Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.11.1504042212230.2975@panix5.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Untitled ongoing performance (Alan Sondheim, final documentation))
Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2015 22:16:20 -0400 (EDT)
(This is written as a final documentation for the piece, interesting I think from a collaborative and mixed-reality viewpoint.) Cave Residency During IRQ3 Untitled ongoing performance (Alan Sondheim, Description) http://www.alansondheim.org/irq3day53.jpg During IRQ3, I had a residency in the Brown University Cave for the duration of the conference. Kathleen Ottinger, Azure Carter, and I worked together; we had also worked on a number of pieces for at least half a year before that. There were three pieces in the Cave itself, collaborations between Kathleen and myself. Kathleen did the programming and visuals, and she and I "wrote into" and through each other's texts beforehand, producing scripts that became independent work. These pieces are her own, with my textual collaboration. (I figure Cave setup and rehearsal for the performance as a whole was about 40 hours in-Cave and maybe 100 in-studio.) The Cave has both visuals and sound; during the conference, the sound originated from one of two laptops I set up in the room. This laptop was projected with into the room; the image was on the right-hand wall. The Cave was physically only a small part of the room - perhaps a sixth - so there was plenty of room for other elements. In other words, the first laptop split sound and image; the image was projected across the room, and the sound came from the speakers surrounding the Cave. The second laptop was projected into the room, through the room projector, onto a screen, and the sound was sent through the large room speakers. Both laptops had capabilities to run virtual worlds, and I used three virtual worlds during the conference: 1. My residency area in Second Life, the most popular online virtual world. The area is in the Odyssey sim, and was capable of video texturing, mesh modeling, and complex physics / avatar behaviors. 2. My three sims in MacGrid, an experimental/research world, with completely modifiable physics and highly malleable landforms. I have an in-world theater set up in the grid, and can project into it. 3. A local Opensim virtual world on both laptops, with different architectures on each; the fundamental configuration or .iar file was downloaded from the MacGrid. There were, most often, two world projected simultaneously into the room. One of the laptops also housed a configuration for Bambuser, an online application which creates personal online video channels. This laptop had a small usb light attached; at times the camera would pick up the room, but most often Azure's face. The channel would then be sent into onto objects in Second Life; the textures were modified to image her face alone, without any background. The image was usually inverted, but through feedback, there were also smaller 'guide' images with her face normal. The face/image was embedded in the Second Life objects, with objects intersecting it, surrounding it. The appearance was ghostly, real-time, and uncanny. In this situation, Azure would sing a number of songs, many of which have appeared on our cds or lps. These songs were fed into one or more SuperCollider programs, designed according to specifications, by Luke Damrosch. The suite of programs is called "revrev" and allows a musician to work with live reverse reverberation - what I call an anticipatory music - the reverberation building up to the enunciation of the sound, a head instead of a tail. Combining programs allows for a thick, more complex way of working with this. The programs also involved multiple coherent streams or chords stemming from the original sound-source, for example parallel streams a fifth above and below the original tones. The programs all ran from a prompt, and the parameters could be changed in process. At times, I would also use alto clarinet, either to accompany Azure, or to create independent sounds which worked with the Cave room resonances; these often used a small instrument amplifier. One of my goals was to keep everything acoustically balanced; live revrev created an environment which could quickly go out of control. (I also used a standard clarinet to play into revrev directly at times.) The video feeds included other elements - the two main sources included pre-recorded materials, and texts. The pre-recorded materials were produced at NYU's motion capture studio, with the help of Mark Skwarek. I worked with two performers who did one of two things: 1. The performers moved at the edge of the recording space, producing deliberate glitches or anomalies that distorted the figures. 