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If this is your first time here, just a quick note about the work. I use oscillator-driven oscilloscopes and/or video feedback in 90% of the video work I do. Oscilloscopes are those things you see in 60’s sci-fi movies that can presumably measure the presence of extra-terrestrials. Actually, they just measure electrical impulses on an X, Y, and optional Z axis. Audio is one such electrical impulse.
For the scope work, I’ve written a software instrument in MAX/MSP that sends a 3-channel stream to the three-axis inputs of the oscilloscope (XYZ). Another 4 channels are broadcast to the listener with much of the higher, potentially damaging frequencies filtered out.
Most of the videos here are excerpts from live shows, with minimal to no traditional video editing. Parts that look like edits are actually LF Square waves applied to the over scope stream.
Click here for a quick video tutorial of how oscilloscope graphics work
I've posted this site as is for now (adding audio and video streaming content in the next weeks) If you need to find something, goto the old site, the link is in the footer. I'm trying out a purely visual/data-driven interface in the spirit of Edward Tufte, the color watch and candy dots. You get to be a guinea pig!
Work spaces are color-coded. General topic entries (like this one), are green.Videos are blue. Audio is pink. Events are yellow. To select an entry click on a small dot in the panel above. To close a section click on a big dot in the lower panel. The small dots are ordered chronologically starting with the newest entries on the top left.
This is the end of the set from the Issue show with Nate Boyce on 9/4/09. It's from a larger composed piece I also screened parts of at the SF Electronic Music Festival.
Sorry, this video may take a few seconds to load.. I have not gotten around to implementing a progress bar.
A Live Oscilloscope set from the Spring of 2007. A fully non-scored approach is used, whereby only the process audio is broadcast through delayed feedback and distortion. The images are generated pre-fx. The sound in this recording was unfortunately distorted by the camera.
Video Synthesizer explorations from a residency at Experimental Television Center. A Sine Wave is driving a CV Step sequencer. The Sequencer steps through several video channels running through the Sandin and Video Colorizer. The sound is mostly the Sine Wave.
Oscillator-driven video feedback from a residency at ETC. A sine wave drives the step sequencer. The sequencer cv out controls several other oscillators which generate the ostinato as well as several attributes of the video colorizer being fed into the video feedback circuit.
Oscilloscope improvisation with the early 'Synthiscope' prototypes.
Everyone has to (or should) use Nam Jun Paik's Wobulator at least once at ETC.
Also produced at the Experimental Television Center. Another feedback loop with fairlight video synthesizer mixed into the signal.
Curated for the Free to be.. You and Me Invitational. This is the last chapter of 70's sex-ed phenom of the same name (not including 'Invitational') randomly chopped up and run through an oscilloscope. The H-sync resolution is partially controlled by sine waves, which also form the score of the exercise.
Earlier scope and feedback, still using a 'scored' approach, but utilizing more of the process sound (the audio that's used to generate the image).
A quick, cheery tutorial on the basics of lissajous patterns.
Oscilloscope piece produced for Transparent Processes, an 'extended cinema' program curated by Nick Hallett for The Kitchen. This uses little to no process audio to emphasize the quasi-narrative quality of the image.
This set was first performed at Ocularis in the Spring of 2005.
9 'discovered' videos
curated by andrea monti
"But in truth, should I meet with gold or spices in great quantity, I shall remain till I collect as much as possible, and for this purpose I am proceeding solely in quest of them." Christopher Columbus
"You discovered America!" is what your mother tells you, in Italy, when you think you discovered for the first time something amazing, and instead you've just found something everyone else already knows since ages. A variant can be "you discovered hot water!". I mean, everybody knows that America exists, right?
Well, that's exactly the feeling I have in presenting this program of 9 short videos realised by renowned artists who have been working in New York for many years, and many of you already know probably, but I meet only now in my personal trajectory. I went ashore only 6 months ago coming from Lucca, a little roman city in the hearth of Tuscany, where I run a film festival for the 'happy few'. Hai scoperto l'America! is the second stage (the first was called NYC TO PAL and took place in Lucca last October) of a larger project aiming to make these works circulate both in Italy and New York.
The other main purpose is to bring in the context of contemporary art galleries very interesting artists related mostly to avant-garde and experimental video-making, whose work is remarkable and particulary predisposed. White Box is the perfect venue for this to happen: very watchful and open towards the domain of video-art, sensitive, thoughtful.
