Category: Specialising and Exhibiting Element 2

From the 26th to the 28th of January our show ‘Here Unheard’ was live at Gallery 46. On Thursday evening on the 26th we had a private view, where some other fellow students and staff from LCC visited the exhibition. On the following day, Friday, the gallery also hosted some performances open to public, with artists from our very own BA Sound Arts year 2; finally, on Saturday and Sunday the exhibition was open normally to any visitors. It was a great experience and we learnt a lot about the gallery field, we had great help from the Sound Arts tech team, and we also have some extra support from Kate Carr and Irene Revell. The class worked smoothly as a team and the installation and deinstallation, as well as the invigilation shifts were synchronised at all times without issues.

Watching the people interact and enjoy with my installation was a really rewarding feeling and it makes you reflect positively about your work. The visitors stopped by my piece to listen to it, make fotos and videos, and I had many comments in the kind of ‘Looks great’, ‘Very cool’ or ‘This is sick’ coming from the viewers. Below, I’m adding some videos of my installation’s setup and screen recording of the visuals.

From Thursday last week, when we started the installation with the load-in at LCC, and then over, Friday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on this week, we’ve been working at Gallery 46 to carry with the installation works of each of the pieces.

The title of the exhibition will be “Heard Unheard” as selected on an online poll. We’ve also done a poster with the main information for the exhibition, in which I have collaborated in graphic design tasks.

Once we had all the equipment at the gallery, every artist, individually started to set up their installations, in my case I arranged the screen on top of a plinth with the Raspberry pi and I connected the keyboard and mouse in order to test the visuals and fine tune some last parameters.

Then, with the help of Rory, we attached the wall mount and hold the screen to the stand, about one and a half meters of height. Although the initial visuals were supposed to be shown in a black background, I found that this colour was reflecting too much light and I decided to change it for a different background colour which would add more contrast to the visuals.

I’ve drawn some sketches in order organise my ideas about the concept of my project. The are two main different options when thinking into the concept of this work: with the projector or with a screen monitor. For this matter, I’ve designed two main possibilities for my generative visuals.

Projector

This is my desired concept for my immersive experience, as it crosses the boundaries of physical space and becomes something that will adapt to the space in a better way, and creates a more immersive experience. The projection will go over the walls and the floor, making the visuals more dynamic allowing the visitors to have the reflection on themselves too. This option would only be available with speakers and would need of a entire dark room for the installation.

Screen

This option is more easily adaptable to any kind of situations, taking into account that the space could be reduced, and focuses the attention just on the screen, making less use of the gallery space. This design could be installed with speakers or headphones, depending on the arrangement of the whole exhibition.

Sketches for the visuals

I’ve also made two sketches for the visuals that I will program with Pure Data, I have two ideas, using different symbols and letters, or making it based in geometrical forms, which is the most common application for Pd Gem. This sketches are a conceptual representation of how the generative visuals could look.

In order to achieve the generative graphic style that I’m looking for I will be using GEM; this is an add-on library for Pure Data which will allow us to create Open GL graphics in real time within the visual programming language Pure Data. GEM was created by Mark Dans, supported by a grant of the Intel Research Council and Miller Puckette, the original creator of Pd.

This technique with which I will be creating my installation for Gallery 46, will follow closely Element 1 in this Specialising and Exhibiting unit, where we’ve been coding with Pd, and also will follow the line in Sound for Screen, as it is an screen based project.

GEM is widely used by media artists and creatives and its possibilities are endless. Here we can see some examples of performances and video works using GEM:

First steps with GEM

The first thing that I had to do in order to use GEM is installing it. Pd features a very easy to use system where we can download external libraries and add-ons, to access this menu we need to go to Help>Find Externals search for our desired library (Gem in this case) and click “Install”.

To load GEM libraries, we need to create the object [declare -lib Gem] this will open GEM in the console and we are ready to go. On my first experimentations I’ve find out that the majority of patches in GEM start with the object [gemhead] and then we can begin by creating a [square], [triangle], [circle] and so on; as well as specifying its size, colour and location, as we can see on other images software but with the visual coding interface that we are use to in Pd. I have also learn that in order to see the representative screen we need to create the object [gemwin] and the message [destroy] or [create]. This is a very basic patch that I created on my first session, it is just a square and a triangle moving around the screen randomly.

• Find 2 Artists working in sound installation that inform or inspire your work. Make reflective notes on their work in a google doc or similar, where you can continue to build notes each week in preparation for the reflective statement for final submission. 
• Make further notes on this google doc, on how you, as a sound artist, will approach creating work that sits within a gallery environment and connects with the themes and skills that have interested you in Element 1 or in other areas of your work.

Ryoji Ikeda

I feel really inspired by the gallery installations by Ryoji Ikeda and my proposal for the exhibition will be highly influenced by this line of work. Ikeda’s sound/audiovisual installations are screen-based works featuring generative visuals and glitchy experimental sounds and music. These installations work on screens and projector and this will be the main material that I will use for my installation, although these installation probably fall more conveniently on the black cube than in the white one I think that is a very interesting kind of sound installation. Rioji has exhibited at such iconic places like 180 Strand in London or Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Source: https://www.ryojiikeda.com

Tundra

Tundra is an amazing collective of multimedia artists performing audiovisual installations around the globe, their installations and performances feature lighting, screens and other physical elements like fans, as we can see in their famous installation “Row”. I really enjoy this kind of work and I’ve been lucky to attend in person to one of their installations in London. These artworks are involved in a high level of research and professionalism but I would like to have these kind of works as a reference for my future gallery work. I think that the light and the sound play and important role in their installations and this is something that I will take into account for my work at Gallery 46.

Source: https://wearetundra.org