Firstly some bootleg video recorded at their recent Cologne gig.

It’s worth checking out the rest of that gig (there are 8 parts).  The video/sound integration errs [...]]]> Some interesting stuff posted online recently from and about Soisong; an AV group consisting of Peter (Coil, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV) Christopherson and Ivan (COH) Pavlov.

Firstly some bootleg video recorded at their recent Cologne gig.

It’s worth checking out the rest of that gig (there are 8 parts).  The video/sound integration errs on the cinematic side, to my mind referencing Dziga Vertov’s “Man With A Movie Camera” and films inspired by this (like Koyaanisqatsi) in the rhythmic editing of didactic / rhetorical material.  Where people like Robin Fox, Botborg and Ryoji Ikeda are concerned with a direct synaesthetic connection, here the cognitive connection between sound and image is explored (see also Rechenzentrum) and the audio and visual aesthetic is subsequently raised in importance (the grainy, over saturated 16mm look screams late ’70s to me.)  Interesting to note Peter Christopherson’s work with Hipgnosis and as a video clip director for hire.

In reponse to some audience member falsely concluding that their material was delivered from a DVD (it’s HD triggered by PC), Soisong have posted some communiques about their live practice here.

Of particular note, from Ivan:

…the more entertaining the performers themselves are, the less “live” their show is likely to be, for in order to be able to perform all those entertaining tricks, the actual musical playing of the instrument has to be polished and rehearsed to be nearly automatic.. In the end, in most cases the audiences end up watching a dancing sampler on the stage…

and from Peter:

I believe that the former view automatically cuts out more or less all the interesting music being made today (mostly with the help of computers) which actually cannot be played at all in the conventional sense…  The most important thing for me, is that I try to put over the excitement and wonder I felt when first conceiving of the music and the image, to a live audience in a fresh and individual way each night….

I’m definately going to try and procure an interview with these fellows.

Something I haven’t blogged about recently are my solo AV experiments.

Here is a video from a performance I did at the Installer gig at the Fringe Bar in October 2009.

Installer Gig excerpt from Performing Audiovisualist on Vimeo.

This footage features compositions i’ve been working on for the next [...]]]> All good intentions…

Something I haven’t blogged about recently are my solo AV experiments.

Here is a video from a performance I did at the Installer gig at the Fringe Bar in October 2009.

Installer Gig excerpt from Performing Audiovisualist on Vimeo.

This footage features compositions i’ve been working on for the next Secret Killer Of Names release with somewhat arbitrary visualisations.  The performance utilises Ableton Live 8,  VDMX and an APC40.  Sound is easily triggered with the APC, a device i’m quite comfortable with despite its annoyingly proprietary nature. It feels like a mixing desk and allows for some impressive control of what would previously be either pre-rendered and sequenced material or just not possible to perform live as a soloist.  An interesting addition to this is the ability to send midi control data from Live to VDMX.  In combination with the APC40 as a kind of mixing desk, I can trigger and manipulate sound and image concurrently.

The visual material in this piece is for the most part, rudimentary.  There is a place I want to go with the visuals for these tracks but I don’t quite have the footage yet.  Good thing summer is upon is – whereby I have to keep occupied for fear of falling into a humidity induced funk of sweaty despair.

A colleague in audio visual terrorism recently had the following to say about the Installer excerpt posted above:

I can say that I didn’t dislike it, although, twice I had to stop myself from opening another window.. seemed like I keep forgetting I was watching it…
You know, I don’t know that i’d say boring… but I guess that’s kind of it. In a live sense it would be more immersive, and I wouldn’t have a computer I am meant to be doing things on in front of me.

Anyway, if your excerpt is just a step in the right direction, then I think that’s awesome. I do find video to be a bit of a weird medium though, more so than sound even. I get it in the context of a visual part of the whole AV performance, live, in a venue, at whatever volume you feel is appropriate or adequate, or as a visual accompaniment to a sound performance, but I don’t get it as something to just watch.. I always have to imagine I am somewhere, watching it.. not just on a computer, or watching a dvd on a tv.
You are intending it as a performed thing, to see live in preference, right? (Private Correspondence)

As the amount of audience chatter might suggest with the N4rgh1l3 performances – setting has as much, if not more effect on AV performance than the work itself.  I’ve had discussions recently with some audiovisual performers and audience members and a consistent thread evident is that much AV work manages to, at best, exist as a distracting novelty and at worse fail pretty hard on all levels due in part perhaps to the need to capture and hold full audience attention in sound AND sight for a lengthy period of time.