For my experience, I have to say, I discovered here - beyond my already very high expectations - an experimental-video "El Dorado", and I think it's a shame that so many extraordinary works don't have in Europe the attention and the recognition they deserve, making the ocean seem bigger than it really is. Well, let's just say, so far.
If I wanted to explain why this show, I would say that you don't explain love, it just happens. And it was love at first sight with these works. Simply, I came and this is what I found. I mean, not ALL I found, I'm not so lazy!
The very special ones.
La Superette 2009 will transform a space at 210 Front Street for three days, creating a temporary store that will present a huge selection of artist-made multiples from around the country. Now in it’s 11th year, La Superette is one of the few crafty events with a non-commercial goal: to support and distribute the works of independent artists and designers. The variety of items include hacked clothes, assemblage accessories, housewares, artists books and CDs. Emerging once a year, just in time for holiday shopping, La Superette offers the most unique and affordable shopping experience for hundreds of shoppers year after year. This year, more than ever, is a time to celebrate the craftiest and be a part of an event that represents the true spirit of New York City.
La Superette 2009 includes live performances by Arpège (Nick Hallett and Ray Sweeten), Anwar Pruitt, Maria Chavez, Carrie Dashow, Pixel Form, Todd Bailey, NAUM f/ Antoine Catala, David Linton, and David Galbraith. La Superette 2009 will also feature Rainbow Cloud City (an art installation created by the collaboration HappyFun, Erik Z., and Rachel Nelson), Edible Winter Snowballs, Coal, Icicles, Pine Cones, and Warm Drinks by Rachael Morrison, and a free ScrapCycle gift-wrapping station by Analogous Projects.
This year’s participating artists include: Ann LePore, Amanda Mayoff, Ben Fino-Radin, Carrie Dashow, Secret School and the K.I.D.S., Cindy Yoon, Daphne Bernard, A Rarer Borealis, Daina Platais Ortiz, unxyloid, Hadas Hinkis, deChow, Jennifer Sullivan, kaboom!press, Kimm Alfonso, Katherine Tali Hinkis, Chiu, RingMan, Canine Orthodontia, Lilah Freedland, LoVid, Loren Siems, Melissa Barrett, Michelle Rosenberg, Molly Dilworth, Madeleine Fix, Miss Chief, Neg-Fi, Mustache Sisters, Nathaniel Kassel, Peter Jacobson, Raquel Hecker, Steven Anglin, Samantha Merritt, sallykismet, Sanjay, Susie Reiss, teamtichenor, heartfast
"Void Ratio: Scope Tutorial" and "Vatican Satellite" will be screened Wednesday evening at Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow.
NYC to PAL. New videos from NY
I will be sharing the bill with Nate Boyce.. Boyce is a video artist and musician who lives and works in San Francisco. His audio/visual works investigate the liminal regions of human perception through kinetically charged, visceral abstractions. His work exploits inherent plasticity of electronic sound and image through the use of customized analog and digital tools with which he has developed a formal language informed the history of structural and psychedelic filmmaking. He has performed and exhibited at galleries and film festivals such as the Scope Art Fair, New York (2009) The Luggage Store, San Francisco (2009), New York Underground Film Festival, New York (2008), Deitch Projects New York (2008), The Stone, New York (2008), Center For Contemporary Art Glasgow, Glasgow (2007), Galerie Alt Neu Brukte, Frankfurt, Germany (2007), the Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2006), the Aurora Picture Show, Houston (2006), Club Transmediale, Berlin, Germany (2006), Monkeytown, New York, (2006) Queens Nails Annex, San Francisco (2005), Yerba Buena Center For the Arts (2004)
Presenting the Nowthenafter album in SurroundSound
Ikue Mori & DJ Olive
Judy Nylon & SA
David Linton & Charles Cohen
Marina Rosenfled
Ray Sweeten
Treyce Warren
Mark C
Mal Torrance
Stuart Argabright
Nick Hallett—singer, composer, and downtown impresario—creates a four-part series at the New Museum theater connecting the human voice to multimedia ritual. In collaboration with a rotating cast of performers and artists, Hallett presents original music and performance alongside new interpretations of celebrated vocal works by Meredith Monk and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The singing voice is seen here in its rawest state, stripped of its language-based sensibilities, and more as a flexible instrument of sound, capable of producing protosemantic, acoustic phenomena. As such, concepts of drone, repetition, and improvisation prevail over the tropes of traditional song. Each evening is staged using pure light, illuminated objects, and projection methods derived from structuralist film and the psychedelic lightshow to create a live, interdisciplinary synthesis of sound and image. Taking from John Cage’s maxim that “art should not be different than life, but an action within life,” Voice & Light Systems revisits the Zen-Buddhism-inspired methodologies popular among Western artists during the 1960s and ’70s as ritual practices in and of themselves, envisioning their scores much as sacred texts in a pre-literary culture, to be rendered as expressions of devout “art consciousness.” With this experimental tradition as a starting point, Hallett begins to develop new work for contemporary contemplation, with the voice—the most basic instrument of artistic expression—at its core.
