reus__
I am a digital artist, musician, engineer and researcher. I have a fascination with the weird and eccentric. The visceral and immediate.
I currently live and work in Amsterdam, where I manage artistic projects and organize educational workshops on music technology at STEIM in Amsterdam.
Click here for my CV
Crackle - iPhone app
Mobile smart controller/interactive audio-visual experience
Crackle is an iPhone app currently in the beta stages of testing. It's a sound and visual instrument with a deceptively simple interface: touch it. Complexity is introduced through a dynamic topological mapping under the surface that keeps the instrument changing as you play it. It also doubles as an encapsulated controller for using this changing landscape to control other systems.. like lighting, remote sound, or whatever. I hope to have Crackle in the Apple app store by early 2012.
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app__
With Crackle I wanted to approach the mobile personal computer (smartphone) as a wholistic digital object, rather than a platform for virtual metaphors. The interaction is visceral and encourages exploration through touch via a non-denotative interface. Sound and visuals are created by directly manipulating arbitrary data on the phone itself. The app is inspired by its namesake, Michel Waisvisz' iconic analog touch-synthesizer the CrackleBox. The CrackleBox puts the fundamental essence of electronic music, electricity, in the hands of a player. Crackle does the same with the fundamental essence of digital media, data.
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research___
I've published some research describing the interaction paradigms and philosophies used in Crackle. The paper "Crackle: A dynamic mobile multitouch topology for exploratory sound interaction" can be found in the 2011 proceedings of the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference (click here to download the paper). This research was also presented in a lecture at the Norwegian Academy of Music and as part of a lecture entitled "Searching for Mobile Music" presented at the Electronic Frequencies festival in Amsterdam.
Future of the Lab
Improv/Experimental Music Collective
Future of the Lab is my latest musical project. It is an experiment in collaborative improv composition. A number of musicians from different cultural and stylistic backgrounds assemble for periodic residencies to explore the idea of composition through playing. The “scores” for our music take the form of conducting games, improv exercises, and on-the-spot songwriting sprints whose methodology will continue to evolve and mature with each session.
A long-term goal of these sessions are to develop a language and improvisation system which is free of stylistic bias (include the bias of free improv itself as a genre). To this end I take great inspiration from metaphors in low-level computer science. Concepts such as memory registers, jump points, and bitwise operations serve as wonderful analogies for building on-the-fly structure from the creative impulses of improvising musicians.
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share alike__
The first sessions were held in early February 2011 with seven talented musicians of wildly diverse backgrounds. The session was a first attempt at using some naive improvisational approaches to compose material for a concept album based upon the Future of the Lab, a truly wonderful collection of essays compiled by Baltan Labs predicting future roles of media labs in a world of highly socialized online knowledge sharing and cheap, ubiquitous technology.
The first product to come out of these sessions is Share Alike, a produced collection of recordings based on the compositional algorithms and command structures we developed during those first sessions. Share Alike is compiled as an album for expected release in early 2012. The cover art is my own handiwork, original photo comes courtesy of Loes Bogers.
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excerpts__
Otherness (4:11) download The Lab in Crisis pt.1 (1:50) download The Lab in Crisis pt.2 (3:35) download The Lab in Crisis pt.3 (2:25) download
Mapping Everything Else
Workshop on brainstorming new instruments and interactive systems
Mapping Everything Else is a workshop where artists and musicians explore the ideas of creating interactive systems from a non-technical approach. Using their bodies, participants are encouraged to explore relationships between gesture, sound, possibility, and limitation through a series of conceptual experiments exploring the notion of a musical system. The workshop was developed through a collaboration between myself, media artist Georgios Papadakis, and researcher/composer Berit Janssen. The workshop has recently been given at STEIM and at the 2011 New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference in Oslo.
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video__
If you are unable to view Quicktime, the video is also available as a FLV, as Windows Media or can be seen on vimeo.com
NON by KIM, Catwalk Show SS2011
60-speaker real-time performance / catwalk installation
I was comissioned by the NON by KIM experimental menswear label to develop a special sound installation for their live catwalk show, premiered at the Amsterdam Fashion Week in July of 2010. To realize this project I worked with media artists Dennis van Doremalen and Eelke Feenstra, and with composer Lars J. Brouwer.
