There will be a fundraiser on Saturday night, 6 pm to midnight, at Castle Clinton in Battery Park ($10 donation). Everyone is invited!

FIGMENT is a celebration of creative culture from June 27-29, 2008 on Governors Island in New York Harbor. It provides an open forum for artists, helps build a creative community, and fosters participatory and public art. A broad spectrum of arts are represented, including sculpture, performance, music, installation, dance, costuming and activities. Figment is free and open to the public. Everyone can participate — with whatever inspires them! There will be almost every conceivable option. Come, engage, build, paint, sing, experience, think, wonder, listen, create, dance, wander: In short, the public can participate in a vast array of imaginative experiences that over 200 artists of FIGMENT have conceived — or bring their own games, costumes, activities, or small works of art.

FIGMENT has moved art from the pedestal onto the front lawn for everyone to enjoy, with over 200 artists to celebrate creative culture and non-commercial art with the public.

• Among the projects planned for this event are:

Starlight on the Island—A series of solar panel powered, spherical steel sculptures that will absorb sunlight to light the island at night.

• The Art of Skateboarding, an art installation and talk with homemade ramps constructed of recycled materials.

• “Circus Sideshow”, an interactive art installation and performance

• The Rose Petal Pool, children of all ages can interact with this rich sensory experience (multi-media sound installation)

• Maroguzcaju Theater Puppet Show, “Silencio, Silencio!,” about finding happiness in life’s details

• “Planetary Dance,” participatory rhythmic circular dance

And many many other events and performances, including a lecture schedule which includes discussions on Interactive and Participatory Art.

FIGMENT 2008 will also offer a range of offerings by video and film artists sharing both their personal and collective expressions—often influenced by Governors Island— including the documentation of the construction of an elaborate reclaimed wood sculpture and one NY native’s 1979 marriage in the island’s Trinity Church.

Other FIGMENT art installations will incorporate such innovative materials and resources as telescopes, a teepee, 2,000 silver colored flags, and a pair of five-foot tall wooden lips! The majority of sculptures and art pieces are touchable and climbable—resulting in much art that is interactive and child-friendly.

The work of both emerging and established choreographers will be featured as part of the many dance performances taking place throughout the 3-day event. Similarly, FIGMENT 2008 will have a range of performance art offerings, including such original and unusual unions as the merging of creative writing with art and improvisational drama exercises with therapeutic movement, sound, and role-play. In addition, visitors to the island can participate in the creation of pop-trash poetry done karaoke style, Ukrainian body painting, private readings at the “Poetry Brothel,” and the “intrepid” use of cameras to record various urban explorations.

The musical offerings of FIGMENT 2008 are extensive, as well as exceptional in their variety and innovation. They range from boogie and classic rock to futuristic Brooklyn hip-hop to the “healing” sounds of electric keyboards to traditional bawdy German songs about murder, madness and mayhem—to the accompaniment of an organ grinder! Many of the performances are also representative of the collaborative spirit of multiple disciplines working together: a sound installation incorporating restaurant kitchen recordings, live electric flute accompanied by modern dancers, a mix of acoustic and electronic dance music resulting from remixes of Rwandan mass and folktronica.

Finally, humor permeates many of the offerings, as probably best represented by the Celtic vocalist who will be singing her heartfelt songs about love, loss and indigestion.

For more information on the highly interactive and collaborative art exhibits, performances, music and dance events, and workshops encompassing all media, go to http://figmentnyc.org/2008/participate.html or contact Rosemary Siciliano :: rosemary [at] FIGMENTnyc.org :: 207.332.9008

ISSUE Project Room is thrilled to host pioneering multimedia artist Joshua White and his legendary Joshua Light Show for a week of unique audiovisual collaborations. The residency will involve White’s iconic projections alongside an incredible roster of musicians, with a different musical genre represented on each night of the residency. The Joshua Light Show involves a team of video and light artists, led by White and his senior collaborator, Bec Stupak (Honeygun Labs) to improvise live synesthetic visuals behind a giant rear projection screen, involving the “liquid light” techniques he developed at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East during the late 1960s. In addition, each performance of the light show will feature contributions from a different live-cinema artist, including Seth Kirby, Zach Layton, and Mighty Robot A/V Squad. The residency is curated and produced in collaboration with Nick Hallett and concludes a month of programming at IPR devoted to the Ecstatic Moment.

