I spent a majority of my time on Sunday aggregating source material and things of interest to use as fodder for the mill. This is what I am currently interested in, reading, watching, and dissecting:
There Will Come Soft Rains – The short story by Ray Bradbury
Open Sky – Paul Verilio
Adbusters – Issue # 79, Hips†er, The Dead End of Western Civilization (see post # 156 – fauxhemian)
Twin Peaks – David Lynch TV series
Zizek! – A film about Slavoj Žižek, directed by Astra Taylor
Within the Context of no Context – George W.S. Trow
Dance sequence from Guys and Dolls – Michael Kidd, choreographer
The Fleetwoods – all songs
YouTube videos of slow-motion plane crashes and skydiving
Pornography
Swimming
pistons / machinery
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?
Last minute posting: I’ll be performing an impromptu piece tonight at The Tank as part of Scale of Sound as curated by the wonderful Leslie Flanagan. I’ll be dancing silently with a stranger. I go on around 11PM. $5.oo cover. You should come! From the description:
Amplification is magnification. Using voice, feedback installations, live soldering, piccolo, modular synths, photography, musical instruments and more, performers will play with amplification to change our perception of sound. Big sound, little sound, and everything in between.
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 ALLMYPERFORMANCEAREBELONGTOYOU1ø>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:
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.
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.
So, when I have way too much work to do, I do what any level-headed, self-motivating freelancer would do…usually I start the client clock and pass the time procrastinating by coming up with funny voices, thinking about old girlfriends, and Googling my own name. I’ve never been disappointed. And now, I can say, it’s only going to be downhill from here. I’ve hit the jackpot as far as I am concerned. Meet Andrew Schneider, auditioning for something called Stonehenge in DC. The kicker is I used to do this stuff all the time. Audition on an awkward set, wear red turtlenecks, do funny things with my eyebrows, and get called at the end for time. I must say though, I thought better about the white Reebok’s when I left my hotel for the theatre the morning of the audition.
I have a dream of contacting all the Andrew Schneider’s that I can and getting us all together and having us do the dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” or something like that. Afterwards we’d all stand around and talk about it. Then we’d all get in our Ford Tauruses and drive home, maybe stopping in New Rochelle for some Gas Station Cappucino or the outlet mall for a new pair of stonewashed jeans.
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:
April showers bring May flowers musical robots. I am fortunate enough to be a ReSiDeNt at LEMURplex this month in Brooklyn. LEMUR stands for the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. Um….could there be a more perfect residency? I get to interface with their xylobot, guitarbot, hydrobots, and modbots. I’m planning on using the Twitchset and Performoshoes (together)as a starting-off point with the bots. I also plan on doing a lot with the fiddle~ object. Fellow ITPer and now full time LEMURer, Leif gave me a breif walk-through of the space yesterday. I’ll be setting up another blog over at LEMUR to document my stuffs. Here we go…
Word. I was incredibled to see this spread about Dorkbot in the new issue of Art Review. I knew it was coming out, I just didn’t know it would be so dope. Regine Debatty wrote it, Douglas Repetto makes the Dorkbot wonderful, and A.J.J. Davis took this photo.
I spent a majority of my time on Sunday aggregating source material and things of interest to use as fodder for the mill. This is what I am currently interested in, reading, watching, and dissecting:
Performances by:
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:
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 
April showers bring May 