hyperessay

jessica rylan is one of my favorite current performers/artists these days. she combines the essence of russolo and the futurists with quirky pop-esque motives. she combines machine noise with the sounds of a flowing stream. and she does it all with home-built analogue synthesizers. jessica rylan is a sound artist based out of boston, ma. though she has done installations in many places, she is most well-known for her dynamic performances which include but are not limited to music, poetry, and storytelling.
i appreciate a lot of what she has to say about her art/music in relation to the rest of the world. she has stated that it is important to her to be appreciated in both academic and popular settings. referring to the serialist composers she said that "most people don't actually like to listen to that". even Helmut Lachenmann agrees that music has split off so that much of what is composed is inaccessable to people without an advanced degree in music theory. rylan has a "folk-pop-noise" approach to her music. her performances are usually in small venues such as houses or apartments, she is incredibly friendly and approachable, and her music is homemade from the ground up.
in my own work i hope never to become too heady or esoteric for people to understand what i am trying to communicate. i feel that when this happens in art or music, the artist becomes instantly disenfranchised from the audience and the art itself looses much of its importance and validity. stockhausen once said that an electronic composer never has to artistically justify his work because he can point to the fact that it is an experiment. while i feel that this is true and also important, i do not intend on spending my life creating art that only appeals to other scientific and experimental artists.

my report about the tropical rainforest in different parts of the worlds

Here is a video of what i am going to be using as a projection.  it's a rough draft i made in AfterEffect.  i hope eventually to have many different keyframes that all connect lines to different places.  that way i can play things forwards and backwards and each keyframe will be at an intersection of other paths for the camera.

wigwamjuice

Osmose lends itself very well to me to study for my installation piece. There is a lot i can learn from reading about immersive virtual reality that relates to a user-interactive installation environment.
First of all, simply naming the participant as the "immersant" makes way for a new way (at least for me) of thinking about those other than myself who experience my piece. In other words it broadens my vocabulary of descriptions for others in relation to my personal artwork. Refering to someone as an "observer" implies passive sensory intake on their part. Refering to them as a "participant" implies to me that they co-create the environment in which they exist. this may or may not be desirable depending on what i want the final outcome of my project to be. Calling someone an "immersant" implies that i am using all the resources available to me to draw them into the piece and entirely abolish the "fourth wall".
Davies' piece seems as much of an experiment in the abilities of technology to affect sensory perception as it is an experiment in sensory perception itself. For my piece, i do not want the participant (this is the word that i have settled on for now) to lose him/herself in the environment to the point where s/he is exclaiming all sorts of things about no longer fearing death. I want to create an environment in which the participant becomes aware of him/herself in a new and unique way but i would like to guide them through a more concrete and intellectual path than the different "worlds" of Davie's Osmos.
I feel that Osmos can be equated to pieces such as Stockhausen's Kontakte in that it surpasses all previously existing barriers in a field (in this instance VR) but that it does not necessarily follow the straight line of natural artistic development. I do not mean to condescend the work of Stockhausen or Davies because it seems that art cannot develop in a strate line if there are not brashe and often times even abrasive advances for others to follow.
in this way, i hope to draw from davies' aesthetic of vr and incorperate the idea of an immersed conciousness in a piece of art.

critical recombinatory ensemble art

first of all, i think that the term "wetware" is really awsome.
Ok, that's out of the way. Something interesting i learned about the electrical engineer Claude Shannon was that he discovered a fractal pattern for transmitting data on the noisy channel. it had something to do with the fact that bursts of static noise when measured against time are self-similar and so by studying the bursts for a short period of time one could predict when the line would be clear enough to send a signal.
CAE's idea about Duchamp's too-far-ahead-for-his-time artwork strikes me as interesting. While theirs is not a unique assesment of his theory, it has sparked interesting discussions between me and other people. Regarding computer programming as an essential part of the creation of digital music, i feel that breaking down a piece of music to its fundamental machine-language level can be paramount to understanding the true creativity and inspiration of the piece. Like it says in the chapter, "order comes from order".
An apparently chaotic piece of music by Schoenberg becomes quite organized when it is broken down into individual cells and matrices consisting of tones, rhythms, instruments, dynamics, and the like. Likewyse, when one sees the intricate architecture in the orchestral score for Xenakis' "Metastasis", the aurally abstract glissandi become immediately apparent as beautiful recombinations of visual media.
The Critical Art Ensemble's agenda of "street theater" contain many elements that i hope to incorperate into my own art. The idea of setting up a temporal situation where communication can occur is very important to my belief that art should be interactive. Temporal situations are vital because they so unique and cannot be replicated. In this sense, the idea of "street theater" seems more like a lifestyle than it does an art movement.
I do not understand why CAE warns of the risks in the failure of experimental theater. They point out that any experiment has its own inherent risks, but i see the risks of their everyday theater as being part of the experiment. if an experimental actor becomes victim of authoritarian culture, doesn't the fact that the theater caused a reaction mean that the "performance" was successful?