May 28 ALL-STAR EXPERIMENTAL IMPROVISATION Ikue Mori (electronics), Zeena Parkins (electric harp), Lee Ranaldo (electric guitar) and Marina Rosenfeld (electronics)

May 29 NORTH INDIAN RAGA and TALA (co-presented by Chhandayan) Pandit Samir Chatterjee (tabla) and K.V. Mahabala (sitar)

May 30 FREE JAZZ with Albert-Ayler-inspired quartet, Spiritual Unity Roy Campbell (trumpet) Henry Grimes (bass), Marc Ribot (guitar), Chad Taylor (drums)

May 31 ELECTRONIC MUSIC Soft Circle (Hisham Bharoocha) and Invisible Conga People (Justin Simon, Eric Tsai)

$20 General-admission floor seating (available at the door before each concert) $30 Reserved chair seating can be arranged by email: reservations [at] issueprojectroom.org All performances begin at 8pm.

ISSUE Project Room at the (oa) can factory 232 Third Street at 3rd Ave, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11215 F, G to Carroll; F, M, R to 9th Street-4th Ave (718) 330-0313 (venue)

For media inquiries, contact Suzanne Fiol, (718) 812-1129 (cell) For Joshua Light Show inquiries, contact Nick Hallett, nick [at] harknessav.org Images available upon request.

ISSUE Project Room’s Joshua Light Show Residency is made possible through Presentation Funds from the Experimental Television Center. The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Creative innovation has always relied, to some extent, on the logic of call-and-response, a phrase that Breitz borrows from musicologists, who use it to describe the interactive quality that is key to musical experience in various oral cultures. Mudam warmly invites you to share your ideas with a group of artists and thinkers as they explore the logic of call-and-response and reflect on strategies of artistic appropriation and creative recycling during a three-day line-up of performances, panels and discussions.

With invited guests Cory Arcangel, Martin Arnold, Pierre Bismuth, Claude Closky, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Iain Forsyth + Jane Pollard, Surasi Kusolwong, Matthieu Laurette, Lawrence Lessig, Gabriel Lester, Bjørn Melhus, Momus, Jonathan Monk, Kaz Oshiro, Guillaume Paris, Paul Pfeiffer and James Webb.

Friday, 25 April 2008 Evening
OPENING EVENTS
Forsyth + Pollard

London-based artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard met and began working collaboratively in 1993. An interdisciplinary approach to art, music, mediation and ‘liveness’ has led to their continued engagement with the soundtrack underpinning contemporary life. Their universal yet highly personal strategies play out ideas of memory, performance and the mediated image in a challenging but highly accessible body of work.

Saturday, 26 April 2008 10am-6pm
Mondo Youtube

This day-long session brings together several artists who have explored the participatory potential of mainstream media such as advertising, the Internet, reality television, video games, MySpace and YouTube. Given the increasingly profit-driven nature of most of these formats, is it possible for a challenging culture of call-and-response to exist within these nascent public spheres, or inevitable that all criticism and innovative thought introduced into these new formats will immediately be instrumentalized towards commercial ends? Invited artists will supplement discussions of their own work with examples of mainstream media that have interested them, influenced them, or into which they have actively intervened. With:

Cory Arcangel, New York
Matthieu Laurette, Paris
Bjørn Melhus, Berlin
Guillaume Paris, Paris
Gabriel Lester, Amsterdam/Brussels

Sunday, 27 April 2008 10am-6pm
After Images

This day-long session brings together several artists who have engaged in explicit call-and-response relationships with other artists or works of art, addressing the crucial exchange and dialogue that motivates artistic practice. Each artist will talk about their own work in relation to those artists or works of art that they respond to or dialogue with in their work. With:

Surasi Kusolwong, Bangkok
Jonathan Monk, Berlin
Claude Closky, Paris
Kaz Oshiro, Los Angeles
James Webb, Cape Town
Keynote Speaker: Lawrence Lessig, San Francisco

