I didn’t even have to cross the street from where I live to see these two:
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This week I saw a couple of interesting shows: Hektor, the Swiss graffiti-painting robot/installation created by Jürg Lehni, and some of the new mirrors by Danny Rozin. Hektor is a system for painting with spray cans, using two precisely controlled motors to pull the can back and forth with wires. When I saw Hektor in Tokyo last year, it was using photographic portraits as the source for the imagery. At the Swiss Institute event, mathematical functions conceived by Dexter Sinister were the input, yielding very clear simple Lissajous figures. A great addition, which I had not seen before, was to place microphones next to the control motors, and play back the heavily amplified sounds through powerful speakers. While Hektor was painting, this led to very powerful throbbing/groaning/hissing sounds, clearly connected to the process of painting.  This all took place during “The Big Blowup”, the busiest night of the year for art gallery openings in New York, so there were a lot of people, and something of carnival atmosphere. Here’s David Byrne’s take on it. Later that week, I went to see Danny Rozin’s new works at Bitforms. Danny specializes in “mirrors”, works that take a live camera input and reflect it back through a variety of innovative, and usually physically intriguing, displays. He showed three new works, the “Peg ” mirror made of wooden pegs, the “Weave” mirror emulating basketwork and a video mirror called “Snow”. I was keen to see his new “Weave Mirror”, since he’d been working on it all summer at ITP and I’d seen it gradually come together. It did not disappoint – the picture below shows me reflected in it, taking a picture:  Both “Hektor” and Rozin’s mirrors have a lot in common: they are carefully crafted works, reflecting considerable engineering input, that also *perform* – they can only be fully appreciated when fully functional. Both of them rely for their impact on transforming their input, and presenting it in an unexpected medium, ie. Hektor takes photographs and math functions, and paints them as graffiti; Danny’s mirrors take a video input and show them using wooden blocks, slices of parchment, etc. It would be interesting to see both works interpret the same input, and see what they come up with. After all, Hektor’s Tokyo show (portraits) was a kind of very slow mirror. Danny’s pieces can represent any input – not just live video.  Woke up at 5am to see what I could see of the lunar eclipse. Unfortunately, there were only a few moments of totality visible before sunrise, and there were a lot of clouds. I did get a reasonable picture of a partial phase.  I had a chance to present, and play, my simple square-wave synth at the Handmade Digital Music event, a collaboration between Create Digital Music, Etsy Labs and Make magazine. Lots of interesting projects on show, and it was great to meet a community of like-minded individuals, all kinds of people coaxing the most unusual sounds out of a mixed bag of components. It was great showing off my project: many people came up and played with it, getting new and interesting sounds out of it. I was really inspired, even more motivated to take it one step further. I learned two things from the experience: letting people play with your projects is always a valuable learning experience, and practicing how to use it gives much better results. I performed a short (<5 min) set, but would like to do something more ambitious. The synth has been slightly modified in the past two weeks: I’m now using diodes for mixing in the output stage, instead of resistors. This leads to a choppier, more percussive (“crunchier”) sound. Listen for yourself here: sample of synth with diode mixing and compare it to the samples on the blog page. Many thanks to Peter Kirn and everyone involved for putting together such a great event!  William Gibson spoke at Barnes & Noble, Union Square, as part of the “Spook Country” launch tour. Appropriately, he chose to read the beginning of chapter 39 of his new book (it takes place in Union Square, and refers to the Barnes & Noble store…). He made an oblique reference to the possibility of a Neuromancer film finally being made – more news in February. I’ve read the book. It’s interesting, but very much in the mold of “Pattern Recognition”, his previous book. Hip young female protagonist is sent on a mission (by the same Hubertus Bigend) to discover a mysterious subculture, and it turns out to be more complex than previously imagined. It’s peppered with numerous references to trendy clothing brands, and obscure subcultures. Ample references to Santería pop up, clearly informed by some of his research to the earlier Sprawl trilogy. Other themes revisited including “street use of tech”, modern art (esp. the art business) and drugs – all subjects I’m interested in, so no complaints there. I’d imagine this is Part Two of another trilogy, in which case I’m looking forward to the next one. I photographed the numbered street signs from 1st to 86th Street, and made a simple video loop. I used it at the FUKT VJ gig at Club Asia on June 30th, 2007. I had a lot of fun bouncing the playback direction back and forth, and changing the playback rate. I will try to get up to 128th Street, or maybe higher. Last term I created a piece called Neon/Music, a Max/MSP patch that analyzes video clips for motion and color information and uses it to generate music. For my recent Tokyo trip and performance, I wanted to update it with footage from New York, and more interesting sounds (the original uses general MIDI piano sounds). I shot a lot of footage from New York, including a very pleasant morning with the camera pointed up through the sunroof of a Zipcar, driving through the skyscrapers of Midtown. I also created some ominous-sounding twangy synth presets in Ableton Live. I found that when used together, it turned Neon/Music into an interesting, ambient, installation piece, very different from the “Broadway boogie-woogie” of the original version. The piece was presented in this form for the first time at Superdeluxe in Tokyo, on July 20th, 2007 as part of the Watermelon Noise Feast. Here it is, in glorious YouTube lo-fi splendor:  For my last meal in Tokyo (on this trip at least), went to Butagumi in Nishi-Azabu. This place, whose name roughly translates as “Pork Gang” specializes in tonkatsu, deep fried pork cutlet. And when I say “specializes”, I mean that they treat their meats with the kind of obsessive attention usually found only in high-end sushi bars and steakhouses. I had the Butagumi Zen, a sampler of five different types of pork, both the fatty belly and the filet. Can’t say I had a strong preference for any of them, however, they were markedly different, and I enjoyed the variety. Very tasty – can’t really get that in NY! Loud Objects – the Tokyo edition! Kunal Gupta trained Kiyotaka Nakano, Ben Jarrett and myself for the Watermelon Noise Feast at Superdeluxe, Tokyo. Astro played his amazing noise symphony, and Shantell Martin accompanied him with her trademark live drawing at the Watermelon Noise Feast, held at SuperDeluxe in Tokyo. |
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