Program Notes

The acoustic automata gallery is a collection of sonic follies, obsessions, synesthetic meanders, toys, a mashup of motors, magnets, springs gadgets. Of sound fields, simple math, software. A distillation. A product of my peculiar interests and capabilities heavily modulated and influenced by various collaborators and friends. Of things inherited, gifted, discovered. Visitations. Remembrances.

I have the need to write here a bit of what this is to help me assemble what i might. I’m in doubt that i’ll get very far on addressing why.

I’m here taking bits and pieces I’ve been given, that have come my way, that i have picked up along the way .

This probably started somewhen around as an eight year old as I discovered that you could use electricity to produce and control sound and light. Turns elegiac in the passing of 7 decades.

These devices, these instruments are manifestations, occupational dalliance. Now more and more talismans than product.

I seek means of taking gestures that would move between media. Expression that morphs between motion, sound, tactility. There is an enduring interest or obession with software as a tangible expressive material.

An accumulation, aggregation, collection. Modularity.

This is unabashedly autobiographical excursions.

Much comes from using that which is provided, found, discovered.

I have an innate habit of connecting things together. I border on the autistic in reaction to loosing and not being able to find objects. I have what at best can be described solution to a place for everything and everything in its place. Of finding function in things at a level of compulsion. I would not do these things if i could not.

Over the past few years coming out of working with John Driscoll, we have gravitated to working with readily available commodity materials.

I struggle to take fragments, ideas words and blunder on in combination of coherent and incoherent juxtapositions.

Of armatures and infrastructure. Structure over surface. Function over form. Texture over content. Tactile. Moldable over rigid. Bend, shape, dimensional. Circular over rectilinear. Compounds and complexity. Fractals over randomness. Self-organizing systems. Models and maquettes. Interaction and influence over control. Of feed back and interactivity. Of motion and stillness. Dynamic over static. Of tension, torque and friction. Ephemeral over the persistent. Variable over fixed. Evolution over stasis. Of unintended consequences. The more dimensions the better. Of range and domain. Prediliction for abstraction and parable over story and narrative. Terrain rather than territory. Gestural. Haptic. Tactile. Sharing over individual proprietary. Accountability over ownership. Of shared spaces and experience. Bayesian Objective + Subjective. Of scores and algorithms. Points of departure and inflection rather than arrivals and destinations. Process over product. Of circumstance, place, time.

There are unavoidable recurring figures. Lissajous, Kolodny plates, iteration, feedback. Resonance vibration, filtering. Self organizing systems. Jiggles, wiggles, precision, resolution, interplay of influence rather than control. Pseudo repeatability. Sustainable, supportable.

Keyword Soup

Reticulation
Breadcrumbs. Tractability, traceability.
Stillness and very slow motion.
Dynamic range. Scalable. Architecture. Models
Parables, literature.
Gardens of forking paths in a theatre of the absurd.
Boundaries.
Proximity.
Interactive, responsive.
Binding and unbinding. Active and inactive.
Real and virtual
Active and passive
Resistive and assistive.
Haptics. Of accelerometers and gyroscopes, magnetometers and sensors.
Calculus of position, velocity, acceleration. Of integrals and derivatives. Black swans, singularities, strange attractors, maxima and minima rather than average or mean. Force, mass, momentum. Range and domain.

Tools and techniques.

