ArtCast in association with moves08, Week 3
 Released 24th April 2008
For the third week of podcasts exploring the moves08 festival theme of the interaction between movement and sound, three videos and one audio piece have been selected. There is a subtlety in the execution of these pieces which crosses the line between calming or contemplative and something more unnerving and sinister. Image: Squeak E Clean + Dr. Woohoo: Solar |
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Programme:
Audio Podcasti:
Kevin Logan: Moving Parts #1 / slow spindle (9 min 23 sec)
Video Podcast:
EcoArtTech: Untitled Landscapes for Portable Media players #1 (1 min 44 sec)
Squeak E. Clean + Dr. WooHoo: Solar (1 min 09 sec)
Lynne Williams: CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS air stream (2 min 00 sec)
Further information:
Audio Podcast:
Kevin Logan is a sound designer and digitali artist based in London.
“Moving Parts #1 / slow spindle” is a sonic piece which spans the areas of soundscape and experimental music, combining an interest in the incidental noises incorporated in the production and recording of music and sound; Unintended feedback / vocal pops etc, often painstakingly edited out, and, their digital equivalent, the hum of cooling fans and whir of over burdened hard drives. A by-product of using virtuali sound studios is still physical movement and mechanical noise. The track is made up solely from audio samples of computer hard drives spinning, searching and failing.
Video podcast:
This week three video pieces have been selected, from the New York based collaborative duo EcoArtTech, New Mexico's Dr Woohoo (with sound from Squeak E. Clean) and the UK's Lynne Williams.
“Untitled Landscapes for Portable Media Players #1” is the first in a series of four short experimental movies intended for viewing on portable media players. “Untitled Landscapes” disrupts the portable media player experience by infusing them with classical landscapes. However, these landscapes are inverted, shifting, and ever-changing. The aim is to question the relationship between technology and culture: Is there a way to imagine the natural environment that is neither romanticized nor a source of exploitable resources to drive an ongoing modernization? What happens when technological developments outpace the capacity for culture to respond to them? The full “Untitled Landscapes” series is available for download to portable media players from www.ecoarttech.net/untitledlandscapes
“Untitled Landscapes for Portable Media Players” is a work by EcoArtTech, which formed in 2005 by Cary Peppermint and Christine with the aim of working with digital, networked, and sustainable technologies to create art about the environmentality of modern life. EcoArtTech is concerned with rethinking the relationship between nature and technology. Ultimately, they seek to imagine new, healthy, and sustainable relationships between humans and their environments and technologies. For more information about EcoArtTech, see www.ecoarttech.net
Standing in front of an imaginary audio/video patch-bay, in “Solar”, Dr. Woohoo uses algorithms for color and sound analysis, and rewires the audio characteristics to the visual characteristics to create the visuals for this piece. The music is from the incredible Squeak E. Clean (www.squeakeclean.com), whose music you might remember from the 'Adidas Intelligent' commercial directed by Spike Jonze, with Karen O. from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on vocals.
Dr. Woohoo (translation: Serious Fun), is a New Mexico based artist, designer and developer creating work for a wide range of clients. Working with digital media since 1993, Woohoo's professional projects are available at www.drwoohoo.com. His personal projects include In The Mod: Color Analytics (ITM), www.inthemod.com, a site which analyzes, finds relationships between and includes downloadable color palettes of (in)famous paintings and brushes.paints.stencils.(BPS). The latest version of BPS is a stand-alone application he developed that uses PlayStation 2 like steering behaviors to define the brush stroke paths. The application then uses painting engines that drive Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effectsthat drive the emulates natural media, records the paint sessions, attaches interesting and unusual behaviors to the paint drops and plays them back in real-timei or renders them out for broadcast tv, film or print.
“CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS air streami” is a screen based work by Lynne Williams about the landscape which reflects a contemplative mood. explores interactions in the movement of trees and grasses (which are like musical instruments), with altered sounds, informed by the action of the wind which moves the leaves and produces sounds. The sounds were removed from the original video. Delays were added to emphasize the repetitions and subtle sounds that the wind causes. The sounds were then fitted to the moving images (orchestration). The piece begins with a plucked sound which started out as the sound of a bee.
Lynne Williams is an artist based in Macclesfield, UK. Her practice is driven by ideas rather than media and is responsive to specific locations and the everyday. The work broaches on concerns about our relationship with the natural world and often involves technology and nature. Her audio-visual work can take the form of site responsive sculptural installations. Research for this work was supported by a Cheshire County Council bursary in 2007 and previous work has been funded by the Arts Council.
