I’m giving a Processing workshop about how to make things happen with sound, at Space Studio, Hackney. Details at http://openlabworkshops.org and http://openlabworkshops.org/workshop-space-studios-17-sept-2009/
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This summer, Openlab, the London-based open source art and technology collective, presents a series of in-depth summer workshops exploring creating and hacking media using free software and tools. Workshops will include both beginner and advanced instruction in such software as PureData, Processing, and SuperCollider, as well as using the microcontroller Arduino, Android programming, general sound hardware hacking, and more. For less than the cost of the cinema, you can gain some valuable skills using free software!
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When: Tuesday 25 August, from 6pm-10:30pm
Where: The Roebuck pub (upstairs room), 50 Great Dover Street, SE1 4YG
Nearest transport: 35, 133, 343, 21 buses, Borough Tube (Northern line)
About 8 minute walk from London Bridge Station (Northern and Jubilee tube, rail, and bus station: 48, 47, 149 buses)
Cost: £15 for the entire night, or per workshop (see below).
How to pay: At the door, or via Paypal to be guaranteed a space (limited to 30 people per workshop). Please email workshop@pixelism.info to reserve a space in any workshop.
1) Introduction to SuperCollider (part 2) with DanStowell – £10
Dan will continue the introduction to SuperCollider, building on the basics to create reusable synths and use them in musical patterns, including pre-defined patterns and generative music. Depending on time and interest we may also look at other topics such as handling audio files.
This 2-hour workshop is the second in a series of summer workshops, but if you weren’t at the first workshop then you’ll probably be OK to follow if you already have some experience of SuperCollider or if you’re already comfortable with programming languages. You’ll need a laptop with SuperCollider 3.3 or 3.3.1 installed (download).
2) Android Introduction – £10
Rob Munro will take students through the install process of the development environment, Linux and Windows and are preferred, but the process should be similar on Mac as well. After the install we will looks at some the basics of android development, the android manifest file, Activities, Services & Databasing as time will allow.
This will be a 2-hour workshop and some Java experience is necessary. An android phone will handy as well but the emulator is included in the install.
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I’m taking some time off from (public) performances to teach a series of workshops across London as part of Openlab, and possibly the UK (if you count Newcastle and Birmingham as across the UK). Also, our crew at ML Studio has been working on a few exciting new projects, from laser-projected dancing to games and apps for multi-touch surfaces. I’ll post more news of our developments very soon, there’s a lot to write about!
In the midst of all that, I am also contributing towards a new Video Games Arts degree at the University of the Creative Arts, Farnham, where I’ve been teaching for the last three years. The exciting thing about it is that I get to do some heavy reading into video games, art, and design – always a few of my favorite topics.
Today I was researching performance art around the 1960’s, specifically Allan Kaprow, and came across this chestnut:
Alan Kaprow: Performance is the replacement of the word happening, or event, or activity, which we used in those days to refer to a number of somewhat related kinds of real time events. What’s called an installation today is the child of what used to be called, before the happenings, an environment. Now, I think that if you look at the words there, the shifts indicate something like a real change toward the installation compared to that of the environment, and the performance to that of the happening. If you look at the word installation, installation means, very simply and literally, that somebody is taking something already fabricated or made, generally, and installing it. It has a kind of implicit art activity to it. It also suggests a kind of aesthetic intentionally, much as you would install a sculpture in a museum. The environment, the etymology of the word, and the whole connotation of the word environment, is that of a surround, in which the particular parts are not necessarily placed with some kind of formal care for their external cohesion, but rather as an interaction between the person who is being surrounded and the stuff of that environment. It has a kind of a fullness to it, which the work installation doesn’t. Installation suggests a discreteness. Now, look at the word performance. It too has a conservative evocation. When you hear that word you think of Jascha Heifitz performing on the violin, Sir Laurence Olivier performing Shakespeare, and so on. You don’t ordinarily think of a high performance engine, which is the more vernacular meaning of the word in English, and in many other European languages it’s used the same way. So, there is the return to a kind of artifying activity, a kind of singular focus on the performer as artist, in a way that a virtuoso was a performer in classical music, or still is. Or an actor.
Now, I think those two words, installation and performance, mark accurately the shift in attitude toward a rejection or sense of abandonment of an experimental, modernist, position which had prevailed up to about, lets be generous, up to about 1968-1969, and began gradually becoming less and less energized. So, I think what you’re getting there is the flavor of modernist exhaustion and incidently a return to earlier prototypes, or models, of what constitutes art. And it’s no accident that the majority of most performance nowadays, there’s not much installation anymore, by the way, the majority of those performances tend to be of an entertainment, show biz, song and dance, in which the focus is on the individual as skilled presenter of something that tends to have a kind of self-aggrandizing, or at least self-focusing, purpose. It is artist as performer, much like somebody is an entertainer in a nightclub. And they’re interesting. Some of them are very good. I think Laurie Anderson is very good. She’s got all the skills that are needed in theater, which is what this is. Many others who jump on the bandwagon, coming from the visual arts, have no theatrical skills, and know zilch about the timing, about the voic about positioning, about transitions, about juxtapositions, those moment by moment occurrences in theater that would make it work. But it’s another animal, whether good or bad, from what we were doing, and I think, in general, even the good ones are a conservatizing movement.
(from http://www.mailartist.com/johnheldjr/InterviewWithAlanKaprow.html)
This is a very short and insightful view of modern-day art, and how it differs in flavor from the earlier experimental artists of the 20th century such as Duchamp. Being a performing artist who tries to break through the “audience/performer” mode of live art, I understand what he is saying: art can certainly be performance, and good performance, at that; it can also be an experience that dissolves the boundaries between audience and artist, dissolves the picture frame, compositional shapes, and entirety of itself until it ceases to be a series of dramatic, jutaposed actions, and instead becomes an all-encompassing mollasses.
Also excellent is his “Art Which Can’t Be Art” essay, which reminds me a lot of Godel and his Incompleteness principal, which is a similar sort of paradox where you can create a system of thought (the counting numbers, in this case) in which things that cannot be proved neither true nor false are true precisely because of that inability to prove. Quite the interesting paradox, in both cases.
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Nov. 25, 2007
Here in the European heart of global finance that is London, there are no shortage of closed, corporate-sponsored, invite-only events promoting proprietary products with secret formulas and patented ideas. A refreshing break from this trend is the perennial [tag]Openlab[/tag] series of events, now in its fourth incarnation. Openlab is a loose collective of artists, computer industry professionals, and performers whose main goal is to spread free software an ideas through events with talks, workshops, and performances.
Openlab4 took place 25 November at Melange, an aspiring art-friendly venue just north of east London’s art-clogged arteries of Old Street and Shoreditch. Read more… »
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