Documentation of the Robot Gamelan

Well, finally put together the video documentation of the interactive robot gamelan quartet --the ISEA 2008 project I was blogging about early this year. Footage is a bit noisy. I know (in theory, anyway) that for stuff like this, the video documentation should be considered the final artwork, but I have to say that thinking and dealing about documentation always seems like a huge mountain after all that physical labor making the work itself. Besides, part of the reason I got into making the robots was because I wanted to get away and make some art using physical matter instead of data and pixels in the first place.

International Herald Tribune!

All right! The International Herald Tribune covered the ISEA show. They got most of it right except for saying that the gestures were captured by photosensors and that I was "half mathematician" The online version's here. They also have a slideshow (with 3 great photos of my work) that you can access via a button on the second page or by clicking here. Appeared in the realspace paper too, with a photo of my work as well! Page 10. Woohoo!

Duh-Day

Made a breakthrough realization today. The solenoids were louder than the gongs, so I thought the solution was quieting the solenoids. Forgot that you could also make the gongs louder. And how do you do that? With MASS. There's a reason the traditional mallets are so heavy: it's because heavy sounds good. Moral of the story: Respect vernacular technology. If they've been doing/building it that way for a couple of hundred/thousand years, it's because there are sound physical reasons to build them that way. Jesus.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! But any day you realize how stupid you've been is a day you've gotten a little smarter, so I suppose that it's a good day in that sense.

The image shows the solenoids and the mallets. On the left is a denuded tennis ball on a stick. This was modeled on/inspired by the padded balls they traditionally use on the gongs. On the right is the new beater I kludged together after the light came on. String wrapped around a good SLAB of wood (from the wood stash of Yeye Calderon, a painter/old Mowelfund comrade now residing in SG. Salamat, Ye!). Mass made all the difference.

Another interesting detail. When the tennis ball mallet hit the gong the first time, it made a nice, loud sound. If it hit the gong again, before the gong had come to rest, sometimes it would make a loud sound, sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes it would even damp the gong. Eventually realized that it was a matter of phasing. If the mallet hit the gong out of phase, the waves it generated in the metal would cancel out the waves already there. Apparently, the solution is just to use really heavy mallets, so that they pack enough punch to damp the existing vibrations AND generate a whole bunch of new ones. Like I said, duh.

I bow in the direction of all the long-dead creators of gamelan instruments, and their acoustic/engineering/physical solutions. I follow in the footsteps of giants.

PS ISEA has its own dedicated blogger (nice idea). He's Joel Ong, whose job it is to write up and photograph the festival and process. His stuff can be found here.

Shift Register

Apologies. Been what, about 2 months? Sundry friends have been on my ass to put something new on the damn page. Truth is, I was ironing out the bugs in a media installation for the 2006 Ogaki Biennale in Japan. This is a festival dedicated to "New Media" which, includes sound installations, video art, and what is now called "media art", which is stuff that uses computers, sensors, etc. Suppose bio stuff could be there, but mostly isn't yet. At any rate, I had to buckle down. Then I went to Ogaki, where I was usually too drunk or too tired to post. Then I got back, but couldn't figure out how to break it all down into little pieces. Well, I got started when I finally started writing the stuff down for a magazine. It's a new magazine, no title yet, but I"ll post here when the maiden issue comes out. Above is documentation footage of my work SHIFT REGISTER, which my curator tells me should be described as a "media installation," and not "computer video installation" as I had been telling everybody.

The work is a tunnel, equipped with sensors, a modified webcam, a computer, and a video projector. You go inside the tunnel, and then your face pops out at you, and then it melts your face. The staff of the festival actually built a tunnel for me, but with characteristic Japanese serendipity, they used the outside walls as projection surfaces for some of the other works. The title "Shift Register" is the name of a digital circuit that computers use to count with. I had the idea of a work that grabbed your image and then melted it, and put it together. I chose the title because it seemed as if the work was something about surveillance. Now I wonder if it couldn't also be about being addressed by a kind of alien intelligence. Someone/something suddenly looking at you. Sometimes the images that I pursue are just as mysterious as other people's works: open/floating metaphors that you try out, this way and that, to see what other things they could attach to...