Serial Consign

Pentagram: Newark Gateways

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:03:09 +0000

New Jersey is often derided as epitomizing the banality of the American urban landscape. So, with that in mind, how do you create a visual brand for a city that is mainly known as somewhere to drive through? This is the question underlying Pentagram's recent Newark Gateways project, which proposes a series of distributed graphics to demarcate various points of entry into that city. The proposal challenges the idea that "the gateway" is an architectural construction and instead pinpoints a network of key locations with a series of patterns that are only really legible when viewed through satellite photography or perhaps from the window of an airplane.

[Route 21 and Miller Street - street view]

Pentagram describes Newark Gateways as follows:

Our design considers the nature of travel and Newark’s role as a hub. It is no accident that the assignment for the Newark gateways project was delivered as a Google Earth file: this is, more and more, the way we virtually “travel.” Our gateways address both remote and local audiences with a set of ideas that are legible in reality and cyber-reality. In our concept, a series of painted “events” on the Newark streetscape would bring Newark to the world, and bring the world to Newark.

It is interesting how much Google figures into the representation of this project and one could even read Newark Gateways as an experiment in civic search engine optimization (SEO). It foregrounds place through indexing key points within a homogenous urban fabric - Adam Greenfield's "search urbanism" interpreted by branding and wayfinding savvy graphic designers.

[Newark Gateways - keyplan]

This scheme also speaks to some of the ambitions within the so-called deconstructivist architecture movement for diagramming the fragmentary sociopolitical or historical forces that permeate the city. While the iconography of Newark Gateways is decidedly mute in terms of "meaning", these visual interventions still speak to the desire to inscribe the city with markup, to make it textual. Experimental architectural masterplans such as Daniel Libeskind's Out of Line (1991) and much of the earlier work of Peter Eisenman or Dagmar Richter operated within this theatre as well—demarcation as formalist play.

I'm kicking myself for not paying closer attention to Newark Gateways when Sean Salmon posted about it back in April. It reappeared on my radar by way of a Benjamin Bratton tweet where Bratton encapsulated the project as "internality of the border/ city-as-meta-interface/ overexposed portal/ edges-overtake-nodes sort of thing" - an apt microcritique.

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.txt/090701

Greg J. Smith — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:37:44 +0000

[Frank Sobotka, union leader / The Wire]

Recently Noted:

Bloggers, theorists, YouTube mashup maestros and students of pop culture continue to pick apart David Simon's excellent HBO series The Wire (2002-2008) and occasionally some new and interesting readings of the show surface. Jeff Kinkle and Alberto Toscano's Baltimore as World and Representation: Cognitive Mapping and Capitalism in The Wire, is a compelling, thorough paper on space, capitalism and bureaucracy in Simon's Baltimore.
AAAARG.ORG is a fantastic archive of cultural studies, philosophy and political theory PDFs - there is a dizzying amount of material up for grabs here.
Leave it to Disquiet to post a review of the (almost absent) score and sound design in The Girlfriend Experience. Some great commentary by Marc Weidenbaum on the significance of a key drum solo: "Only later do we realize that the drum solo is, in fact, a live recording of a street musician, when we see him plying his trade on a street corner (and yes, he’s banging away — this metaphor can be stretched quite a bit before it breaks). This re-use parallels the structure of Girlfriend Experience, which chops up the story into little chunks that are then parceled out in a manner that reveals additional meaning."
More thoughts on sound and structure - Monica Ponzini's write-up on raster-noton: the shop in the most recent issue of Digimag.

I post .txt dispatches bi-weekly to highlight noteworthy content from across the web. Feel free to subscribe to my Google Reader shared items or add me to your delicious network if you want to tune in to the material that I'm bookmarking.

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Exploded View

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:00:41 +0000

Representation and mechanical enthusiasts should note Phil Patton's Stand Back for the Exploded View!, an article he wrote for the AIGA in May. The short essay uses the above exploded Porsche 12-cylinder racing engine (installed in the Delugan Meissl-designed Porsche Museum in Stuttgart) as a springboard into a fascinating discussion about exploded views of objects for illustrative and sculptural purposes. While quite auto-centric, the text moves beyond machine-fetish to parse the cultural appeal of these installation displays from the perspective of the institution and the viewer. Patton on the allure of visual disassembly:

In today’s world, the news is often punctuated by explosions, and increasingly there is a sense of the center losing grip and of things flying apart. The exploded diagram might make real life seem menacing. But dissection is also teaching, and showing the parts is a fundamental element of learning and study. The verb ‘articulate’ can mean identifying the bones of a skeleton or the segmented parts of something, as well as to make meaning clear. Exploded diagrams, whether on paper or in space, do something similar. They offer an exposition of a subject.

