art installation

Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.

Listening Post cycles through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it’s own data processing logic.

Artists description: Dissociating the communication from its conventional on-screen presence, Listening Post is a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication.

via MediaArtTube

Nebraska science god Aaron ALAI, an expert in the theoretical side of wildlife ecology, demonstrates Stochasticity, a music installation that lets you draw musical notes with water:

The name of the piece is called Stochasticity. I built it to demonstrate the randomness that humans introduce into very precise systems.

When someone uses my art piece they are directly interacting with a very precise electronic tool. It produces musical tones based on the amount of resistance sensed in trails of water. The resistance changes unpredictably, and thus this is where the variability in the system arises from. The water evaporates, the user will flex their muscles, their hearts will pump blood at varying rates, and the conductivity of their skin will change. All of these variables change the placement of the notes in the water and make the system unreliable. I found it interesting that even though imperfect animals such as ourselves are plagued with randomness, we are capable of producing reliable highly precise tools that we can indirectly interact with.

I have included it here on my webpage because it fits within my philosophy rather well. The concept of resistance is commonly explained with analogous personal experiences, a common experience involves turning on a water faucet, wider openings allow more water to flow through and more water means more electricity. My art piece bridges the gap between personal experiences and the complexity of resistance. The user can visually see themselves changing the resistance of the electronic system while receiving an instantaneous auditory response. They become the resistor and can manipulate that variable in a familiar way.

It’s fascinating as an art installation – but can you imagine larger, multi-player temporary electronic instruments – made of water?

In Bb 2.0 is a collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls.

It’s made up of a collection of YouTube videos, all featuring musicians playing something in Bb major. The videos can be played simultaneously and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders.

Anyone can participate. Here are some guidelines:

• Sing or play an instrument, in Bb major. Simple, floating textures work best, with no tempo or groove. Leave lots of silence between phrases.
• Record in a quiet environment, with as little background noise as possible.
• Wait about 5-10 seconds to start playing.
• Total length should be between 1-2 minutes.
• Thick chords or low instruments don’t work very well.
• Record at a low volume to match the other videos.
• You can listen to this mix on headphones while you record.
• After you upload to YouTube, play your video along with the other videos on this page to make sure the volume matches.

The concept of In Bb lends itself to ambient music, because of the lack of sychronization between the videos, but it’s open-ended enough that you could add a drum and bass track to the mix and it could work just as well.

Check out In Bb and leave a comment with your thought!

Bacterial Orchestra – Public Epidemic No 1 (2009) (App Store link) is an unusual iPhone app designed to turn a group of iPhones into “a huge musical organism that is not only self-organizing, but also evolving with the sound environment.”

The video above is a first test of the prototype – with only a few cells. The first performance will be the 6th of June at Volt Festival in Uppsala/Sweden.

Details on the Bacterial Orchestra below. Read more…

This bizarre video, Granular Synthesis – Modell 5 (STRP 4-4-2009), explores granular synthesis applied to video. Read more…