absolute multimedia piece

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atjByPSKTRA&feature=related&fmt=18

here's a video by chris cunningham for autechre's "Gantz Graf". Incredible use of Max/MSP/Jitter take a generative piece of music and make a generative music video out of it.
Background:
Chris Cunningham does a lot of music videos for IDM artists especially Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. He's done some cool stuff with Portishead and Bjork too.

season in hell

The visit to the "Season in Hell" exhibit proved to be very insightful and inspirational for me. Since i want to do an installation piece for my project, it was very useful to visit an actual installation where i had access to a lot of information that went beyond the piece itself. The fact that i personally knew the artist and that i was able to meet one of the performers became to me an integral component of the piece itself.
A piece of art that comments on and challenges the environment in which i live can be difficult to accept at face value. Viewing a still life by one of the Flemish Masters does not necessarily require enormous effort for one to understand its aesthetic quality. For me, even viewing political art from the 1960's feels as though i am viewing a slice of history and not active comment or statement.
Not so with "A Season in Hell". The fact that since i was in the eighth grade I have grown up with a war that is fueled by fear and individual gain at the expense of others makes the installation a lot more personal.
The narrative of "A Season in Hell" is a very playful and yet serious method for tying together many intellectual and factual aspects in a creative way. Documenting the journey of a well-developed semi-fictitious and semi-real character while he tries to gain understanding of a world that is so absurd that it might as well be a surreal artistic creation is frighteningly poignant. I feel that having a fictitious narrative using real characters and real events creates a unique glue that ties the artwork together.
This piece has made me consider how i can get the audience as involved as possible. sure it wont be possible for me to meet everyone who views the piece, nor are the subjects of Godel, Escher, and Bach current topics of much debate, but the notion of changing the viewer into more than just a viewer has become very important to me. maybe i can do this if i find a way for the viewer to understand how the piece operates by displaying and explaining different max patches or sensor arrays.

pd

here's a programming environment that i've used before. it's by miller puckett, the same guy who mad Max/MSP/Jitter. puredata is the freeware/opensource/prototype version of Max. apparently it's more flexible than Max which is pretty wild because i have never found an area where Max is limited. granted i've only used max for 30 days.
i feel like pd uses a lot less RAM/CPU resources because it's not half as colorful and there's not really any rounded edges or anything like that. from what i've heard if you can use pd you can use max but if you use max you can't necessarily use pd. since pd is opensource it's a lot easier to create specific function blocks using direct code.
above is a simple patch i made a long time ago to approximate a sawtooth wave by inputting a sine wave. the box that says "pd fund" is an encapsulated object that has inputs for the fundamental frequency and amplitude of the wave. coming off of those inputs are boxes that say "s amp" and "s freq". these things send the data of the frequency and the amplitude of the fundamental wave. the "r amp" and "r freq" are the receiving ends of the sent data.
Sawtooth waves have every single integer overtone. the amplitude for each overtone is the the fundamental's amplitude divided by the integer.
"dac~" sends the data to pd's digital audio converter.
wagwan.

sonicbirth

here's a program that i've used in the past to create vst and au plugins. made some synths in it but mostly just effects plugins. it's called sonicbirth. freeware for mac. it's a pretty awsome program if you're not great at command-line programming but still want to make some awsome effects really quickly. it's kinda similar to Max in that you have objects that you drag and drop and connect by lines. it differes in that each "circuit" can be zoomed in on so that you can edit smaller details and build subcircuits and the like. doesn't have half the power of max though and it's a bit trickier to interface with midi.

along the left side is an editor for all the parameters of a specific selected unit. on the right hand side is a list of components to choose from. on the bottom is an audio server thingy. it lets you play sound and tells you how much cpu is in use.

up top is a closeup of a plugin i made that allows you to select a crossover frequency and then treats each output with a bit-depth reducer and a sample-rate reducer. it's pretty cool when you use it in ableton to affect a drum loop.

phasing

steve reich: music as a gradual process

minimalist composer steve reich uses phasing in his music to achieve gradual movement from one idea to another. phasing takes place in several different ways. some examples are:

1. having two or more players playing the same loop and having one of them intentionally speed up or slow down. (piano phase, electric counterpoint, violin phase)
2. taking the same loop of tape and playing it through two different players, one on the right channel and one on the left. (come out, it's gonna rain)
3. giving woodwind players certain phrases to play for the duration of one breath. (music for 18 musicians) these are not the only types of phasing nor are they the only pieces to incorporate it. the just happen to be ones that i can think of off the top of my head.


phasing appeals to me because it is concrete enough to notate yet it still contains a strong element of indeterminacy. i would like to take the idea of gradual movement from one idea to another and apply it to something other than musical phrases.

updated project proposal

Updated Project Proposal For the fall semester of MMDD-350:

Goals:

To gain a practical understanding of combining and interfacing more than one form of media in a single project/presentation. This is to be done primarily through the software Max/MSP/Jitter.

