Introduction by Joshua Pablo Rosenstock (Chair)

Panelists:
The Orbitar (Kate Riegle-van West)
Sledgehammer-operated Keyboard (Taylor Hokanson)
Arduino-based Video Synth: An Open Source Interface (Sabine Gruffat)
Intimate Architectures/Social Gestures/Cinema Ontologies: Objects, Actions, Transitions, People and Environments (N_DREW aka Andrew Bucksbarg)

This piece re-imagines/re-wires clothing for a globalized, media-saturated era.  It situates the wearer as a sonic hunter/gatherer, exploring and documenting the sonic landscape of the postmodern city.

The autonomous machine embedded in the jackets amplifies the contemporary trends of ubiquitous, wearable electronic devices that constantly reassure us with their chattering voices, and, like John Cage’s compositions, seeks to recognize music in the sounds of everyday life. It weaves together sonic fragments of a multiplicity of voices and localities into a perpetually-remixed soundtrack to accompany the wearer’s journeys into public space.

The jackets themselves represent a trans-global remix of textile traditions, incorporating shibori and other Asian, African, and American techniques, as well as found and recycled materials. Brightly-colored and richly textured, they invite curiosity from spectators and encourage interaction with the wearer.

The project I’m working on is fun because it’s a collaboration with my Mom, an accomplished fiber artist. She has always been a major influence on my aesthetic sensibilities, so our styles work well together.

The piece is called Nomadic Remix Jacket.

After presenting my research on self-contained digital sound modules at the conference portion, I fulfilled a lifelong dream by performing with the Parasites at the legendary Cabaret Voltaire, birthplace of the Dada art movement and still an exciting venue for avant-garde art. I was part of a ‘wired freak show’ with an international cast of performers who mixed technology with provocation and humor.

The Sound Parasites are designed to feed off the verbal energy of sound-emitting hosts, disrupting their sonic integrity but providing an annoyingly/amusingly glitched remix of the original sound material. They are worn by the artist, who then interacts with the public, or they can be alternately deployed by being spontaneously attached to other performers (or any sound-producing medium) to form a simultaneous audio intervention. Their autonomous chatter satirizes both the vapidity of our current culture of ubiquitous communication devices and the elaborately futile surveillance that characterizes our current political regime.

The Parasites are built using a version of my Sound Modules, consisting of a custom-designed circuit board, PIC microcontroller, and control software and pattern algorithms written in C, as well as a condenser microphone and several small speakers.

In a sense, this is a ‘Marxist’ piece in that it attempts to overcome the alienation that separates the creators of a product and its consumers.

This piece manifests the attraction/ repulsion relationship I have with TV. It provides a hyper-stimulating barrage of fast-paced images and sounds, yet frustrates attempts to actually ‘watch’ it in a conventional sense.

Created as the culmination of my MFA in Art & Technology, this electronic installation is run by a MAX/MSP/Jitter patch that both outputs video samples and talks to a PIC microcontroller. The PIC is programmed in C with my rhythmic pattern algorithms and controls custom video switching electronics.