2. The mocap markers were remapped among the two performers - representing a single avatar; as the performers moved in topologically complex ways, the projected avatar in the mocap room broke up in various ways. The result was an avatar that appeared more as an emanation from the performers, than as an embodiment of them. These are techniques I've used close to a decade, in order to create avatar distortions that represent avant-dance, wounding, death throes, hysteria, desire, pain, and political issues. The videos that were made at NYU (just a few weeks earlier) were linked together in a half-hour piece that was played at times, as a marker or punctum of what was occurring in the virtual worlds. The second main source of the video feeds was a series of texts I would write into the virtual worlds themselves; these appeared as chats on the side of the image. The texts were improvised and related to the ongoing mise en scene in-world. The virtual world imagery was always, always complex and difficult to navigate in-world; for the spectator, it was also difficult to disentangle. This was deliberate; the result, and one of the main contents of the imagery, was the representation of extreme states of mind, which related to the ongoing crises of violence in the U.S., Africa, the Mid-East, and so on. The primary source for me, for all of this, was the special topic Johannes Birringer and I co-moderated for the empyre email list in November, 2014, "ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance" - a topic which considered issues of torture, beheading, violence, anguish, and fear, for the month. The distorted avatars I work with - distorted because of the distorted movement - go all the way back to 2011, a 2nd topic for the same, this time with Sandy Baldwin, on "Pain, Desire, and Death," in the real and virtual (I'm not sure of the exact title). Both of these and my mocap lab work resulted in over 100 bvh files - these are files that represent real-life performer movement - that could then be fed into a virtual world, to animate an avatar or avatars. The process is difficult but the result are these distortions. So the most recent distortions, from NYU, would be projected; other in-world projections were live and in-world, and could be viewed in-world by another avatar; this is an important element of interactivity I work with. The in-world projections, then, resulted in the avatars moving wildly on the screen, creating particle emanations in the form of nude human warriors and charred bodies, and "dancing" with symbols made to represent ISIS and other forms of terror. All of this is at fairly high-speed. The revrev was heard from three sources - Avatar's voice itself; the revrev fed through either the projector speakers or the Cave speakers; and the revrev fed through the virtual worlds, as if it were emanating within them. All of this created a mobile and fluid sonic architecture, one that, for me, defined or modified the fixity of the Cave itself; room resonances and speaker interactions, beat frequencies, etc., all came into play. The sound was a hollowed organic body tied to, yet not tied to, the Cave pieces and the ongoing transformations visible in the projected images. I imaged a sonic bubble, almost a galactic bubble, in which there were occurrences both alien and domestic; texts would appear and disappear in the space, always grounded by the Cave pieces which were purely textual. Most of my time in the Cave was used for either working within the virtual worlds, or "tuning" the space itself - and the latter began to fascinate me. The sounds and images resonated with each other; the four sound streams had their own internal resonances; the darkness or brightness in the room affected the texture mapping and readability of the in-world texts, and so forth. Conditions were constantly changing. The room itself was always on the edge of feedback; I had to keep the revrev sounding full, but not overloading the in-world sounds, and not screeching. We used a lavalier mic to correct this in parts. The tuning of the room relates to the tuning of the body itself; much of my work deals with the labor involved in production, especially dance or music production (and the performers for the original mocap were almost all dancers); in this residency, labor was represented by voice and instrument, but also by the sheer weight of the production, which involved constantly adjusting the equipment and its position in the room. So even though the body was close to invisible (except for the video textures from Bambuser) on the screen, it was present in the sense of sonic architecture, the body of the piece, the galactic bubble, and so forth. Artists: Kathleen Ottinger Azure Carter Alan Sondheim Luke Damrosch Thanks to John Cayley for the opportunity. Thanks also to: Mark Skwarek, Johannes Birringer, Foofwa d'Imobilite, Sandy Baldwin, Kira Sedlock, Frances van Scoy, Patrick Lichty, Columbia College, West Virginia University, NYU, Brown University Audio-Visuals: http://www.alansondheim.org/theforge.png http://www.alansondheim.org/irq3day24.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/irq3day50.JPG http://www.alansondheim.org/irq3day51.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/irq3day49.JPG http://www.alansondheim.org/irqday3.mp4 http://www.alansondheim.org/irqq3.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/irqqb.mp4 (Kathleen Ottinger, Cave) http://www.alansondheim.org/irqrevrev.mp4 http://www.alansondheim.org/irq3day54.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/visage4.png http://www.alansondheim.org/irqspace1.mp3 =====================================================