This piece is located in a Tisch stairwell, building off Tiri’s 17 Tones prototype. It’s is composed of a continuous rotation servo motor which turns at a speed based on the input from a photo resistor. Two strands of wire are attached to the motor which hit a hanging chime as they are spun around. The photo resistor is taking light input from the fluorescent fixture directly above it. This fixture uses a PIR sensor to detect a person’s presence in the stairwell and responds by raising its brightness.

This piece utilizes the existing visual response system to generate an aural response in addition.

What’s interesting about watching this thing work is how jittery the servo is — it almost has a mind of its own. When the stairwell’s light dims, the servo slows to a crawl and ends up pulling the chime off the wall and dropping it back. When this happens you can hear the motor’s jittering buzz and the chime dinging as it’s pushed around.

Whoop Dee Doo is a non-profit organization that puts on family-friendly workshops and live performances in the spirit of cable access variety shows in collaboration with various local youth programs, art institutions, and other community organizations nationally. Kansas City based co-founders and hosts Matt Roche and Jaimie Warren  involve members of the local community through the ideation, construction and performance phases of each show with the help of artists from various disciplines, “from science teachers and Celtic bagpipers to traditional clogging troupes, West African dance teams, Tibetan throat singers, bodybuilders, barbershop quartets, and punk bands” (src), to create a platform that removes the various social, cultural, or economic barriers existing among members of each local community it performs in, as well as a stage for artists to perform; essentially fostering “unique collaborations between unlikely pairings of community members that ultimately blossom into exceptional and meaningful interactions.” (src)

Whoop Dee Doo could be described as socially engaged art because each performance engages directly with the various groups within the communities it’s attempting to foster communication/collaboration among, as a form of communicative action, rather than performing separately from the community as a form of symbolic practice. Although it may not provoke “critically reflexive” dialogue as much as it may create undisputed harmony among the involved groups, Whoop Dee Doo is a community-building mechanism by way of constructing a new temporary social group through this unique, weird, funny, engaging experience they share together. Though, the experience is temporary — what lasting effects are there within these communities, if any? I imagine through targeting the children of each community, the lasting impact is likely greater but perhaps not directly observable. Perhaps Whoop Dee Doo is also catalyzing critical discourse and further collaboration across unexpected cultural boundaries within the art world as well, particularly through the artists who’ve performed on Whoop Dee Doo from the local, or larger “high-art” community.

(src: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

The high-school-play-meets-off-Broadway set designs convey handmade, DIY sensibilities and an absence of inhibitions as expressed through the vibrant and almost absurd use of colors and textures. This style reflects the chaotic and unexpected mash-up of participants from across social or cultural boundaries who become inextricable parts of the temporary Whoop Dee Doo world, and especially obfuscates the boundaries between high art and that which is not traditionally considered so. To me it’s simultaneously successful as a critically reflexive work of art as well as a party. In a way, it’s success as a critical piece is driven by the core party ethos of bringing communities together through the prospect of having fun.

http://andrewmccausland.net/watchingNow.html

This work is a “collaborative performance” consisting of 9 live streams ( from Twitch‘s Creative section) playing simultaneously. The title of the piece (in bold) is constantly changing, being a combination of the title of all the currently playing streams. Authorship goes to the streamers themselves.

This piece attempts to provoke the following ideas:

Identity – these streamers have a carefully mediated online identities, each of their streams are sort of themed based on their various interests, they sort of perform for the user bases they develop, and for faceless masses (consciously or subconsciously) through the internet.

Agency – these people have no idea the context that I’ve put them in – up on a projector in a room full of people, contrasted with 8 other streamers.

What’s the nature of a performance, or any time-based work on the internet, with recordable, reproducible media? These users are performing, which is a time-based thing, a happening, but in this context there will always be other performers to replace them, so this piece is time-based in the sense that no one moment is the same as the next, but the piece is always going to be here, it’s constant in that sense.

This is a simplified version of the S.O.VIZv1.0 (page hasn’t been updated in a while) interface I’ve been working on for some time now. This is a desktop application which visualizes much of the publicly available data describing the orbits of “satellites” (any man-made object larger than a softball) in Earth orbit, and enables users to explore this data.

When the app is launched, it fetches the full TLE data and SATCAT via the Space Track API, and saves it locally as a few JSON documents from which the app then reads from to create the visuals (with openFrameworks).

The visualization shows each satellite’s apogee and perigee as a red and green point (respectively), ordered chronologically by launch date around a circle representing the Earth (at scale to the data), going clockwise from the top (90º).

The app allows users to zoom between high, medium, and low earth orbits. The arcs which appear in low earth orbit describe the number of satellites launched within each decade. Clicking on an arc filters the visualization so that users can see a specific decade in greater detail.

