Light Potential

I’ve been tearing into canvases since I started using the projector to augment the experience (It just felt like the natural thing to do). However, just recent I’ve started placing the projector behind the canvas–so now it looks like I’m drawing with light as I break the fibers. After practice Anton drew my attention to the lines thrown across the room. Of course this happens! But it hadn’t occurred to me as I was doing it. Now that I know, I can use it and grow it. Pretty f—ing awesome.

Light potential by Takahashi (A sample from that session)

Environment

Move the drawings to three dimensional space.

Do it with movement and sound.
Possibly by diffusing the sound.
Eliminate the canvas/flat surface [any surface].
Eliminate the physical mark.
Use concat synthesis to create the sounds using gesture.
The natural gesture that would create them on the canvas surface I’m used to (as a starting point from which to build).

Keep breath to light.
Move in space.
Draw with sound to create the drawing.
I’ve built up the experience I wonder if I can do it without the visual output of actual marks.

Collect a library of sounds.
Build a corpus.

For home listening/viewing disconnected from the performance
Record the jit.window output
Record the sounds
Viewer wears headphones and closes eyes, then is placed in front of a projector (maybe just a computer screen is bright enough)
A version of the experience (just like the painting is–just a sample), if one can’t be at a performance, which is the ideal situation.
A translation.

Things I can do:
-Control brightness: the ramp up rate/decay rate
-All white
-Light off or all black
-All red
-Intensity of red based on pitch
-Red splash (currently with a set duration but doesn’t have to be)
-Synth pitch based on voice pitch
-Stutter/strobe (currently can’t control the alternating rate. Currently set at the constant 50 milliseconds)

Things I want to do:
-Illuminate specific area of a canvas (control the brightness & shape of those areas)
-Play back sounds using gestures in space–sounds that those gestures would produce on the canvas. Concat?
-Get my left hand free; not tied to a wiimote. Can do this if I move to gestures.

Extended mind thesis
Extended body

If you can do anything, why do this? –Rod
Anything is possible -me
Not everything is worth doing -my father

What’s worth doing?

I assume I can control [some aspects] of my development–conscious development.

I assume the norm for me is to exist in time and that it moves forward, as far as its perceivable to me. Its not useful in terms of my own development to assume I have no control or to not believe in time, or to believe the most useful things occur outside of time.

f(k) = A
Thinking of myself in terms of Kate Freeborough. (Is that formula kinda right?)
Kate is interested in play without agenda.
I have an agenda.
I do what I do to exercise mixing up information. I think I increase the probability of success by doing it in an unforgiving environment–in front of people, performing, in time (which is unforgiving because there are no ‘take backs’).
Doing it with other people (Anton and Rod) creates a dynamic, stimulating environment that I have to navigate in.  I have to read it and respond.

Its getting easier to hear.

I improvise in that environment.
I set my intention to be aware and to be as fluid as possible so I can learn what I don’t know. I want to be surprised.

Questions to ask Kate:
Do you believe you can do anything?
Do you believe anything is possible?
Is everything you do worth doing?
Do you set an intention before beginning to make?
Do you [always] play without agenda? or is there sometimes ‘game’ involved?
Can you expand on the difference between the two as far as you’re concerned?
Do you consider unpredictability in your closed systems?
If yes:
What’s the role of of unpredictability in your closed systems?

I am mostly bacteria

I am mostly bacteria. My body is in stability, an equilibrium of symbiotic small organisms. But I also have a single point of view, I. And it is a tool, or a muscle, that evolved from that organization of trillions of simpler life forms–presumably because it benefited me.  I am still trillions of bacteria. I think sometimes about how my I is not as big a part of me as I necessarily presume it is.

I wonder if that consciousness formed slowly or came into existence all at once.  What is the simplest form of life that has that singular awareness? Or is that singular awareness just a group of dummies that cross a critical mass threshold, and the whole crowd puts that self-awareness hat on for the time they are that group? Its funny to think about ooze that’s all of a sudden like “whoop! Here I am”

And then…
What am I doing when I am part of a group and we explore the transfer of information–and there’s an ephemeral abstraction to it?

Related:
Bonnie Bassler: Discovering bacteria’s amazing communication system
Joe Rogan: “There’s a study that proves that humans are 96% chimpanzee. If I gave you a sandwich that was 96% shit… and 4% ham… would you call that a ham sandwich? Shit sandwich, my friend.”

Trinity

MP3 (8:55) of our TSC performance (creative commons BY, so download and remix if you wish)
VIDEO of the event with Takahashi as the first act

Takahashi’s Shellfish Concern performed at Trinity Church on March 15th 2012 for a Videoformers event. I used the new set up, which means I was controlling the light source using a wii-mote, in conjunction with my voice/breathing, in conjunction with Max/MSP.  There are still lots of things to improve on with this set up. I’d like to get my left hand free again. I feel too restricted not being able to use it, even if its not the hand I draw/paint with. It wasn’t the best performance, and didn’t yield the best painting, but it reinforced my feelings about refining things and needing to push forward.

On the video you’ll also be able to see other performances from Helmut Lemke, and Kate Freeborough.

HISS Tools – Impulse Response Tutorials

I shot and edited this video. It stars Rod and he’s explaining some crazy voodoo that Alex Harker and P.A. Tremblay have been researching at the University of Huddersfield. Basically they steal the soul of a room so it can then be imbued into any recording to make it sound as if that recorded music was recorded IN that room. Whatever–its impressive looking. Watch it and learn something.

Here is the second video of the series: