Enso v 5 from Aaron McLeran

Last week I had two collaborative shows with computer music composer of “noise”, Zbigniew Karkowski. One show was at Terminal, a warehouse that does many underground music shows in Oakland, CA. The other was at the Biko garage in Goleta, CA, a similar venue for the underground music scene.

The collaboration was an improvisational performance where Zbigniews live-performed music was modified by live algorithmic processing of the audio. The algorithmic parameters were each controlled via accelerometer data from an iPhone. The visuals were also generated live and controlled from the same accelerometer data.

The video posted here is a short sample of the performance. If you’ve been on my blog before, you might have seen some posts about a piece of mine called, “Enso”. There’s more about the concept of Enso I’d like to write more about, but for now, it’s relevant to know that this collaborative performance was yet another iteration on this particular series of pieces. What’s important to know from the conceptual core of the piece is that I wrote the processing and graphical algorithms from scratch the weekend before the performance.

Unfortunately, I did not have a chance to record the actual live-screen capture of the performance (was worried about computer performance and stability in a live show), but I reproduced shorter demonstration of the performance at home using Zbigniew’s music. Stay tuned for more music and visuals from this collaboration in the future.

I also added an interface for OSC control. This video was a live screen-cap of an iPhone performance using the $5 app oscemote.

This is a generative audio-visual piece created in collaboration between myself, Graham Wakefield and Wes Smith.  It was done after a long and grueling day consiting of a single 6-hour meeting about ways to integrate software systems currently being used in research in MAT’s Allosphere.

In the process of working on a basic hello-world type demonstration script (to introduce the basic features of LuaAV), we ended up code-jamming for several hours and actually made something worthy of Brian Eno. Graham and I are going to do a real-time code jam with the script at the End-of-year show at MAT [ed note: this went really well. I'll be posting the code of this jam shortly].

For the curious, the super messy (it was a code jam!) LuaAV script is here.

These are early versions of a piece I am going to perform at MAT’s End of the year show. It currently looks quite different, but I haven’t made any new video captures of it. I figured I should post the old version up here now and then in a week or so when I get around to doing a new video capture, you’ll be able to compare the different versions. This version is largely non-interactive and just “runs”. It’s based on a variety of generative audio transformations of simple input sinusoids.  The graphics are directly linked to the same control data which triggers the audio events. This allows for a tight synchronization of audio and graphics.

I called it Enso in reference to the Zen circle. The Zen circle is a symbol of everything and nothing, the drawing of which, directly represents the state of mind of the artist. The circle is drawn in one stroke with no revisions.

Pehr and I worked on a very productive collaboration in the last few weeks and managed to scramble together a pretty awesome draft of a Media Arts and Technology Seminar Video Intro system. Our colleague, Andres Burbano, is organizing videos of our seminar presentations, which are usually on Fridays. He approached myself and Pehr about doing an intro tag for the seminars for when they are presented online. And naturally, instead of just making a single video, we elected to create a generative system that creates unlimited versions. Though we are both swamped with our respective classes/projects/jobs, we managed to get something pretty interesting together.

Aesthetically, we arrived at this sound/look via a series of iterations. The department logo is pretty much blocks (see?) so we riffed on that. I made some music which had a glitchy, computer-y, yet playful sound and the graphics converged on an equally glitchy, computer-y, playful aesthetic. As you can see from Pehr’s other (prolific!) work, he’s a big fan of lots of color.

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