Personal Creative Practice

Having been inspired for some books and texts, investigations, and my visit to 180 Studios I have started to experiment with different techniques, always trying to find this important relationship between the technology and our studies. Here I will show you some shorts videos with line-in audio recording of course, experimenting with different techniques and devices that have arisen from my most recent research.

Coding: Making Visuals with Pure Data

Following my installation at Gallery 46 and my recent research in creating visuals in Pure Data with the ad-on library Gem, I keep making investigations in order to improve my skills in this field and possibly I will use these techniques during the third year. In this case, I’ve used a new object called [pqtorusknots] with which we can create complex geometrical forms; I have also researched the Midi compatibility in PD and I’m controlling the rotation and some other parameters in the visuals with a Midi controller, as well as some parameters of the sound at the same time. I have also combined this with some drones coming from the modular synth.

Combining a Cassette player and an old portable console.

In this experiment I wanted to combine some obsolete media devices in order to create a sonic composition. I’m using the cassette player with a pre-recorded melody that I created with another synth; the cassette tape is going to add some warmth and vintage feel to the sequence as well as the iconic noise sound when pressing play or stop. On the side I will use an old Nintendo 3ds with a special software from Korg called ‘DS-10’ which tries to imitate the classic modular synth Korg MS-10. I achieved some kind of synthetic wind sounds with it, and I also manipulated it with a FX pedal, Electro Harmonix Oceans 12. I also added some background sound with the modular synth and I’m mixing everything in the Tascam Model 12.

Week 18

  • Consider the criteria within the Learning Outcomes on the assignment brief and the ways in which your initial ideas can meet them
  • Expand on last week’s blog post incorporating the Learning Outcomes
  • Prepare a link of your work to share with students and collaborators from other disciplines

Enquiry

Engage in practice-based research and demonstrate confidence in creative problem-solving. 

I think that I have plenty experience in building instruments like synths, pedals and other mods and gadgets; I’m also well versed in Pure Data and the Bela Board and I’m recently learning other programming languages. Creating an instrument for Drake Music will be a challenge but I think I can contribute with my experience to carry on with this project.

Knowledge

Demonstrate proficiency in the application of subject knowledge alongside the sharing and exchange of knowledge with other disciplines and art-forms.

I will apply my knowledge as good as I can and will also learn new things in order to achieve the project’s goal. I’m also quite interested on other visual aspects, like in design, sculpture and DIY aspects.

Communication

Demonstrate confidence in the communication and presentation of ideas.

Explaining the process is for me one of the most important parts in creative projects, I’m always keen to write, sketch or talk about my techniques and I will be happy to document every aspect of my work.

Process

Show evidence of engagement with the principles of enterprise and entrepreneurship.

I have really chosen this pathway because I think working with a company on an stablished project is a great opportunity, however; I also have experience developing my own projects and collective works like organising events, releases or any other king of collaborative ideas.

Realisation

Evidence the ability to collaborate with those of a different discipline in undertaking a common project, demonstrating an interdisciplinary perspective.

For sure I will enjoy working with other individuals and artists in this unit and I hope to learn and help from each other, this is probably the most important outcome of this assignment.

Links:

Here I have a couple of links that I could share for a collaboration,

This is a more professional portfolio with diverse works on sound design, graphics and photography:

https://danielmarindesign.wordpress.com

Also, I could show my work on my personal projects on synths, electronic music and sound design with my alias “Dasero” through this link:

https://linktr.ee/dasero

Independent Study – Week 18

1)    Write a short synopsis (at least 200 words) about the text that you chose for discussion. 

2)    Continue reading and collecting quotes, and follow up material cited in the texts that you read. Locate at least two of the sources you think you will be including in your Annotated Bibliography.

3) Start developing your creative ideas. Post reflections and considerations on your blog and reflect on their strengths and weaknesses. How does your practice overlap with and feed into your research?