Monday, 28 April 2008 9am-8pm
Art Goes To The Movies

Martin Arnold has written that, “The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.” This premise can be seen to inform the work of many contemporary artists who work in video today. This day-long session brings together several artists who have responded to and cannibalized mainstream cinema in their work, addressing the complex call-and-response relationship that exists between commercial cinema and contemporary art. Each artist will have the opportunity to talk about their use of found footage and their relationship to the cinematic images that they recycle in their work. With:

Paul Pfeiffer, New York
Pierre Bismuth, Brussels
Martin Arnold, Vienna
Candice Breitz, Berlin
Keynote Speaker: Diedrich Diederichsen, Berlin

Evening
Momus Live

“Ultraconformist, voyager, timelord, tennis and ping pong champion, tender pervert, poison boyfriend, hippopotamus, philosopher, folk singer, star forever.” Nick Currie, more popularly known under the artist name Momus (after the Greek god of mockery), is a songwriter, blogger and a journalist for Wired. Most of his songs are self-referential or postmodern.

Mudam can provide assistance with accommodation, food, local transport and other details for students. Call+Response will take place in the Mudam auditorium and will be open only to registered participants. All talks will be held in English. Program subject to modification.

THURSDAY MARCH 27:

“Living Cinema” is the creation of Quebecois filmmaker Pierre Hébert and San Francisco composer Bob Ostertag. This innovative project brings the creation of cinema out of the movie and recording studios and on to the stage. Ostertag has created custom software that allows the two artists to actually perform an animated movie with soundtrack, live on stage. They will perform their newest work Special Forces, which premiered last May in Beirut and San Francisco. Like their earlier works, it incorporates events from the world news; in this case, it begins with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

“Sonodendron” is a fully immersive work that explores the sonic potentials of cello and electronics on both the microscopic and macroscopic scale. With a 5.1 Surround Sound score by Mem1 (Laura Thomas-Merino, cello & M. Cera, electronics) and video by media artist Liora Belford, Sonodendron is a visceral tour through the bowels and ephemera of the cello.

FRIDAY MARCH 28:

“Messages” is a collaboration between Tres Warren of Psychic Ills and visual artist Taketo Shimada. Their sound falls somewhere between drone, raga, techno and psychedelia - mashing guitar, homemade tanpura, voice, percussion, turntables and everything else they can get their hands on. About their first EP from The Social Registry, Dusted magazine proclaimed: “This is some heavy, humid drone, pregnant with 4am electricity and, in the end, thick fuzzy beats. A beautiful surprise, engaging even in its abstract tendencies.”

Messages’ apprearance at Roulette will be a continutation of their recent live sets, the ‘Brain Damage On Broadway’ show at the Emily Harvey Foundation and their appearance at the ‘Evas Arche Und Der Feminist’ party at Gavin Brown’s Passerby. Expect an evening of hypnosis, experimentaion and improvised psychedelia.

Jeff Perkins (Single Wing Turquoise Bird, who provided light shows to Velvet Underground, Grateful Dead and Dr. John to name a few) provides his minimal psychedelic light show with four slide projectors and motorized fly wheels.

Violinist and composer Rebecca Cherry will present a new multi-media Surround-Sound installation exploring the relationship between sound and imagery. Juxtaposing original sound samples of stringed instruments employing extended techniques with video footage from popular music videos, the work seeks to generate new and unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated materials. Audience members will have the opportunity to interact with the installation through a computer interface provided by the artist.

SATURDAY MARCH 29:

A collaboration between guitarist Vernon Reid and multi-instrumentalist Leon Gruenbaum, gReid and Ruen is a kaleidoscopic conglomeration of field hollers, space sounds and general mayhem. Exploring instrumental groove-based futuristic improvisations, this is a rare opportunity to hear these virtuoso musicians in their most experimental mode. Yuko Sueta will be providing visuals via video projection.

Performing under his IDM/electronica moniker Plasticity, New York-based composer Robert Madler will perform a set of electronic works that explore experimental beats, static drones, loops, polyrhythms and noise. A 2006 Harvestworks Artist In Residence, Madler’s music has been featured at many universities in the US, including the SEAMUS festival, as well as in Canada, Mexicao, Spain and France.

