Category Projects

Shobana Jeyasingh Dance: Trespass

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Next week we’re working on a sound score for Shobana Jeyasingh Dance in a research and development project with King’s College London and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. The project brings together choreography, robotics theory from KCL Informatics, and mechanical design from the Bartlett’s Interactive Architecture Lab.

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The sound score is still on the drawing board, but will be the usual mix of Cycling ’74 Max and Ableton Live, with a bit of Max’s physics engine thrown in to explore some ideas of robotic underactuation. The audio setup will also be six-speaker ambisonic for a bit of surround-sound goodness.

The venue is the KCL Anatomy Museum, and it will be open to the public on Friday 3rd July, 2-4pm.

More information from the Interactive Architecture Lab, and a preview article at Dance UK.

Hacking Choreography 2.0

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Kate Sicchio and I were recently awarded a European ICT & Art Connect residency to develop ideas involving the combination of choreographic technique with software structuring: how does “thinking in code” influence “thinking in dance”? The result incorporates a Neville Brody-inspired animation system which transforms time-based Clojure DSL data structures into geometric textual designs projected onto the dance floor (and, sporadically, onto our dancer, Tara Baker). We are showing the performance work at FoAM in Brussels on Sunday, and presenting at the European Parliament on Monday.

(Photo credit: Dann Emmons.)

PEAL Revisited

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We’re about to do some remedial work on PEAL, our laser-controlled virtual English church bell tower. The work has just been listed as a Cycling ’74 Project. The main project page is on the Monomatic site, with videos on Vimeo.

Here are some shots of the piece in situ at Kinetica 2010:

Enter Sifaka

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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.

TooMortal Trailer

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.

Quartet Project: Personal Space

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.

Anarchy in the Organism

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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.

Loadbang Reloaded

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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.

Plenum at Lumiere Durham

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.

Coding for the Cathedral: Dreamhub at Vor Frue Kirke

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.