Hallett’s monthlong residency ends tonight with a new multimedia ritual created by Auroville, a “tribute band” to the experimental community dedicated to the guru Sri Aurobindo on the southeastern coast of India, founded by his spiritual partner, known as the Mother. Auroville is performed as an immersive, audiovisual travelogue by a collective of musicians and multimedia artists, featuring Hallett, Ana Matronic, Seth Kirby, Zach Layton, Brock Monroe, and Ray Sweeten. A wraparound projection design will set the stage for Hallett’s chanting and electronic music while Matronic performs on the glass armonica, an integrated series of glass bowls, popularized as a musical instrument by Benjamin Franklin. Hallett and Matronic, alongside performing artists Caitlin Kirby, Renée Soucy and Juan-Carlos Castro, act as celebrants for a universal ritual of art, devoid of specific icons or dogmas (much like its namesake in India). Sound design and electro-acoustics by Jeff Cook. This performance will make heavy use of stroboscopic imagery.
Nick Hallett—singer, composer, and downtown impresario—creates a four-part series at the New Museum theater connecting the human voice to multimedia ritual. In collaboration with a rotating cast of performers and artists, Hallett presents original music and performance alongside new interpretations of celebrated vocal works by Meredith Monk and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The singing voice is seen here in its rawest state, stripped of its language-based sensibilities, and more as a flexible instrument of sound, capable of producing protosemantic, acoustic phenomena. As such, concepts of drone, repetition, and improvisation prevail over the tropes of traditional song. Each evening is staged using pure light, illuminated objects, and projection methods derived from structuralist film and the psychedelic lightshow to create a live, interdisciplinary synthesis of sound and image. Taking from John Cage’s maxim that “art should not be different than life, but an action within life,” Voice & Light Systems revisits the Zen-Buddhism-inspired methodologies popular among Western artists during the 1960s and ’70s as ritual practices in and of themselves, envisioning their scores much as sacred texts in a pre-literary culture, to be rendered as expressions of devout “art consciousness.” With this experimental tradition as a starting point, Hallett begins to develop new work for contemporary contemplation, with the voice—the most basic instrument of artistic expression—at its core.
Tonight Hallett premieres a new composition, Whispering Exercises, for women’s voices (Katie Eastburn, Rachel Henry Rachel Mason, Daisy Press), harp (Shelley Burgon), and electronic pulsations generated from customized software created by Ray Sweeten, with sound design by Zach Layton. This is a concert version of music currently being developed for a new opera created by Hallett and the video and performance artist Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 10, to premiere at The Kitchen in Spring 2010. Folk song forms such as rounds and hockets are layered over electronic arpeggiations, in addition to acoustic phenomena such as Shepard Tones (a series of rising pitches which elicits feelings of weightlessness), while lumia and oscillographics float throughout the space.
Loosely inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 masterpiece of psychedelic cinema The Holy Mountain, ISSUE Project Room and Galapagos Art Space will collaborate to host a sumptuous event for the senses. Marking ISSUE’s sixth anniversary, the event will be part costume party and part benefit, with raffles, prizes, photobooths, auctions and some wild performances.
The evenings Delights and Highlights:
JG Thirlwell (FOETUS) with Ed Pastorini and Owen Bloedow
Ray Sweeten – live video and performance
Brock Monroe – live visuals (member of Joshua Light Show)
"Straight and Narrow" (1970), Film screening by Tony Conrad with soundtrack by John Cale and Terry Riley
Films by Martha Colburn & Marie Losier
Elysian Fields
MV Carbon
members of Excepter
DJ Fabio from WFMU's "Strength through Failure"
And others TBA
Another Unity Gain approaches. I don't know what this one will have in store, but I don know I will be doing a duet with Zach Layton. As usual there will be two show times, 7:30-ish and 10. Reservations are recommended!
