William Kentridge installation

Just saw a fantastic installation by William Kentridge, Preparing the Flute at the Marian Goodman gallery in Paris. His work wonderfully combines the object with new media, using everything from hand-drawn animation, film, stage and set lighting techniques and sound. Upstairs he also displayed prints and drawings relating to the film.

Other highlights from our trip included Claude Leveque's Valstar Barbie, which used simple materials to create a soothing all-pink environment. Very restful during the summer heat wave!

Science and art

One of the most fun aspects of working in new media is the cross-pollination of science and art. Anyone who's ever built things with Lego's as a kid has got to love the new sensor-driven robots- Mindstorm NXT from Lego. I can't wait to figure out how to hotwire one of these for my installations.

The Washington Post ran a story Saturday about the community that is helping to promote the new Mindstorm.

I've been gradually turning my Theremin into a MIDI interface for detecting motion in a space. Jitter is performing extremely well and I hope to have some details up soon to help others who are working with heterodyne oscillation devices that can be feed proximity data into Max.

Our French cousins...

This last week we had a wonderful time hosting a french singer from Caen, France. Caen is Alexandria's sister city and so Alexandria hosted the Caen University Choir for a week. They were amazing singers (and dancers), as you can see from their performance at the Kennedy Center.

Our guest introduced me to a really cool experimental group called Bumcello. At some point we hope to visit her hometown in the Normandy area of France, hopefully our French will be better by then!

Now she is off to NYC, Boston and Montreal, we are sad to see them go but wish them the best.

My homemade Theremin

Here are some pictures of the Theremin that I made using PAIA's Theremax kit. It's a really cool instrument, it can sound violin-like but it's usually heard in old sci-fi movies. It's actually quite hard to play it well, it's activated by sensing the distance of your body to the antenae.

It's ability to sense proximity makes it ideal for use in interactive art work. In the next month or so, I will attempt to modify this so that it's range is extended to 10 feet or more, so that it will be affected by how close people in the room are to it. Rather than using sound, I'm going to use the 1-5 volt output to feed into an interface and then into the mac to work with for my project.

There's not much information on the web about this, but this article was helpful.

What's up with the blog?

You may notice that there was quite a pause in my blog from January through June. Well, I tried to create back-dated entries, but I guess that contradicts the whole point of a blog, so I'll just summarize what I've been up to since then:

Jan-May, pretty busy taking 3 grad classes at GMU, one of which involved creating installations for each project. Also, taught 2 courses in digital arts at GMU. That was a lot of fun, the students are pretty talented these days, had to pull out obscure stuff from my bag of Photoshop tricks to keep up with them. Spent most every weeked in Lynchburg visiting family.

May-June, built a Theremin! What's a Theremin, more on that in a future post, in the meantime: Be Happy ... Also submitted some proposals for shows, and finished my new web site.

Already got a friend interested in blogging, check out James Yang's Yangblogworld. Mostly about the World Cup, but Art is mixed in, along with finance and I'm sure golf at some point... pretty funny stuff though, he's a good writer.

New Media show

Went to a great opening for a show called 'displacement' at Pyramid Atlantic, some cool installations. I talked with Jenna Thwing for a while about her installation, which used grass, old trunks, old windows and projections of the landscape. Symmes Gardner did an installation in the 'vault' which is a great space for video work.

Worth the trip if you want to see some really good experimental art.