chris caines

There is a project in western Sydney at Blacktown Arts Centre that I’ve been involved with for a while called CODED, a series of projects loosely based around contemporary art approaches to coding, tagging and writing in place. There was a Sydney Writers Festival panel back in June last year that I participated in & now there is an exhibition to which I’ve contributed an audio installation piece called Orbital.

Orbital consists of four train of thought monologues by drivers on the Sydney orbital motorway network, visitors walk the floor map of the network a camera sensor system triggering playback of the audio pieces around the space.

Installations are not my usual thing & thanks go to the curator Sophia Kouyoumdjian and the installing team at BAC Tim & Bo for the fantastic help they gave. The show is there until the end of march and all the artists involved have done great work, so please drop in if you are in the area. It opens next Thursday the 4th at 6pm. I’ll post video and audio here after the documentation shoot happens.

I was lying on the couch at the beach shack the yesterday, reading after having just had breakfast, when my phone rang. It was a journalist from Adelaide radio wanting comment on something related to mobile phones.

“You are a expert on mobile phone culture right?” he said.

I told him I was driving and would ring him back later, he gave me a number I didn’t write down. I felt a little ashamed to lie to him, but also a little self righteously glad and I realised then how my attitude to dealing with journalists and the media had changed over the past few years. Even though I’d worked at a few other Universities, after starting at UTS 5 years ago I came onto the media radar strongly, firstly around blogging and then around mobile cultures.

Even when these calls started running at five or six a week (and I felt like I had to spend time preparing for the radio and TV spots) I felt like this is what academics were supposed to do. Contribute to the public conversation, be a public resource in some small way speaking through the media. Which is how I ended up on 2UE during the Cronulla riots debating the content of the text messages flying back and forth. But also how I ended up in the Courier-Mail entertainment section before Christmas pontificating on the way young people interact with the world through mobile devices.

I’ve stopped returning the calls now, disillusioned with the idea that participating was doing anyone any good except for the media companies hungry for free content from “experts”. For a while I had an ABC-only policy to callbacks but even that got tired after a while. In short I was worn down by the ceaseless inanity of the requests and the conversations, the clueless journalists with no idea about what they are asking or who they are talking to, keyboards clattering away in the background as they soundbite your impromptu spray delivered from the office chair.

The guilt I still feel about having taken this attitude is related to two things, firstly if no-one participates in the endless spectacle for these reasons all you end up with is people with a particularly crazy axe to grind like Hetty Johnson. These people make great media fodder, always up for an outraged/combative quote. And the second reason is that media is of course a kind of public space, especially in terms of broadcast media where public airspace is used under publicly granted license. It feels wrong not to contribute in some small way if you have the opportunity, leaving it to the news pros and the axe grinders they feed on, but for me at least I’d prefer that feeling than opening the floodgates again.

The wonderful Golden Live performers. Videos below in order or appearance on the night. Roger Mills & performers with Idea of South, Emily MacDaniel & Emma Ramsay as well as Alphabet Soup the first collaboration between Nick Wishart & Miguel Velenzuela.

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Norie Neumark & Maria Miranda have just posted the video from the installation they did at CarriageWorks earlier this year that uses one of my songs from the Beardwagon CD.

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I’m organising a performance night for the Golden Eyes festival next Tuesday night with some fantastic performers, come along if you are in Sydney town. See blurb below for details.

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Golden Live – A performance night for the Golden Eyes Festival

8pm Tuesday the 20^th of October 2009. Bon Marche Studio. UTS

The bi-annual Golden Eyes Festival of Media Arts has been held at UTS for over 20 years. This year it will also include a performance night showcasing the very active AV performance scene among undergrads, postgrads and staff at UTS.  Three groups of performers will be presenting on the night in the wonderful purpose built Bon Marche Studio at UTS with 9.1 sound and high resolution digital cinema projection. Performers will be: Emily McDaniel & Emma Ramsay, Roger Mills & Neil Jenkins as well as Nick Wishart & Miguel Valenzuela.

Entry to the Bon Marche Studio is on Harris St, Ultimo on the ground floor of UTS Building three. http://www.uts.edu.au/about/mapsdirections/citymap.html

8pm Tuesday the 20^th of October – The event is Free. Duration approx 80 mins.

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Emily McDaniel is an Aboriginal artist, curator and educator from the Wiradjuri Nation. Her work traverses performance, new media, film and sound installation. This year she has begun curating and coordinating Refraction, a UTS Media Arts performance night that encourages the next wave of artists to get amongst it. She is currently completing her BA in Media Arts and Production.

