For Bindu Shards, audio and light needed to be synchronized in order to create a fully engaging and immersive piece. Using Max/MSP, a visual programming tool for audio, I created an interface in order to bridge the gap between the auditory experience and the light. A DMX hardware interface was used to connect the Max/MSP interface to the light system that was installed. The sound design was done working with Alexandra Kuechenberg. Coming out of the concept of Binaural Beats, the sound was created to bring the user into a meditative state by stimulating brain waves.
The relation of exterior light to interior light is explored further in the work Bindu Shards (2010), a fully immersive visual and auditory work to be experienced by one person at a time. Part of the ongoing Perceptual Cells series, Bindu Shards possesses the same invasive qualities of “behind-the-eyes” seeing as could be experienced in Gasworks (1993) which was first shown at the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust in Halifax, and then at the ICA, London in 1996. In the late 1980s, Turrell resumed work on the Perceptual Cells, which stemmed from his university studies, then continued from 1968 through 1970 as a collaboration with the artist Robert Irwin and two psychologists. Each cell stimulates an experience in which there is no object of perception; the light which is presented is light “not seen.” This produces the “Purkinje effect,” a transitional patterning that is perceived uniquely during the transition from light to dark. Together with the Dark Space series begun in 1983, Shards shares this dissolving of the juncture between the light outside and the light inside. During the eight to twelve minutes required for the eyes to adapt to darkness, the realm where the difference between “in-front” and “back-of-the-eyes” seeing dissolves and allows the iris to open.
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An array of pylons sits untouched, waiting for someone to discover it’s true nature. Based in proximity, dissonance and curiosity, Dissonics reacts to entities unknown to it through sonic force and light.
Dissonics is a new instrument I created in order to push the use of tension both physically and sonically. I used Arduino and custom built hardware along with Parallax PING ultrasonic range finders to interface with custom and off the shelf software. The data from the range finders was sent to custom made Max/MSP software in order to interpret the data to midi messages and pass that on to software synthesizers. Musically speaking, Dissonics creates music initially in a major scale, giving the audience a fairly pleasant experience. As the performer comes closer to the pylons, the notes being played travel to more and more dissonant places, through a minor, augmented, diminished and finally twelve tone scale. The interaction truly gives the performer a sense of power over the sound, a sort of sonic conjuring. Certain objects that are part of the instrument drastically change the timbre and quality of the sound to truly give it more than just dissonance as part of it’s dynamics.
The idea started with taking a place that I find to be a sort of personal hell…a boring office desk and making it worse by making everything useless. It turned out, I made the office a lot more fun than I wanted to. The music is Colour Eye by Jon Hopkins.
After a year of working on and off on a purely generative music visualizer, I wanted to attempt a pre-rendered visualization. We Have You Now was a first real foray into animation with After Effects.
Stickman! FIGHT!!! is a game made for getting out your aggression with friends without actually injuring anyone. Jason Aston and I used openFrameworks to put everything together and a Kinect to do the real brunt of the work. Using the Kinect’s skeleton tracking abilities made creating this game a much simpler task than without it.
One day while wandering around Union Square in New York City, I wanted to capture the motion and action of the park in a single still image.