Project Outline:

I will build a software instrument in Max similar to the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate built by Larry Owens at Bell Laboratories for the composer Steve Reich. The instrument can take up to twelve audio inputs and gates their outputs based on divide by ten and divide by twelve flip-flops driven by a common clock source. The net result is a phrase that will not repeat itself for 120 gate open-close cycles.
This instrument will be will be a type of a sequencer but instead of counting in bars and beats this sequencer will count in repetitions, sample length, and pulse-width of the positive edge of the gating flip-flop. It will be interesting to experiment using the same sample but stretching the time to fit the gate length, to use different samples, for each input, to use video samples in some places, to continuously gate the same sample, have live performers playing into different inputs that would then be delayed and gated, etc…
Ideally, I would like to be able to set up a surround environment in which people could experience phase-gating in 360 degrees.

Limitations:

Outputting sound on more than one channel from a single computer. I have a 7.1 surround sound card that I could possibly use for this but it requires a desktop computer and I only have a laptop.

Overall:

By building this instrument, I can load samples of real instruments playing, thus creating interesting time-shifting effects, I can load midi sequences to control virtual instruments where pitch will not be affected, and I hope to be able to extend properties of this instrument into Jitter where I will be able to capture and manipulate images/video in relation to pulse/phase phrases created by the instrument. I intend to create this instrument as a sort of tool that I can add to a growing collection of software that I can use for live audio and visual performances.

intermedia response

Dick Higgins' essay on intermedia starts comes across as very abrasive and elitist. though he later states that he doesn't want for avant-garde to mean "avant-garde: for specialists only", he doesn't do a good job of making traditional art seem very worthwhile.
I disagree with what Higgins says about paintings being static. he says that there is no dialogue in a painting, and that they exist as decorated ornaments to imply grandeur. I think that the quality and value of a painting has to do with the though process of the painter and the interperatation and subsequent thought processes of the spectator rather than it's cost-value or whose wall it decorates.

Higgins excludes a very important and very alive form of art in this essay - folk art. Though he mentions pop art as being dead, i think that folk art is part of a dialogue with modern life (i probably don't know what the difference is between pop and folk art). Who can argue that graffiti is static? Higgins himself commends a contemporary for his political art, though in that case the art was not composed of a single type of media.
I think that it was Goethe who said something along the lines of there being three different types of art: 1) art that entertains 2) art that educates and 3) art that exalts. Higgins does not take the first type of art very seriously, in fact he suggests that it may even be an insult to our intelligence. Though it is important for art to break down boundaries, it is probably not essential to be as reactionary as Higgins is.

thank you for reading my essay about the water cycle in central europe

Russolo's The Art of Noises guides modern composers toward a new aesthetic regarding the incorporation of existing sound and "sound objects" into musical compositions. regarding a letter from a friend in the trenches of WWI, Russolo shows us how even the sounds and sights and smells of war can be looked at as a bizarre performance orchestrated by horses, machine guns, signal lights, and cannons.
It seems as though Russolo's desire to seek new media for composition stems from a feeling that existing instruments and standards of instrumentation are inadequate for expressing emotions of a world in an age of machines and mechanical rhythms.
It is interesting to note that Igor Stravinsky, who was composing around the same time, said that he felt that the twelve notes in the standard equal temperament scale and the standard system or rhythmic notation could allow him infinite possibilities for composing music. Stravinsky's music was considered to be revolutionary in his own time and even today a lot of people think that it's pretty far out. right on.
people have been incorpoerating natural sounds into music for centuries. the sounds of birds, streams, wind, cannons and other janx have been written into music by haydn, handel, mozart, bach and others.

did some more reading about philip zimbardo. apparently his book The Lucifer Effect he talks about a lot of things that regard the inherent dismal nature of the human being. doesn't sound very uplifting.

beating a dead horse

The Hirshhorn Museum's recent gallery titled Cinema: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image featured many interesting pieces of film. One piece that particularly interested me for many reasons was Artur Zmijewski's Repetition. Repetition explores the reconstruction of Philip Zimbardo's 1971 "Stanford Prison Experement".
Zmijewski's film was interesting because it demonstrated the power that a camera has to influence events and decisions of actual people. The fact that the experiment was filmed and that the subjects were aware that they were being filmed gave off an eerie feeling of some sort of twisted reality television show.
At one point in the film someone, who i presumed to be the director of the experiment, was speaking to the guards and was encouraging them to use harsher measures with the inmates. By having this interaction caught on camera, it was very suggestive that the director was not conducting a true experiment but actually trying to manipulate the guards to create the ends that he desired. With this in mind, I was reminded of Anne Ellegood's essay Character Driven: Subjectivity and the Cinematic where she comments that "Reality television is not real [and] [d]ocumentary film is not purely truthful." Is it possible to portray something completely true and honest through the cinema? before answering that question we should first try to define truth and honesty. is it even possible to define truth and honesty? how can we determine what is truth and what is real? truth seems like it should probably be relative to reality. is reality the same to every person? probably not. if reality is subjective then maybe truth is also subjective. In the case of Zmijewski's film, it is obviously not an honest attempt to portray truth when the director tried to manipulate the guard by trying to plant insecurities about the warden's ability to control the inmates.
zeppelin rocks number 1.

goals

i want to create an interactive multimedia piece to use in my junior honors recital at the end of the semester.  i want to use max/msp/jitter to create this piece.  hope to make it cool and unique without making it seem really pretentious.  i also hope to learn a lot about artistic theory and multimedia theory because i really have no clue about it.