STEIM's Project Blog

The week in november 2009, I stayed at STEIM, I worked on two different setups.

One is my LiSa-based Live-setup with  an aditional old drummachine, the Rythm-Ace, the antecessor of the TR 77, Rolands first drummachine ever. which means, no editing, only presets with a lot of Mambo in it. I use it for goofing around with some kind of semi-serious impropop and later used it live in a duo with Eugene Chadbourne.

For the other setup, I use is  a Micro Modular to produce a feedback, that I control with fotoresistors placed in a pizzabox -sized board on a table, with a dimmable lamp over it, there are 12 sensors to control 12 parameters. With my hands I produce shadows on the pizzabox to ‚play’ the feedback. I can just use the dimmer to modulate, I use coins to cover single sensors and as well two small plastic stroboscopes with adjustable speed to produce patterns. Itried to use a drumloop (with a tap-pad) with the stroboscope and quite like it. The sound is rather raw and prickly and the Micro- Modular-patch reacts pretty unpredictable. I put this setup together in search for an electronic instrument, that I can use in a solo performance. There is the good question, if you can improvise solo at all and I find it  inspiring to work with material, that is good for unexpected moves.

The fotoresistors are quite interesting. Find something for  € 1.98, that is so sensitive! I tried them out on the screne of a TV-set and the result was that they sent a signal, that was pulsating at 5o Hz, which is the frequency of my old telly. On the Mico Modular it played a nice piece of music, unfortunately only one piece, as the result is always the same, whatever happens on the screen.

I tried the sensors on the MM as well with diffrent cheap chinese lightchains for x-mas trees, that have  diffrent pulse-programs. Sounds a bit like Terry Riley on a no-input-mixer.

I add a pic of the Micro Modular patch. The (hardware-) Out 1 is connected with the AudioIn Right. The interface between the MM and the fotoresistors is based on  a Doepfer ‚Pocket Electronic’ (http://www.doepfer.de/home_e.htm), a small Midi Interface. The sensors are easy to connect (same way like on the Junxion-Box), you find it in the Pocket-Electronic-Manual on the Doepfer page.

The way I built this controllerbox was like the French use to construct cars, start at the bottom and build one thing on top of the other. It has 12 potentiometers and 4 switches, 12 sensor -inputs, that you can switch, meaning, you can either use the sensor or the poti.

The lamp I use is a 300 watt stage light mounted on a microfone-stand with a distance of about 125 cm above the table. I use a suitable dimmer; (http://www.atld.de/Lichttechnik/Lichtsteuerungen/Einzeldimmer/Uni-Lite-1Ch-DimSlide-1000W-and-Analog-0-10V-Output::272.html).

I have used this setup in a soloperformance by now and will go on working it out more. One thing, that I find nice, is to use one or two stroboscopes and syncronize their actions with adrumloops, which is not so easy to handle life. So when I come back for another week at STEIM, I know what to start with.

Sound examples:

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Uli Boettcher

ulboe@arcor.de

A big thank you to all the STEIM staff members and other participants for this inspiring week!

As a textile designer working with simple sound electronics, but no background in music and only very little experience in live performance, learning LiSa and JunXion is challenging. But I was very happy finding out that the software could be a real big step for my work and bring live sound sampling into textile sampling.

I am currently doing a residency at London Printworks Trust which supports my research about textiles and electronic sound.

I am interested in the translation of colour and printed patterns into sounds, using either colour sensors or cameras. To provide a steady light for accurate colour recognition I built a little stage for colour swatches. David developed the set up in JunXion. Obviously it is quite tricky to achieve repeatable results but it was very promising and I just need a better camera and more even light  and a few other adjustments. Not regarding though that the textiles are still soft materials and not very steady by themselves…

Here a few images from the swatches on stage.

[more...]

Developing of the composition ” …mit schwarzem Glanz” for viola and live-electronics

Concert on 10.12.10 in Vienna, Stiftung Essl Klosterneuburg
In planning: concert tour in New Zealand 2011
Collaborating period: between 17-19.1.10 at STEIM, Amsterdam

John Croft:

My first visit to STEIM, after several years of working in live electronics. Barbara and I have been working on this new piece, …mit schwarzem Glanz for viola and live electronics, for some time now, in the rare moments we could get together, so it was a pleasure to work intensively over a number of days at STEIM. The piece relies on the detection of many parameters of the viola sound — pitch and loudness of course, but also noise content, brightness, melodic angularity, suddenness of attack, and so on — and mapping all of these to complex patterns of immediate response in MaxMSP, including a lot of real-time spectral processing. Because there’s no score following or pre-composed sounds, it’s essentially impossible to work “in the abstract” on the patch — it is the kind of thing that really needs testing in a kind of “controlled environment”, with plenty of time to try all the possibilities. Which is precisely what STEIM provides, and so we achieved a great deal, from the dark, pulsating opening, where the slow surges on the open strings of the viola control spectral compression and dilation of the sound, to the explosive passage near the end, where the undulating line of the viola controls a constantly changing filterbank. Because I work in a university, with its ever-increasing administrative distractions, it was a rare and welcome experience to work for a sustained period of time in such wonderful facilities. So now, aside from a few minor things, my piece is essentially finished. I’m very grateful to STEIM and to Nico for this opportunity, and I hope to return some time. Thanks to everyone! [more...]

David Fodel in Studio 3 at STEIM

I came to the STEIM orientation with the expectation of gaining deeper understanding of the commercial software they have developed, and to present to the staff several artistic projects I currently have in development.

I have used JunXion in the past, but only for basic operations in mapping HID hardware. During my stay I was able to create several new patches for use in an upcoming performance titled “Still Life in Real Time”, which will premiere at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in April of 2010. For this project, I am tracking position and 3-axis orientation of several objects, which constitute a “Still Life” composition, both visually, and sonically.

David Fodel - Still Life with Guitar

The aim of the project itself is to interrogate the possibilities of real-time, structured improvisational, audio-visual composition, while incorporating the symbolic potential of the interface. The traditional Still Life, and in particular Dutch Golden Age Still Life paintings, provided me with an art historical locus and context for referencing this potentially symbolic quality of objects. [more...]

During the introduction course at the STEIM institute my main focus was to see if there where possibilities to use the STEIM knowledge for my future works.

In the summer of 2010 I hope to get my masters degree in Interactive Media and Environments at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, the Netherlands. My final work will a series of hand build instruments (guitar, harp, violin and drums) with buttons and sensory attached. The sensor data will be send to a computer or another piece of hardware for live sampling purposes. So my special attention went out to the LiSa X and junXion programs as well as the support STEIM might give me developing these instruments.

At the Frank Mohr Institute I was working with Max/MSP a lot, the advantage of this program over the STEIM software might be the expansiveness, something useful when trying out lots of things. But on the other hand I’d rather work with LiSa X and junXion, it seems more reliable and a lot faster, besides that it a more ’single-use’ program which makes it easier to comprehend. I think it will be a valuable addition to my set-up and I will surely consider using it when I had a Mac computer. The fact that it doesn’t work on windows or linux (yet) might be a reason to switch OS in the future.

The examples of instruments (partly) build and developed at STEIM really gave me a good feeling about asking for help in the near future, I think they can really help me out in all aspects of my work, like thinking of conditions for sampling functions, building sturdy instruments and developing the hardware part.

I had a good and inspiring time at STEIM and hope to stop by every now and then for concerts and I hope to do a collaborative thing in the future.

Kasper van Hoek

Hello.

I’m Giorgio, trumpet player and electronics-user from Italy.

For a long period of time I’ve been using a number of midi/usb controllers ,but I never found the one that suited me completely.

My idea was about a controller ON the trumpet, something within the instrument that could control the parameters of the computer.

Then the only place where to ask “how to” was Steim.

I had the chance to meet really interesting and cool people that put down in a really simple way what seemed to be out of the world to me.

They introduced the Arduino platform and everything started to make sense.

Right now I just started to work on that kind of plattforms and I hope to be able to go back soon to Steim to start working on this project.

In the last couple of months I’ve been using extensively Lisa and Junxion for my music and they works really fine.

Steim seems like a plays where you may share ideas and learn something for sure.

