Last week I was fortunate enough to be able to get out of the city and up to the artsy air of Adams, Massachusetts.  The curators at Greylock Arts gallery asked me to give a performance as part of their artist salon and in conjunction with their previous exhibit, Wearable Expressions – “a group exhibition of wearable art, accessories, and technology apparel exploring fashion as a means for individuals to dynamically express themselves.”  I had a great time performing and the local audience was absolutely amazing.  I wish I had audiences like this in Brooklyn.  Maybe my demographic has shifted to the over 50 set.  An edit from the gallery is below.

You get 5 minutes to talk about whatever you want in front of a large audience.  You get to use twenty slides.  Each slide auto-advances after fifteen seconds.

Back in September of 2008 I was able to convince someone that it was a good idea to let me do an Ignite talk.  Actually, no, I think Tikva Morowati convinced me that it was a good idea.  In any case, I decided to use the unique format to talk about Experimental Devices for Performance.  The video is now here!

You should also check out Ignite’s Youtube channel as well as Kati London’s ridiculously good talk about plants taking over the world.  Ignite!

Thanks to Andy Jordan at The Wall Street Journal for doing this nice piece about some of my technologically augmented performance stuff.

A big thanks to everyone who helped make this happen including Kate Hartman (pictured in the poster-frame image), The Wooster Group for use of their space, and Andy Jordan of The Wall Street Journal.

Also covered by:

BoingBoing
Make: Blog
nycresistor

And here’s the YouTube video
And here’s the Dance-Tech.net video

Tell your friends!

I totally lied and did not come through with posting CHN01′s progress.  We all know how it goes.  Too busy making the thing to remember to remember how we’re making it.  Anyway, now’s your chance to come see what I’ve not been releasing early and often.  I’ve got a performance coming up tonight!  Here’s some excerpts (from rehearsal) on video!  You should(‘ve) come!  I was part of the “interactive art” night so there were tons of great performances lined up throughout the night.

- click to play -

I showed a work-in-progess piece called “CHN01″ which is more or less “PLEASEURE” again.  I used a bunch of the EDP set.

Artist Michael Arthur was at the festival all weekend and made some beautiful drawings of some of the artists.  I’m honored that he was able to sketch some of CHN01.

Ignite NYC II: Energy, Cupcakes, and Alley vs. Valley is happening Monday, September 15th at New World Stages (340 West 50th Street).  I’ll be cramming Experimental Devices for Performance into a rapid-fire ride-’em-and-eat-’em log-roller jamboree of a presentation.  What is Ignite?  From the site,

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.

Ignite was started in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. Since then 100s of 5 minute talks have been given across the world. There are thriving Ignite communities in Seattle, Portland, Paris, and NYC.

Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Media is heading this up.  He writes on the O’Reilly Radar blog, “We are a guest of the New York Television Festival. They are providing us a ~400 person theatre and free beer (during the cupcake contest).”

The presenter line-up looks pretty dope:

Krikorian Raffi - holmz : open database for energy consumption
Deb Schultz – Alley vs Valley
Jennifer Pahlka – Technology Anxiety: Jello and Web 3.0
Sam Lessin – A very brief history of privacy in our data-deluged world
Nichelle Stephens – Cupcakes: The iPhone of Desserts
Don Carli – The Carbon Footprint of Banner Ads, Emails and Websites and why you should care
Nate Westheimer – Magic at the Democratic National Convention
Andrew Schneider – Experimental Devices for Performance
Audacia Ray – Porn as a front runner in technology innovations… With a twist

I know that Kati London of team Botanicalls (the plants that call you on the phone when they need something project) will also be presenting.

The 2008 Prelude Festival, which is “at the forefront of contemporary NYC theatre and performance” is but one month away. It’s got an unreal lineup this year including Richard Foreman, The Builders Association, Big Art Group, NTUSA, and Banana Bag and Bodice just to name a few. I am not prepared. What to do when procrastination and creator’s block kicks me in the teeth? Post it online. No excuses and public humility are sure to torque me into doing, doing, doing. I’ll be documenting my progress here of the new work I am creating called “CHN01″ as a way to stimulate and catalyze my progress. From the Prelude ’08 website, “CHN01 is an experiment. Andrew performs “the television” using his body and custom-made wearable electronics. ” Yikes, I proposed that?

Here we go.

It’s the end of April, which means my time with the musical robots of LEMURplex is at an end.  To celebrate I’m saving the last dance for THIS FRIDAY NIGHT May 2nd at 8:00 PM at LEMURplex in Brooklyn.  I’ll be performing some disjointed technopromtendobluesical numbers and telling a tale of love, life, and loss, which together make up the work in love progress called ALLMYPERFORMANCEAREBELONGTOYOU 1ø>3 is a Work in Progress.    It’s a triptych quadtych really.   To those interested, the set list includes songs by Mungo Jerry, The Bangles, and STYX, just to name a few.  Here’s a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny preview:

The night’s line-up includes sound artist Dafna Naphtali, and new media artist Simon Morris.

It’s all going down at LEMURplex in Brooklyn on 3rd Ave. between 9th and 10th Streets: (map)  Bar Tano is a hip joint right next door that were bound to grab a drink at after the show so come even if you come late.

more info below.