The Engagement Aesthetic – Francisco J. Ricardo

This is the first text that I’ve chosen as a guidance for my research, it describes very closely this relationship between technology and art, taking as an example cinema. Cinema is a contemporary form of art which is closely related to technology and development, and the text has profoundly surprised me because I didn’t even thought in Film practices in this way, but it is a clear example (Probably one of the most clear, with Photography too) of how visual art has changed with the implementation of technology since the late 19th century.

Some keywords that have arisen from this text are Installation Art and Electronic Art for whose I’m starting to research and I find interesting for this topic.

New Media Art (Book) – Mark Tribe & Reena Jana

I also found interesting this work, explained in the book New Media Art. I enjoy the concept of hacking code creatively like in this case with the game “Super Mario Bros” from 1985. Video game techniques and toys in general are also used in sound practices like chiptune or circuit bending and I love the naivety and humorist touch of this piece by Cory Arcangel and the experimentation with old media nostalgia iconic products which are clear examples of digital art.

I’m not really sure if I will be adding these two books on my annotated bibliography, definitely ‘The Engagement Aesthetic’ is a really good book and I love this text so this could be one of the chosen ones, ‘New Media Art’ is a collection of famous works in the field and I don’t know if these kind of books can be used on the bibliography, although is a super interesting and interesting book and I love every work there and in special video game related works. I have taken some other books recently which are speaking more in depth about t these subjects and I will be speaking about them soon.

In conclusion, I’m finding these texts and experiences very inspiring; I love electronics, new technologies and art, and I’m happy to find dozens of studies about it. I think that I can relate this fields with my practice, where I experiment with synthesisers, computer software and other kinds of media with the purpose of creating experimental music, ambient and sound design. Technology is a very important subject within any modern studies, but specially in the field of sound art; and the majority of great classic sound artists and experimental musician that we study to like Pierre Schaefer, Pauline Oliveros or Stockhausen had a close relationship with electronics at some point, that’s why I’m really interested in that relationship between technology and sound and how can we use it and find a good balance to create amazing artworks.

Synchronicity

I have visited this last weekend an immersive experience at 180 Studios, a well known exhibition space in London, which usually commissions audiovisual installations with works of renowned artists from all around the world featuring great works in contemporary and new media art. On this event the show has been created by United Visual Artists “UVA”, a London-based collective which focuses on the integration of new technologies with traditional media, having collaborated with at other sites like Printworks or VA Museum.

I really enjoyed this show, it was a perfect combination of visuals and lights and the sound design was just incredible. It perfectly merged together the engineering work with the most artistic approach and the result was an uplifting immersive experience where although it was formed of eight large installation I was able to stay fort about two hours, discovering the full length of the audio and movement patterns and enjoying different points of view of the pieces, due of their large scale. Maybe I missed a bit more of variety of elements or interactivity with the pieces would have been great and the installation motifs were a bit linear with the use of lights and led in all of them. Anyway, really inspiring visit to analyse from a Sound Art perspective; 180 Studios is a great gallery that never disappoints and where I also visited Electroshock, a couple of years ago, another amazing show that really gained my attention into these kind of practices.

This exhibition has made a bunch of questions to arise within my research, ‘the importance of the technology on immersive art’, ‘the coding or programming used for these installations (If there is any)’ and the computer used for this; what kind of computer is it? Where is it hidden?. All these subjects are helping me to find the direction of my research, and I think that the technology used on these kind of installations is a really important issue in contemporary Sound Art.

Week 17: Unit Introduction & Practice-based research.

Independent Study/Personal Creative Practice

Post your practice-research questions to your blog. Write a blog post (200-500 words) reflecting on your possible choices of topic for this unit and the various advantages and disadvantages of these. 

As this unit is quite extensive and taking into account that we are researching for our practice in the next 5 years, I have started my research in a quite wide spectrum of different practices which is Media Art, or New Media Art. This field involves different categories of contemporary art in which Sound Art is one of them and its main fundament is that new emerging technology is normally implemented in the creation of the art itself. New Media art is compromised with the audiovisual realm, and in its creation, electronic media technologies are used. Other aspects that I’m interested in, apart from sound are: computer graphics, internet and video games.

These fields are really extensive but I will choose a specific related topic to research in depth for this essay and I will keep evolving this research looking forward to the third year. Some specific topics that I’m thinking on could be Creative Coding, Immersive Experiences or the sustainability of electronic devices. These topics will be also supported by my own practice in which I will keep implementing generative computer graphics and electronic music production, looking forward to more projects at university as well as personal work.

Another aspect where I’d like to put a special focus is the activism behind these practices, to make it a diverse artistic field, where all sectors of the society are equally represented without distinction on gender, race or cultural background; and differencing this new forms of art from older visual art, music or high culture where many of these sectors were underrepresented. Also to create awareness about the impact of new technology in the environment, being committed with recycling methods, and also approaching technology to disadvantaged people, by supporting humanitarian projects and charities, or developing open source software and affordable hardware for example.

In conclusion, New Media Art is a subject that really fascinates me and englobes many factors that I enjoy apart from sound, but the majority of practices on this discipline include sound. Because I like the visual aspect, but always when the experience is audiovisual, and never something just visual which is definitely not my practice. This is just the beginning of the research, soon I’ll have opportunities to get more specific, however, from my point of view sound is quite specific in itself, not being that easily understood in comparison with visual art like painting or photography. As we see in the Guest Lectures, the majority of sound artists explore different activities and genres; making sonic compositions, but also developing and collaborating with sound design, sculpture, visuals, media or activism projects at the same time, making it a bit difficult to find sound artists whose practice doesn’t get flexible at some points, stretching and discovering new areas where they think they can get creative.

I have navigated the library search trying to find related books and I have taken these two to start getting some knowledge on the field.

Preproduction

In this unit we are encouraged to collaborate with other courses in order to produce an interdisciplinary creation. There are 3 pathways where we can choose from, facilitating us to align with our preferences, looking forward to expand our portfolio and skills. Here I will sort this paths in order of preference and will also evaluate the pros and cons of these options.

1. Accessible Instrument Design (Option 2)

This is a really interesting opportunity to work with a stablished charity, helping disabled people to making use of a musical instrument is always a rewarding experience and for me that means that we can change other people’s life with our sound studies and technologies, which is a huge achievement. I have also produced an instrument on Specialising and Exhibiting Element 1 and I’m well versed with Pure Data and the Bela Board which I think that could work well for a music instrument. I have assembled other instruments like modular synths and guitar pedals in the past and I love it, working with Drake Music on such an amazing project and the solidarity background of it makes it so far my first choice for the collaborating unit.

2. Immersive Sound Design for VR and AR (Option 1)

Working on VR and immersive sound design looks very promising and an interesting project. I’ve had my first experience on VR this week booking a Meta Quest from the ORB and I found it very cool, I think that the technology is improving notably recently and also with the recent release of Apple Vision Pro in the US which has had a good acceptance from the public, this field is getting to the next step and is a growing industry. I’m not a specialist on VR but I love video games and modern technologies as well as sound design, these factors makes this option my second choice for this unit.

3. Independent Interdisciplinary Project (Option 3)

I think that every one of the paths in this unit has its pros and cons and is really hard to decide an order of preference but I’ve chosen the independent project as my third option. In the one hand, this path could give me the opportunity of working with specific fields of choice like video games or animation, but in the other hand might look that is a bit of a riskier option and a priori not that straightforward like the other two. Working on an independent project requires high constancy from all members of the group and although I’ve worked on numerous collaborative projects in the past, organising events or in sound design for cinema and advertising; I find that at this point I’d like to contribute with something that is driven by a pre-stablished scheme.

Show Live

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.

Installation Week

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.

Final poster for the exhibition at Gallery 46
All the equipment needed at the loading bay in LCC.

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.

Sketches

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.

GEM “Graphic Environment for Multimedia”

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.