what
As we draw nearer to the opening of what, the self-curated art show that I am staging at Back Lane Studios, I am producing and releasing a lot of material for the feature project, High Park Branches.
The show opens this coming Friday at 6pm. Part way through the evening, I will be giving a short talk to explain and demonstrate the interactive installation.
So over the past two weeks I have been getting an enormous amount of work done on the High Park Branches Project as I get ready to open. Last weekend I released three new albums (all from this project), and today I posted another video, and added eighteen new prints to my online shop.
Here’s today’s new video:
As you can hear, this is a different set of sounds. The first installation playback video that I posted, branch strikes was generated using samples – small audio files. This one, on the other hand, makes use of Supercollider’s real-time synthesis capabilities – which are considerable. From the website (https://supercollider.github.io/), Supercollider is, “A platform for audio synthesis and algorithmic composition, used by musicians, artists and researchers working with sound”. It is based on an older language called Smalltalk. It is free and open source, very powerful and very fast. It has a pretty steep learning curve if you want to do more than the most typical things with it so it has taken me a while to get the hang of it and I still have plenty to learn. I am just so impressed by how powerful Supercollider is and how amazing it sounds and I have been using it to handle audio for my interactive installations, and for other audio work, for about six years now.
In my artistic practice I afford equal attention to audio and visual – one is not dominant over the other. I tend to go back and forth between working on one or the other. Over the past couple of weeks I have been working with the audio aspect of this installation and what you hear in the video above is a good example of how I use my interactive installations to generate audio compositions. Here is the album I released last weekend that is made using ‘continuous tones’:
And here is the album generated from the ‘branch strike’ samples:
These are both hour long ‘white noise’ pieces. White noise is a form I use throughout my work. From Wikipedia, “..white noise is a random signal having equal intensity at different frequencies, giving it a constant power spectral density” – uniform intensity but patternless throughout. I have been creating white noise audio pieces for decades now and the hard part is making them sound interesting. Here’s the first album that I published on Bandcamp, Shape Changer’s Stairway, and it serves as a good model. Anyone can make roaring or hissing sounds, and unused television channels produce perfect white noise but who can listen to that for longer than a minute?
The first ‘white noise’ album that I published – Shape Changer’s Stairway.
I am happy with the High Park Branches albums above (and the SCS too). I make them an hour long for many reasons. It is like the meditation music that you hear on You Tube – those 8hr, 12hr videos with music that is on a loop, except the pieces your hear above are not loops – they are continuously variable. Its the kind of thing that I can put on and leave on in the background while I am doing something else, such as cooking or practising Tai Chi. You can listen to as little or as much as you want and you will, generally, hear the same thing – it is uniform throughout in terms of its overall sound, though no two moments are alike – like a waterfall. In fact, I have an album that is nothing but a recording of a waterfall – high falls, as a model expression of white noise. I am working on some more sets of audio for the installation. Actually, I will probably be working on them into summer, long after the art show is over as there are many sets I want to try out. I will of course, be working on them throughout the show and posting them here as I finish them. My art shows have always been a work in progress.
I have always aspired to create true ‘audio art’ which is not that easy to do. It is difficult to not just end up making music. There is a difference between audio art and music – this a discussion for another blog. What you hear above is my version of audio art and I am confident that this is indeed and expression of that and not music.
new prints
This is something that I will cover in more depth next week, but I will quickly mention that I have added ten new prints of nine new branches and eight new prints of the final results. I have finished some paintings too but have not photographed them yet – I plan to have that ready soon as well.
branch #17
One of eight new prints made from snapshots of the final results from a session with the interactive software. Available in the online shop now – click the images to go there.
I am in the process of making paintings out of many of these images as well – both as acrylic on canvas and India ink on watercolour paper. Coming soon!
High Park Branches:
things:
newmedia #audioart #generativeart #mediaart #openframeworks #blender3d #mediaartist #3dart #canadianartist #forestart #highpark #interactiveinstallation #newmediaart #complexsystems