Of tokens and talismans
Fetishes and fixations
Fantasy, Munchausen, Quixote
Winches, pulleys, marionettes, puppets, fabrics
Whole cloth
Folds (oregami, protein) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding
molecular chaperones
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_Data_Bank
Flocking and genetic morphology
Alice and Bob entanglement, and Eve
Majorana fermion, each its own antiparticleBidirectional over unidirectional.
Ubiquitous QR codes.
Of systems as means of expression
“Process is the Product” (attributed to Chadabe by Ditto)
Opportunities for the visitor to become participant
Of Mandelbrot and Lorenz, Chua circuits over metronomes
Complexity rather than randomness. methods to achieve variation over duration
Shared acoustic social spaces
Of negative space. Silence. The onset of motion
Of signals, quantatization. integers and floating point numbers. (Probably should add imaginary)
What is rather than what it should be
Of orchestration, composition, choreography
From Tom , of lasers and four quadrant mulipliers
Of John, David, Tom, myself, … rotation and phase.
From John, DMX , ultrasonics and rotating loudspekers
Of focused sound and sculptural sound, of sound ad a sculptural medium
Software and expression, as literature
From David, transduced objects, resonance, contact mics, feedback,electronic and acoustic
From Joel , algorithmic composition
From Pauline, deep,listening
From Behrman, a place for everything
From Doug thinking fast and slow
The Doing and Undoing
Of mimes and marionettes, puppetry and personality. Character over caricature
Of fishing poles – it is the code not the cod, carp and the eels
The orderliness of canonical forms.
Of spooky action at a distance
Of fabric and looms, warp and weft
Tools of hegemony and orthodoxy, technocracy, kleptocracy, oligarchs, tyrants, oppression, suppression, repression, segregation
Cameras and scanning
Of closed loop over open loop (bi-directionality, semantic impedance matching over interfaces)
Palette inclusive of wifi, wireless, radio, of spectrum and wavelength, propagation delays, responsiveness
Of thresholds
Of convolutions
How to include toms holographs and diffraction gratings, Shakespeares whispers.
Neurons (Hopfield Chua, ETANN)
Of feedback acoustic electronic Bayesian subjective and objective
Of computer graphics, NURBS, meshes
Of collage and montage
Of vocabulary: position, transposition, rotstion, convolution, scale, colorization, masking, three body problem, compound pendulums, Thor’s hammer (of sledge hammers and ball bearings)
Of (graphical) scores and improvisation
Of microcosm and macrocosm
Physical Things and Digital Materiality
Brining Your Own Device
Rossums universal robots, of gollums, of the Master and Margarita, Gardens of Forking Delights, 100 Years of Solitude
Feathers and wires , nurbs, drapery, marionettes, sock puppets, shadow shows.
Of puppets , indonesian cutouts, stencils
Of waldos , normal action at a distance
Software as literature, architecture, algorithmic defined environments
Semaphores and token passing
Flocking and genetic algoritims, self-organizing systems
Lazy schedulers vs clock works, fractal time, quantum and quantized time , boundary between discrete and continuous
From Calder’s Circus, Cornel’s boxes, Rauschenberg combines, Duchamp’s readymades, Matisse paper cutouts, Giacometti miniatures and Alberto’s armatures
Haptic poetics

Personas

A term borrowed from design thinking – roles, responsibilities, behaviors – composer, performer, improviser, orchestrator, choreographer, actor, observer, viewer, listener, participant, recipient, congregant, member.

Application of technology in these systems accommodates and shapes to varying degree transformations and combinations between and across such personas.

On Performance and Installations – a Spectrum

My first creative origins are primarily in the ephemeral nature of the performing arts and over time of decades has evolved into works that can be installed in a gallery that persist over long durations. There has come a time of recent years to be more cognizant of persistent of media. In this aftermath is techniques and adaptations for extended duration.

The rational and irrational without clear distinction.

There are many beginnings and points of departure. Those more clear than the arrivals.

There was a distinct point in time when John gifted me a collection of components he from his work with ultrasonic instruments. There was a week in February when and a drive from colorado to Massachusetts win several bankers boxes. There was an immediate usage in a concert of his Speaking in Tongues around the closing of our installation at the Zuccaire Gallery.

There was a transformational departure upon Tom’s passing early March.

There is now a clear desire to do a retrospective of Toms creative life in August at Eclipse. This coexists under the shadow of cancer and the suddenness and unpredictability of age.

There is a thread around new new work i had been discussing with Tom and Ivars involving acoustic lens constructed from CO2 weather balloon. Instead of Ivars suggestion of CO2 production from baking soda and vinegar, I look to CO2 cartdrige bicycle pump that quickly showed need for larger industrial size CO2 tank and regulator. Clear challenge of the practicality of keeping a large balloon filled for the month of August in the gallery. Lacking good way forward, I revert to proceeding with the components from John mixed with my ragged list of ideas from something in my head roughly an acoustic automata collection of networked instruments.