cassiel

We are about to depart to Poland to install the computer platforms for Plenum, showing in Toruń from August 9th. This work by Simeon Nelson is part of the Lux Scientica festival series; the piece moves on to Estonia in September and Durham in November.

Dates:

• 9-13 August, Skyway ’11, Toruń, Poland
• 22-25 September, Valgus Festival, Tallinn, Estonia
• 17-20 November, Lumiere, Durham

Plenum is a revision and extension of an earlier work, Księżyc (The Moon) which premiered at Skyway 10. (Pictures here.) We took the opportunity to rewrite the graphics system for the new version. The original made use of Processing as a renderer embedded within Field, but the bridging wasn’t totally robust, so it made sense to exploit Field’s native rendering system for a less convoluted implementation. Field’s author, Marc Downie, stepped in with a reimplementation of the low-level graphics routines to shift the geometry rendering from Python/Java onto the graphics card, resulting in a rather nippy frame rate, some lovely anti-aliasing (pictured left), and Processing left somewhat in the dust. (There’s a technical write-up here.)

Tallinn is expected to present some interesting challenges: we are anticipating being given access to a forty-metre-high mediaeval cylindrical tower.