Giedion/Kircher is my vehicle for applying art, music and technology — along with concept and narrative development, information architecture, UX design, etc. — to create brand experiences, immersive environments and various other interactive media solutions for corporate clients, educational institutions and production companies.
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(more…)The Brewery Artwalk is a twice annual open studio weekend at the worlds largest art complex ….
The creation of the Brewery Arts Complex began in 1982 at the site of the Pabst Blue Ribbon Brewery. With the passing of the Artist-In-Residence code, artists could rent live/work space in industrially zoned buildings. We rented only to artists and that is our policy to this day.
In July 1997, the LA Weekly called us “the world’s largest artist-in-residence community” and in a March 1999 Los Angeles Times article The Brewery was quoted as the “world’s largest art complex.” These are true lofts, not apartments, in industrial buildings that are a part of what has become a uniquely vibrant and creative community.
While moving forward on a new body of work in 2023 for Lightspace Modulator — my continuing intermedia art endeavor — I’ve also been taking some time for a look back at the history of the project and a review of some of the conceptual underpinnings of the process.
With the release of the new album by the legendary German rhythmic noise act Synapscape (Ant-Zen) comes the official video for “Dirty Deal”:
This piece — built around aggressive, dynamic 3D typography — was composed of footage generated entirely (and live, in real time) by the VSx visual synthesizer, making use of the UDP connection to Ableton Live — with some simple compositing and editing after the fact.
If you’re curious, some “making of” notes can be found at the Coredark Laboratories blog:
See more at lightspacemodulator.com.
Finishing off 2019 with a live audiovisual set in Barcelona: this was an opportunity to give the latest version of the live performance video tool a test run in front of a festival audience. With only minor UI issues that were easily worked around, the touchscreen-driven visual instrument performed admirably on stage. On return, I used VSx (after “VS3,” “VS4” and “VS5” I’ve given up on numbers as a naming convention) as a presentation tool (imagine a realtime motion graphics version of a PowerPoint deck) at a local Los Angeles forum to tell the story of the event and describe some key features of the application. With the full feature set now tested in front of live, discerning audiences, I’m looking forward to further visual adventures in 2020.
In July 2018 at a venue in downtown LA I gave a talk that described some of the background, historical references and motivation behind the development of the VS4 project. This discussion touched upon a range of topics — from Wagner and early 20th-century avant-garde art, to UX and design of the current revision of the software visual instrument.
The venue was spec.la, a monthly salon-sort-of-event for inventors, artists and various types of mad scientists. While the sessions are invite-only, videos of many of the varied presentations are freely available on YouTube.
The VS4 (“Visual Synthesizer, iteration 4”) project is finally at a point where it can be called a Beta version. While I’ve just been running simple test patterns through it so far, the basic architecture and feature set of this tool for audiovisual performance and real-time motion graphics are pretty much complete and functional (though there are still a number of secondary features and options that need to be implemented before it’s really usable; “Bare Bones Beta” might be a more accurate title).
This is the first in a suite of three tools (and associated processes) currently under development for furthering realtime audiovisual experiences and interactive storytelling across multiple media. While each component has a distinct purpose and audience (ranging from practical to experimental, commercial to fine art, tactical to theoretical), they all share a common architecture built around symbolic structures and patterns. (more…)