Emma Ramsay works across many platforms of art including sound, video and installation. She is a founding director of Sydney based ARI Quarterbred, that promotes cross disciplinary practice and developmental support for emerging artists. She is currently completing a Masters in Media Arts and Production.

Emma and Emily have been collaborating for over a year and have recently exhibited and performed at Electrofringe. Their practice tries to achieve a good feeling through sonic spirituality, by fusing installation with performance and lo-fi with hi-fi. Although they can be placed under the umbrella of new media, sometimes, they just like to leave the brolly at home. Golden Live will see the two of them collaborate with stunning visuals and epic sounds to create a cockle warming sound that will make the little hairs on your spine stand on end.

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Idea of South – Roger Mills & Neil Jenkins

Exploring ontological notions of southernness, Idea of South is a three part radiophonic composition combining live networked terrestrial radio and Internet streaming. It is a musical sound journey integrating spoken word, live processed trumpet, violin and location recordings contributed by sound artists and phonographers throughout the southern hemisphere. It was originally broadcast simultaneously over Radio 2SER, FBi Radio and Shoutcast stream in June 2009, and will be performed for Golden Live as a six channel mix with a live visuals by artist Neil Jenkins.

Performers are:  Roger Mills – Trumpet, Hogi Tsai – Violin, Bernie Maier – Spoken word, Visual Mix – Neil Jenkins.

Roger Mills is a composer, sound artist and writer whose practice focuses on networked collaborations, internet performance and radio. He has worked internationally as a composer & sound designer, and is editor of the online sound art magazine and net label Furthernoise.org. Roger is currently an HDR student at UTS, researching improvisation in remote online collaborations and founder of the Ethernet Orchestra.

http://www.eartrumpet.org

http://ethernetorchestra.netpraxis.net

http://www.furthernoise.org

Neil Jenkins is an artist whose practice is heavily engaged with

electronic media and the Internet. He creates highly interactive works

that often require a live internet connection and the participation of

its audience to function and exist.

http://www.devoid.co.uk

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Alphabet Soup, is a new audio/visual performance by Nick Wishart + Miguel Valenzuela

Using a hacked Speak n Spell and other circuit bent alphabet toys, animations,a cube, some code and an asprin,  Nick & Miguel will attempt to reassemble language into a sonic & visual feast.

Think R2D2 on acid!

Texas Instruments released the Speak n Spell toy in the late 70’s and are now the holy grail for circuit benders. Containing one of the 1st commercially available speech chips, these wonderful toys can be retro fitted with a MIDI input kit allowing the phonetic sounds to be triggered by keyboards and sequencers.

Nick Wishart – Working in music, sound and multimedia his main area of artistic practice is in the development of Physical Interactive Systems. Combining his skills in electronics, tactiles, MIDI, interactive devices, audio production and circuit bending techniques, Nick creates interactive multi-media installations and circuit bent instruments that form the basis of the all toy band Toydeath.

www.toydeath.com

www.cell.org.au

Miguel Valenzuela has been making video art since 1996. He has exhibited at Artist Run Spaces such as Mekanarky studios and Newman Lane Gallery, as well as in various public spaces around Sydney. He is currently researching multidimensional interactive video/sound art and its associative dimensions with regard to social norms, laws, formalities and their relative elasticity.

http://fmgrande.blogspot.com/2009/02/film-art.html

There is one of these Doepfer analogue synth modules in the studio at work, used for teaching synthesis concepts. I’d been meaning to learn how to use it and play around with it for ages but didn’t do it till just recently. I think for the first time after years of using virtual analogue and various types of hybrid sample sound devices I really began to understand the practical basics of designing sounds this way and I can understand how it can get pretty addictive. Firstly, compared to software it feels quite out of control and you can never save anything so unless you record as you go (or are willing to document patches) its all pretty in the moment. Secondly, it’s quite a lot of fun. I spent a few hours burbling away with it the other night, forgetting all worldly cares. The Doepfer is quite cool and germanic sounding, a cliche I know but I even thinks its true of Native Instruments products, compared to the only other analog synth I’ve ever played (a Moog).

Unfortunately I can’t drag it home to my studio, so back on the software instrument trail I’ve found something very similar.

Somehow Fab Filter Twin 2 pictured above here captures that weird fragile instability, that feeling that you are playing with modulated electric current that is more the attraction of the real thing than the sound for me.

Ken Robinson at TED a couple of years back on the difficulty the edu machine has with creativity.

I love bits of gear & software that you can work with like an instrument. By that I mean, fluidly and fast and where time spent honing some proficiency and familiarity is repaid with more interesting and unique results. Aside from the sort of relationship you can have with a video or stills camera you use over a long period this isn’t a common way of working in film or video. Editing software and compositing, animation and effects packages lean toward a complex detail oriented non realtime workflow that while it can of course be engrossing, doesn’t lead to the sort of play you can experience with a softsynth or something like Ableton Live.

