human facial images back onto the body of a performer. In this way, we try to link 'flesh' (the 'warm', human and tactile world of the human body in performance) with technology (what in this sense could be described as the 'cold', resistant, screenbased world of digital media).

Through our research we will deal with different topics as: subjectivity and multiplicity, affection, gender, age and develop dramaturgical tools as well as technological/interactive tools. See 'Experiments'.
Our research aims to open different points of view on reality (what everybody is supposed to accept as reality). By twisting the appearance of a human, playing with similarities and differences between human faces (and especially the affection one almost automatically has with an image of a face), we want to create an experience of meeting a two faced person and increase ambiguity and 'play' with that in an artistic context.

As an extension of the interfacing real and surreal we plan to meet audience in a an everyday life context.
Flat Corner will site-speciﬁcly develop the work for different apartments and create a surreal version of the reality in an ordinary space. From the "Human Facial Interface" we would like to extend our research to a "Human Social Interface" which can be the interaction with an apartment. In this constellation of 4 artists with profound experience in the ﬁelds of choreography, performance, animation, VJ-ing, installation, sound and interactivity, we combine our knowledge and creativity to curiously go someplace exciting and 'new'.

Short Term Goals

Within the timeframe of the Masterclass, we will focus on experimentation and conceptualization. At the end of the last workshop we will have a framework which then can be developed into a live performance. The framework includes development of effective tools, try out aesthetics, try out dialog. See 'Experiments'
In order to develop and to concretize our work we would like to create occasions to meet physically. Between physical meetings each one of us would like to keep working and continue researching on our own. The development will be communicated through discussing and presenting further experiments on the cimatics blog.
In the immediate future we would also build a project-blog as a virtual space for meeting, discussing, exchanging and working. Within the blog we will build a database that will function as toolbox: definition and categorisation of what we had already experimented and its relative potential developments.

Long term goals

Within half a year the Flat Corner group aims at gathering in several places at least with two persons at the time. These meetings can simply function as a work in progress inside their own apartments.
We have also sent in an application to the festival "Body Navigation" taking place in St. Petersburg in July 2008. Our proposal for this festival is a site-speciﬁc work in progress inside an apartment that will be open to the audience.
Our goal is to have an apartment in Brussels during the Cimatics Festival 08. Based on the continuous process "Flat Corner" will prior to the festival move into an apartment that during the festival will be open for the audience in the evenings.

Experiments

Experiments we have done :
-Live ﬁlming and directly projecting.
-Same face on same face projection.
-Different recorded faces projected on live faces.
-`Gender-blending´= projection of a man on a woman and vice versa.
-Motion tracking with the camera on the ceiling, making a projected face stay on the performer's body while moving through the space.
Planned Experiments:
-Sound (generated granular sounds of the body, environmental sound).
-Interaction with live sound (for instance: voice triggering movement of video projection, movement of body triggering sound)
-Filming of a full body and projection on a full body
-Projection with feedback and delay effects.
-Live ﬁlming and projecting with a delay.
-Projection of clay animations (frame by frame projection on a sculpture in clay which gets manipulated in a stop-motion way) on a face.
-Motion tracking with the camera in front.
-Motion tracking a persons movements in a bed (nice context..)
-Color motion tracking.
-Recording a person who is smoking.
-Projecting on a person who is smoking (on the smoke).
-Projecting on a face with see though face mask (wet surface).
-Filming the proﬁle of a face/body and projecting on the proﬁle of a face/body.
-Projecting on see through screen (to shift between two dimensional projection and three dimensional projection).
-Projection an old face on a young person and vice versa.
-Collecting and digitizing youth pictures of a person and projecting them on the `now´ person
Possible scene for the apartment:
Bathroom scene: Two performers standing in front of a mirror in the bathroom. Faces/bodies are projected on them. Spectators are standing behind them and
follow the performance by looking in the mirror.

References

Mark B.N. Hansen - New Philosophy for New Media (2006):

In this experience, the infelicitous encounter with the digitally generated close-up image of a face - and speciﬁcally the affective correlate it generates in you, the viewer-participant- comes to function as the medium for the interface between the domain of digital information and the embodied human that you are.
(p. 129)

To my mind, the The digital Facial Image (DFI) and the affective response it triggers offers a promising alternative to the profoundly impoverished, yet currently predominant model of the human-computer interface. (p. 129)

Thus, rather than than channeling the body's contribution through the narrow frame of preconstituted software options, the DFI opens the interface to the richness of the bodily processing of information. For this reason, the DFI allows us to reconceptualize the very notion of the interface: bypassing exploration of more effective technical 'solutions', it invests in the body's capacity to supplement technology - its potential for collaborating with the information presented by the interface in order to create images
(p. 130)

If we can allow the computer to impact our embodied affectivity directly, our communication - and indeed our coevolution - with the computer will be opened to a truly new, 'postimagistic' phase.
(p. 131)

Affectivity is more than simply a supplement to perception (as Deleuze maintains) and it is more than a correlate to perception (as Bergson holds). Not only it is a modality of experience in its own right, but it is that modality - in contrast to perception - through which we open ourselves to the experience of the new. In short, affectivity is the privileged modality for confronting technologies that are fundamentally hetereogeneous to our already constituted embodiment, our contracted habits and rhythms.

We can now pinpoint exactly how digital facialization differs from Deleuze's refunctionalization of facialization in Cinema 1:
Whereas Deleuze celebrates the close-up as a liberation of affect from the body, the Digital Facial Image aims to catalyze the production of affect as an interface between the domain of information (the digital) and embodied human experience (p.134)

Gilles Deleuze "Francis Bacon - Logique de la sensation"

'....the ﬁgure can be almost reduced to an head. Bacon is a painter of heads and not a painter of faces. Is there a big difference between the two.
The face is a structured spatial organisation that cover the head as the head is depending from the body.
Bacon de-structure the face making the head rising upon the face....
Can we objectively say that the head is ﬂesh? As well that the ﬂesh is spirit?
Is' t the head the closer part to the bones?
The head is ﬂesh, is a block of ﬂesh which separe itself from the bones.'