[NetBehaviour] Untitled ongoing performance (Alan Sondheim, final documentation))
Alan Sondheim
sondheim at panix.com
Sun Apr 5 08:06:40 CEST 2015
thank you greatly; I wanted to give some indication of the process -
- Alan
On Sat, 4 Apr 2015, Mab MacMoragh wrote:
> fantastic alan
>
> On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 10:11 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
> (This is written as a final documentation for the piece,
> interesting I think from a collaborative and mixed-reality
> viewpoint.)
>
>
> Cave Residency During IRQ3
>
> Untitled ongoing performance (Alan Sondheim, Description)
>
> http://www.alansondheim.org/irq3day53.jpg
>
> During IRQ3, I had a residency in the Brown University Cave for
> the duration of the conference. Kathleen Ottinger, Azure Carter,
> and I worked together; we had also worked on a number of pieces
> for at least half a year before that. There were three pieces in
> the Cave itself, collaborations between Kathleen and myself.
> Kathleen did the programming and visuals, and she and I "wrote
> into" and through each other's texts beforehand, producing
> scripts that became independent work. These pieces are her own,
> with my textual collaboration. (I figure Cave setup and
> rehearsal for the performance as a whole was about 40 hours
> in-Cave and maybe 100 in-studio.)
>
> The Cave has both visuals and sound; during the conference, the
> sound originated from one of two laptops I set up in the room.
> This laptop was projected with into the room; the image was on
> the right-hand wall. The Cave was physically only a small part
> of the room - perhaps a sixth - so there was plenty of room for
> other elements.
>
> In other words, the first laptop split sound and image; the
> image was projected across the room, and the sound came from the
> speakers surrounding the Cave.
>
> The second laptop was projected into the room, through the room
> projector, onto a screen, and the sound was sent through the
> large room speakers.
>
> Both laptops had capabilities to run virtual worlds, and I used
> three virtual worlds during the conference:
>
> 1. My residency area in Second Life, the most popular online
> virtual world. The area is in the Odyssey sim, and was capable
> of video texturing, mesh modeling, and complex physics / avatar
> behaviors.
>
> 2. My three sims in MacGrid, an experimental/research world,
> with completely modifiable physics and highly malleable
> landforms. I have an in-world theater set up in the grid, and
> can project into it.
>
> 3. A local Opensim virtual world on both laptops, with different
> architectures on each; the fundamental configuration or .iar
> file was downloaded from the MacGrid.
>
> There were, most often, two world projected simultaneously into
> the room.
>
> One of the laptops also housed a configuration for Bambuser, an
> online application which creates personal online video channels.
> This laptop had a small usb light attached; at times the camera
> would pick up the room, but most often Azure's face. The channel
> would then be sent into onto objects in Second Life; the
> textures were modified to image her face alone, without any
> background. The image was usually inverted, but through
> feedback, there were also smaller 'guide' images with her face
> normal.
>
> The face/image was embedded in the Second Life objects, with
> objects intersecting it, surrounding it. The appearance was
> ghostly, real-time, and uncanny.
>
> In this situation, Azure would sing a number of songs, many of
> which have appeared on our cds or lps. These songs were fed into
> one or more SuperCollider programs, designed according to
> specifications, by Luke Damrosch. The suite of programs is
> called "revrev" and allows a musician to work with live reverse
> reverberation - what I call an anticipatory music - the
> reverberation building up to the enunciation of the sound, a
> head instead of a tail. Combining programs allows for a thick,
> more complex way of working with this. The programs also
> involved multiple coherent streams or chords stemming from the
> original sound-source, for example parallel streams a fifth
> above and below the original tones. The programs all ran from a
> prompt, and the parameters could be changed in process.
>
> At times, I would also use alto clarinet, either to accompany
> Azure, or to create independent sounds which worked with the
> Cave room resonances; these often used a small instrument
> amplifier. One of my goals was to keep everything acoustically
> balanced; live revrev created an environment which could quickly
> go out of control. (I also used a standard clarinet to play into
> revrev directly at times.)
>
> The video feeds included other elements - the two main sources
> included pre-recorded materials, and texts.
>
> The pre-recorded materials were produced at NYU's motion capture
> studio, with the help of Mark Skwarek. I worked with two
> performers who did one of two things:
>
> 1. The performers moved at the edge of the recording space,
> producing deliberate glitches or anomalies that distorted the
> figures.
>
> 2. The mocap markers were remapped among the two performers -
> representing a single avatar; as the performers moved in
> topologically complex ways, the projected avatar in the mocap
> room broke up in various ways. The result was an avatar that
> appeared more as an emanation from the performers, than as an
> embodiment of them.
>
> These are techniques I've used close to a decade, in order to
> create avatar distortions that represent avant-dance, wounding,
> death throes, hysteria, desire, pain, and political issues. The
> videos that were made at NYU (just a few weeks earlier) were
> linked together in a half-hour piece that was played at times,
> as a marker or punctum of what was occurring in the virtual
> worlds.