… on the road to hell.

In my paper, “Towards a definition of the Performing Audiovisualist”, I quote author of The VJ Book, Paul Spinrad, as stating that “our expectations and habits around being audience members have atrophied ever since movies became popular. [They] taught us to sit together and pay attention to a dead, unchanging recording rather than something living and responsive.” (2009)  It would be interesting to compare this assertion with expectations of musical performances (the stage, the Proscenium) and the context of the “gallery” in the construction of Art.  Notable director Peter Greenaway directly addressed some of these considerations at his recent “VJ” performance of Tulse Luper at the Gallery of Modern Art.  I have to say, i’m sure there was a diversity of opinion on the performance, however I was bitterly disappointed with what I saw as his inability to successfully connect his evocative manifesto with the space, his own material and the audience.  Here is an example from a performance that actually looks and sounds more dynamic than the one I witnessed.

peter Greenaway en Collegium Hungaricum from Servando Barreiro on Vimeo.

“…my complaint is that now, after 108 years of activity, we have a cinema that is dull, familiar, predictable,
hopelessly weighed down by old conventions and outworn verities, an archaic and heavily restricted system of distribution, and an out-of-date and cumbersome technology.” (Greenaway, 2003)

His rhetoric is superb!  His thesis, while full of holes and ignorant of developments in experimental and expanded cinema throughout the last century, is impressively calculated to stimulate thought on the ephemerality of sound and image. At this point I should disclose that I am:

1. a fan of his work from the post modern surrealism of the survey-like “The Falls” through the segmented narrative of “Zed and Two Noughts” to his intermedia compositional experiments “A TV Dante” and “Prospero’s Books”, Greenaway is nothing if not an interesting provocateur with a visually engaging style (with or without the great Sacha Vierny as his cinematographer).
2. familiar with the first half of the six hour Tulse Luper Suitcases from which this VJ performance is excerpted.

My problem with the Tulse Luper Suitcase performance is that I feel his rhetoric sets the the scene for a dramatic contribution to live cinema that is not backed up in practice.  My criticism starts with the source material:  the loops of 2-5 secs appear directly ripped from a Tulse Luper DVD or Blu-Ray without any attempt at recomposition.  As there is already a multi-layer conversation occuring in the single image version it would make more sense to take some of the source material and rework it for the space and projection surfaces: why not break this up and have it occur across the three screens – making it a re-composition rather than an ineffectual remix?  To me this would represent a live, in the moment cinema much more effectively.  He stated in his intro that he wanted to reflect the CNN style of information overload, something the Electronic Broadcast Network effectively pioneered.  In practice this overload cheapens HIS OWN art and the repetition of elements provides for a noisy incoherent spectacle that actively distracts the viewer from the artistic composition he clearly wants his cinema to reflect.

Sonically the loud mid frequency cacophony, enhanced as much by his repeated phasing of clips as it was by a poor sound system in an echoey hallway, was apparently backed up by a couple of awesome DJ’s.  Aside from their mid-nineties sounding acid-jazz-electronica intro (think peak period Ninja Tunes at best) I didn’t notice them once peaking beyond the aggressive din of Greenaway’s soundtrack.  It seems like the system he is using to mix this material is remarkable only for its user-friendliness.  Utilising an impressive touch screen to drag clips to one of three windows, each representing a projected image, there appeared to be little else under his control.  Had he outsourced his material to any number of budding underground audiovisualists i’m sure we could have witnessed some unique re-interpretations of audio, visual and textual material.  In his hands it struck me as something of a blow to the art of live cinema and audiovisual performance as it contributes monotony and undercooked “experimentalism” to a field already in danger of being seen as having little merit beyond novelty.

At the same time a lot is happening with underground audio-visualists.  The technology, no matter how expensive or sophisticated, is essentially doing the same thing; projecting digitised image and sound.  It is worth considering how readily comparable a $48 per ticket act in an established gallery is to an underground, legally grey audiovisual art event?  Let me suggest “Company Fuck” as an example.

Scott Sinclair is an Australian artist currently living in Europe who has explored a number of audiovisual avenues as an artist and curator of the Small Black Box experimental music events and the ‘half-theory’ collective.   From solo and group based electro-acoustic improv, his contributions to Botborg and his queer mash-up of breakcore, metal and disco as Company Fuck, Sinclair demonstrates a restless muse, with an emphasis (perhaps unintended) on how technological tools can mutate and transform objects, performance and context.

This particular work demonstrates a number of tricks that the audio-visualist can invoke to support the performative illusion.  He inserts himself within the performance as the body to be projected on – an interesting form of performer projection mapping that is also used to great effect by Sally Golding of Abject Leader / Other Film.  The direction of audience gaze towards both visual material AND the body of the artist is an approach with strong ties to historical applications of the phantasmagoria, echoed also through Dada performance and expanded cinema.   Sinclair’s bodily contortions are translated into control data through a Wiimote, hidden in his extravagant cloak.  This data alters values in a Max patch that serves to manage the AV assets and translate movement and shrieking into an instantaneous and adaptable performative outcome.

It’s obvious that both performances draw from different schools of thought on the nature of performance and both are likely to attract a very particular kind of audience.  In thinking about why I might consider Sinclair’s work as more successful and entertaining than Greenaway’s I can’t help but feel it is too easy to build up a ‘Straw Man’ argument.  When audiovisual performance relies so heavily on the audience being able to “get” the context, particularly in relation to their expectations and prior knowledge, it is easy to be distracted by subjectivity and exaggerate the complicity of the artist in their own failure to meet expectation.  Whether we like the sound or vision in connection with, or separated from the actual performance, it can be difficult to assess their relative worth as our familiarity is more likely to come from artworks that prioritise individual sensory elements or address them quite separately.

Fission or Fusion?

In order to quanitfy and assess different approaches to audiovisual performance objectively, i’m working on designing an analytical framework which I intend to road-test at the Electundra audiovisual festival this weekend.  As with the paper, where I used Panyiotis Kokoras’ Morphopoeisis to outline the approach to an audiovisual performance, I’m approaching this from musician/composer perspective by utilising David Hirst’s procedure outlined in “Fission or fusion: analysing the acousmatic reaction.” (2004)  While by no means a final solution, this procedure complements Morphopoesis well and is sufficiently broad in scope to encompass divergent modes of performance and composition in the search for context and meaning.

Elaboration will be provided after i test-drive this approach over the weekend; for now a summary.

As with Morphopoesis, Fission and Fusion can be read from top to bottom (knowledge driven) and bottom to top (data driven).  Hirst’s approach considers the following elements which, while in many ways analogous to the levels outlined by Kokoras, occur constantly in a cycle that (hopefully) expands understanding through each iteration:

• Segregation of AV objects;
  • identification of audio visual objects and their relative weightings;
• Horizontal integration/segregation;
  • the manner in which linkages are established between AV objects over time, both technically (cuts, wipes) and cognitively (juxtapositions);
  • – the manner in which these linkages demonstrate a progression that can be perceived and understood by the audience;
• Vertical integration/segregation;
  • the connection between sound and image at each point and how these elements work together to support or challenge audience perception (dissonance and consonance);
• Assimilation and meaning;
  • the architecture of ideas;
  • awareness of the global organisation within the work that is built upon a shifting foundation of formal structures and hierarchical relationships.

The play between form (syntax) and meaning (semantics) is addressed as polar opposites bridged by various factors; semantic, ecological/physical, acoustic/visual, spectral & temporal. The dominance of a discourse being either based more towards recognition of meaning through mimesis of source/cause in the audiovisual work or a typological/relational discourse that plays towards more abstract forms, informed by historical approaches to the practice of audio and visual performance/composition.
While an audio/visual mash-up or prototypical VJ performance demonstrates traits familiar to similar examples of the practice as it has evolved culturally over time, the success of the work relies heavily on a familiarity with the concepts being juxtaposed.  This is often reflected in the reinterpretation of pop culture memes as meaning is more readily generated when the associated elements are already clearly defined in the minds of the audience.  Using Hirst’s framework this would place AV/VJ mash-ups more towards a source/cause dominant discourse, as they are built upon a concrete reality, defined by the context of place or culture and reliant on semantic factors and conscious recognition/association with the elements being delivered.

By contrast, a performance like that of Company Fuck relies less on an appreciation of concrete elements, ideas and philosophies and more on the construction, by the artist, of an abstract compositional framework that demonstrates a clear, consistent logic.  Combining acoustic, visual, spectral and temporal factors to generate an array of symbolic gestures that stimulate emotions directly without the need for cohesive global meaning.  As an exploration of performative possibilities, the connection between sound, vision and gesture unfolds in real-time, generating a syntactic relationship as the understanding between performer and audience is developed.  The conjured form is as much defined by this exchange of meaning as it is by the approach to technological tools and conscious acknowledgement of culture and context.

Anyway, let’s see how it works in the field.

Bibliography

Greenaway, P. (2003) “Toward a re-invention of cinema”, from http://petergreenaway.org.uk/essay3.htm accessed 20/04/2009.

Hirst, David. (2004) “Fission or fusion: analysing the acousmatic reaction”, in the Australasian Computer Music Conference 2004 proceedings, pp. 48-52.

Kokoras, P. A. (2005) “Morphopoiesis: a general procedure for structuring form”, 5th International Music Theory Conference, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2005

Spinrad, Paul. (2009) “The Video Injected Hive Mind” in Boing Boing from http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/24/the-videoinjected-hi.html, accessed 15/04/2009

Turkish group Cotton AV (seen working above with Volkan Ergen) are one of many groups around the world exploring the live manipulation of audio visuals. One of their previous musical partners started up an interesting argument on the Audiomulch discussion list about [...]]]>
VOLKAN ERGEN // POOLPOOLPOOLPOOLPOOLPOOLPOOL // PART-2 from VOLKAN ERGEN on Vimeo.

Turkish group Cotton AV (seen working above with Volkan Ergen) are one of many groups around the world exploring the live manipulation of audio visuals. One of their previous musical partners started up an interesting argument on the Audiomulch discussion list about the use of Visuals in live experimental music performance.
The following is an excerpt:

Korhan Erel:
I hope my words did not imply that I find all laptop performances dull. That’s not what I think.

Don Hill:
It wasn’t that you said it. Plenty of people (and not even here) I know have expressed the opinion that it’s hard to tell what’s going on. “Are they manipulating parameters? Effecting the incoming sound of the room/audience? Actually writing code? What, is this another guy with iTunes, checking his e-mail?”

I know what goes on. I have plenty of friends who do music/sound-artthis way. Doesn’t bother me if they’re staring at their screen.

I have seen a lot of LT artists using video or collabing w/ VJs lately. That’s the road I think I’ll take. For me it’s more a matter of insecurity. I’ve played bass for crowds as big as 5000+, no problem. Put me in front of 10 people where I’m the center of attention, and I’m all thumbs and left feet. :^P

Korhan Erel:
Actually, my first solo laptop performance in years was two weeks ago. It was based on a video of the Turkish prime minister babbling how fucking great he is. What I did was use the Kaosspad to control a few
effects here and there and use a keypad to trigger some samples. As I wanted the audience to focus more on the video, I placed myself and the laptop away from the audiences view. There was no reason for the audience to see me (and if someone was really desperate to see my fat face, they could slightly lean to their right and reach salvation).

Yiorgis talks about actually facing the speakers while performing solo. I have been thinking about that – to sit among the audience, preferably in the back rows. However, then there is absolutely nothing to look at for the audience. This may be desirable from a puristic perspective, but the audience in Turkey is fairly new to experimental, avant-garde music and there is a danger of alienating them when you give them nothing to relate to except for the music. Using video or working with VJs provide a practical solution to this, but I would prefer either to prepare the video myself or design the whole performance from scratch with the VJ.

Yiorgis Sakellariou:
By using visuals it’s like admiting that music just isn’t enough to sustain the audiences interest. Working with a visual artist for a specific concept is always a good idea but again I feel that music loses it’s unique power and the opportunity to live the excitement of “pure” sound. A friend who doesn’t use visuals told me once, in
sarcasm: “I can watch TV at home!”

Korhan Erel:
If you use video just to give the audience something to look at, yes.
That’s why I said I would not work with a random VJ in an improvised
manner. I had the pleasure of seeing Rechenzentrum, a german band with
two musicians and one video artist, twice and I loved their use of
video. I also watched a video / sound performance called Tempelhof by
Tom America in Amsterdam, which was another great example of merging
music, spoken word and video.

Club music is another story. There’s a driving beat and the audience
reacts to it in many different ways, ranging from bobbing one’s head
to jumping around like a lunatic Mouse on Mars is great at that
too, though their performance isn’t only laptop.

As I said in the previous mail, I would never put visual just for the
sake of giving the audience something to look at. That’s absurd. It’s
like the text most electroacoustic tape music composers feel obliged
to provide to their audience – full of abstractions, metaphors, etc
which aims to ‘conceptualize’ the sounds/music.

Just a handful of opinions relating to the use / abuse of video in experimental electronic performances.
On one hand we have the suggestion that laptop based performance needs something beyond mere sound production in order to entertain the audience (visuals being one kind of extra). The other suggestion is that performers should not have to adopt extraneous performative tropes in order to satisfy a fickle audience; as if that might be cheapening your art somehow.

On publication (in September 08) this discussion was one of the catalysts behind my drive to commit to research in this area. The area of gestural control and performance aesthetics within electronic music have a theoretical basis going back over a decade now. What i’m interested in challenging is the separatist notion that audio and video, remain separate entities with one leading the other. The arguments broached focus on sound as the primacy whereas my focus is on a form of synaesthetic composition incorporating both equally.

P.tree verz from Andrew Thomson on Vimeo.

I come from a background in Film, Multimedia, Music and Education. My sonic work has consistently explored notions of cinema and I have on occasions produced visual work to support my sonics. To my mind it feels comfortable and makes sense to combine elements I have interest in without lending priority to any one medium.

When Andrew Thomson and I started collaborating as n4rgh1l3 we were initially at a loss to really produce work that was really iconic, representative of our combined creative talents and of any real interest or quality. It was, after a period of reflection that we came upon the notion that our mutual appreciation of Abstract Expressionist images and sounds might be unified to produce a unique and representative performance aesthetic.

When generating the audio and video content we are conscious of working in similar fashions with both types of media. Sound elements are recorded from natural and occasionally synthetic sources are processed and filtered in order that they work to fulfill a role within a broader soundscape. In a similar fashion still images and captured footage are sequenced, filtered and composited in order that when combined they will provide an interesting visual landscape. Sound and Image are then combined in preproduction and both sound and image are mixed and manipulated live in software (currently Isadora Windows Beta and Audiomulch.) In addition to the software we use external midi controllers to allow for useful gestural control and design our performance interfaces with this in mind.

At this stage I feel that there is little inherently new in what we are producing. The production and performance aesthetic harkens back to the mid-late 90s when both of us earned our stripes producing and performing post-industrial drone/noise/electronica within the burgeoning Brisbane Noise Scene.

It is for me however very satisfying that the tools exist to be able to create what is for me a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. The kind of total experience that i’ve always thought much live electronic performance seriously lacks. In this state of mind i’ve been lead to consider what this means to the art of electronic musical performance and how I see the relationship between the art, the performer and the audience. I share as much enthusiasm for Visual Music, the work of artists like Stan Brakhage and expanded cinema types as I do for the ideas behind the performative act as it relates to popular (and relatively unpopular) music of the last century.

Consider the following with reference to a laptop performance:

• sound and image exist as data/assets on the live performance HD
• neither has any obvious priority depending on what software you are using (Isadora, Pure Data and Max/MSP/Jitter amongst others consider them all to be media files for reproduction)
• processes for generating, manipulating and reproducing both assets share obvious semiotic connections (opacity=volume / colour=tonality / cuts, sequences, loops etc…)

Given these simple few assumptions my goal with my work and research is to examine the frameworks applied by other practitioners who work with live AV to see if, and how they apply similar semiotic connections. While modern laptop musicians are more readily adopting gestural control systems that add considerable value to the use of computers in a live context, i’m concerned that this push to connect the historic notion of live musicality and virtuosity with computer based performance is ignoring developing areas within the field.

Is the performing audio-visualist a musician with videos or a visual artist with instruments?
A director, as in the cinematic sense?
As a form within forms there has been much development in content, awareness and technology over the last couple of decades. Has performative AV finally reached a point where it can finally leave the legacy of a stage bound performative act and strike out in the world with a new focus and original set of priorities?