Patton's article can be found here. Be sure to spend some time examining Damián Ortega's work - it is great! [via Archinect]

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Ctrl-V: The Cinema Effect

Greg J. Smith — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:31:33 +0000

Image and transport technologies, revolutionized in the nineteenth century, instigated new relationships with time as fundamental as those begun in the transition from prehistory to recorded time (Kern 1993). Both Paul Virilio (1989) and Friedrich Kittler (1999) suggest that cinema must be located in the twinning of media and military technologies. As Sigfried Zielinski argues, however, reiterating the assertion made earlier by Lewis Mumford (1934: 12-18), nineteenth-century military and media technologies both depended for their mechanization and automation on the logically and chronologically prior development of the clock (Zielinski 1999: 72-74). The new armaments and logistics of the Maxim gun and the tank, like the new network of rail and telegraph, like the structured time of the shutter, derive both technologically and conceptually from the mechanized measurement of time. Without the mass-scale precision engineering required by the popularization of watches and clocks in the 1870s, the machine gun, the railway schedule, the production line, the cash register, and the cinematograph are not thinkable. The splitting of human actions into mechanically discrete movements, the atomization of economics and bureaucratic flows into distinct and quasi-autonomous, even meaningless keystrokes on the adding machine and typewriter, the Taylorization of work at Ford's River Rouge plant all spring from the same imagining of time as a discrete series of steps. And yet, although the cinema has the discretion of a chronometer, it also struggles with other temporalities, some coming into being, some fading from their old hegemony. However important the addition of the second hand to mass-produced watches, it alone cannot account for the opening up of microscopic, infinitesimal times, or the mise-en-abyme of the commodity fetish as it spiraled into spectacle.

- Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Pg. 6-7.

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Prototype: Open World, Locked City

Greg J. Smith — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:44:38 +0000

Prototype is a widely anticipated sandbox-style game that was developed by Radical Entertainment and released by Activision a few weeks ago. I had the opportunity to spend a few hours playing the game earlier this week and the experience left me a combination of numb and puzzled. The plot revolves around Alex Mercer, a young amnesiac infected with a weapons-grade genetic enhancements that ties him to the outbreak of a related lethal virus. The tone is dire and the game is set in a faithful reproduction of Manhattan, albeit post-quarantine, overrun with mutants and military contractors and rendered in a style that speaks to the cinematography of Children of Men and 28 Days Later. As is the case with most open world games, while the plot is not worth speaking of, the level design and gameplay are.

Does Prototype bring anything novel to the table in terms of playable urban space? Yes, there are some wild opportunities for movement and battle within this game. The most impressive characteristic of Prototype's Manhattan is that experiencing the verticality of the city is a key element of gameplay. Hopped up on superpowers, Alex is able to sprint up the sides of skyscrapers and half-glide around the city. Battles rage on the street, up the faces of buildings and onto rooftops. The cityscape is jammed with architecture, infrastructure, street furniture, vehicles and trees - all precisely tuned by a physics engine to facilitate total carnage. The game designers must have a particular fascination with the mechanical systems of buildings as rooftop air conditioners and water towers figure rather prominently into gameplay. This is similar terrain to that treaded by Faith, the parkour protagonist in Mirror's Edge, last year's first-person platformer. However, where Faith used building systems to circumnavigate the pitfalls associated with moving from rooftop to rooftop, Alex Mercer hurls AC units at helicopters. Ultraviolence aside, Prototype actually delivers the kinetic rush you'd expect from a game like Mirror's Edge, where the stiff level design reduced gameplay to little more than spatial grinding. The "adaptive parkour" of Prototype is the best free running I've seen in a game and the momentum you can build is incredible - like a Liberty City rampage that isn't tethered to the asphalt. Unfortunately, movement is about where my accolades for Prototype end. While the combat system is vast and idiosyncratic, my impressions thus far lead me to believe that the game is crippled by a lack of imagination. Now hold that thought.

