July 3, 2008

Some video experiments I've done are up over at the Wizard Prison page - Click here. The footage is the result of playing with Iole's laser plane in our beautiful backyard garden, then running that footage through some software I wrote in Processing.

June 30, 2008

The excellent Channel 53 once again comes through with a fringe You Tube treat from the place where technology and biology interact. This man's interior decorating is amazing. From the TV show born of the late, great Omni magazine.

Novel things here: inclusion of children, group activity, touch. Why are these qualities so absent from art, especially any technological art, these days?

June 22, 2008

I've been experimenting with Processing, a very simple language for visual and audio art. There are so many ways to quickly prototype things it's sick. The big limitation with it, for me, is the slow video capture and encoding with it's dependency on Quicktime for Java. At any rate, the work-in-progress there is a bridge from Csound to Processing, enabling me to generate visual events from csound.

March 19, 2008

A busy year so far! Too busy to write about here - check out the new projects (click on projects, above left) page for updates.

Iole, Ed and I are seeking funds to publish a primer on Sensoria, expounding on it's design and showing off some beautiful images taken by Iole. This will be a book+DVD.

I've been doing work for the Seattle Aquarium with cousin Mike from Modern Dog. I can't post the details until the our proposal is accepted, but let's just say it's another interactive piece which will be permanently available to the public.

The wait continues for the next C'mon C'mon cd

Wizard Prison is looking at scoring two horror films this year - Taken (filmed in Bellingham) and Zombies of Mass Destruction (great title) filmed in eerie Port Orchard!

Also, we have a new dog named Jim - that's his picture there.

November 1, 2007

Sensoria

Iole Alessandrini, Thom Heileson, Wyndel Hunt, Ed Mannery, Ben McAllister

SOIL Gallery | 112 3rd Ave. Seattle 98104 | Hours: Thu-Sun 12-5pm.

Opening reception Thursday, November 1, 6–9pm

Sensoria presents two new immersive installations, each integrating light and sound to transform the gallery space, concentrating on the visitor’s sensory perceptions within the specific physicality of a new environment. Each work will in its own way conflate and link different sensory experiences: vision, hearing, and feedback to physical movement.

The exhibition will feature the interactive installation Hidden Spaces, by artist/architect Iole Alessandrini, programmer/composer Ben McAllister and engineer Ed Mannery. In this work, lasers create planes that form flat spatial fields. Through the use of video tracking and computerized sound, the planes are ‘audio-visualized’: people explore, with their own movements, the spaces hidden within the planes of light by triggering sounds made as they intersect these planes.

Photo: Ed Mannery and Iole Alessandrini

Also featured is Free Dissociation—a new collaborative work by Thom Heileson and Wyndel Hunt—a three-channel, stereo audio projection installation enveloping the gallery visitor in a textural, audio-visual tapestry that pairs Heileson’s animated visual imagery with Hunt’s similarly abstract sound composition. The artists exploit perceived parallels in their work—which speak in corresponding emotive tones but in different sensory media—to build an immersive perceptual ground delineated by intrinsically linked strata of light and sound.

October 29, 2007

When I was a young whippersnapper of 19 and first discovered there was more to Varese than Ionisation, I discovered pictures of the Phillip's Pavilion at the 1958 Brussel's worlds fair. This building, created by Le Corbusier and Xenakis (though some credit X with most of the work), housed a primitive light/sound show consisting of projected visuals and colored gels interacting with a synced, massively multi-channel soundtrack by Varese. I would listen to the soundtrack's 2-channel mixdown release on my copy of Robert Craft conducting Varese, and try to imagine the visuals. What did the films look like? What was Xenakis' intro like? These questions were hard to answer before the internet came along. The excellent book on the piece "Space Calculated in Seconds" shed quite a bit of light as well.

As my interest in X increased I heard his contribution, but it wasn't until last year or so that someone posted the original film on You Tube that I actually witnessed anything more. Now someone in the EU has gone a step further - creating a virtual reality experience of the piece. Here's the 'trailer' they posted on You Tube to promote it.

August 22, 2007

Check out Rebonds by Xenakis

July 7, 2007

Wizard Prison Cd release tonight at SS Marie Antoinette in Seattle, WA

Check out the Priz covered on the Pitchfork Media page.

June 6, 2007

Waiting excitedly for my copy of Center for Visual Music's Jordan Belson DVD - it's been a long time coming!

New 30 minute mp3 up on the audio page - 'charlie'. This one's an old one, in the John Oswald tradition.

June 3, 2007

One of the most enlightening bits of video - I rented this from a bookstore in Roosevelt in 1996 and still have it. RIP Terrence.

June 2, 2007

Who needs to surf youtube when other people find great stuff for you? In conjunction with my installation work, I've been experimenting with video for the past year. Most of it's focused on motion capture, rendering based on data FROM motion capture etc. Sometimes the results are weird and distorted - I WISH it was as distorted as the stuff I found at a site called 53 o's, though. Be sure to check the previous entries and see everything this site has - lots of primitive video generation. A few samples:

June 1, 2007

Iole, Ed and I recently showed our piece Hidden Spaces to Bellevue Art Museum. Very exciting day - pics below:

May 28, 2007

Wizard Prison provided the track for the June installment of the Eric Lanzilotta's Ri Be Xibalba mp3 series - here's the blurb:

It seems like there has been a bit of black metal in the air for me the last few months: Forest of Grey, Malkuth, Under Satan's Sun, Fauna... So it seems fitting that eventually something like that would sneak into the mp3 series. Any coincidence it is the 13th installment? Fear not that I have gone astray though, any self-respecting fan of SCG and CGT should recognize what connection this has pretty quickly.

Here's the link to the cut. Hope you like.