Take the F/M/R to 4th Ave. and walk one block down either 9th or 10th St. to 3rd Ave. LEMURplex is on 3rd Ave. between 9th & 10th Sts. Or, take the F/G to Smith & 9th Sts. and walk two blocks up 9th. Cross and then turn right onto 3rd Ave.

$5 at the door

bring friends!  love summer!  save the last dance!

ALLMYPERFORMANCEAREBELONGTOYOU

________________________________________________________________________

April ReSiDeNt show: Friday, May 2ndFeaturing new works by Dafna Naphtali, Andrew Schneider and Simon Morris
Dafna Naphtali is a sound-artist and improviser-composer from an eclectic musical background. As singer/guitarist/electronic-musician she performs and composes using custom sound processing of voice and other instruments. Besides her composing and improvised projects, she co-leads the digital chamber punk ensemble What is it Like to be a Bat? with Kitty Brazelton (http://www.whatbat.org) and has collaborated/performed with Lukas Ligeti, David First, Joshua Fried, Ras Moshe, Alexander Waterman, Kathleen Supové and Hans Tammen, among others and done sound design and programming for Jin Hi Kim, Shelley Hirsch, Pamela Z, Phoebe Legere, Fred Frith, Jim Staley, Henry Threadgill, Steve Coleman, Chico Freeman and others. Dafna can be heard with Mechanique(s) on a forthcoming release on In-situ, and was featured vocalist on José Halac’s CD “Dance of 1000 Heads” (Tellus), as well as on her acclaimed release with What is it Like to be a Bat? on Tzadik/Oracles.
Dafna’s residency will involve dynamically controlled algorithmic improvisation and live audio processing, using vocal cues and controls to trigger and manipulate LEMUR robots.
Andrew Schneider is a multimedia designer and performer whose work investigates human/technological interdependence. He is the co-founder and Associate Artistic Director of the Chicago-based theatre company, BigPictureGroup. His solo performance work has been seen at P.S.122, Monkeytown, The Prelude Festival, and The Tank. His multimedia devices have been featured in Art Review, Wired, TimeOut NY, Maker Faire, SIGGRAPH, Dorkbot, the Telfair Art Museum, and at the Center Pompidou in Paris. His Solar Bikini has been featured internationally and is slated to be featured in the next Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. His latest projects include Experimental Devices for Performance (.com) and Acting Stranger (.com). Andrew Holds a Masters Degree in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU. He is currently working with The Wooster Group. (http://andrewjs.com)
Doing musical theatre with robots used to be Andrew’s standard joke answer to the question “So what do you want to do with your life?” Finally, a life-long dream comes true. He plans to start with a dance number, interfacing his movements with the robots via custom-built wearable controllers.
Born in New York City, Simon Morris (US/France) is a new media artist exploring urban landscapes, new musical interfaces and skateboarding. Investigating new forms of musical expression, his work examines technology and its role as a socially engaged art practice. He has conducted live performances at Eyebeam, NYC, the Article Biennale 2006 in Stavanger, Norway, the KiasmaMuseum in Helsinki, Finland and the Barker Theatre in Turku, Finland.
Simon is planning an interactive musical performance orchestrated by the movements of three skateboards.

Yeesh.  A really short day in the LEMUR studio this evening.  Leif helped me out with note dampening on the guitar bot which helps with things like this:

VIDEO!

More to come tomorrow. The long haul for show prep (which happens on Friday, May 2nd) will be over this weekend. All my performance is belong to you.

Okay day three.  I had a vision in the shower.  That’s usually how it happens.  Change of plans somewhat.  Today I shifted focus from gestural mapping cueing to programming.  The “ModBots” / or the bots that are mainly percussive and tend to hang from the ceiling at LEMURplex / are easy enough to control using simple thresholding detection while wearing the TwitchSet.  But the bots with notes, i.e. the XyloBot and the GtrBot are much harder for me to control with any sort of fine resolution.  The GtrBot, for example, takes MIDI notes of 36-81, which means 45 note resolution.  I had been trying to control notes variations using one axis of the TriAx accelerometers on the TwitchSet.  An accelerometer is not a tilt switch and is a bad substitute for one in this case of trying to get 45 steps of resolution with a 180˚ rotation of my shaky hand.

Besides, I’m not a musician.  I’m not going to become a musician just because I have the pleasure of spending the next two weeks with musical robots.  I’ve decided to focus on the performative aspect of why I’m doing the residency.  Hell yes.  I think I’ve got something going here.  Below is a short clip documenting the partial results of today’s programming.  I didn’t write the song.  And I’m not going to tell you what song it is based on, or who wrote it.  That’s the surprise for the performance.  In progress:

Recently I spent my first significant amount of time at LEMURplex in Brooklyn as part of my April residency in preperation for the Resident show on Friday, May 2nd.  I’m not great with Max/MSP for logic, which seems to be the biggest hurdle for me right now.  That and not possessing the ability to write music are bringing me down.  I will not rest though.  Hopefully I’ll use these obstacles to make more interesting work.  Here’s a video of yesterday’s experiments: