dr. pangloss (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} denshi) wrote,@ 2007-01-07 13:11:00 |
|
The Fibonacci Conductor
[this is filtered to cc, llc, and collaborators. that said, who doesn't want to see all the proposals? all the themes presented at town hall were little art projects themselves...wouldn't proposals be as inspiring?]
flythrough, flash video
vision
A common struggle every year going into Flipside is whether or not we've done enough to have contributed, to feel like we belong in a gift economy. It can take us a few days in that environment before we realize that all the work we do building things, bringing art, giving gifts, is to recenter us, so that we can be fully present and human, that we can then have the most meaningful and connective experiences, with the people artistic and idiosyncratic enough to choose this life. Every year we remember that the most valuable gift we can give to the community is just being there. This year we're asking to build an effigy that helps people 'be there' more than ever before.
The theme 'Symphony of Construction' is a call to arms, a return to participation, emphasizing the role everyone plays building our event and community. We propose 'The Conductor', an anthropomorphic tower for musical performance and creation, with electronic interfaces for participants to guide interactive compositions. 'The Conductor' will be more than a sculpture, he will be a participant, creating music and experiences alongside everyone else. People can decorate and place notes on the effigy to guide the melody, musicians can perform on the stages and archive their music to take home or use for later sampling, composers and MCs can use community generated samples as the basis for more music, people sitting on the effigy may find their conversation sampled and added into the music as well, and who knows what other means of interaction the community may come up with between now and May. As the effigy burns down on Sunday, we plan to play music formed from a combination of automated composition and human musicians, replaying chunks of sound added to the effigy all throughout the course of the festival. In this song we hope that everyone present recognizes something that they contributed, and thereby identifies on an audio level with the effigy as it goes up in smoke.
The design:
Attached is a sketchup model of our design, roughly 25 ft tall and 36 ft wide. From the front and top, it looks like this:
Also attached is a spreadsheet for the materials and cost estimates, found on the second sheet. I refer to that for the exact design of each component.
The spine of the structure is a 20 foot cross-braced, horizontal banded tower, roughly 3 feet square. (We are considering widening the spine and making the braces wide enough to allow people to climb within it; this gives more total space, more private areas, and also better emphasizes the body of the conductor. Due to time constraints we have not submitted this model as it would change our budget estimates. Also in the possible revision is a wider torso for better shade/rain cover of the tech stage.)
All the stages are built on a similar design: 45 degree wedges that fit into the tower at the tip and are supported by 6"x6" pillars at the far corners. The wedges themselves are fairly standard, plywood supported by joisted 2x8s and 2x10s. These are fully modular and can be subdivided between several build crews, as well as transported easily.
The first stage has a diameter of 26 feet and area of 262 sq ft. We envision this as being a sufficient area for a band of 3-6 members to perform, or several dozen people to dance. Due to the possible loads a large dance party could bring to bear, we plan to cast concrete feet for the support pillars here in Austin, bury them at Flat Creek, and retrieve them during clean-up -- we estimate this will allow us to support one person per square foot, the figure by which dance clubs design flooring.
The second stage: 16 feet, 100 sq ft. As a performance stage this lends itself best to DJs, 1-3 people working relatively stationary over their gear.
The third (attic) stage: 10 ft, 38 sq ft. We envision this being primarily a tech stage housing the electronics gear controlling the effigy: amps, computers, speakers, midi synths, etc. Consequently, both to ensure the safety of the gear and for the lack of space, we see this as being closed to general access, whereas the other two stages would be open for random chilling.
The shoulders and head are mounted on a lazy susan powered by a worm drive and are controlled from the 3rd stage. The arms move on the elbow joints, allowing the effigy to 'conduct' with the fire batons in his hands.
The stages and stairs combine to form an approximation of the golden spiral (there is some variance for feasibility and space). The opening spiral of the stairs gives the impression of invitation, that the effigy is spiralling open to admit easy access to participants. Additionally, the spiral design plays into some lighting elements discussed below.
Winding around the stairs and stages are 5-bar musical staves. Structurally, these serve primarily as handrails but they are also devices for interactivity: people can decorate notes and plug them into the staves or rearrange existing notes to develop new melodies. More on these below.
A more recent idea is using ziplines and fabric to attach a 'tailcoat' to the back of the effigy (over the 2nd stage to the ground). This would provide both shade during the day and a surface for projections at night. We're looking at a system of four large pieces, two black, two white, angled and cut to better imply a tailcoat and thus boost the anthropomorphic affect.
Nearby is a small shade structure housing an area to decorate notes (alternatively we can do this under the first stage during the day and remove the materials to make space for dancing at night). Participants can decorate any kind of note (whole, half, 16th, etc) and place it on the staves to change the melody generated by the effigy. Re-arrangement is expected, as are ad-hoc notes (silhouettes of people, etc). Additionally, several people at the first charrette proposed shelf space within the effigy for the placement of random sculpture; there is some space within the effigy for this, and the decoration area can help coordinate.
Attached is a spreadsheet, '2007 effigy proposal.xls'. On the second sheet is a detailed parts and budget estimate for the structure. The total budget estimate is $3634.74, but we advise a 25% overage, bringing the estimate up to 4543.43. Adding in the $1000 for the electronics (see below), $200 for truck rentals, and $100 for scaffolding, we have a total (overaged) budget of $5843.43, not including purchase and/or rental of tools.
sketches 3
sketches 4
dimensions
The electronics:
The first thing to remember is that this effigy is not a completed audio/video art piece but rather a platform for various audio/visual creation. We plan to be open to more musicians working with us throughout the spring and preparing new gear for it. On the second and/or third stage are found a keyboard, screen, midi instruments, and so on, for full console control of the effigy's music. Audio engineers and programmers can monkey with this level, exploring new rhythms, textures, and other ideas, taking control of the sampling, or plugging in their own gear to play directly, using the effigy software as counterpoint or not at all. There are many brilliant software minds in the Flipside community, many of whom would love to play on this level, and have told us such.
Shanta is working on procedures for time-sharing access between artists, performers, etc.
We have three primary projects, and several others have been proposed.
One: the staves & canon composition. The staves have a plug-board interface, sort of like the lite-brite children's toy, on 32nd-note intervals all across the bars. Pre-built notes in the decoration area have two plugs on the back that fit into the bars, whereby 1) the notes remain affixed to the bars, and 2) the software recognizes the position of the note on the bar, via serial interface to the staves. Each type of note (whole, half, 16th, etc) has a different resistor between the two plugs, allowing recognition of the type plugged into the grid. The wiring diagrams for these are developing smoothly but still incomplete. The final output from the staves into the software is a melody of the participant-configured notes.
In composition, the 'motive' is a base melody (or theme) from which the rest of the composition is derived, via orderly transformations like pitch change, offset, reversal, tempo change, stretching/shrinking, and so on. Take Pachabel's 'Canon in D': the theme in the first two bars, played by the double bass, is repeatedly transformed as the other instruments pick up the same melody; the polyphony of the four instruments playing separate variations on the same melody forms the song. There are a number of ways to do this algorithmically (this goes all the way back to Mozart's "Musikalisches Wurfelspiel" (Musical Dice Game)), notable methods are genetic algorithms, evolutionary markov models, chaos models, among others. I've been working with Bruce Jacob's program "variations", which uses genetic algos to model both the variations in the music and the 'ear' that strives towards continual novelty and selects which variations remain in the music. Bob Sawey is running with a primarily markov model system that builds off his generative music project from 2004. Other people have had other ideas and hopefully they can plug their software smoothly into our system.
Two: recording/archiving and ambient automated mixing. Musique concrete is a musical style from the 1950's that emphasized using explicitly 'non-musical' sounds (traffic, weather, conversation) as instruments in composition. We see keeping the microphones on the effigy live at all times, so that automated mixing of background noise generates new ambient texture for the chill hours of the day. Attached is a song from Paul Lansky that demonstrates some of this automated mixing; we can provide more examples upon request.
Probably more useful and interesting is that this necessitates archiving all the sound the effigy hears over the course of the event. This database of sound can be easily indexed for use in loops for live mixing and djing, moreover, we can offer CDs or flash drives to anyone who wants to take a copy of a performance back to their camp.
Three: spiral lighting via midi. Igor Karpov has been working out a thesis at UT about transforming musical distances into positions on a spiral, and vice versa. In this, we would light the stairs and rim of the stages with LEDs and control them via software. See http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~mucoaco/MuS
Other options are possible; all of the following have been suggested to us: giant keyboards, Dance Dance Revolution-style dance pads (multiple game programmers who work with that interface are avid Flipsiders), video-driven music running off of eyesweb focus on fire or dancers, max/mps-powered musical games, amongst others. We envision leaving open RCA and midi plugs on each stage, so that anyone who has a new device, idea, or piece of music can try it out.
Budgeting: all the computers have already been donated, as well as 3 video projectors. The LEDs, plugs, and wiring are in the hundreds range, rather than the thousands, but require a great deal of labor. The software is mostly free, and if we are approved, we will try to either purchase or have donated software from Ableton and/or other software packages, for familar access to the community-generated music. (We see things like Kid Beyond's performance at Flipside 2005 being enhanced by utilizing everything we might throw at the effigy over the course of the weekend.) Lasers have been offered but we are waiting on that group to confirm. We will rent speakers for the weekend, perhaps for another $300. The total estimate is roughly $1000.
The build plan:
Our initial timeline is found on the first sheet of the spreadsheet linked above. Changes are to be expected, but we still see the effigy being complete in a series of versions, thus major slippage will lead to the loss of particular music, lighting, or detail work, but not to the loss of a functional effigy with which people can interact.
For transport we plan to rent a flatbed, quotes are around the $100 range for the day we need. We should probably estimate another $100 for the needed beer for loading and unloading.
We haven't done sufficient research on the burn plan for safety distances, accelerants, etc. Hopefully more experienced DaFT members can add their pyrotechnics to this question. For breakdown before the burn, we will need only the afternoon on Sunday to teardown and cleanup the non-burnable elements. Speakers, computers, etc, must be carried off the tech stage, lighting detached and removed, the wiring removed from the staff handrails. If we have time and have a feasible method to raise the head, we will remove the susan and worm drive as well.
For rapid tear-down before burning, the plugs and wiring are not attached directly to the wooden handrails, but rather to a metal bar behind the wooden bars, which can be removed by undoing the latches or screws that hold them to the rails. The notes themselves will be reinforced before the burn with screws, so that the final pattern remains in place for burning.
In the case of a burn ban, we will disassemble the effigy after doing the above cleanup, truck it back out via a rental coming out Tuesday, and store it at Dorothy's house, or scavenge it for other art projects.
The team thus far:
Todd 'denshi' Gillespie - designer, electronics manager
Dorothy 'dotti' Spearman - structure designer and build manager
Beth Engelland - architecture and build advising
Lance Walker - stage construction, lighting
Rusty Shepard - build advising
Igor Karpov - music and lights programming
Bob Sawey - generative music, video
Josh Maredith - video art
Sodium - warehouse wrangler
Rachel Walker - cat herding
Lucretia Krause - volunteer coordinating
Shanta Stevens - Burn area coordinator, event scheduling
Seth - construction
[this is filtered to cc, llc, and collaborators. that said, who doesn't want to see all the proposals? all the themes presented at town hall were little art projects themselves...wouldn't proposals be as inspiring?]
flythrough, flash video
vision
A common struggle every year going into Flipside is whether or not we've done enough to have contributed, to feel like we belong in a gift economy. It can take us a few days in that environment before we realize that all the work we do building things, bringing art, giving gifts, is to recenter us, so that we can be fully present and human, that we can then have the most meaningful and connective experiences, with the people artistic and idiosyncratic enough to choose this life. Every year we remember that the most valuable gift we can give to the community is just being there. This year we're asking to build an effigy that helps people 'be there' more than ever before.
The theme 'Symphony of Construction' is a call to arms, a return to participation, emphasizing the role everyone plays building our event and community. We propose 'The Conductor', an anthropomorphic tower for musical performance and creation, with electronic interfaces for participants to guide interactive compositions. 'The Conductor' will be more than a sculpture, he will be a participant, creating music and experiences alongside everyone else. People can decorate and place notes on the effigy to guide the melody, musicians can perform on the stages and archive their music to take home or use for later sampling, composers and MCs can use community generated samples as the basis for more music, people sitting on the effigy may find their conversation sampled and added into the music as well, and who knows what other means of interaction the community may come up with between now and May. As the effigy burns down on Sunday, we plan to play music formed from a combination of automated composition and human musicians, replaying chunks of sound added to the effigy all throughout the course of the festival. In this song we hope that everyone present recognizes something that they contributed, and thereby identifies on an audio level with the effigy as it goes up in smoke.
The design:
Attached is a sketchup model of our design, roughly 25 ft tall and 36 ft wide. From the front and top, it looks like this:
Also attached is a spreadsheet for the materials and cost estimates, found on the second sheet. I refer to that for the exact design of each component.
The spine of the structure is a 20 foot cross-braced, horizontal banded tower, roughly 3 feet square. (We are considering widening the spine and making the braces wide enough to allow people to climb within it; this gives more total space, more private areas, and also better emphasizes the body of the conductor. Due to time constraints we have not submitted this model as it would change our budget estimates. Also in the possible revision is a wider torso for better shade/rain cover of the tech stage.)
