Leafcutter John – Light Thing

 

“Something I’m working on at the moment. It’s early days but I think it could turn into something really nice. Light falling on 4 sensors controls all the sound in this clip. Lights controlled by an Arduino which also sends the light sensor data back to Max/MSP which deals with the audio generation.”

Live performance using the light interface at the Beam @ NIME night at XOYO in London 1st July 2014.

Inspiring Creativity

 

Inspiring Creativity is a short film created by Liberatum, directed by Pablo Ganguli and Tomas Auksas, and presented by illy, featuring 21 artists and cultural figures from art, fashion, film, design, technology and music. The film is an insider’s perspective on inspiration from the minds of leading creative personalities.

Fibonacci Zoetrope Sculptures

 

These are 3-D printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light. The placement of the appendages is determined by the same method nature uses in pinecones and sunflowers. The rotation speed is synchronized to the strobe so that one flash occurs every time the sculpture turns 137.5º—the golden angle. If you count the number of spirals on any of these sculptures you will find that they are always Fibonacci numbers.

For this video, rather than using a strobe, the camera was set to a very short shutter speed (1/4000 sec) in order to freeze the spinning sculpture.

John Edmark is an inventor/designer/artist. He teaches design at Stanford University.

For more details on how the piece was made, click here – instructables.com

Alexander Schubert – Sensate Focus (2014)

 

For electric guitar, bass clarinet, percussion, violin, live-electronics and animated light.

“Abstract: Cats were reared in a light-tight box in which the only source of illumination was a 9-psec strobe flash every 2 sec. This allowed them to experience visual form but they did not experience visual movement. Most sampled signals are not simply stored and reconstructed. But the fidelity of a theoretical reconstruction is a customary measure of the effectiveness of sampling. Sensate focusing is a term usually associated with a set of specific sexual exercises for couples or for individuals. Each participant is encouraged to focus on their own varied sense experience, rather than to see orgasm as the sole goal of sex.”

More info available on Alexander Schbert’s site – alexanderschubert.net

What The Future Sounded Like

 

Post-war Britain rebuilt itself on a wave of scientific and industrial breakthroughs that culminated in the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. In this atmosphere was born the Electronic Music Studios (EMS), a radical group of avant-garde electronic musicians who utilized technology and experimentation to compose a futuristic electronic sound-scape for the New Britain.

What The Future Sounded Like colours in a lost chapter in music history, uncovering a group of composers and innovators who harnessed technology and new ideas to re-imagine the boundaries of music and sound. Features music from Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Roxy Music and The Emperor Machine.

Porthmeor Productions/Produced by Claire Harris/Written & Directed by Matthew Bate (Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure)

For more details visit

Disneyland 1990

 

A short film created for Vimeo’s Weekend Project: Memories Revisited by film maker Chris Zabriskie: “It’s about my family’s 1990 visit to Disneyland and the VHS tape that miraculously never wore out.”

The Diatomist

 

THE DIATOMIST is a short documentary about Klaus Kemp, master of the Victorian art of diatom arrangement.

Diatoms are single cell algae that create jewel-like glass shells around themselves. Microscopists of the Victorian era would arrange them into complex patterns, invisible to the naked eye but spectacular when viewed under magnification.The best of these arrangements are stunning technical feats that reveal the hidden grandeur of some of the smallest organisms on Earth. Klaus Kemp has devoted his entire life to understanding and perfecting diatom arrangement and he is now acknowledged as the last great practitioner of this beautiful combination of art and science. THE DIATOMIST showcases his incredible work.

Soundtrack by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bernard Herrmann and Cults Percussion Ensemble.
MATTHEW KILLIP is an English filmmaker living in New York. His documentaries have been broadcast on UK television and exhibited in festivals including Sundance and True/False.

Cube with Magic Ribbons

 

Cube with Magic Ribbons is a computer visual and synthesised sound composition for live performance. The piece takes its title from a drawing of M.C.Escher which is rich with contradictory perspectives but it is also inspired by the wrapped spaces found in the two dimensional graphics of early computer games such as Asteroids and Pac-Man. It was created using a custom visual sequencer SoundCircuit, which rather than employing a conventional DAW layout, allows multiple virtual tape-heads to travel through a two-dimensional wrapped space along tracks that can be freely inter-connected. As the tape-heads travel through the resultant network, the topological layout of the tracks comes to directly influence the macro form of the music. Furthermore, as the piece unfolds the nature of this already confusing space reveals itself to be increasingly elastic and complex, yet inexorably intertwined with the musical form.