Noise Machine

OK so I haven’t really had the chance to keep this resource up to date over the past few months, and my internet presence is somewhat lagging behind. I’ve been working on the Oramics project (I now have the machine and am developing it with some pretty big players), working on my Brain Computer Interface project (which is now much faster), designing a studio for audiovisual cognition and arts/technology research at Goldsmiths (which will be world leading), and doing a fair amount of related research and promotion, including giving 6 invited talks at different Universities, as well as running Creative Computing here at Goldsmiths, where I am very happy. There’s been a few radio interviews too, mainly for the BBC. I did a few gigs, and helped to organise the Future of Sound/ Future of Light Symposium, which featured the totally genius Andrei Smirnov from the theremin centre, who I will be working with much more closely I hope. Also I’ve been working on building some objects for Max MSP that do feature extraction and search for sound and image, and helping to manage the new Mabuse VST plugin development which is seriously sexy and will be released soon. Then there was raga explorer, a collaborative software tool for exploring Indian classical music. I did this with SPNM, who’ve merged with SAN, BMIC and some other into what I hope will be an excellent organisation that doesn’t waste public money, but invests it in truly novel sound and music programmes for the benefit of all.. Hint hint.

I hope this is of interest to some of you. One thing I have learned in the transition from lowly avant-gardist to whatever I am now, is the sheer amount of work that is involved. It’s got to the stage where there is simply not enough time to do the everyday things that I used to take for granted, like showing up to the Roundhouse at the weekend to see the various Daphne Oram related events I have helped to make happen over the last few months. I’m particularly excited about Andrea Parker’s Oram performance, which should be great. There’s also a film by a guy called Barry Gibb, which should be good, with unheard music from our Daphne Oram Collection.

Finally, I got married, bought a house, and my partner and I are having a baby. These, I have to say, were the best things to happen over the last few months.

Truth is, I am now so busy that this could be my final post here for a while.

However, as I think you might be able to tell, it won’t be the last word by any stretch of the imagination.

Kind regards,

Mick

The output of the S P E C T R A device

UPDATE: SPECTRA will be showing at Meantime Arts Gallery NEXT WEEK.

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a number of projects. As usual, I’ve been keeping them all under wraps until I’ve been absolutely happy that they’re appropriate for release. This tends to mean that I don’t do any forward promotion, it all sort of happens after the fact. Also, when you work with national and international partners, you sometimes have to be careful how you time things, as they are understandably a little sensitive.

Well, I’m going to break this tradition for once. S P E C T R A is a project I’ve been developing over the last few months with Rob Mullender. Check out his blog for more information on what he’s up to. Anyway, we share an interest in the development of audiovisual art and technology, from the turn of the century to the second world war.

As part of a research project we were both involved in, we stumbled across something very peculiar - an analogue Auviovisual Distortion mechanism. I guess you could say that it’s a bit like the Gyson / Burroughs Dreammachine, and it certainly has a similar effect. However, it goes beyond these approaches to produce an entirely analogue audiovisual phase distortion - something neither of us had seen before. In order to see if it actually worked, we decided to build it. And so S P E C T R A happened.

The S P E C T R A device can be used either by looking directly at it, or by filming through it and then watching the results. We’ve made a few films with the device, but the most recent one showed up some very interesting artifacts.

Click here for a demonstration, and some information on when you’ll be able to see it for yourself. Please remember, this is very much an arts project. We’re absolutely confident of the technological elements of the device. However, neither of us are totally sure what sort of affect it can or might have.

P.S. It looks like Google have removed this website from their search engine results in favor of my official Goldsmiths website. You can still find this but it’s a lot harder than it used to be. Not that it appears to be affecting the traffic that much.

A week or so ago (can’t remember exactly when), I did a set at “Beyond Signal 2″. I did two pieces. The first was Braindrop, my recent BCI-driven Audiovisual Composition. This piece is an example of what I’ve been thinking of calling “probabalistic-structuralism“. That’s a bit of a mouthful, and it’s quite complicated, so I’ll probably write about it properly soon once I’ve thought it through some more. I’ve floated the idea to a few folks recently and I think it’s beginning to make sense.

Anyhow I also did an older piece called Delusions of Alien Control Part 3. This went down really well. It was a great event and loads of other brilliant performers were playing that night, including John Bowers and Ryan Jordan. Have a look at the flickr photos.

So my installation “Study for Film and Audience” was used to represent the new “Sonic Art” award at the British Academy Composer Awards. The awards ceremony was yesterday evening, but I understand it will be broadcast on Radio 3 tonight.

There were lots of photos taken, although as is typical, not by me. It was fun watching the audience (comprised mainly of composers and musicians) trying to get to grips with the installation. It’s always good to see how people react to this type of material. There’s lots I could say about this, but I’m not going to yet. I’d much rather wait to see what people say to me, although the predictable comments along the lines of “it’s not a)art b)music c)refined d)reasonable e)serious etc. etc.” have so far been notably absent. Hurrah for progress.