All the stages are built on a similar design: 45 degree wedges that fit into the tower at the tip and are supported by 6"x6" pillars at the far corners. The wedges themselves are fairly standard, plywood supported by joisted 2x8s and 2x10s. These are fully modular and can be subdivided between several build crews, as well as transported easily.
The first stage has a diameter of 26 feet and area of 262 sq ft. We envision this as being a sufficient area for a band of 3-6 members to perform, or several dozen people to dance. Due to the possible loads a large dance party could bring to bear, we plan to cast concrete feet for the support pillars here in Austin, bury them at Flat Creek, and retrieve them during clean-up -- we estimate this will allow us to support one person per square foot, the figure by which dance clubs design flooring.
The second stage: 16 feet, 100 sq ft. As a performance stage this lends itself best to DJs, 1-3 people working relatively stationary over their gear.
The third (attic) stage: 10 ft, 38 sq ft. We envision this being primarily a tech stage housing the electronics gear controlling the effigy: amps, computers, speakers, midi synths, etc. Consequently, both to ensure the safety of the gear and for the lack of space, we see this as being closed to general access, whereas the other two stages would be open for random chilling.
The shoulders and head are mounted on a lazy susan powered by a worm drive and are controlled from the 3rd stage. The arms move on the elbow joints, allowing the effigy to 'conduct' with the fire batons in his hands.
The stages and stairs combine to form an approximation of the golden spiral (there is some variance for feasibility and space). The opening spiral of the stairs gives the impression of invitation, that the effigy is spiralling open to admit easy access to participants. Additionally, the spiral design plays into some lighting elements discussed below.
Winding around the stairs and stages are 5-bar musical staves. Structurally, these serve primarily as handrails but they are also devices for interactivity: people can decorate notes and plug them into the staves or rearrange existing notes to develop new melodies. More on these below.
A more recent idea is using ziplines and fabric to attach a 'tailcoat' to the back of the effigy (over the 2nd stage to the ground). This would provide both shade during the day and a surface for projections at night. We're looking at a system of four large pieces, two black, two white, angled and cut to better imply a tailcoat and thus boost the anthropomorphic affect.
Nearby is a small shade structure housing an area to decorate notes (alternatively we can do this under the first stage during the day and remove the materials to make space for dancing at night). Participants can decorate any kind of note (whole, half, 16th, etc) and place it on the staves to change the melody generated by the effigy. Re-arrangement is expected, as are ad-hoc notes (silhouettes of people, etc). Additionally, several people at the first charrette proposed shelf space within the effigy for the placement of random sculpture; there is some space within the effigy for this, and the decoration area can help coordinate.
Attached is a spreadsheet, '2007 effigy proposal.xls'. On the second sheet is a detailed parts and budget estimate for the structure. The total budget estimate is $3634.74, but we advise a 25% overage, bringing the estimate up to 4543.43. Adding in the $1000 for the electronics (see below), $200 for truck rentals, and $100 for scaffolding, we have a total (overaged) budget of $5843.43, not including purchase and/or rental of tools.
sketches 3
sketches 4
dimensions
The electronics:
The first thing to remember is that this effigy is not a completed audio/video art piece but rather a platform for various audio/visual creation. We plan to be open to more musicians working with us throughout the spring and preparing new gear for it. On the second and/or third stage are found a keyboard, screen, midi instruments, and so on, for full console control of the effigy's music. Audio engineers and programmers can monkey with this level, exploring new rhythms, textures, and other ideas, taking control of the sampling, or plugging in their own gear to play directly, using the effigy software as counterpoint or not at all. There are many brilliant software minds in the Flipside community, many of whom would love to play on this level, and have told us such.
Shanta is working on procedures for time-sharing access between artists, performers, etc.
We have three primary projects, and several others have been proposed.
One: the staves & canon composition. The staves have a plug-board interface, sort of like the lite-brite children's toy, on 32nd-note intervals all across the bars. Pre-built notes in the decoration area have two plugs on the back that fit into the bars, whereby 1) the notes remain affixed to the bars, and 2) the software recognizes the position of the note on the bar, via serial interface to the staves. Each type of note (whole, half, 16th, etc) has a different resistor between the two plugs, allowing recognition of the type plugged into the grid. The wiring diagrams for these are developing smoothly but still incomplete. The final output from the staves into the software is a melody of the participant-configured notes.
