Misnomer dance troupe
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I worked with Misnomer Dance Company from October 2006- April 2007 as part of a residency to encourage new audiences for dance. We explored various means of integrating dance, technology and video into performace, making it as “human as possible.The entire endeavor was ambitions, with 2 primary goals (for my involvement). The first was to create a new work, and show the work in progress, with the hope for extending the residency another six months to premiere a new show. Unfortunately the funds weren’t available and we had to abandon our explorations after the work-in-progress showing. Video ought be showing up soon.
The other aspect involved outreach, getting new audiences interested in performance in general, dance in particular. We created blogs, and posted videos of rehearsals on YouTube, encouraged people who normally would not attend and hypothesized about working in different venues, virtual (like Second Life) and real (alternative spaces that are not typically associated with dance). On this front, the project really took off, and Chris is exploring these outreach initiatives with Jaki Levy, our intern during the spring portion of the residency.
Instructions on the Removal of Birds from the Head
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A collaboration with Manlio LoConte (audio) and Greg Howard (text). Instructions on the Removal of Birds from the Head is a work of fiction composed of fragments, anecdotes, self contained stories, unfinished stories, lists and vignettes, all relating to an unknown disease that surfaces among the populace in an unknown country. The book details the disease’s many and seemingly unrelated symptoms, the stories of patients and presumed patients’ experience with the disease, the attempt by four doctors to understand and diagnose it, and the world that created it.
Using custom audio and video software, Manlio and I accompanied Greg’s text and created an improvisational performance for Anti-Gravity at the Tank. Manlio and I had been working with one another for several years at that point, and Greg and I had been friends for over 15 years. However, this was the first time we had all performed together (and Greg’s first reading in a setting like this).
9vdc
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For Harvestworks‘ ‘Who is in Control‘ symposium, I was asked to perform. Taking into account the nature of the meeting, I created a performance rig that was variously under my control, and not. It consisted of an audio circuit, primarily made of a 555 timer, a bunch of capacitors and resistors, powered off a 9vold battery. This audio circuit fed into a hybrid analog/digital Atari visualizer, which was plugged into a video mixer and computer. The rig had so many levels of parameters, it was difficult to truly say who was in control.
Watch a brief excerpt from the performance. (Quicktime required)
The entire setup was designed to reuse as much from one source as possible, hence the 9 volt battery as a staring point. The connecting components twisted and warped the electronic signal in way that were wholly unexpected (including acting as a receiver from a local radio station).
2cp : Days of Play
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Manlio LoConte and I were selected to be part of the inagural Outside/Input workshop at Richard Foreman’s Ontological Theater. We dubbed ourselves 2CP (since we were 2 members of the short-lived bicycle group the Christ Punchers), and submitted a proposal that detailed how we wished to explore using technology as a third performer. We created an elaborate setup that involved children’s games and a tree-based branching structure of the computer’s decision process that would drive both the audio & video content and aesthetic.
As time went on in the incubator, we started to drift more and more to a theatrical expression of these ideas, our original abstractions were morphed into a less experiential and more narrative direction. Neil Hellegers was added to the mix as a performer, and we worked in a few different ways, through text, audio and video, each of us taking on each role at least once.
While I was happy in most regards with the final output, I also felt that perhaps we went too far into the narrative area (though there was not real dialogue, barring the texts we were reading from). Regardless of how we felt, Richard Foreman said about us at our premier that the piece was “polished,” we “could be the next Blue man group,” and that he “hated it.” We all thought it was rather silly that he felt we gave too much to the audience. But we were glad he almost called us assholes (which was out intention all along).
All the Right Bits
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‘All the Right Bits’ was a new media performance project which examined the difference between analog and digital means of expression using custom designed gestural interfaces and software instruments to create a plastic audio/visual experience. It was performed with Michael Sharon at the Graduate Student Showcase in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU
Watch a recording of the audio/ video output (Quicktime required)
The statement from our original proposal :
We seek to examine the loss of information in the transition from analog to digital, be it in a gesture, image, or sound. By looking at these “unsampled” pieces of information, we can begin to draw out those facets of artistic expression that are lost as we move from one form to the other.
Using simple human gestures as our analog expression and using this as the input for sound and video synthesizers, we seek to deform the resulting digital output to bring its array of ones and zeroes (the bits) to an aesthetically and philosophically engaging expression of technologically mediated performance.
Magtavox
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The Magtavox (seen above in a very rough sketch) was an idiosyncratic audio/video controller. Unfortunately the piece was destroyed before adequate documentation was made, but it was comprised of 5 ribbon sensors (made from scratch), metal tubing, poker buttons, and a fair amount of wood. It looked like it belonged next to a moonshine distillery. Its unique look and design was created in an attempt to make a more gestural controller for a laptop based audio/video performance.The controller spoke to a Max/MSP/Jitter patch that was networked across 2 computers. One processed audio, creating a vocoder-like effect on pre-recored bluegrass music. The other machine was running a video application. The 5 buttons selected preset settings, while the ribbon sensors controlled different parameters in each preset. This was a personalized tool that would be difficult for anyone unfamiliar with the programming or design to work with.
It was planned for this to become part of the “digital jug band” named dactilde, but after a successful 3 days at the ITP Winter show in 2003, the instrument became irreparably damaged in transit to my home.
The name was shorthand for Magnetic Tape Vocoder.