[Wasted space, locked door syndrome illustrated / diagram: Structure]

Last week, Peter Kirn highlighted some of the current developments in the procedural modeling of urban space for gaming and CGI purposes. As illustrated in the demo video for Structure, programmers can employ generative systems to reduce the workload of producing digital cities for gaming. The developers of Structure contextualize their tool as follows:

This system overcomes the main limitation normally found in virtual city models and games: The "Locked Door Syndrome". Although there are enterable buildings in urban games or city simulations, normally only a small fraction of the buildings can be entered. This is due to the sheer number of buildings in a typical city. Given limited development time and memory requirements, it is infeasible for developers to create such a large amount of building interiors using traditional asset creation pipelines, where all buildings in a city have to be individually modeled and placed by artists. To the best of our knowledge, current existing solutions attempting to generate or model virtual cities are generating only "fake" building exteriors without indoor areas.

So if we take this statement at face value, spatial authenticity is the key concern in modeling cities for games. Are we to assume that gamers want to move beyond the bitmapped streetscape (a stage set) and into the interiors of nondescript retail space and generic office towers? The developers of Structure seem to think so. While few studios can afford the reported $100 million price tag of GTA IV who can deny the degree to which Liberty City resonated as a place? What bothers me about the Structure demo video is how much it is tied to the first-person shooter genre - point of view is synonymous with wielding a firearm and the "destructibility" of matter is a major selling point. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had an oblique fascination with building assembly and the penetration power of various firearms factored heavily into gameplay. Whether you unloaded a shotgun blast or a 5.56x45mm round at an adversary on the opposite side of sheet metal fence could have drastically different results. In the procedural cities generated by Structure everything just crumbles uniformly, and this is ultimately my confusion about Prototype - why go to the trouble of creating a complex, detailed, simulated city and neutralize it with gameplay that is entirely contingent on spectacular, unending mayhem?

If locked door syndrome limits the experience of space in gaming by presenting architectural window dressing rather than explorable interiors, I posit that locked city syndrome could be a charge levied against another type of dead end - the lack of engagement associated with many open world games set in cities. Johan Huizinga situated "play" as a phenomena that emerges from, and can be measured against the protocol and the rhythms of daily life. Sandbox-style urban games need to ground their narratives and play in some semblance of "urban normalcy" otherwise there is simply no friction. The Manhattan in Prototype doesn't succeed as a dystopian urban space because there is no hint that it ever even functioned properly in the first place - sandbox as stage set rather than a charged, oscillating environment. Locked city syndrome.

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spmb: Complex Order

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:29:02 +0000

Several weeks ago I received Complex Order: intrusions in public space, a design monograph recently published by Winnipeg's venerable Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art. The book collates a decade of creative output by Eduardo Aquino and Karen Shanski who operate under the moniker spmb - an acronym acknowledging the duo's divergent connections to São Paulo and Manitoba. Aquino and Shanski, both trained as architects, are active on the street and in the gallery through a practice that is particularly concerned with examining public space. Past projects have inscribed street furniture with information to create "everyday memorials", created perceptual interventions which challenge users and playfully explored graphic design and signage in the urban landscape. What initially drew me to Complex Order was the following statement, that describes the philosophy underlying the monograph:

We were not interested in the traditional monograph, centred in the production of the individual artist, but instead in the relationship of the work within a larger context. We work "in response" to circumstances and challenges presented to us, often in the public realm. Therefore, we wanted Complex Order to create a kind of public space of sorts, made of several constituencies, to stretch the discussion of public space itself, its poetics and politics, its actions and representations.

An anti-monograph monograph? Yes, and an engaging one at that. Aquino and Shanski have not only done an admirable job of presenting their own body of work but situated it within a constellation of other projects by peers and influences. The serial photography of spmb's All the Signs of Pembina Highway (2003) is displayed alongside Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) and Gilles Hébert's Town Without Pity (1989) - all grounded by even-handed analysis. The book is a pleasure to move through as the typical hierarchies associated with chronology and inspiration melt away yielding the districts and "constituencies" promised by the mission statement rather than the opaque notions of absolute authorship implicit in most design monographs.