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show___
The catwalk show took place in the large hall of the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. NON by KIM's inspiration for the collection was lost indigenous tribes, so we sought to create a sense of alienation and separation between the audience and models by constructing a wall of localized sound in the space between them.
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installation___
The installation consisted of 60 identical tiny speaker modules divided into groups of four per cable. The cables run the length of the catwalk to a small apartment of amplifiers. The amplified signals come from a 30-channel rig of three MOTU828 interfaces daisy-chained to a computer running Ableton Live and MaxMSP, which is controlled in real-time during the catwalk show.
Early works (pre 2005)
UV-Tracker instrument - 2004
A computer-vision based musical interface that tracks colored objects (gloves, balls, etc..) painted with flourescent colors under ultraviolet light. I used the interface a number of times in live performance, including the premier show at the Florida Electronic Music Studio's Unbalanced Connections concert series (see excerpts below). The tracking software was written in C++ and uses Intel's OpenCV computer vision libraries.
Excerpt from "Samsara", recorded live (0:52) download - Download concert program
Excerpt from "I AM", recorded live (0:57) download
Gesture Based Controllers for Computer Instruments - 2004
My undergraduate honors thesis on gesture based musical controllers. The paper can be downloaded by clicking the image or this link.
Too Much to Say - 2002
Too Much to Say is a net art piece exploring a personal relationship with the omnipresence of noise and energy. Warning: Some links may point to external sites which no longer exist. Another warning: it's loud.
Odds and ends
STEIM Research Group
The STEIM research group is a collection of young artists and researchers exploring means of dealing with complexity in instruments. I've been a part of this group since it's inception in early 2010. Some of the primary topics we have explored together are multi-dimensional mappings, data visualization of musical geometries, and self-organizing structures of musical material for suggesting peformance choices. I'm the computer science expert of the group, and in that role I've written a few custom software applications in C++, C, Cocoa, ChucK, and SuperCollider. We are now wrapping up a set of experiments exploring the possibilities of recording performance data and turning the performance into something that can be played: playing through the work of another performer on the level of physical structure. We're expecting to publish a paper on this work pretty soon.
LiSa Redesign Prototypes
In 2009 I worked with the software team at STEIM to build some prototypes for a new sound engine based on Frank Balde's LiSa live sampling software. The idea here was to have the new LiSa be modular, with a minimalist interface that talks to the engine over a network, via OSC. What I ended up with was a proof of concept that had the sound engine and interface effectively separated, communicating between each other via OSC.
Embedded, low-power computing
I've been researching embedded options as an alternative to laptops for a while now. This research culminated in a three-week artistic residency at studio N.K. in Berlin. Most of the experimental work was done with the Beagleboard, an ARM-based system-on-chip that runs embedded flavors of linux.
Interaction Mapping with Machine Learning
I've been doing some ongoing work building musical systems using machine learning tools to "teach them" how I want them to behave. In particular I've been using the Wekinator, a great machine-learning interactivity tool developed by Rebecca Fiebrink at the Princeton Sound Lab. I built a Wiimote-driven live sampling instrument using Wekinator to "learn" the mappings I wanted. The sound engine was written in ChucK, another nice piece of tech that came out of Princeton.
Performance excerpt (0:57) downloadDeformable meshes via Kinect input
I wanted to get my hands dirty with OpenFrameworks and the kinect, like the tangible table-top, just to see what all the excitement was about. So I created this audio-visual instrument that uses a Delaunay mesh triangulation algorithm to turn the kinect's point cloud into a deformable mesh. I built a simple 30-voice additive synthesizer to be controlled by the mesh movements. It's nice, but I still feel the lag from camera-based systems is too much to serve alone as a musical interface.
Tangible Table-top interface
Back in 2009 everyone was building tangible tabletop interfaces. It was the cool thing to do, and just a fun project to get used to some of the tangible computing ideas that come along with this kind of setup. We built the table in two days using a healthy mix of caffiene, Reactivision, Quartz Composer, duct tape, a beamer, PS3 Eye, some cardboard, and a laser printer.