Best regards to everyone.

Giorgio

Between late October and early November, I spent 2 weeks at STEIM working on the electronic part of a composition that’s gonna be released in Switzerland in May 2010 (http://arte-fact.blogspot.com).

This project uses a pre-recorded material: Florence Foster Jenkins singing.
Her recordings are processed by electronics and controlled first by the sound of live instruments (enveloppe follower, centroid-tracking, spectrum analysis) and then also by the gestures of the instrumentalists. That second part (motion tracking) was the center of my residency.

Except a compass, a light sensor and video-tracking that I finally excluded, I  used different sensors: pression, distance, accelerometer. The mapping was: sensor->arduino->Junxion->MAX/MSP. Quite easy to set up actually and no troubleshooting.

Aestechnical

This composition is about communication in a mediatic world, which most obvious symbol would be Skype, I guess.

The artifacts between two people communicating interest because they create their own space. Artifacts, like this blog on a computer, are part of our social lives.

For a musician, an instrument is an artifact, the way you communicate being widely determined by it. That is even more obviously when you use electronics. There is also something about artifacts in composition. Your choices are mixtures of aesthetics and technology, creating a space of its own. Choosing a microphone or a sensor is a technical as well as an aesthetical matter. This impure way of thinking music is highly stimulating to me.

But only if you keep it impure. Using new technologies doesn’t create new music. You can’t reduce music (or sound art) to some options about technology. Today the big challenge is not really technical. It is more about building your own language and communicating .

That’s something I try to kee in mind all along this long process.

***

At the moment I am still testing some sensors, particularily in making them wireless (the musicians have to move in this composition).

As an accelerometer, the Wii remote seems to be a practical choice.

First public test on the 5th of february. I will get back to you

An interactive music area is a place where sound induces sound in specific rhythms and harmonic relations. The system indicates the difference between silence and sound and shows the pitch in colours. Due to the use of pentatonic scales and measured repetitions a visitor/user is likely to experience his or her own input as music …
The interactive system is based on the Jazzperiments Jam technology partly developed at STEIM in October 2007. The installation on the picture – Interactive Music Area 51.180012,4.414798 – is a ‘mobile’ version, set up near the Yayoi sculpture of Corey McCorkle in Middelheim Museum on 7 January 2010 (sound of wind, birds and distant airplanes).

During Time Canvas 2010 (7 March) in M HKA Antwerp a larger installation will be set up: Interactive Music Area 51.211140,4.389929.

A year had passed since I last came to STEIM for the microjamboree. Following my last stay much had changed in that my PhD, now drawing to a close, was forcing me to reappraise my past work and my motives. Drawing things together is never easy for me, a case in point – leaving it two months before writing up a residency… .

Welcome to STEIM where ideas 'bloom'.

I had come this second time with a project in mind, to work on a set of audience feedback remotes for interactive audiovisual music. I had a prototype, naked and caseless, living in a Farnell bag and a set of half finished Max patches and Arduino code to fill out. I had seriously intended to hole myself up in the attic bunker that STEIM kindly offers wandering artists. However announcing this plan to Daniel, my mentor at STEIM, drew a response that diverted me on to a series of interesting and useful tangents. Perhaps the first lesson to draw about residencies is that the plan one arrives with is often a residency’s first victim.

This is what an artistic residency at STEIM may do to your carefully laid plans. Render them beautifully broken.

Daniel gave me some key advice that would colour my ten days in Amsterdam last November; ‘leave programming for the ivory towers and engage in the culture of the city and the richness of feedback’ – or somesuch. So it was in my second residency I focused less on announcing myself and my work to the people around STEIM but instead tried to keep myself open to the intervention, opinions and knowledge of others. This took the form of a series of annotated conversations with Daniel, Kristina and Taku, the trawling through as many galleries as I could stumble upon, all night google sessions and much reflection done in bars and restaurants. In short I attempted to become a cultural sponge. Instead of throwing my ideas at people and seeing which stuck as I am often apt to do, I turned that model on its head and encouraged others to talk while I furiously took down notes.