This one is something of a homecoming for me, since I used to work as a 'sound guy' at Galapagos and also bartended EVERY Darmstadt show since its inception back in... 2005? 4? ..when the big G was on North 6th. I have not been to this new Galapagos, but I hear it's actually pretty cool. It probably doesn't even have that New York bar smell yet which, depending on your inclinations, is great or terrible. I will be performing scope and video feedback jams fresh from playing at the SFEMF. Possibly with guests. Possibly not.
I will be doing an extended Oscilloscope performance for the first time ON THE WEST COAST. I have to say I am very excited about it. I share the evening with Edmund Campion (with Thomas Buckner) and Tujiko Noriko.
Sevilla was rad.
Matt Welch performs Bhima Swarga (Balinese Journey of the Soul 2006) with Ikue Mori* and 6-piece gamelan ensemble. This collaboration is a modern spin on the Balinese Wayang Kulit, or shadow puppet theatre. Ikue Mori has added image processing to her unique sound manipulations to create a brilliant audio/visual performance animating characters from traditional Balinese paintings. Welch's accompanying compositions for Balinese gamelan are based on bagpipe laments. Utilizing a revolutionary new gamelan species called Semara Dana, Welch is able to take his starting material of excerpts and arrangements of pibroch, the classical music of the bagpipe and completely map it onto the pitch spectrum and idiomatic rhythmic, formal and textural practices of the Balinese gamelan.
In this, the very first installment of What the Dormouse Said, Ray Sweeten and Zach Layton perform new and old takes on sound/image generation. Using the OpenGL protocol, Layton produces dimensional wire-frame geometrics and extracts lush sound abstractions from the visual field. Approaching at 180 degrees head-on, Sweeten digitally synthesizes two sets of waveforms which are graphed to XY coordinates on a pre-pc era analog oscilloscope. Joining us this evening, the live circuit building stylings of Loud Objects.
We offer a twice-yearly video art program - a semiennial - of the high water marks, the standouts, the stuff that made an impression. The immersive video equivalent of \"come hang out a my place and listen to some records.\" The curatorial criteria is no more complicated than this is the best new stuff we've seen. We've continued to be turned on to great work and we're just itching to pass it along.
Inspired by a film artist´s recent discovery that his 16mm film collection included copies of the 1974 film Free to Be ....You and Me, more than twenty artists were invited to rework, restage, and respond the original´s all-too-memorable segments.
The Film-Makers’ Coop held its third annual Film and Music Benefit on April 23rd at Angel Orensanz Center in the Lower East Side. Within the beautiful, gothic surroundings of the former synagogue hundreds of the Coop’s friends met up to celebrate the art of the experimental avantgarde while enjoying themselves, each other, and the mesmerizing film and music performances. An immersive evening of live music by Philip Glass, Bill Frisell Trio, Pedro Soler, The Clogs, Irena and Vojtech Havel, Dorit Chrysler, Benoît Pioulard, Ray Sweeten, members of The National, and Now We Are Here feat. Jonas Mekas, performing to experimental films by Robert Breer, Marie Menken, Maya Deren, Harry Smith, Bill Morrison, Bradley Eros, Jonas Mekas, Lynne Sachs & Mark Street, and Paul Sharits.
Media Archeology is here! Get ready for three mindbending days of audiovisual kinesis featuring hackers, benders, builders, and overall enthusiasts of the analogue aesthetic. These artists invent their own instruments of sound and light, and find new uses for technologies of the past to create future-forward entertainment. Thursday night features Bruce McClure and Ray Sweeten at Aurora Picture Show
A composer and software designer, working in the intersection between image and sound using a hybrid of digital and analog media.
He has worked and performed with Michael Galasso, Sesame Street, Vito Acconci, Zach Layton, Alex Waterman, Ha-Yang Kim, Nick Hallett, Nate Boyce, Robert Wilson, Experimental Television Center, Harvestworks and many others.
Sweeten has performed and screened at The Kitchen, PS1, NY Underground Film Festival, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, CinemaTexas, Liverpool Biennial, The Stone, Issue Project Room, Aurora Picture Show, The New Museum, Lux2008 Spain, and has held youth workshops for electronic music at Community Musicworks (RI), Vibe Songmakers (NY), and The Guggenheim Museum (NY).
Ray is currently an Interface Engineer at LBi IconNicholson in New York City.