jonathan_reus
Jonathan Reus (US/NL) is an artist and educator working with sound, electronics, computing technologies and social artefacts. Through improvised music and sound performances he investigates the alien-but-entangled relationship we share with our ecosystems of machines and information. His background includes studies in mathematics, folk art, music composition, artificial intelligence and painting. In the past he has been a computer science teacher, Fulbright research fellow, banjo picker, and cyber-hobo.
Jonathan has given talks and done workshops on music, people and machines at the NIME (New Instruments for Musical Expression) conference in Oslo, LIG Art Hall in Seoul, and at Electronic Frequencies Festival in Amsterdam and at STEIM, where he currently works developing professional workshops and organizing educational collaborations.
Crackle - iPhone app
Mobile surface controller/interactive audio-visual object
Crackle is an iPhone application 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 is also an encapsulated surface idiom for remotely controlling any system (lighting, remote sound, etc.) that can be interfaced with OSC. Crackle is planned to be in the Apple app store by late 2012.
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app__
Crackle is an approach to the mobile personal computer (smartphone) as a wholistic digital object, rather than a platform for virtual metaphors. The interaction paradigm plays off the flatness of the "one-device-to-rule-them-all" general purpose approach of the smartphone, encouraging exploration through touch via a completely non-denotative interface. Sound and visuals are created from arbitrary data on the phone itself. Crackle's namesake, Michel Waisvisz' iconic analog touch-synthesizer the CrackleBox, carries a similar non-referential gestalt. Waisvisz once stated that, at its root, electronic music was about electricity - that it should be electric. In searching for a similar material essence in computing technologies we might consider 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
Rapid Form-finding Music Workshops
Future of the Lab is an experiment in collaborative composition as playing. It is a rapid-prototyping tool for new music. A collection of musicians from different cultural and stylistic backgrounds assemble for short periods to explore for two days a rapid compositional approach. Although improvisational exercises form a core element of the composition strategy, the Future of the Lab is not an improv group or jam session. The end goal is the creation of formal structures. Future of the lab approaches to composing take the form of conducting games, improv exercises, metaphors, and on-the-spot songwriting sprints whose methodology continues to evolve and mature with each session.
A longer-term goal of Future of the Lab is the development of a freewheeling composition system which is necessarily free of stylistic bias and allows performance and composing to form a self regulating system. Concepts from cybernetics and computing serve as analogies for building on-the-fly relationships.
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share alike__
The first sessions were held in early February 2011 with seven musicians of wildly diverse backgrounds. The session was a first attempt at using naive improvisational approaches to compose material for an album of material based upon the Future of the Lab, a 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.
Share Alike is a produced collection of recordings based on the compositional algorithms and command structures developed during these first sessions. Share Alike is compiled as an album for expected release in late 2012.
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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
Concept workshop for new instruments
Mapping Everything Else is a workshop where artists and musicians explore new new computer instruments from a non-technical approach. Using their bodies and voices, participants explore relationships between gesture, sound, metaphors, and affordances through a series of thought experiments exploring essential considerations of musical performance systems. The instrument is deconstructed: first as a library of sonic relationships, then as a complex system, and finally as a navigable landscape. The workshop was developed at STEIM through a collaboration between myself, media artist Georgios Papadakis, and researcher/composer Berit Janssen - with helpful advice from Kristina Andersen and Joel Ryan of STEIM. The workshop has been given at STEIM and at the 2011 New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference in Oslo.
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video__
Mapping Everything Else comp from Jonathan Reus on Vimeo.
"Mapping Everything Else" Workshop at NIME 2011 from STEIM Amsterdam on Vimeo.
NON by KIM, Catwalk Show SS2011
60-speaker real-time performance / catwalk installation
Comission from the NON by KIM experimental menswear label to develop a multi-multi-channel sound installation for their live catwalk show, premiered at the Amsterdam Fashion Week in July of 2010. This project was realized 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 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.
(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. The interface was featured in 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 my own personal relationship with the omnipresence of noise, energy, and information in post-industrial society. Warning: Some links may point to external sites which no longer exist. Also, it can get pretty loud, turn down your speakers.
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. For our research I've written a few custom software applications in C++, C, Cocoa, ChucK, and SuperCollider.
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
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. The Beagle has come a long way since my residency. It's now a fairly robust platform (especially for sound). See Satellite CCRMA for more information.
Interaction Mapping with Machine Learning
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 machine-learning interactivity tool developed by Rebecca Fiebrink at the Princeton Sound Lab. Built a number of Wiimote-driven live sampling instruments using Wekinator. Sound engines written in ChucK, another lovely (if not a little tempramental) piece of software from Princeton.
Performance excerpt (0:57) downloadDeformable meshes via Kinect input
Audio-visual instrument that uses a Delaunay mesh triangulation algorithm to turn the kinect's point cloud into a deformable mesh. Interaction with the mesh drives a 30-voice additive synthesizer.
Tangible Table-top interface 2009
An experiment with tangible computing in the wake of the Reactivision-driven explosion of the TUIO protocol. The table was a proof of concept project, built in two days using a healthy mix of caffiene, Quartz Composer, duct tape, a beamer, PS3 Eye, some cardboard, and some quickly printed fiducial markers.