What did I learn? What stuck? Early on Daniel mentioned two ideas that he had which I was quick to appropriate i.e. steal – in the academic community we call it ‘referencing’.

• An artwork has three properties; A name, ‘reference’ and theory.
• A piece of music has three properties; A name, ‘reference’ and score.

This appeals to me as a model for describing the products that artists, musicians and art musicians arrive at. A good piece of art or music, or in fact anything worth mentioning, should have a name; how else would one talk about it otherwise? The ‘reference’ is easiest to think of in music where I like to think of it as the ‘hook’, the recognisable point of entry for an audience. Meanwhile the score or theory is the aesthetic framework, the pattern of decisions that the artist has made to arrive at the final piece. Perhaps the third property is the most interesting to the artistic community when evaluating a work. But even the casual observer of an art work can quickly ’smell a rat’ when a piece appears to have no underlying logic to it.

This image has no underlying logic.

In a long sofa discourse held in STEIM’s lobby with Kristina I invited her to tear in to my ideas for an interactive music controller for audience feedback. Better that I got used to it then with the friendly STEIMies than go in to my viva later this year unprepared for rigorous (read rough) artistic feedback. Kristina soon knocked some sense into me, forcing me to confront several flaws in my ideas.

At this point it’s worth explaining a little more about the work I brought with me to STEIM. The as yet unnamed music controller features a single rotary encoder,  an 8 x 8 tri-colour LED matrix and a ZigBee wireless link as well as the obligatory Arduino. My plan was and still is to use ten of them to allow real time ‘worm polling‘ of my music with an audience, and then use that feedback data to interact/intervene/improve my tunes algorithmically (or should that be algo-rhythy-magically).

Naked tech.

Knob to twist and a display for visual feedback. Simples!

Kristina gave me the idea that the items could be shared, not tied to a particular audience member, which I’d overlooked as a concept. Perhaps a side effect of sitting through too many ‘buttoned up’ ’sit down’ electro-acoustic concerts. This forced me to reappraise my notions of how I would box up my controllers. Kristina gave me many suggestions, all of which were useful and relevant. Here are some of my favourites

• ‘Become the Nielsen family‘. – As a ‘reference’ for my art.
• ‘Run experiments – the gig is your laboratory’ – On the subject of developing my idea.
• ‘Use bubblewrap’ – An awesome suggestion for extra rapid prototyping of case designs.
• Use ‘iterative interaction’ making small changes to the design after each ‘regular deployment’. – On the subject of design strategy.
• ‘The chemist asks what happens when …?’ – On the subject of how to take the next step in development.
• Remember there are ‘no imaginary people’ – On the subject of avoiding living in my head/over intellectualising.
• ‘Go to gigs and test it out. Don’t talk or think about the final thing.’ – On the blunt reality of what I have to do.
• ‘Convince people you’re allowed to do whack shit and don’t be lame’ – Here Kristina was telling me the secret technique of testing new technology on ‘punters’ but perhaps this should be applied to all art/music/science/life in general?

I convinced these people I was a freelance fashion photographer. I'm really not. I had aspirations of selling the photo to VICE's Dos and Don'ts. They weren't interested, but I still love the stop sign above the gormless goon's head. What was she thinking?

After talking to Kristina I left it a couple of days before returning to STEIM. Perhaps I should mention that my last residency was not just an opportunity to work on my artistic practice in STEIM’s appealing attic atelier space, jokingly known as ‘the monastery’. I had far greater responsibilities than simply looking after the development of my ideas, software and hardware. Really I was there to look after Daniel’s cat Cheetah! Daniel had kindly put me up at his Jordaan apartment with instructions for the care and comfort of his domesticated moggy while he was away, ironically at his own artistic residency.

Daniel and Cheetah.

