Wireless Imaginings

lb — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:45:50 +0000

Recently N4rgh1l3 performed at the State Library of Queensland as part of the Douglas Kahn / Other Film presentation “Wireless Imagination“.

Over two nights, the vacuously named “Queensland Terrace” became a science fair of experimental music machines and sound sculptures including Rod Cooper’s superb “Vessel” augmented by a group of manipulators and Anthony Magen’s playful use of data projection.

Saturday night was an ungainly pile-up of where all performers grabbed a space and commenced braying to an increasingly diminished audience of fair-weather intellectuals. Within this morass we found an abstract corner jutting out into the night to project a new work entitled “Aurora Magnetica”.

n4rgh1l3 : A Roarer Magnetica pt1 from Andrew Thomson on Vimeo.

Technically this is not a projection mapping as we had not mapped the surface prior to setting up, however the abstract nature of the visuals suited a non-standard boundary and the play between shape and outside elements (mirrored ceilings, city backdrop) change the nature of the composition. The section above was recorded during a “showcase” segment where each of the artists were encouraged to solo. For us it worked much better on the second night as the material (sonically at least) was designed to function as part of a greater whole.

The setup for this performance utilised Ableton Live 8 and VDMX from my trusty Macbook Pro laptop. I setup the software as a split screen to enable Andrew to work the video section with mouse/keyboard while I could still see through to Live and manipulate sound elements with the APC40 controller. All sound to image correlations are imagined in this case as there was no synchresis: the audio analysis was not working effectively in VDMX so we shut it off. To reflect the theme of “Wireless Imaginations”, which riffs off Kahn’s interest in electromagnetic interference, I used the sounds of machines humming and buzzing alongside some of our Wired Lab recordings to construct the soundscape in real time. Source footage combined our usual obsession with saturated plays with shadow and light reduced to greyscale and combined with a number of choice renders from Artmatic Pro; a software purchase that I feel will become my holiday game as I remain as fascinated as I am baffled with how it works. An unintended consequence of projecting on a dark olive surface is that the greyscale transformed into a monochromatic green redolent of 80s IBM DOS display.

n4rgh1le: A Roarer Magnetica pt2 from Andrew Thomson on Vimeo.

For the second night the idea was to focus on short sets from each of the performers and so we prepared more connective tissue between sound and image. Aside from a messy mid section and relative lack of communication between Andrew and I regarding changes this variation is slightly more “together”, though I wonder if engagement will dissipate outside of real time in comparison to the first piece.

So in all this practical work i’ve let the theoretical and ethnographic sides of my research down a little and i’m hoping to make amends with a couple of upcoming engagements. So as not to make this blog a wall of text I will deal with these in the next post.

Performance Experiments Phase 1: N4rgh1l3

lb — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:33:48 +0000

As mentioned before on this blog, N4rgh1l3 is a collaborative project with Andrew Thomson who also works with Joe Musgrove in Biffplex. We have similar tastes in music and movies and it seemed logically that we should help swell the artist/band scene in Brisbane with yet another side project. Initially though our collaborations lacked a definable characteristic to separate us from what we do with others. It wasn’t until much later on that we twigged about our mutual love of abstract sound and image, and that this might form the basis for an interesting, challenging and diverse performance approach.

Birthing N4rgh1l3 within the Audiopollen / Other Film scenes would seem to be an important contextual consideration as our work, while using digital tools, is heavily influenced by Visual Music pioneers like Len Lye and the experimental film works of Stan Brakhage. Response to our performances within this scene have always been encouraging and positive. Then we played at the Australasian Computer Music Conference…

N4rgh1l3 at ACMC 2009 from Performing Audiovisualist on Vimeo.

In attendance were about a dozen of our friends, sitting up the back like good little emos, who all seemed to agree that this was our best performance. I felt it was our smoothest set so far due to a substantial overhaul in the weeks prior to the performance that resulted in a full AV collaborative performance model allowing us to share control equally.

Response from the ACMC attendees was not so positive. Many were concerned that they could not understand the interaction between sound and image, that it was boring and seemed fairly static. Peter McIllwain, lecturer of composition at Monash University was concerned at the lack of dynamism and that there was no symbolic energy transfer between sound and image. Bad feedback like this makes for great research fodder and extra considerations. Where our comfort zone obviously exists in a scene familiar with our cultural references, a different set audience and different circumstances compromise what we consider to be key features of our art. Quite simply, our work is designed for darkened spaces and mesmirism; we are not a backing band and this isn’t wallpaper. There is a forced engagement required in setting up the space, to ensure the audience will sit and stare, become entranced and then note the changes. A question then might be: should we change our setup to suit a different context or should we demand the right context for a successful performance.

From a performance perspective i’m happy to keep moving forward from where we are. If nothing else the current framework is fun to perform with; a pleasant replacement for the stress of loosely tieing disparate systems together into a cohesive work. Connecting a licenced with a demo version of Isadora via OSC allows us to work equally with the same material and oddly turns it into something like a game of Snap, parts being added and subtracted collaboratively in order to create a dialogue with the prepared materials. We are looking at touring a performance next year and the advancement of the system moves slowly forward towards an extensible design that can be used in a variety of situations.

Updates have dropped off lately as i’ve been shuffling paperwork (boo) Next blog will be an update including my paper and some information on my current concerns.

The Performing Audiovisualist » otherfilm

Wireless Imaginings

Performance Experiments Phase 1: N4rgh1l3