BIOGRAPHIES:

Bob Ostertag is a composer, performer, historian, instrument builder, journalist, activist and kayak instructor. He has performed at music, film, and multi-media festivals around the globe and his collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, John Zorn, Mike Patton, Anthony Braxton, Lynn Breedlove, and Justin Bond. He is currently Professor of Technocultural Studies and Music at the University of California at Davis.

Pierre Hébert, born in 1944 in Montreal, is a self-taugt filmmaker strongly influenced by animation film makers Norman McLaren and Len Lye. He worked for The National Film Board of Canada from 1965 until the end of 1999 and has since pursued a career as an independent artist and filmmaker. Since 1983, he has taken part in live performances with musicians such as Jean Derome, Robert M. Lepage and René Lussier, Fred Frith and Bob Ostertag.

Mem1 is an electroacoustic duo that seamlessly blends the sounds of cello (Laura Thomas-Merino) and electronics (M. Cera) to create a subtle evolution of textures that moves beyond melody, lyricism, and traditional structural confines, resulting in an organically revealed narrative.

Laura Thomas-Merino is a professional cellist originally from Los Angeles, currently residing in Providence, RI. An active orchestral and chamber musician, she has performed in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Peru, and Italy with such artists as Pamela Z, the Robin Cox Ensemble, the group OXO as part of the Sonic Boom Festival in Vancouver, with the Providence String Quartet.

M. Cera is a media artist who is interested in exploring audio/visual control systems that are intuitive as well as experimental in nature. He is a member of the experimental media art group Redux, and the electroacoustic duo Mem1 alongside cellist Laura Thomas-Merino.

Liora Belford is a Tel-Aviv based video artist and a filmmaker. Her works have been featured at numerous worldwide festivals and art exhibitions including Art Film Festival (Slovakia), Tel-Aviv Museum of Art (Israel), Vancouver Film Festival (Canada), Washington Jewish Film Festival (USA), and many others.

Taketo Shimada is a visual artist and musician from Tokyo. He has lived and worked in NYC since the mid 80s. Taketo paints everyday and makes the most of instruments and sound systems for his music. He has worked with a variety of figures such as Henry Flynt, Alison Knowles and Rammellzee to name a few.

Tres Warren is an artist and musician living and working in New York City. He’s involved in various music collaborations including Messages and has performed as part of Damo Suzuki’s Network, in addition to recording and touring internationally with his band Psychic Ills.

Jeff Perkins is a visual artist and filmmaker. While serving in the U.S. Air Force stationed in Tokyo, he met Yoko Ono and her husband Anthony Cox. Through them he was exposed to the works of Cage, Duchamp, LaMonte Young and others and began participating in events, performances and concerts. He a co-founder of ‘Single Wing Turquoise Bird’, a multimedia group doing light shows for Velvet Underground, Grateful Dead and Dr. John to name a few. Jeff currently exhibits at the Emily Harvey Gallery and is now finishing up his new film ‘The Painter Sam Francis’.

Violinist Rebecca Cherry is a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory and has performed in the Baltimore, Annapolis and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras, the London and Bergen Philharmonic, and with pop music performers including Jay-Z, Kanye West, Stevie Wonder, and more.

Best known as the founder and primary songwriter of the hard rock/heavy metal band Living Colour, guitarist Vernon Reid was named #66 on Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. Reid first came to prominence in the 1980s in the band of drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. While he is perhaps best known for his work with Living Colour, Reid has had an active solo career that includes collaborations with Bill T. Jones, Salif Keita and James “Blood” Ulmer; performances with the Roots, Mick Jagger, Rollins Band, Spearhead, Public Enemy, Mariah Carey, and Tracey Chapman; and various original scores for film and television.

Leon Gruenbaum has been a vital force in the New York music scene for the last 20 years. After early classical training on piano and woodwinds, Mr. Gruenbaum developed an interest in jazz, funk and avant-garde music. Mr. Gruenbaum conceived of the world’s first relativistic music keyboard, a patented MIDI controller called the Samchillian Tip Tip Tip Cheeepeeeee. He has recorded and performed internationally with this instrument with guitarist Vernon Reid, and demonstrated it last year at the academic conference “NIME” (New Interfaces for Musical Expression).

