Kora, Boudhanath, Kathmandu

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We’re just back from a week in Kathmandu, working with Gaynor O’Flynn as part of beinghuman on a pair of performances for the Kathmandu International Art Festival: a collaboration with local artists for a piece at the Patan Museum, and the multimedia installation work Kora at Boudhanath, featuring nuns from Nagi Gompa.

Technology alphabet soup: audio from the nuns was routed into Ableton Live and Max for Live, tracked and converted into a stream of Open Sound Control messages, and routed into Field with custom Clojure code for projection.

(The backup plan was to project with an off-the-shelf laser display, but the only interface of any use at short notice was DMX, which really only provided recall and simple transformations of built-in clip art.)

This is the second time in two weeks that we’ve had the opportunity to project onto world-famous iconic man-made structures.

Plenum Pics, Cambridge

An early set of photos of Plenum on King’s College Chapel.

CLA for Digital Transformations Moot

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We’re showing the Choreographic Language Agent at the AHRC’s Digital Transformations Moot on Monday 19th.

The event also features performance by Imogen Heap and contributions from our friends at body>data>space, Soda and MzTEK.

Monome Action at Music Tech Fest

This video from a gig we played back in May at Music Tech Fest has just made its way online. As far as I know, the audio was lifted from the PA which, being d&b audiotechnik, sounded superb.

Instruments: monome running Straker sequencer (Python over Shado), arc running some Clojure over Shado.

Joining the Dots: Plenum, King’s College Chapel

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This coming week sees the next outing of Plenum as part of the Cambridge Music Festival, for which we are being given King’s College Chapel, Cambridge to play with. Installation dates: November 15 and 16. There is of course a Facebook event.

Some pre-publicity:

ClojureScript for Max

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I’ve been writing graphics widgets in Javascript for MaxMSP using JSUI for a few years (things like the TextBrick and the Nixie tube display, as well as the Forbidden Planet-inspired Krell Mixer Panel which I really must release some time), and I’ve also been working in Clojure for a while, so the arrival of ClojureScript, targetting Javascript as its back end, prompted an investigation of using Clojure to develop user interface panels and scripting extensions for Max without writing any Javascript directly.

Summary: despite a few niggles it all hangs together rather nicely, but be wary of thinking in Javascript terms when coding in ClojureScript, especially when porting example code, otherwise it can all go a bit pear-shaped.

TooMortal Reviews

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A quick roundup of press coverage of TooMortal:

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.