Complex Order organizes content by way of geography. Winnipeg, São Paulo and Montreal become the frames for considering work by spmb and peers - the book brings together approximately two dozen projects. For additional context, the monograph also includes several (refreshingly informal) interviews as well as essays contributed by Adrian Blackwell, Charles Kirschbaum and Theodore Zeldin.

[spmb / Vous Êtes Ici / 2003-06]

While this review has focused on context it goes without say that the work of spmb is diverse and engaging. Some standout projects include the studies of and reactions to Oscar Niemeyer's Copan building and the various Canadian memorial projects. To summarize, this is exciting work presented in a smart catalogue-like format - the collaborative nature of their projects (and thinking) really shines through. You can view a selection of work included in Complex Order here and order the text via the Plug In ICA webstore.

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.txt/090619

Greg J. Smith — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:14:45 +0000

Recently Noted:

Mez Breeze's syntax spins! Check [ S/pace_98 = [twitte]reality_fictions_09 ] a guest "assembly" built especially for UCSD's micro-journal Version.
Geoff Manaugh unpacks the significance of Bloomsday in 2009 and manages to tie narrative, cartography and fabrication into a lovely Joycean knot.
Ceci Moss reviews the 53rd Venice Biennale and in doing so disassembles a related "internet pavilion" - this portion of her post has inspired some interesting comments.
The gaming nostalgia never stops - Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice outline the history of Spacewar! for Gamasutra.

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1000+ Unread POIs

Greg J. Smith — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:48:11 +0000

While researching a new project yesterday, I spent a few hours trawling Google to try to get a sense of the options for feeding OpenStreetMap data into Drupal. During my travels, I came across a postcard from the networked city and I couldn't resist sharing it.

While dead simple, this collage is very effective in suggesting how immersion in a information-charged city might play out. Rather than rely on the omniscience of the ubiquitous satellite view, Andrew Turner (the presumed author of the image) has instead situated his perspective on the street. No mobile mapping applications, no civic visualizations, and no screenshots of EveryBlock. Instead we are presented with a vignette of an RSS streetscape where stakeholders negotiate trajectories, architecture, infrastructure and bodies are broadcasting and every action is encoded into a full spectrum of microformats. It is a visceral sketch that speaks volumes - looking at it reminds me of the glorious din of Iván Huelves Illas' Much Ado About Nothing (click on the orange button on the upper right of the page this link opens to hear what I mean).

The image is culled from Drupal and the GeoSpatial Web, a talk given by Turner and Jeff Miccolis earlier this year - the slides are worth browsing through if you are at all interested in online mapping.

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Robert Henke & Christopher Bauder Interview

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:13:48 +0000

[Atom at TESLA-Berlin, September 2007 / photo: Justine Lera]

Robert Henke and Christopher Bauder's installation Atom was one of the most exciting performances at MUTEK 2009. The project could be described as a whimsical rhythm machine or perhaps a spatial system for visualizing music. A summary of the project from the MUTEK review I wrote for Rhizome:

The piece involves an eight-by-eight grid of helium-filled balloons, each tethered to a motorized cable winch. Each balloon contains a dimmable LED and the entire assembly functions as a spatial instrument that responds to Henke's atmospheric ambient techno score. Audio events such as percussion hits trigger illumination within individual balloons and the height of individual nodes are constantly modulating.

During the festival, Robert, Christopher and I had the following chat about Atom. The pair of artists situated the work in relation to their respective Monolake and WHITEvoid projects in a conversation touched on musical performance, audience expectations and the occasionally blurry line between instruments and interfaces.

[Atom - technical rider illustration / photo: WHITEvoid]

Greg J. Smith: Between your performance of Atom and the A/VISIONS Tesla coil mayhem, I couldn't even bring myself to face another club event at Metropolis last night - so thank you. I've been trying to wrap my head around your piece and there are two ways that I'm inclined to think about it - I'm hoping you can respond to both of these ideas. Is Atom an instrument for playing space or an interface for musical composition? To me, the piece appears to be an instrument and I can only imagine the relationship between the motorized system and Robert's compositional process. Thoughts?

Robert Henke: It is an instrument because it is performed. There are only a few things pre-programmed, like building blocks and the whole narrative structure is the result of actually playing it - I really see it as an instrument. Christopher is playing the position of the balloons and I play the LED patterns and the sound.

Christopher Bauder: Yeah, it is like one huge machine that we are operating together.

GJS: In terms of the organization of the piece, at what level is it arranged? Is it movements or scenes or... I was thinking of scenes in Ableton Live and there were moments during the performance in which it felt like new movements, or vignettes were beginning. You could see the behaviour patterns of the entire system shift.

RH: It is more individual clips - it is not on a scene level.

CB: Actually, technically it is.

RH: I think we need to clarify exactly what you mean though...

GJS: Maybe referencing scenes in Ableton will limit this discussion.

RH: To clarify, the whole concert consists of nine pieces and the order of the pieces is fixed because the transitions between the pieces are very important. However, what happens within these pieces is very variable - the length, the dynamic and structure within the performance are all very free. So it is really like a concert where we play nine pieces and each allows a lot of freedom.

GJS: Presumably the behaviour, the possibilities influence the way that these pieces are performed. Can you elaborate on the overlap of your skill sets. I know that you've performed this project several times, how exactly have you tuned this system?

RH: You mean the interaction between the capabilities of the instrument?

GJS: The capabilities of the instrument and the sound that is showcased through it...

RH: 8x8, 64 LEDs is not that much material to work with - it is a very small, and very rough matrix. This forces you to come up with very basic shapes, and I set up a very simple rule for myself that every percussive element in the music has to create a sound and a visual signal. I limit myself to four MIDI clips in Live as that is the maximum that I can handle and really pay attention. These limitations lead to musical and optical and spatial structures that have to be simple. What makes this whole system come alive are the changes. Another approach would be if you think about a very difficult instrument, then the changes would be very difficult and you could work out very precise and well designed tableaux. The tableaux within our setup are very simple and the impact comes from the constant change.

GJS: I was quite struck by the fact that I had no clue where you guys were located until the very end of the performance. I didn't know if you were in the room or "the men behind the curtain". Towards the end of the concert, all the balloons dropped down to their base, resting state, and I thought the performance had ended - but it hadn't, there was one tableau to go. This final tableau started with all the balloons rising up to the highest position and as they rose I could see the audience on the other side of the room again - I had forgot about the people on the opposite side of the space the installation was mediating my view of them. To what degree does Atom reflect your thinking on performance, audience expectations, and space (within the context of a music festival)?

RH: First of all, as I repeat again and again, I find it really important to be close to the audience. I find it crucial to not be elevated, and, in a piece like this, since we are playing an instrument, we need to see and hear it - all these constraints more or less force us to almost become part of the audience.

CB: Since the piece has no direction and you have the same views from all sides, we decided from the very first performance that this will not be performed on a stage and the audience will surround the piece. We will create the patterns so that they can be perceived equally from all sides.

GJS: So there is no "sweet spot"?

RH: Exactly - I really try to create four channel sound in a way that works in every position. It might sound different in certain points within the room but it works everywhere. Even some of the overtly spatial sounds and effects, while they might cycle in one direction and then turn around - you can understand them from everywhere in the room.

[Atom at MUTEK 2009 / photos: basic_sounds]

GJS: Did you try to work through all the configurations of the matrix? There was a definite sense that you explored the entire form. There were some architectural references, such as the ramp, and arrangements where the balloons formed a floor or ceiling - but the bulk of it wasn't figurative. Certain balloon configurations had me thinking about the aesthetics of trackers and step sequencers but others seemed explicitly architectural. What is your thinking about the way that you "play" space with Atom?

RH: Really free associations - the ramp was our space ship.

CB: ...aliens landing with lights flashing on the side.

RH: ...and other forms like the bowl shaped volume that might read as that for for a while and then shift into a groups of lines that fire like pistons.

CB: Sound and space were interlocking all the time. The balloons created a shape and it looked like something and then we had a musical association. Sometimes it was the other way around...

RH: ...and we worked from sound. We asked ourselves: what shape or pattern would work with a specific sound?

GJS: It is funny, the MUTEK documentation for the project was quite limited. I checked out the project on Robert's site and even after examining the material on the piece I assumed that Atom was some kind of a percussion equalizer. Now, I would have been interested in this but what surprised me was the degree to which I could see a back-and-forth between the movement and the sound design - it was reflexive. So now I wonder, what exactly you guys do after this? Is Atom something that you tour, refine and explore, is there another system on a sketchpad somewhere?

CB: Both. We are refining it - this system, and the new prototypes are already under construction. This next version will have full RGB and the matrix will also be comprised of more units, and the balloons will also be able to be bigger - we're going to have a lot more options. This new system will also be faster and there are also a lot of other ideas in the works.

GJS: Ok. So with festivals like MUTEK, OFFF and ARS Electronica - do you see this project as some kind of a middle ground between the music festival and the new media expo? Do you think other artists might head in this direction?

CB: This kind of work as a trend?

RH: I don't know. Something I see that I know a lot of people who came for instance from a club music background when they were in their twenties. If they are continuing making music and they are serious about their art, at some point they will probably wonder to themselves "What should I do - when I am 50 or 60 will I still want to perform a minimal techno set at 5 in the morning?" You think about where can you put your creative output, what situations allow you to make art when you are older? Of course, working in an audiovisual context allows your work to perceived in a different way. I personally have a film sound background and I'm interested in those things and to me it was clear that I liked this kind of interaction and I feel that a lot of people from my generation who have been making music for a few decades are exploring similar systems for exactly the same reason.

GJS: I know you guys weren't at the panel that Philip Sherburne hosted yesterday, but Uwe Schmidt was talking about the travesty of that "well now what?" moment with making club music - he said he was always happy to leave a club when he was done performing.

RH: The club experience is important, but for me it's really a world that is not my world anymore and I have to be aware of that if I am interacting with this world. I don't want to be seen as someone who is pretending to be in this world anymore and for instance as a result of this I now insist that my Monolake live shows - which are still working in a club context somehow are four channel. It works extremely well because it clearly tells the crowd that something else is going on. For instance, I recently played in a party in France with Jeff Mills. It was a 3000 person rave with a gigantic PA and I was booked by the agent of Jeff Mills because Jeff likes what I do and I performed in the centre of the space and it was fantastic because it became so obvious to the people that something different had happened - not the normal DJ somewhere in the background or the usual live act and it worked extremely well. It wasn't that everybody was dancing their ass off, but I totally had the feeling that people were very fascinated with the fact that in their club space, they heard something related to their music and ideas - it had bass drums and it had basslines and hi-hats and snares and those things but at the same time it was different. For me this is where I can see the future and at the same time I can see audiovisual stuff working in these contexts as well. The only thing is that I currently have no concept how to integrate interesting visual content into this four channel scenario in a club.

[WHITEvoid / Polygon Playground / 2008]

GJS: What's interesting is that there seems to be a lot of prototypes out there for the way that artists can perform sound with video. We've talked about the press play, well-branded "cool visuals" camp that is prominent and well received but there are limitations there - how reactive can these systems be? Are video artists limited to being "interpreters" for musicians? To change directions somewhat, Robert seems to be referencing a mutated or evolving vision of the club experience. Christopher, how are you approaching this project? Are you coming at this work from an interaction design background or perhaps from architecture?

CB: Yeah, I've studied interaction design and I do a very broad range of projects from commercial work to art installations. I show my work at a lot of art and media festivals and I love club music, I still go out clubbing and that is the common ground.

RH: The raw energy of good club music refers back to a few very basic principles of music. I've been involved with academic computer music for long enough to understand what is often missing there and at the same time I am bored to death by minimal techno.

CB: It is also funny the way Atom reaches some people who would never go out to listen to techno. There was a 70 year old woman who came up to us after we performed in Paris and she didn't say it was too loud. She listened to it, she was very close to the speakers and she thought the performance was too short. She was completely immersed in the piece - it is funny that people who never go into clubs can listen to similar sounds in a different context and love it.

RH: ...and they feel connected to it. For them, techno is a different style tied to a different scene, or world for that matter - we find this connection very interesting.

GJS: At one point during the performance, when the bass was cut, the whirring of the motorized winches became a part of the soundscape. That made me think about the legacy of sampling these types of sounds within electronic music and hearing a motor as a "working part" of a musical performance was kind of a moment of purity - it was great to hear this here at MUTEK.

CB: Sometimes people say that they are disturbed by the sound of the winches.

GJS: ...do they want all the process to be inaudible and seamless? To me, the process is what is interesting. For example, if there wasn't a bit of swing on the balloons the performance might be more formally perfect - whatever that means, but what I like is how certain balloons are a little off from their neighbours.

RH: I think that I have to put in a layer, and Christopher has to put in a layer of "spray" in the next version - so you can adjust the randomness a little bit.

GJS: So there is no randomness in it right now? Aside of course from dealing with air and physics?

RH: No, currently there is no imperfection in the system but in thinking about the next system we probably need to introduce a little bit of this mist. In music this is needed, same thing in animation - if it is too perfect it is boring.

GJS: Impenetrable.

CB: A little grain always helps.

GJS: Indeed! Thanks for the chat.

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POWEr Play - Artificiel at MUTEK

Greg J. Smith — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:59:33 +0000

In writing my Rhizome piece on multimedia performance at MUTEK 2009 I made a strategic omission. While the visual overload and watertight formalism of the raster-noton label showcase and the mechanical delight of Atom both made distinct impressions, it was Artificiel's POWEr that prompted the most visceral reaction I experienced at the festival this year. To be reductive, POWEr is electronic music in the purest sense. The project utilizes a custom made Tesla coil as the driving force in a dynamic musical performance. This concert was completely improvised and set out to explore the possibilities of using "electricity as a subtle but pressing instrument". Subtle is not the first word that comes to mind in attempting to describe POWEr as the Tesla coil device took up approximately half the stage and emitted violent arcs of electricity throughout the entire performance. The resulting crackling, buzz and uncanny sound of current became raw material with which Artificiel assembled on the fly electroacoustic sketches. In addition to modulating the electricity, "playing it" as if it were a rudimentary instrument, an array of cameras and microphones were used to collect and process the sound and images of the arcs. The concert was structured as a series of short vignettes in which Artificiel switched the focus between the device, their sound sketches and a range of simple but effective video sequences. These varying perspectives foregrounded different aspects of the electricity which moved and sounded so quickly that it was difficult to process in real time.

A cynic might dismiss POWEr as a one liner, but the performance was as much about time as it was about harnessing electricity. The previously mentioned recording devices were used to collect video and sound samples and this source material was reprocessed and abstracted moments, or minutes later. The audience watched with awe as the Tesla coil spat ever-evolving branches of electricity and Artificiel would then rework sounds sampled during a sequence. The focus would then shift to a projection screen that zoomed in on the minutiae of the arc and filters and compositing effects would highlight the uniqueness of each flicker and flash. The video offered a split screen viewport to index these electrical events down to the nanosecond and graphically in relation to negative space. The performance was riveting and it prompted the following observations:

If you consider the entire concert, there was no explicit centre of visual focus - it was a lot of work to keep up with this piece. While Artificiel cycled between video, the device and their performance interludes the audience was left to triangulate an impression of what was going on. In some ways this use of video and scattered stage practice reminded me of Matmos but less bricolage and more "weird science".
The manner in which POWEr utilizes raw electricity as an instrument most certainly gives the glitch aesthetic in techno and experimental music a black eye. Seeing Artificiel's Alexandre Burton and Julien Roy onstage operating this giant apparatus made most loop-based DSP driven experimental music seem conservative. The polite, cropped photos at the top of this post very safely document the most easily aestheticized aspect of the performance but seeing this device onstage blasting arcs of electricity was nerve wracking. Beyond this there was no real precedent by which to evaluate the musical performance, it was completely earnest, exploratory and captivating.
Not a thought - a percept. I was sitting in the front row while POWEr was performed and by the end of the set I thought I smelled fruit. A person nearby was convinced that the smell was fresh strawberries. A little research suggests that this was in fact Ozone, which is often produced by Tesla Coils. I have not smelled anything but sweat, liquor or petulance at a show for a long time.

Aside from being impressed with Julien Roy's comments at a panel earlier in the week, I didn't know who Artificiel were before seeing and hearing POWEr. I can say with complete confidence that it was like no performance I've experienced before. You can learn more about Artificiel's earlier projects such as condemned_bulbes and cubing on their website - they also have a page documenting POWEr (which has limited information and some dark, grainy videos that do not do the project justice).

I almost didn't hear POWEr as I was going to duck out of that A/VISIONS event a little early - thanks to pals Peter Kirn and Aaron Meyers for convincing me to stick around.

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