Just got back from the medienkunstlabor, its 2:30 in the morning, at
the end of the night I was drinking with Yves Degoyon, Jamie Tittle,
Tom Schouten, and Martin Pichlmayr. The conference has been quite
something so far, I already feel like I have been immersed for days tho
I just arrived yesterday. One highlight from today was the Shepard
tone composition for the IEM cube, which is an amazing piece of work, a
24 speaker ambisonic array powered by Pd, capable of 150 dB, and
therefore has a large red kill switch. For this Shepard tone
composition (I forgot the name of the composer unfortunately, Winfried
will hopefully remind me), each of the 12 speakers in the "equator"
ground plane of the array played one note from a chromatic scale. When
you were towards the middle of the room, all of the tones summed
together and it sounded like funky white noise. But as you approached
a given speaker, you could clearly hear that single tone. Then if you
walked around the circle of speakers, you heard an ascending or
descending tone, depending on which direction around the circle you
walked, which had a very similar effect as Shepard tones.
The highlight of the evening for me was the concert by the Henry Bros,
Cyrille and Damien, aka chdh. They played a set where they had tightly
linked Gem visuals with electro rhythms and tones. The visuals were
almost completely black and white, except for one red object, and the
shapes where generally quite simple. But there was an incredible
fusion of sound an visuals, and they build up layers of sound/visuals
in really nice ways. The music and visuals were tightly linked and you
could see and hear the layers coming together.
But this is saying nothing of the talks that went on today, all of
which were totally interesting, as well as the first big developer
meet-up session, where we all sat in a room and discussed ideas about
how to work together. Some issues were resolved, others were left
unresolved, and others remain on the table for discussion.... But there
is still 4 more days, its like drinking from a fire hose...
.hc
"[W]e have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are
deliberately throwing it
away to benefit those who profit from scarcity."
-John Gilmore