Category Projects

Entries 11 Total

Enter Sifaka

Jul 24, ’12 7:21 PM

IMG_0010-440x330

Lemur is a multitouch control application for iPhone and iPad, ported by Liine from the now-obsolete JazzMutant hardware device of the same name. The application comes with a rather quirky WYSIWYG editor, and while the editor’s irritating interface might not be enough to prompt efforts on a replacement, control interfaces tend to be heirarchical, highly structured and repetitive, so it makes sense to use some kind of dedicated high-level language to create them and lay them out. So: enter Sifaka.

Continue Reading… Comments (0)

TooMortal Trailer

Jul 24, ’12 10:13 AM

This is a short trailer for TooMortal by Gary John Tanner. (Note: the sound mix here is unfinished; for a more polished version see SJDC’s Vimeo channel.) The UK leg of the tour is over; next performance dates are at Dansens Hus, Stockholm in September.

Comments (0)

Quartet Project: Personal Space

Jul 22, ’12 4:55 PM

This is a blast from the past, and something I didn’t know was online: a video of the Personal Space section from the Quartet Project, directed by Margie Medlin, which I worked on in stages between 2004 and 2007. (There’s a cassiel.com archive page giving more information.)

Personal Space was probably the most successful part of the show, but was also the only section in which I wasn’t directly involved (since it featured no virtual world animation, realtime audio processing or gestural control systems). I think it works because of its relative simplicity, and concentration on choreography rather than technology.

Comments (0)

Anarchy in the Organism

Apr 1, ’12 8:54 PM

01352-440x275

The Wellcome Trust-funded installation piece Anarchy in the Organism by Simeon Nelson has just gone live at the UCLH Cancer Centre. We designed and built the animation and rendering system; Rob Godman composed the multichannel soundtrack.

Continue Reading… Comments (0)

Loadbang Reloaded

Dec 22, ’11 11:49 PM
jython170

We’ve been putting some effort in recently to shift our major JVM-hosted MaxMSP projects to GitHub. Most of them started out hosted privately in CVS and built using Eclipse, and then migrated to hosting in Mercurial, with a different directory structure and a fair degree of pain in getting the various Ant scripts to work again. Moving everything to GitHub made sense, but that required another rearrangement of source directories and build paths, so it was obviously time to bite the bullet and use Maven to build everything instead. This decision has lowered the maintenance effort considerably.

Continue Reading… Comments (0)

Plenum at Lumiere Durham

Dec 12, ’11 11:35 PM

This short video shows Plenum projected onto St. Oswald’s church as part of the Lumiere Durham festival. This was the third outing for the piece this year, the first two being at Skyway (Toruń, Poland) and Valgus (Tallinn, Estonia), associated with Lux Scientia.

Continue Reading… Comments (0)

Coding for the Cathedral: Dreamhub at Vor Frue Kirke

Dec 5, ’11 8:16 PM

We recently did a bit of coding for Dreamhub: the Lysets Lyd chill-out gig at Vor Frue Kirke required twelve Percussa AudioCubes connected into an Ableton Live set, capable of sending MIDI data to Live (to trigger clips from the sensors) and of responding to MIDI (to transform automation controller messages into colour changes). Percussa’s bundled control software wasn’t up to the task at the time, being limited to four cubes at once and a rather laborious manual setup procedure, so we built a custom Max patcher using an external object by Thomas Grill and our Python machinery to deal with the configuration and state transitions required by the set.

Continue Reading… Comments (1)

Monome and Wall of Sound Gig at the Science Museum

Sep 18, ’11 10:15 PM

wall-440

In the very-short-notice department, we’ve been asked to do some kind of live performance/installation for the upcoming Science Museum Late event on September 28th, using the 77-speaker Lottolab Soundwall as the sound system.

Faced with a complete lack of existing material which can be pressed into service in this kind of environment, and also faced with a very tight deadline, the only solution is to quickly assemble a set of tools which can be used to generate and modify musical material quickly and fluidly. This is a good excuse to dust off some sequencing tools which were aired briefly for the Post Me performance project in Prague, plus the Max for Live sample shard processor which has been pressed into service for a few gigs (and which features in a video here). Visual impact is going to be a factor for this gig, so we’re going for this look:

lotto-monomes-440

The Straker sequencer already has some bling on the monome 128, but we need to get something up and spinning on the arc 4 in quick order.

(Geek note: in this photo the monome 128 is running Straker, written in Java, with sequencer tracks implemented in Python, while the arc 4 is running an animation demo written in Clojure. Both use the shado rendering library.)

Oh: the Soundwall is apparently OSC-controllable. We may or may not have time to throw some code at that.

Comments (0)

Digital Futures in Dance Residency

Aug 5, ’11 8:05 PM
dfid-170

We’ve been awarded an artist’s residency at DanceDigital as part of the Digital Futures in Dance National Conference this September. Our mission is to bring the Choreographic Language Agent forward from its current workshopping phase into a state where Wayne McGregor can make use of it in the creation of his new work which premieres at Sadler’s Wells in December. We present the outcomes of the residency on September 9th.

There’s more information about the residency (and the other artists based at South East Dance and Dance South West) here.

(Photo: Jonah Bokaer.)

Comments (0)

Plenum: European Tour 2011

Aug 4, ’11 6:31 PM

plenum440

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
Continue Reading… Comments (2)