I did an interview for Radio 3 Music Matters the other week and it was broadcast on the 15th of November. It’s been available on listen again for a while now. I’ve been a bit busy organisation our recent Daphne Oram exhibition, and forgot all about it. I’ve just listened to it and it’s good. The presenter/producer didn’t have a great deal of time which made it a bit tricky to get right, but they managed to give a sense of how the system works.

I think the presenter might have even said “Alvin Lucier, eat your heart out”. I certainly wouldn’t want him to do this, but it might make an interesting text score.

I’ve just recently begun using the system at gigs, mainly to control the way algorithmic electronic music structures develop and change. I just finished a piece called “Braindrop”, which I performed last night at the Sound Practice Research Unit launch at Goldsmiths College. Beyond the fact that it was controlled by my mind, the piece seemed to go well and I will probably make it available on-line soon. I’ll also try to get some photos up if anyone sends me some (hint).

My appearance on See Hear, the BBC’s main program for the deaf and hard of hearing happened yesterday. It was quite a long segment and I didn’t look too untidy, although I never realised I stood like that. Weird. It was on after “the Daily politics” on BBC 2, and I only realised when I got a call from Sebastian Lexer about seeing me on his television, which I think shocked him a bit. I didn’t even know Sebastian had a Television, so that shocked me too.

You can watch it on the iplayer for the next 7 days. It starts around 14 minutes in:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dw8g6/sign/See_Hear_Series_28_Episode_13/

Me at the Collision Festival, courtesy of Isaac Cordal. Scroll down for the article (in spanish) and video (er… in english…and in the dark!)

Hi Everyone,

Just a quick note to say thanks to all those that attended my seminar on Plundermatics at the Collision festival, and to those that hung around to check out all the great work that went on this year. There were some brilliant live electronics sets on Friday from a number of cool performers, including Tom Mudd, and the Electronic Orchestra (brackets (goldsmiths)). This event is one of my favourites in London for experimental arts - if you missed it, you missed out. It’s a great scene.

If you missed my set at midnight you can catch me at Placard Headphone Festival, Cafe Oto this Saturday around 8ish.

I’ve got a new official web site at Goldsmiths - it’s here. Check it out if you are interested in studying live electronic audiovisual creative arts with me - I’m now running the BSc in Creative Computing at Goldsmiths College. Also, if you’re looking for somewhere to do that PhD in Live Electronic Audiovisual Arts, Gaming, Experimental film or Electronica, you could always get in touch. I might be interested.

I’m extremely proud to announce that Lumisonic, my audiovisual performance system for the deaf and hard of hearing has been made available for free by the sonic arts network. you can download it right now by following this link.

It’s a really simple thing, directly inspired by experimental film tradition, and influenced by neuroscientific research. I’ll be demoing it at EVA 2008 (July 22nd) and ICDVRAT artabilitiation in september. You can read the .pdf here.

It’s based on the real-time FFT display that’s also available in Mabuse. This is not immediately obvious, but I’m hoping it serves as a good example of how pure arts research is relevant to both industry and society. I guess that’s for others to decide.

Edit - Check out this BBC article on Lumisonic, with video and interviews.

Well, just came back from SAN expo 2008. It was ace. Lots of really interesting and engaging performances, recordings and installations. I particularly enjoyed the Sunday night, with at least three people doing fabulous 1-person performances. Magnus Spectrum, Stag Beetles and Nick Collins in a suit. Brilliant.

I did a piece there called “Study for Film and Audience”. It was a Max patch based on the Mabuseproject with some wii and ps3 controllers, and an automatically segmented film - like a 2up VJ loop battle, reconstructing ‘a famous film featuring brighton’ that I won’t name. It was just supposed to be fun really, whilst secretly getting the audience to make a hardcore experimental film mashup. It worked.

I’ll put up some photo’s when I get back from Holiday

www.daphneoram.org

Our celebration of the Life and Work of Daphne Oram will commence at 12:00 midday on this Friday the 27th of June, the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre.

Click here for more info

The Symposium begins at 12:00 and is free.

The day will continue with a concert at 7.30. This concert features unheard music by Daphne Oram, and a performance by Andrea Parker. Entry to this part of the day will cost £6.00.

The day will finish with a late concert featuring People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) and Ninki V, two of London’s most extraordinary electronic artists. This is also a free event!

Finally, you can tune in to Resonance FM tonight at 11.00pm to hear a 1 hour Daphne Oram special featuring John Lely, Phil Hallett, David Rogerson and myself. This show will feature previously unheard recordings, and give a taster of what you can expect on the day.

Tune in to 104.4 fm, or if you’re outside the transmission radius, listen on-line at

http://resonancefm.com/listen