In composition, the 'motive' is a base melody (or theme) from which the rest of the composition is derived, via orderly transformations like pitch change, offset, reversal, tempo change, stretching/shrinking, and so on. Take Pachabel's 'Canon in D': the theme in the first two bars, played by the double bass, is repeatedly transformed as the other instruments pick up the same melody; the polyphony of the four instruments playing separate variations on the same melody forms the song. There are a number of ways to do this algorithmically (this goes all the way back to Mozart's "Musikalisches Wurfelspiel" (Musical Dice Game)), notable methods are genetic algorithms, evolutionary markov models, chaos models, among others. I've been working with Bruce Jacob's program "variations", which uses genetic algos to model both the variations in the music and the 'ear' that strives towards continual novelty and selects which variations remain in the music. Bob Sawey is running with a primarily markov model system that builds off his generative music project from 2004. Other people have had other ideas and hopefully they can plug their software smoothly into our system.
Two: recording/archiving and ambient automated mixing. Musique concrete is a musical style from the 1950's that emphasized using explicitly 'non-musical' sounds (traffic, weather, conversation) as instruments in composition. We see keeping the microphones on the effigy live at all times, so that automated mixing of background noise generates new ambient texture for the chill hours of the day. Attached is a song from Paul Lansky that demonstrates some of this automated mixing; we can provide more examples upon request.
Probably more useful and interesting is that this necessitates archiving all the sound the effigy hears over the course of the event. This database of sound can be easily indexed for use in loops for live mixing and djing, moreover, we can offer CDs or flash drives to anyone who wants to take a copy of a performance back to their camp.
Three: spiral lighting via midi. Igor Karpov has been working out a thesis at UT about transforming musical distances into positions on a spiral, and vice versa. In this, we would light the stairs and rim of the stages with LEDs and control them via software. See http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~mucoaco/MuS
Other options are possible; all of the following have been suggested to us: giant keyboards, Dance Dance Revolution-style dance pads (multiple game programmers who work with that interface are avid Flipsiders), video-driven music running off of eyesweb focus on fire or dancers, max/mps-powered musical games, amongst others. We envision leaving open RCA and midi plugs on each stage, so that anyone who has a new device, idea, or piece of music can try it out.
Budgeting: all the computers have already been donated, as well as 3 video projectors. The LEDs, plugs, and wiring are in the hundreds range, rather than the thousands, but require a great deal of labor. The software is mostly free, and if we are approved, we will try to either purchase or have donated software from Ableton and/or other software packages, for familar access to the community-generated music. (We see things like Kid Beyond's performance at Flipside 2005 being enhanced by utilizing everything we might throw at the effigy over the course of the weekend.) Lasers have been offered but we are waiting on that group to confirm. We will rent speakers for the weekend, perhaps for another $300. The total estimate is roughly $1000.
The build plan:
Our initial timeline is found on the first sheet of the spreadsheet linked above. Changes are to be expected, but we still see the effigy being complete in a series of versions, thus major slippage will lead to the loss of particular music, lighting, or detail work, but not to the loss of a functional effigy with which people can interact.
For transport we plan to rent a flatbed, quotes are around the $100 range for the day we need. We should probably estimate another $100 for the needed beer for loading and unloading.
We haven't done sufficient research on the burn plan for safety distances, accelerants, etc. Hopefully more experienced DaFT members can add their pyrotechnics to this question. For breakdown before the burn, we will need only the afternoon on Sunday to teardown and cleanup the non-burnable elements. Speakers, computers, etc, must be carried off the tech stage, lighting detached and removed, the wiring removed from the staff handrails. If we have time and have a feasible method to raise the head, we will remove the susan and worm drive as well.
For rapid tear-down before burning, the plugs and wiring are not attached directly to the wooden handrails, but rather to a metal bar behind the wooden bars, which can be removed by undoing the latches or screws that hold them to the rails. The notes themselves will be reinforced before the burn with screws, so that the final pattern remains in place for burning.
In the case of a burn ban, we will disassemble the effigy after doing the above cleanup, truck it back out via a rental coming out Tuesday, and store it at Dorothy's house, or scavenge it for other art projects.
The team thus far:
Todd 'denshi' Gillespie - designer, electronics manager
Dorothy 'dotti' Spearman - structure designer and build manager
Beth Engelland - architecture and build advising
Lance Walker - stage construction, lighting
Rusty Shepard - build advising
Igor Karpov - music and lights programming
Bob Sawey - generative music, video
Josh Maredith - video art
Sodium - warehouse wrangler
Rachel Walker - cat herding
Lucretia Krause - volunteer coordinating
Shanta Stevens - Burn area coordinator, event scheduling
Seth - construction