>
> The second main source of the video feeds was a series of texts
> I would write into the virtual worlds themselves; these appeared
> as chats on the side of the image. The texts were improvised and
> related to the ongoing mise en scene in-world.
>
> The virtual world imagery was always, always complex and
> difficult to navigate in-world; for the spectator, it was also
> difficult to disentangle. This was deliberate; the result, and
> one of the main contents of the imagery, was the representation
> of extreme states of mind, which related to the ongoing crises
> of violence in the U.S., Africa, the Mid-East, and so on. The
> primary source for me, for all of this, was the special topic
> Johannes Birringer and I co-moderated for the empyre email list
> in November, 2014, "ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance" - a
> topic which considered issues of torture, beheading, violence,
> anguish, and fear, for the month. The distorted avatars I work
> with - distorted because of the distorted movement - go all the
> way back to 2011, a 2nd topic for the same, this time with Sandy
> Baldwin, on "Pain, Desire, and Death," in the real and virtual
> (I'm not sure of the exact title). Both of these and my mocap
> lab work resulted in over 100 bvh files - these are files that
> represent real-life performer movement - that could then be fed
> into a virtual world, to animate an avatar or avatars. The
> process is difficult but the result are these distortions.
>
> So the most recent distortions, from NYU, would be projected;
> other in-world projections were live and in-world, and could be
> viewed in-world by another avatar; this is an important element
> of interactivity I work with. The in-world projections, then,
> resulted in the avatars moving wildly on the screen, creating
> particle emanations in the form of nude human warriors and
> charred bodies, and "dancing" with symbols made to represent
> ISIS and other forms of terror. All of this is at fairly
> high-speed.
>
> The revrev was heard from three sources - Avatar's voice itself;
> the revrev fed through either the projector speakers or the Cave
> speakers; and the revrev fed through the virtual worlds, as if
> it were emanating within them.
>
> All of this created a mobile and fluid sonic architecture, one
> that, for me, defined or modified the fixity of the Cave itself;
> room resonances and speaker interactions, beat frequencies,
> etc., all came into play. The sound was a hollowed organic body
> tied to, yet not tied to, the Cave pieces and the ongoing
> transformations visible in the projected images. I imaged a
> sonic bubble, almost a galactic bubble, in which there were
> occurrences both alien and domestic; texts would appear and
> disappear in the space, always grounded by the Cave pieces which
> were purely textual. Most of my time in the Cave was used for
> either working within the virtual worlds, or "tuning" the space
> itself - and the latter began to fascinate me. The sounds and
> images resonated with each other; the four sound streams had
> their own internal resonances; the darkness or brightness in the
> room affected the texture mapping and readability of the
> in-world texts, and so forth. Conditions were constantly
> changing. The room itself was always on the edge of feedback; I
> had to keep the revrev sounding full, but not overloading the
> in-world sounds, and not screeching. We used a lavalier mic to
> correct this in parts.
>
> The tuning of the room relates to the tuning of the body itself;
> much of my work deals with the labor involved in production,
> especially dance or music production (and the performers for the
> original mocap were almost all dancers); in this residency,
> labor was represented by voice and instrument, but also by the
> sheer weight of the production, which involved constantly
> adjusting the equipment and its position in the room. So even
> though the body was close to invisible (except for the video
> textures from Bambuser) on the screen, it was present in the
> sense of sonic architecture, the body of the piece, the galactic
> bubble, and so forth.
>
> Artists:
>
> Kathleen Ottinger
> Azure Carter
> Alan Sondheim
> Luke Damrosch
>
> Thanks to John Cayley for the opportunity.
>
> Thanks also to:
>
> Mark Skwarek, Johannes Birringer, Foofwa d'Imobilite, Sandy
> Baldwin, Kira Sedlock, Frances van Scoy, Patrick Lichty,
> Columbia College, West Virginia University, NYU, Brown
> University
>
>
> Audio-Visuals:
>
> http://www.alansondheim.org/theforge.png
> http://www.alansondheim.org/irq3day24.jpg
> http://www.alansondheim.org/irq3day50.JPG
> http://www.alansondheim.org/irq3day51.jpg
> http://www.alansondheim.org/irq3day49.JPG
> http://www.alansondheim.org/irqday3.mp4
> http://www.alansondheim.org/irqq3.jpg
> http://www.alansondheim.org/irqqb.mp4 (Kathleen Ottinger, Cave)
> http://www.alansondheim.org/irqrevrev.mp4
> http://www.alansondheim.org/irq3day54.jpg
> http://www.alansondheim.org/visage4.png
> http://www.alansondheim.org/irqspace1.mp3
>
>
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==
email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285
music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
current text http://www.alansondheim.org/td.txt
==
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