When I started out making video one of the tools I had was a Fairlight Computer Video Instrument, the much much cheaper visual partner to the famous pioneering CMI sampling keyboard. What was most amazing about the CVI was that it really was an instrument, the tactile sliders and buttons allowed for live play with digital video in ways that haven’t been equaled till recent  years.

While most of the presets were cheesy as hell, the synthesis model it was based on meant you could develop your own patches and save them to memory. And if you were like me, then laying the treatments out to tape, layering them up later in expensive online suites. While the sampling inspired by the CMI of course became foundational to modern sound and music production, live video instrumentation and manipulation as a performance or compositional tool has only slowly developed in response to the rise of VJ culture in clubs and in live music. There are now a range of decent software tools and importantly control surfaces like this nanoKontrol (note the similarities to the CVI surface) are becoming widespread amongst the live visuals fraternity.

While live visualism is certainly diversifying into live cinema, the architectural and harking back to ideas of expanded cinema, the tools and techniques still fall into the domain of the eye candy techno Vj style aesthetics that completely dominated not so long ago. One thing holding back integration into more established (and high resolution) video workflows is the lack of recording options in many of the key software packages, the emphasis is all on the moment. While in some ways this is laudable, it is also a stumbling block for allowing live visual “playing” to become part of the process of image generation workflow for high resolution video and for the sort of visuals unable to be generated in realtime. This is only partly about the computer speeds & video hardware improvements required, it is most importantly about recognising what this sort of instrumental play brings to moving image practice in general, both how we produce and read video.

Never have I used so much gear for a performance, this Liquid Architecture gig is turning into a Pink Floyd style equipment fest. We got the streaming working the other day, its a bit of a complicated thing, but luckily we have the resources to make it happen.

The chain goes like this:

Jes & I with separate laptop VJ rigs (mine probably with two computers) running Modul8 & VDMX5.

These are mixed together in a edirol HD video mixer and output to the projector, the streaming encoder and a HDV tape deck for recording the performance.

Shannon has his laptop/controller sound rig with a submixer that as well as outputting to the main 7.1 PA also sends feeds to both Jes and I so we can use audio frequencies to control some of the visual FX we have going on. The visual and audio feeds are fed to the encoder machine a Tricaster, which is a mixer in itself and a bit overkill for this job but happily sends out a flash video stream to the flash media server sitting elsewhere on the campus. We got it working the other day and the Tricaster is now sitting down it its room sending out some random stock footage to the server, you can see it working here.

The only thing that remains to be worked out re: the streaming I think is how we might send a different high quality stream out to the screens in the main campus tower and a lower quality one out to the pages it will be embedded in, Kat Baird & I are going to sort this through the week hopefully. A lot of setup for a short performance yes?

We went and did Rider Spoke at the MCA last night. A Blast Theory project where participants ride around leaving personal responses to questions in locations around the rocks. To then be listened to by other riders as they cruise about on bikes, wifi enabled PDA thing on the handlebars. Like a lot of Blast Theory work it was strong on the theatre of intimate personal confession and not that strong on the resonance of media delivered or created in place. What was most enjoyable though was simply riding a bicycle. Something I do so seldom do in the traffic maelstrom of the city.

I was excited a couple of months back to hear that Blast Theory were coming to do a project at the MCA. Then I completely forgot only to be randomly reminded this evening. If you are in Sydney go and book one of the remaining slots, you don’t get many chances to experience big budget locative media projects.

Started using Twitter a few days back & enjoying it so far. Updates down the sidebar there or directly via my twitter page. Like being able to txt to it & in turn to here.

I’ve waited a long time to have a platform for playing Grand Theft Auto 4. Until I got the newly released PC version for christmas & installed it using BootCamp on my new iMac. Where it just runs, but nevertheless I’ve been having the most engrossing game experience I’ve had for years with Niko driving like a crazy person through faux New York. I’m recognising streets and shops in Manhattan where I’ve haven’t been for ten years, hard to get used to driving on the right side of the road though.

As you can imagine looking at the picture this 1920s satnav device worked by manually scrolling the map on your wrist device as you progressed. From Strange Maps, further details here.

There is a perfect storm of online/cheaptools/market fragmentation upending big portions of the entertainment industry & while I find it easier to understand what has been going on in film/tv & the music industry, the advances that people have been getting in publishing have been hard to make sense of. If like me you suffer from bamboozlement about this you may find this NYmag peice clarifying.