Demo:

High-res Snapshots (open separately for detail):

Full catalog, high earth orbit (link):

Full catalog, medium earth orbit (link):

Full catalog, low earth orbit with arcs describing number of satellite launched within each decade since Sputnik 1 in 1957 (link):

1990-1999, low earth orbit (link):

1990-1999, medium earth orbit (link):

1990-1999, high earth orbit (link):

Survival Research Laboratories is a California-based performance art group established by Mark Pauline in 1979. Customized industrial machines made from a wide array of repurposed mechanical parts are remotely operated by humans to perform unique, and infamously loud, dangerous, and destructive shows in front of live audiences.

Mini-doc of a Tokyo performance:

A list and descriptions of their machines can be found here. Some appropriated mechanical devices used include a backhoe, tesla coil, jet engines, aircraft tires, car parts, and Master Mover tugs.

“What ever happens in the show, we’ll try to plan it out and stage it in a very carefully considered way but we intentionally pace the show very rapidly, and we intentionally layer very extreme elements — elements that most people would never be exposed to unless they had been in a war or something some time in their lives. And so the impressions that people are gonna get from that are very personal, in the same way that, if a thousand people saw an accident everybody would have their own personal version of it and those versions would not necessarily agree with each other.  ” (Pauline, src)

SRL’s performances highlight a seminal issue which has been increasingly prevalent in industrialized societies. Through using technology in unintended ways, the performances help liberate the human condition from the claustrophobic, bureaucratic, orderly nature of modern society as imposed by these very machines. Similar to noise music, the destructive nature of the shows express the visceral level of catharsis to this release of the tensions felt between man and machine.

In another way, SRL expresses an escapist form of institutional critique.

“I started SRL with dissatisfaction for the other options I was trained for. I didn’t wanna work at a job, nor did I want to become part of the gallery/museum world… really just sort of an act of desperation… I didn’t like the experience of working with people as much as I liked the experience of working with machines, so I decided to try the experiment to see if it was possible to replace humans in a theatrical context with machines.” (Pauline, src)

 

 

This post discusses the procedural and aleatory (or stochastic) nature of the sound pieces which appear on pioneering post-WWII composer Iannis Xenakis’s “Electro-Acoustic Music” LP.

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Something is procedural in that it’s based on a given instruction — it’s algorithmic, but not necessarily computer-produced. Visual artist Sol Lewitt popularized the procedural generation of art throughout the development of mid-twentieth century minimalism, while composer John Cage is best known for pioneering similar techniques in music composition — both artists involving the use of aleatoric properties, or “the incorporation of chance into the process of creation.” (src)

Xenakis utilized both aleatoric and procedural methods in the creation of compositions like Concret P–H (which was a site-specific composition for the presentation of Le Corbusier’s Pavilion), Bohor, Diamorphoses, and Orient-Occident (all of which were later released together by Nonesuch in 1970). These tracks were composed through cutting-edge (at the time) techniques from splicing tape loops to computational methods to create non-representational sounds, a process and set of characteristics known as musique concrète.

Aleatoricism appears in how Xenakis used computational methods to apply mathematical models to compose his music, particularly stochastic processes: “a random process evolving with time” (src), which is to say that “some element or variable is governed by chance” (src). Where a traditional composition would be completely deterministic, Xenakis’s works introduced a probabilistic element. These methods are also procedural: “[Xenakis] composes a general structure, with broadly defined formal shape, density, etc, and then uses statistics (usually with the aid of a computer) to generate the details (i.e. the specific pitches and rhythms) that will create that structure.”(src) What’s interesting about this is the question of whether stochastic methods could truly be considered aleatoric if the probabilistic element is itself set within a deterministic structure, insofar that it’s statistically predictable. In a discussion regarding the semantic differences, a Wikipedia editor points out that “Stochastic music does involve chance, but to a comparatively limited degree and on a very local level. It also results in more traditional, determinate scores, without room for performer choice… all stochastic music is aleatory to some degree, but not all aleatory music is stochastic.” (src)

Although Xenakis’s stochastic approach may indeed be aleatoric, it is interesting how the work’s procedural methods put its aleatoric nature to question — what is chance anyway? Randomness can only be observed when there isn’t enough statistical data to reveal the pattern. Randomness may be more easily observed in the physical world where there are innumerable variables at play. In Electro-Acoustic Music, Xenakis confronts this notion: “Splicing of innumerable little pieces of tape (the sound source is the discharge of smouldering charcoal) and mixing to obtain varying densities were the two main techniques employed in Concret P-H… Despite the fact that Xenakis uses many computational methods, both manual and mechanized, to construct his instrumental works, his electro-acoustic music is not the direct result of mathematical operations. The sounds that are used possess by their nature the qualities of which the mathematical formulae are abstracted reflections. Thus, instead of working “outside of time” to find general mathematical structures which then give rise to specific temporal events, Xenakis feels that there is a direct contact with materials that have statistical properties,” like the smoldering charcoal, “and he approaches the work in the manner of sculpture.” (James Mansback Brody via “Electro-Acoustic Music”, cover text; emphasis my own)