Yuko Sueta is an interactive video artist who presents landscapes to live music. She creates sensual textures and stories into visuals by using chaotic mixtures of manipulated 16mm films and digital images. Her work has been performed live with rock, experimental, electro musicians such as Ifwhen, Apollo Heights, Costanza, Kayo Dot and played all around U.S, Europe and Japan.

Robert Madler is a composer and performer who has focused on experimental media since 1998, specializing in electroacoustic composition (both stereo diffusion and octophonic), compositions utilizing multiple video projections, and programming in Max/MSP and Reaktor.

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Eng and Linton have been working in a similar vain exploring experimental cinema and sound in the electronic arts scene in New York. This is the first collaboration between these two artists who have spent a life dedicated to observing, manipulating, pushing the limits of vision and listening. Here at Maison Populaire, they have combined their ideas of nomadic movement (Eng) with continual optical spirals (Linton). Change in the perspective of character, window, reflection of light, scale and mirroring are subjects at hand. The sensitive observer will notice the subtleties in the connection between image and sound which affects one another. Here lies the interactivity between the substances rather than the moving hand of the passerby. Using a simple set up of a digital camera, a moving glass ball, a computer with the software by Vidvox.net, and the feedback of the projected image, the viewer witnesses a process of remaking moving light and object.

Biographies

Angie Eng is a media artist who works in video, installation and time-based performance. Her current work draws from inspiration from nomadic cultures. In 1993 she moved to New York City to pursue her career in the arts. During this time she became involved in the downtown electronic arts scene and has collaborated on numerous video performance projects. She co-founded The Poool a live video performance group with Nancy Meli Walker and Benton Bainbridge in 1996-1999. Her work has been performed and exhibited at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, Lincoln Center Video Festival, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, The Kitchen, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, Roulette Intermedium and Experimental Intermedia. Her videos have been included in digital art festivals in local and international venues in Cuba, Greece, Japan, Germany, France, Holland, Former Yugoslavia and Canada. She has received numerous grants and commissions: New Radio and Performing Arts, Harvestworks, Art In General, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York State Council on the Arts, Jerome Foundation and Experimental TV Center.

With his Bicameral Research Sound & Projection System David Linton aims to make vibrational wave induced perceptual energy states manifest by deploying interconnected measures of electric sound & light in live action with hand manipulated objects in physical (live camera) space. He employs an integrated recursive audio & video feedback system of his own perversely simple design modulated by freehand intervention to deliver vigorous eye, ear, and - sometimes - body shaking realtime audio visual performances from which a kind of retro-tech animistic ritual “medicine show” emerges where subject and object blur.

What appeals about real-time video manipulation, about ‘live cinema’?

The world is catching up with vjs in enjoying a spot of real-time video manipulation: just watch people using PhotoBooth on any modern Mac. It’s compulsive, it’s fun! That term ‘Live Cinema’ is something close to my heart though: I reckon you can specifically and deliberately combine a lot of whats good in established cinema and clubbing to give a completely new way of expressing yourself as a VJ-esque performer while engaging with audiences’s own creative thoughts. The key to it is an improvisational use of narrative, rather than forcing a fixed story down their throats, you could be a cinematic incarnation of the oral storytellers of old, weaving tales on the fly, or providing the scenarios and juxtapositions that people find themselves compulsively mapping their own narratives onto. Stepping back from that, I’m interested in anything that uses media to make people interact or think in unexpected ways, which has taken me from playing with the conventions of one-man theatre to storytelling installations. And the tools are really hotting up at the moment, things are getting interesting.

Describe the live show you’ve developed and have been playing at various festivals…

‘rbnesc’ is a project fusing cinema and live experimental visuals. Presenting a series of character scenarios, it invites the audience to construct narrative and cultural critique: rbnesc >> urban escape. So its about the urban condition; whats happening, the forces acting on it, whether we should be accepting it. Some of this is overt, such as pasting up provocative quotes, some of it you can’t miss, given my visual obsession with CCTV cameras (hard not to living in the UK) and some is for the audience to map their own actions and consequences from the loose narrative arc I present. I hope they wonder whether the escape in rbn_esc is a valid solution…

How does it come together technically ?

I use Ableton Live talking to Vidvox’s VDMX on a macbook pro, with two behringer control surfaces. It allows a sophisticated audio-visual mix, and a template for the performance means I can somewhat improvise the mixing while keeping it together as a whole. I’m really happy that we’re at a point where an ‘engine’ to churn it out in realtime is clearly achievable, but boil it down and its only semi-live, its far from my ideal of being that proverbial oral storyteller, drawing on an archive of memories to make something new every time. Still haven’t seen the kind of interface to be able to truly improvise a fresh take each time. Well, ironically enough, that is except at the cinema in films such as Minority Report.

If you can produce content and have an ear for a soundtrack, it really isn’t that difficult to make an audio-visual setup for yourself with a modern laptop that can quite adequately get you to a ‘semi-live, semi-meaningful’ state, akin to rbn_esc as-is. Get some kind of audio sequencer that you can program in the building blocks of a DJ mix and sound effects, load the shots of your ‘film’ into a vj program that can perform your editing and montage on the fly, and tie it all together with as much midi and ‘knobs and sliders’ as you see fit.

What lead you to dedicate such efforts exploring narrative within live video?

Even starting out as a VJ, I found myself dividing a night of club visuals into discrete sets, each with some kind of theme, playing with hook and flow. Then I got involved in a little theatre outfit, and we explored how my responsiveness onstage with laptop and camera could enhance the act of a stand-up storyteller. Soon enough, we were delving into tv-like documentary sections with b-roll footage edited live to the storyteller’s semi-improvisational speech, we were having the storyteller interact with pre-filmed snippets of his other characters, not to mention many a coup de théâtre switching live cameras with staged pre-recorded chunks… it was a fun time, and really showed the potential of live, improvisational audio-visual media.

What differences emerge from playing similar set of audiovisual material, as opposed to playing a similar set of music again?

You can listen to that cd seemingly ad-infinitum, but the dvd will only get a play or two. there’s just something different in the way we experience a film to music. i don’t have the answers here, but thats kinda the point: there’s space between these two forms and that’s what we’re exploring. it could be that the film’s devotion to a all-consuming narrative and its set up to deliver an exact experience to you as you watch it means it leaves nothing to interest you on a second viewing, or it could be that the visual image is literal rather than abstract and once you’ve seen it, well, you’ve seen it. at the moment, I can only perform one route through my live-cinema piece, and so i have to rely on fresh audiences - not so hard given its a niche entertainment form - but my next big project is about giving me the tools as a performer to truly start exploring this.

As though to prove the live video performer is not checking their email, you were involved with an innovative trade show presentation with large touch screen technology, can you explain that?

I was asked to work with a production company developing a vj installation to be used as a central attraction of a motor show stand. A groundbreaking project as a whole, working on three 65” touchscreen plasmas surrounded by the public was quite something. Imagination, the production company, created a bespoke application that allowed us to playlist content submitted from the public around us, which we then published and imported into the vj setup I created on the central screen. The real innovation though was in the project’s raison d’être: interacting with the audience to create films that embrace them, putting the audience up alongside the über-produced brand films playing on the mighty LED walls. For that, and for realising it was vjs who could make the magic there, Imagination deserve a lot of praise.

How did it feel to VJ in that kind of spotlight?

We were making a five minute mix every twenty, all day, every day, in front of people who’d never seen anything like it. It was quite something, especially when they saw themselves on the six meter high led wall we were outputting to, or heard their voice booming over the stand’s PA. What really impressed me, was how working on that kind of surface really transforms the act of performance - arms flailing everywhere - and how an interface designed specially for it can really communicate to the public just what it is you’re doing.

Relentlessly, digital tools are making it easier to make music or video. Who are VJs producing work you admire, and why do they stand out?

- the Light Surgeons for so early on nailing the idea of an audio-visual performance broken out of the screen and into the fabric of the venue.
- bauhouse for so perfectly realising what I see as the vj/av approach in their high-end ‘montage on the beat’ productions.
- visualnaut, a good friend and collaborator over the years first with avit and then with narrative lab. Simply put, he’s a genius.
and I recently bumped back into ameoba, whose been trailblazing crazy-yet-superrefined a/v for years now. A welcome meeting, he’s a true original.

What attracts you to Quartz Composer?

If you look at a modern Mac desktop running Motion, you soon realise we’ve reached some kind of threshold in the development of all this realtime stuff: we can proverbially vj with after effects. Translating that to the realities of what you need as a performer, Vidvox’s VDMX combined with Quartz Composer seems the dream ticket. Still in beta, and with an interface that is yet far from streamlined, it does the magic trick of handing you the keys to the studio, where every bit of kit is free. Want another preview monitor? There you do sir. And if there’s some visual trick or bit of interactivity it can’t do, chances are you can make it yourself in quartz composer and it will load in as if it were coded by Vidvox themselves. At the high-end, thats pretty empowering. And if your needs are more specific still, you can take your “plug-in” QC knowledge and make native Mac apps yourself with a bare minimum of code, or if you’re willing to take the plunge (and its well worth it), then you’re extending QC itself with custom coded plug-ins or partnering QC based rendering engines with bespoke interfaces. If you’re on a PC and feel the ninja-fu, go immerse yourself in the world of VVVV. You won’t have the system-wide integration enabling things like VJ apps using it for plug-ins, but you’ll get a much richer environment to build your own castle with.

Video content and improvisational abilities are important for Vjs, but beyond those aspects, what ways have you enjoyed video artists involving themselves in simple or sophisticated ways within events / environments?

The ford project certainly grabs a handle on the future we were promised, where it isn’t just about ever bigger tvs broadcasting ever more channels with ever fancier graphics: its embracing of the audience through user-generated content and face-to-face interactivity really changes the relationship between media and the masses at events. The VJ set that was the most pleasant surprise to see last year was a beautifully simple operation from exyzt, who took a little wireless camera and ran around the clubspace and stage with it, always getting nice motion and feeding it into a framebuffer on a laptop, controlled by a playstation controller. So their performance was the two of them dancing, one with controller and one with camera, sampling and triggering on the fly and wiggling the joysticks to overlay graphics on the action. Fun and a consistent visual flow that fed the club back onto itself in the best way. As exyzt are a bunch of supertalented renegade architects with a string of huge installations and production pedigree to their name, it was doubly interesting to expect some mapped space super production and instead see something so simple. And of course, they hit the same theme of embracing the audience there.

What’d you learn from your AVIT experiences, and how do you feel about the global network of VJs today?

AVIT marked the moment in time when VJing transitioned from people-inventing-vjing-in-isolation to VJing being a recognised term and vjs being networked up in their home towns and beyond. Fuelled by the internet, there was a mounting pressure for VJs to meet each other and actually see VJ practice that wasn’t their own, and avit was one of the main releases for that: it started as the physical spin-off or incarnation of the then-new and skyrocketing vjforums.com. In the UK, three years after our first event we produced a week long symposium that really hit home to us that we’d met our objectives and the vj world was established: the work was good, the networks were in place, organisations were forming and taking up the baton. So now, for me, the focus has to be delivering on the potential of VJ practice, which means groundbreaking works, which means putting rocket boosters on interesting projects and talented people. Who and how, that’s an interesting project, and a continuing one. [posted by Sean Healy aka Jean Poole on Sky Noise]

Distributed Memory, originally presented at the Getty Center, features commissioned pieces supported in part by Montalvo Arts Center, pairs filmmakers and composers in the creation of collaborative real-time cinematic works from the recomposition of found and new materials. This evening is the second in a two-part series curated by Julie Lazar. In Rotary Wobble and Horizontal Boundaries, Pat O’Neill’s formalized contemplations of urban and natural environments are merged with electronic musician Carl Stone’s live digital scores. Janie Geiser and Tom Recchion’s fusion of live performance, re-photography and collage animation, Magnetic Sleep, reinterprets the formal melodramatic traditions of Man Ray and Maya Deren. (Steve Polta)

The majority of cinema as a form seeks to: 1. capture ideas and impressions of the spaces and places we inhabit or 2. visualise those we can’t. The former of these, representation, has been more dominant throughout cinema’s history. The lens has in effect become a means of capturing our ‘reality’, allowing us to store and later reproduce sights and sounds to be replayed as a substitute for personal memories.