In England we have a saying about people and pets, “he’s a nice guy – but I wouldn’t trust him with my cat“. As such I felt the heavy weight of the commitment and spent much of my time in the Jordaan caring for Cheetah. Cats have an awful habit of sulking when their owners leave them and then sulking even harder when they return, to punish them. Out of respect for Daniel and a curiously English bent for pets I was determined to keep this skitty-kitty happy. I allowed her to rule my day in a way that made my partner at home quite jealous. Working on a laptop, listening to the BBC World Service, feeding and most importantly playing with a cat, I worked on the ideas for my thesis and final pieces. The laser pointer sessions conducted to improvised and new music and the rapidly prototyped cat interaction device I built deeply coloured my thinking on the subject of metaphor; a key part of my thesis. I shall not divulge nor digress into my ideas on cats and dogs as metaphors for people yet. Rather I shall ask one question, what can cats and dogs teach us about the dance floor?

Portrait of the young artist with a little cat.

Returning to STEIM for a final interview with Taku I was keen to ask his advice on an idea that had occurred to me when searching for the ‘theory’ behind my work. It is often the case that artists simply ‘do’ and then search for the theory after the fact, the same occurs in the sciences – or so I am told. My own ‘theory’ was that in my first two serious pieces I had been obsessed with  embedding my own modern ideas for interactive audio visual music in the bodies of existing old technologies, namely the radio and the TV. I had been interested early on with Duchamp’s ready mades but also deeply concerned with artistic intervention/re-appropriation and subversion of existing technologies. I decided to coin the term ‘post-neo-retro-futurism’ as googling it yielded no hits – which surely meant I had at least some space to develop in to artistically. Essentially it was a made up phrase designed to encapsulate my ideas about taking our past ideas of what future technology would bring and then colliding them with my own current ideas of ‘future’ art/tech.

Talking with Taku about my ideas of the future and in particular looking at our past ideas of what future technologies would bring allowed me to put some meaty ‘art theory’ on the bones of what could otherwise smell like another poorly thought out idea. Taku reminded me that historically thinking the concept of the ‘future’ is a relatively recent one, emerging from enlightenment thinking in the 1600s and opposing the older, more static, Greek notions of ‘concepts’ and ‘knowledge’. Apt topics for discussion in a great enlightenment city like Amsterdam where Descartes himself had once lived. Descartes it should be noted is my favourite philosopher, a hang over perhaps from my days as an undergraduate studying theoretical physics, he invented the subject… .

I don't know what post neo retro futurism looks like yet, but it will definitely require a lot of cables. Which is lucky because I seem to collect them.

Quite apart from picking Taku’s brain for juicy thesis references I was keen to ask him for his opinions on the subject of artistic appropriation as we share a common love of DJ-ing and stolen/sampled/sample based music. Taku pointed out to me that in his opinion there were no real ‘ethics’ of sampling.

“The ‘ethic’ comes in during the act of making or the listening of the audience. If your medium’s recorded media you just do what feels right. Nobody can own me when I play. I control the music.” – Taku/DJ Sniff

Perhaps that’s an interesting place to finish the review of my residency with the idea of Taku controlling his music, reading the crowd manually with his eyes and ears. Meanwhile I’m still trying to reinvent the wheel and build a system where the audience battle the DJ with their own set of knobs to twist and push the music forward. Till next time STEIM… .

After ten days I went home. But I'll be back. If they'll have me.

In 2005 Anat Spiegel and I went with Manuela Tessi to a wonderful artist residency in Czech Rep called Cesta. At this month residency with artists from all over the world, we saw a performance by an electronic musician named Matthew Ostrowski. He was using an old video game controller called a P5 to manipulate sound with Max/MSP. This informal performance spawned the beginning of a thought process about the interface of electronic music, and the sounding result.

3 yrs later, the electronic duo Controllar came to be, borne out of desire to create electronic pop music with human expression. After a long development process, the first performance of Controllar occurred in Theater Kikker in Utrecht in 2008 resulting in a 3 month tour through the United States. After performing for a year on this original setup, we came to know the borders of what is possible- and our desire to push these borders further grew enormously. That’s where STEIM came in the picture. We were looking for a place to provide the space- but more importantly the technical and artistic support we needed to develop our instrument, our sound, our band further.

As I write this we are sitting in a friends apartment in Pittsburgh PA before our show in Garfield Artworks amidst our 2nd “American Tour”. Thanks to the incredible support from STEIM during our 2 weeks in November/December, we’re reaching a performance level we didn’t dare to consider 3 months ago.

Thomas Myrmel