WITHOUT A ROCK ‘N’ ROLL STAR
Interactive Internet/Gallery Installation

I approached The Depot Artspace based in Auckland New Zealand to produce installations for a showing in 2012. This gallery has a history and current life that includes multimedia production, an on demand internet radio station and a recording/practice studio reputed to have recorded all the important bands from Auckland’s North Shore.
This piece is intended to make a humourous reference to consumer orientated music industry and hopefully will be built within eyesight of the engineers desk and rock band paraphernalia. Keeping within the Zeitgeist of free, online, open access music and its desire to bypass a controlling and archaic recording music industry, I thought, if we should abandon those tedious record labels why not also bypass the equally tiresome Rock n Roll Artists and their posturing egos! Hence, with this piece anyone can go online, Skype in any sound they wish and create their own music in real-time, avoiding the entire music industry.

Structure:
Ceramic cartridge tone arms fixed to guitar and pick-up resting on strings.
SKYPE – User interface for remote audio in.
Analogue signal passed to a modified speaker driver.
Three parallel outputs to “Audiomulch” patch. It contained a row of 8 buffers grabbing a segment of audio and looping it for a set period of time applying various effects and feeding back into the system to create a sound processing evolution.
Audio out simultaneously diffused to gallery space whilst being streamed online.

Video documenting BETA test.

CORPUTOPIA
Audio/Visual piece for RGB projection and stereo diffusion

The aim of this piece is to explore the possibility of audio/visual relationships crossing over into other senses: the possibility of perceiving an impression of touch from information received by eyes and ears.
Also exploring indeterminacy within a multimedia environment and how that may enhance the experience of the audience by creating the phenomenon of non static ‘synchresis’.
The content of this composition is informed by the “heterotopia” worlds of online fetishist communities who are considered deviant and marginalised by society as a whole. I was intrigued by one community in particular that appeared to have evolved into a quasi-religious type structure practicing a particular form of ritualistic drug usage as a means of placing themselves into the service of Satan! Visually, I aimed to create a metaphor of the P2P webcam conference application CUCMe which the participants of these communities often use to interact with each other.
For the authoring of this piece I created a controlled generative structure: A “roll of the dice” – each playback will vary slightly. Authoring programmes used:
Final Cut Pro
Photoshop
Director
Linux Kino
Cubase SX
Reaktor V3
SoundForge

This video was captured via camera from an RGB projection so visual quality is low

VANISHING POINT
CONCEPT
Public broadcast in New Zealand, facing attack from the current government, has reached a crisis point. Firstly we saw a statement by Broadcasting Minister Jonathan Coleman in 2010: ‘…that Radio New Zealand’s funding would be frozen “for the foreseeable future”’ with the accompanying threat: “Members of Boards who are not able or prepared to meet these expectations might need to move on and be replaced by members who can” should they not seek to find commercial sponsorship to make up the shortfall (1). And recently the government has announced the closure of TVNZ 7 by ending its funding in 2012.
If New Zealand wishes to maintain its ambitions as an educated, progressive and democratic nation it would suggest producing quality local content through public funding, not marketing income.
(2). This interactive installation aims to address these issues from a “consumer” viewpoint by offering directional choices. The, perhaps, more challenging path will produce a more rewarding mediated experience – the path of least resistance will lead to schizophonic static and silence. Which path will we choose…?

SCHEMA
This in an audio-visual, interactive installation informed by Transmission practice and is designed for a single user. There are two spaces to navigate: the physical space of the gallery (the “container”) and the perceptual of transmission space. The physical space will be dark and there will be a form of “signposting” as a route guide. This will be the intuitive path to take, yet will produce the most unsatisfactory mediated experience. The path less obvious within the “container” of physical space will be directed by the feedback responses of the audio/visual (Transmission space), producing a more engaging media experience. The user is tracked by the 3D motion sensing device “KINECT”. Her/His position within the X axis will determine the input of real-time broadcast media via USB TV tuning hardware: data output from KINECT sensor will trigger keyboard commands for changing stations. The Y Axis will determine audio spectrum manipulation via AUDIOMULCH patch and will be transmitted via miniFM device to user’s headphones. A similar real-time processing will take place for visual spectrum manipulation (still determining best solution for this process).

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