full blobizizerz
the final visual results from a ‘sound painting’ session
This interactive installation was supposed to have been presented at Nuit Blanche North during the summer of 2020, but the show was, of course, cancelled due to the Coronavirus.
I kept working on it and this is where it is right now (the software): click on the triangles in the triangle mesh to fill them in with arbitrarily chosen colours to form a ‘painting’ while activating sounds and music – generative art – a non-linear re-mix.
It is designed to make it impossible for the user to know what action creates what result (it is more like difficult than impossible really but it is close enough to random for my purposes). This is where the key is – in how the variation is generated – no random generators have been used. Direct human gesture is central to this investigation. Mundane, somewhat arbitrary action is the channel through which information-meaning may flow unimpeded. It a mundane action that I am recording, its is not like playing an instrument – a standard sample player for example, there is very little agency, but the gesture is still there and that is what is recorded and is of interest. I am seeking a way to record an unmediated form of awareness and action (achievable within reasonable means: ie. casual), so that I may capture living presence that is as undistorted as possible. This ‘capture’ of living presence is then subjected to various computational treatments in order to explore, examine and reveal different aspects of the material and thereby different aspects of psyche. Analysis as artwork.
Menu Advisor
This is a little bit about what I had planned for the event:
Use sensors to create a fun menu filled with various unparalleled delights and whimsicalities:
Snorkagizer Plus
clumpagizer
full extra things or whatever
blobs or stuff or whatever
blasterz-o-tronic
bunch extra tymez stylez
globules with encrustulations please
blobizizerz
so there you have it
anyways,
I definitely appreciate the opportunity, so thank you again to Dan Watson, Huntsville Festival of the Arts, and Edge of the Woods Theatre for nearly a decade of NBN!
Here is the first album (click album images to go to Bandcamp page):
and here is the second:
It was made with this particular audio piece as source material:
And here is the animation of the creation of the first piece on the first Menu Advisor album.
And here a sped up version (x12) of the creation of the piece in the second album. Warning: blobs involved.
OH OK GREAT
This version of the NB (Net Blaster) serves as a form of ‘sound painting’. When each of the triangles are pressed (clicked on), they change colour in an unpredictable way (or unpredictable enough). I keep pressing triangles until the field of colours forms a visual composition that I like. Each time a triangle is pressed, a sound file is also triggered, thereby constructing the audio piece through the action of painting. The structure of the resulting audio work is determined more by visual (compositional) impulse than by audio (compositional) impulse. It is definitely a mixture of them both, but the visual dominates.
I am very happy with how this one turned out – this is the kind of aesthetic in my audio that I have been aiming for. The accompanying material, the album ‘things music1’, is the composition that was used as the raw material that was fed into the NETTTBlaster 9000 model this year. This source audio was broken up in to pieces (20-30 seconds long) and each of these pieces was assigned to one of 451 triangles. I am in the process of learning/developing a much more efficient way of doing this – by assigning samples dynamically.
I am suffering no illusion that I am some sort of programming master or what have you. What I do say is that I enjoy it immensely and I plan to maintain that joy and follow what interests me most about it: Cybernetics, Agent Based Modelling, Self-Organizing Systems, Dynamic Systems, and also Blobizizerz.
OH OK GREAT
There is also some other material that would have been part of this installation – the ‘text to speech’ pieces from ‘things music2’. Those were going to be the recordings of automated voices reading the wonderful delightful menu items.
and also this things:
So, great then.
Definitely moving on from this as my programming skills evolve. I plan to re-write this software using OpenFrameworks (C++). Right now its all about web, online interactive artwork – three.js – animation – 3D and 2D with sound. Simple game-like pieces that produce finished ‘figures’ with accompanying analysis. Each piece serving as a formalized psychological/creative imprint left by the participant. The difference is that I am approaching this as if the goal is artistic rather than to perform some concrete task or solve some problem. I want to have fun with it, so I will implement systems not knowing exactly what they will reveal from the data. Experimental – art and programming as the medium for revealing and studying psyche. Absolutely anything can be ‘read’1.
1Adrienne Starr – spoken statement – Feb. 2021