Workshops and performance Bruges 2002
1. General information
Within the context of Bruges 2002 - cultural capital - IPEM was invited to lead a workshop and organize a performance with young people, using multimedia. We decided to relate this to the mega project, and concentrate on young and technology oriented artists. The venue was the new concert building esp. built for the festival. With 15 young artists we organized a 3-day workshop, then there was a period of unmonitored work, ending with a 1 hour performance, dealing with emotions as a content issue.
2. Aim
There were a combination of targets:
- introducting young multidisciplinary and multimedia oriented artists to realtime analysis and synthesis, and relating the content of the mega project to it
- thinking with them about using eyesw, pd, max-msp-jitter and some other tools, as engines for constructing expressive actions
3. Concept
The workshops were structured as following:
- day 1: introduction of artists, technological setup
- day 2: creating "pieces" based on patches
- day 3: communicating with data, and structuring a performance
The performance was structured as following:
1 hour of continuously moving over 7 emotional labels and adjusting the "way
of playing" to it, with the audio and visual patches that were made during the
workshop. The labels themselves were used within a creative context of realtime
text animations. Special attention was given to the use of an ethernet network
for the communication and data transfer. participants:
The participants were mainly in the age category 20-30, and had somehow an
artistic interest. Most of them were active in the field of visual and audio
performances.
Contacts:
aeeckhaut@pi.be, agnetz@caramail.com, angelo.vermeulen@hisk.edu, bert@rekalldesign.com,
bolwerk@freegates.be, caroledelaey@hotmail.com, forward@pandora.be, hik@boutiquevizique.com, kris_vleeschouwer@hotmail.com, kurt.stockman@pandora.be, n.de.gols@pandora.be, tom@zzz.kotnet.org, undacova1980@icqmail.com, waverecycler@hotmail.com
4. Relation with MEGA
The idea of using a network setup for communicating with people was tested here. In a common setup with a common protocol (osc) each of teh participants' data could control anyone else's. The idea of having similar patches that could be changed and controlled dynamically - based on emotional values oculd prove to be fruitful for analysing emotion-based synthesis. Most of the tools developed for mega were used. In the performance it was clear that the content was built on a vision of human creativity, reflected on the inductive idea of showing emotions as causes for expressivity.
5. Technical description
5.1. Hardware and software set-up
IPEM's mega computers, all the rest consisted of the participant's computers and a network infrastructure. 4 projectors and a pa system provided by bruges 2002. The software used in this workshop was depending on the participants' tools, and apart from Eyesweb and PD, also Max-MSP-Jitter, Flash (controlled by PD) were added.
Of course the objects developed by IPEM (ear~ and SMLib) were introduced.
5.2. Description of the employed patches
Participants were developing patches for motion tracking, audio and visual synthesis (bitmap, vector, video, 3D/GL), text motion, and networking.
The setup was a small ethernet network and several participants were while motiontracking sharing this information to the others within the osc protocol. This allowed for instance a PD sound patch to communicate with Flash and Javascript for the realtime generation of vectorized images.
6. Performance evaluation
Bruges 2002 is a major cultural event in Europe and the participation of IPEM with a group of 15 young artists, working with the ideas and development by the mega project, is an important contribution. The workshops gathered a special group of new artists coming to the cultural field, ready to transform this decade, in an enthousiastic and collaborative way. The staging of a special concert, in between performance and interactive installation, was certainly strange. It is important to let this happen within a high level cultural festival, and it certainly gained a lot of interest from the audience.
7. media
- http://www.ipem.rug.ac.be/activities/200210WorkshopBrugge.html
- http://www.tinck.be/index.cfm/act/show/event/2803
- announcement of the workshop
- patches within pd + eyesweb + max-msp-jitter
- dv video tapes of the preparations and performances
- quicktime movies for website + cd