MAzine@Cybersonica's blog

Golan Levin likes to talk. His presentation lasted for nearly three hours, covering a historical overview of 'audiovisuality and interactivity' as well as a comprehensive presentation of his work since 1998.

I was thoroughly distracted from what could have been a gruelling experience by the dynamism and sensuality of the ideas and the work presented. << from Audio Visual Environment Suites

This work, done at MIT and Carnegie Mellon Universities in the USA, falls somewhere between software development, research into human interaction and art. He identifies his main focus as developing new interface metaphors where he explores "dynamic, audiovisual substance, gesturally created and manipulated".

Levin reminds us of the recent merging of Adobe and Macromedia and tells us of the importance for him of programming his own software to generate his interfaces. "If you use the same software as everyone else you find yourself dealing with the affordances of these softwares" and the danger of this is that your work starts to look much the same as the same as others using the software.

This may read a bit like a small child's reflections after having been to the fair or circus. I can tell you about lots of bright colours and new sounds / noises and nice people offering me things but there may not be much more to it...

Cybersonica 05 was made up of a number of quite distinct elements. There was the first two days at The Dana Centre and then another existence as The Art at Encompass at The Old Truman Brewery. There were symposia, performances, workshops, exhibits and things without names running throughout.

On the first day I caught parts of a session about Interactive Audiovisual Experiments. I chatted to Chris O'Shea afterwards because I found the ideas behind his work challenged things that bother me about lots of 'interactive' work that I think has a very narrow idea of what interaction involves. Particularly he talked about how important open source principles / ideas are to him.

Created by Anthony Elliot. The idea is to induce the viewer to interract and create random sounds. It's a massive ear which can hear absolutely everything, even your breathing. It picks up sound constantly.

Air your views Share your poisons Sing to me Or get down and pray Light up my lights And twiddle my ray You are anonymous

This is produced by the Someth;ng people. You play with the stalks to generate sound. Press a button to change the sound mood. Good to play with and also aesthetically pleasing - quite beautiful, you get both visual and tactile pleasures. We thought this would work well in a dentist's waiting room, or even in cafe's. They are considering marketing this as a product.

There are many talented artists present interesting works in Cybersonica. Why don't they target specific audience? With fantastic programming skills, they have got to make something could approach more realistic rather than stuff stuck in a gallery.

I just had a play with Orbe whilst chatting to the creators of this kinestheic synthesiser for group musical improvisation, Amjad Chaudry and Vikesh Bhatt.

They describe this prototype as "a synthesiser designed for simultaneous multiple user participation." We hugged 5 translucent globes, from the floor to just above our heads, jiggled them about on their vertical pole, pressed buttons and listened to the pitch and tone warp as we talked about bringing "the funk back into jamming".

Amjad referred to it as an antidote to the Kraftwerk performance aesthetic: moody, eyes down on knobs and dials. He wants to bring our attention back not only to our ears but also to the other performers as we play- to the romance of human ensemble playing. And this was when I realised how close I was standing to them both. Less than a foot away, attention divided between the conversation and the sounds of the orbs and feeling pretty OK about it.

I just check out the artists page on the Cybersonica website.
http://www.cybersonica.org/artists/

Why are there no/so few women represented?

answers on an epostcard please.