With the arrival of computing and it’s now widespread use within cinema we see the latter begin to take dominance. Cinema as representation is changing to cinema as simulation, creating an era more important than the transition from silent to sound or from black and white to colour. Cinema has the possibility to become a form without any necessarily inferred referent, it is known, quantifiable (pixels) and so can be modified, abstracted, constructed in numerous ways. It’s method of production can be improved, changed or even reconceived allowing it’s authors to work as never before. Cinema arrives at the end of an era with promise of a new one enabling it to become immersive, live, participative, interactive, navigable, recombinatory, distributed, networked, coded etc.

Cinema presents performances and screenings on this theme. Works will address the future of cinema and explore a diverse set of possible directions. The line-up for the evening will be as follows:

- Semiconductor (http://www.semiconductorfilms.com)
- Paul Adams (http://www.myspace.com/mrpauladams)
- Mick Grierson (http://www.mickgrierson.co.uk
- Frédérique Santune (http://www.saturne-feerique.net/LABO/
- John Kannenberg (http://www.stasisfield.com)
- Adam Chapman (http://www.adamchapmanart.com)
- 33dB (http://www.myspace.com/letageramegot)
- And more

Open Ear, audio-visual events and performances 2007 – 2008 are supported by Canterbury Christ Church University. For all further information, up to date details on events as they happen and videos of previous events please see the Open Ear website.

Canterbury Christ Church Broadstairs Campus, situated on the east coast of Kent, England approximately 30 minutes from Canterbury, opened in 2000 with a wide selection of higher education courses. The campus is committed to the arts and cultural regeneration of the area and regularly host’s events, exhibitions and performances on site. Detailed information on how to get here can be found on the university website.

The result of this fusion - Islands of Consciousness - is not a simple combination of the two concepts but a great advancement. Sound and Images enter a very close relationship in which the randomly arranged musical phrases are taking direct influence on the visual outcome. So when you look at this piece keep in mind that all the visuals are assembled in realtime using photos downloaded from Flickr.com. All the transitions and effects are entirely random and only happening on you screen. Other people will see a movie and hear a soundtrack that is totally different from yours.

The infinite soundtrack is built upon Oleg Marakov’s idea to run multiple mp3 players parallel in shuffle mode just like musicians playing different instruments. In this case the instruments are not only pianos or synths but also natural atmospheres and sound effects. Islands of Consciousness consists of four parallel layers: Layer one plays synth background pads, layer two is the piano track, layer three holds ambient atmospheres and layer four contains all kinds of different sounds and effects. Just like in a regular composition the sounds vary in length and in fidelity and a very important part is also the space in between the notes - the pauses of different duration. [posted by Luca on Ecopolis]

Three circles of loudspeakers are suspended from the ceiling above an abstract landscape. On entering the space, the visitor starts the composition with a button at the center of the piece, triggering an immersive audio-visual experience in a 3-dimensional soundscape, enhanced by a specially designed LED lighting system. For the exhibition in Berlin, Keiichiro Shibuya creates a new composition which is presented here as a world premiere. It is based on research of complex systems and makes use of cellular automata and logistic maps for sound synthesis.

The accompanying CD filmachine phonics emulates the spatial experience of the installation within the limited acoustic space of stereo headphones.

Opening: January 28, 2008, 7:00 pm :: Podewils Palace, Klosterstr. 68, Berlin (U2: Klosterstrasse / Bus 100: Alexanderplatz).

At the transmediale festival the artists will give a lecture about their work. Keiichiro Shibuya and Takashi Ikegami: The Third Term Music January 30, House of World Cultures.

Keiichiro Shibuya will perform live in an evening at club transmediale with alva noto, Alexander Rishaug and Marius Watz - Generator.x 2.0, February 1, 8 pm :: Ballhaus Naunynstr.

filmachine was developed and premiered at Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media in 2006. The international premiere in Berlin is produced by Les Jardins des Pilotes for transmediale.08. Co-produced by ATAK. Organised by Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media. Technical support by YCAM InterLab. In cooperation with Tokyo National University of Fine Arts & Music. Kindly sponsored by Musikelectronic Geithain, Audio-Studiotechnik Glasa and Color Kinetics Japan. Commissioned by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan.