23rd January 0amK version
23rd January, 0h version
Contents |
Introduction
Triadic Oculus is a creative collective investigating human uncertainty and decision-making processes in contemporary urban societies. The group, through its research and enquiries, will develop audio-visual site specific events fed by live input received from the cosmos above, the geology beneath and contemporary global and urban data processed in real time through its carefully constructed oracular system.
The performance installation proposed for this residency will be a new work that interacts with the physical environment and social strata of its locale to create a rich and shimmering tapestry construct of 3D sound and image. The work will be a site specific artistic intervention in a researched natural or industrial location (e.g. cave, abandoned railway, deconsecrated church, incomplete architecture,) that uses its bespoke theatrical, electronic, software system to invite questions from audience via an old telephone, so attempting to reflect the current state of contemporary society and the relations between humans, free will, machines, tools and the Alterity.
The creation of an oracular logic software system, used as a portal through which to invite answers from other dimensions, will be the central core to this approach.
Triadic Oculus will look into the relationship between ancient and contemporary oracular activities across spaces and culture in order to create a global understanding as to how and why they were used in the past and are used now in the present, so as to define their relevance today in relation to humanity and contemporary life. Simultaneously, they will research, gather and utilise located, modern, earth-bound and data-related extrasensory influences as potential sources for foretelling the future and reflecting on the present, in an attempt to engage with other dimensions.
Triadic Oculus takes this route in the belief that its explorations will also create new and inspiring art works at every location, touching a wide range of possibilities and audiences.
Description
The data gathered to feed the work will be of three types; local, remote and physical. The local will include human communitites, geological, humidity, temperature, radio waves, on-air TV; the remote - satellites, the Internet, (data based, live streamed plus webcams), cable TV, GPS ; the physical - audio, seismic, vibrational, the architectural details of the site and light. The systems used to read/gather this material will include accelerometers, microphones, radios and cameras as well as computers and the Internet.
Data gathering methods, sonifications, projections, the interaction of the public and developing oracular techniques will be vital ingredients to test throughout, as well as the installation of the real and virtual systems, both digital and analogue. A central local input will be the questions asked to the Oracle. Remote interventions, sensors, streams and databases will be used mainly as source and manipulation techniques for the answers created.
The questions themselves will be asked through an old telephone set up close to the machine. Each answer revealed could be sound, noise, still image, recomposed speech, light, loud music, text, colour, fast moving image , a collage of all. The content could be abstract, narrative driven, symbolic, time based, no sense, as well as nothing. The decision, choice, mix and blend of these varying ingredients will of course be the central creative task for the artists and its oracular system to tackle throughout. This system of input/output, question/answer, data/sound-visuals, will be based on open source software and open hardware electronic components.
At this stage we propose the abandoned railway line ‘La Petite Ceinture’ in Paris as a location for the final performance.
It is envisaged that we could use a central arch or circular space as the main performance area which will be fed by 2 other spaces on the question mark shape that ‘La Petite Ceinture’ draws through the city. To be able to take a wagon of audience/materials/data even to and from these remote spots to the central performance point during the installation will also be investigated.
Triadic Oculus will also travel overland by minivan from London to each residency city in order to touch and map, materially and virtually, practically and symbolically, the unknown routes and spaces which they will traverse.
Participation
An essential aspect to this work will be to create a focused and genuine collaboration with specific communities in each city. We anticipate a close relationship with our hosts therefore who will help us identify and connect with the relevant target groups and professionals with which to gather and create material. We also intend to run open public debates on issues arising in the development, creation and production of the work so as to enable new and unpredicted influences on its creative process.
We will also want to meet and work with professionals and experts in the field of astronomy, geology and open source programming for example, and will create an open pubic forum within which the specificities of the sky at that time could be presented alongside the underground morphology of the city, so cross- pollinating expertise and approaches whilst seeking out mapping links and compositional structures to employ.
With the experience gathered during the development of this and other past projects based on local and remote streaming and interaction, care will be taken in sourcing both kinds of audience/crowds. This aspect of the work will be facilitated through support and knowledge of the different local hosts on the one hand, with the vital addition of a well publicised and simple online user input interface on the other.
Remote public contributions are likely to be made, among others, through an online portal (see Interkomm software: http://mezzodistrutto.e-w-n-s.net/) to collect and live stream video material in the performance/installation. Specific streaming facilities of Interkomm will also be tested and developed during the entire project as required.
Outcomes
- a site-specific multichannelled audio-visual performance-installation
- a logic combinatory system for decision making and oracular responses (open source software and DIY hardware)
- a theoretical paper/essay on 'Triadic Oculus' which will part of the wider research in the framework of 'The Oracle Machine'
- audio-visual material and compositions (DVD and/or online downloads)
- workshops: at the end of each residency there will be a workshop for local artists divided in two sessions, the first to exchange ideas, techniques and methodologies with the community. The second to involve local digital practitioner in order to gather data (mainly in real-time that become integral part of the project)
- online and off-line documentation of the work in all its phases: pre-production, development, realization, reflections
- live online journal of the artists narrating their journey crossing land, human history and knowledge to develop the work
- live streaming and radio broadcast: resonance FM, the Wire Magazine,
Questions
The global world offers individuals an ever widening range of choices. People can decide their occupation, their residence, their gender; multinationals and supermarkets provide the same products all over the world, homogenising place and dismissing season and local production. This claimed variety is questionable. Slavery still exists but in a subliminal, merchandised form. Consumer routes are controlled even by the most assiduous of buyers, while people's preferences,logged through our digital domain, are becoming new forms of goods.
These thoughts generate the following questions: is the lack of will a possible reaction to globalisation? Can it be considered, therefore, a specific disease of post-industrial civilised urban territories? If avoiding decision making is a way to boycott the system and the self, reacting to instability and refusing any responsibility in the flow of life, is contemporary freedom only apparent and predetermined?
What is happening to the human animal as it further removes itself from physical work with hands and the body? We persist in filling all our time with brain consuming tasks, smart phones, messaging, screens, new information 24/7, fingers tap, brains think. Will this fast increasing obsessive activity ultimately cause the loss of any creative space as there is no cerebral pause time?
Urban society is becoming more detached from instinct, from original nature, human is developing an incapacity to connect, to detach, to release him/herself from desires created by the capitalism.
References
- The Oracle Machine. http://theoraclemachine.net
- Alan Turing's Oracle Machine and 'System of Logic based on Ordinals'.
- Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle
- The Multiverse Theory
- The I-Ching or The Book of Change
- Leibniz, 'Dissertatio de Arte Combintoria'
- Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of Polyglossia and Carnivalesque
- The Psychogeophicis summit. http://psychogeophysics.org/
- P.D. Ouspensky, In search of the Miraculous
- C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
- Tesla Coil
Notes
Years of experience in developing and testing open source tools for live audio and video streaming, such as TTS (Theora Streaming Studio), Gstreamer, Pure Data and Darkice, and platforms such as Giss.tv will be invested in the creation of this tentacular infrastructure of sound and images and data packets traveling throughout the globe.
Authors
Triadic Oculus is the group name of the collaboration between London based Kaffe Matthews (UK), Eleonora Oreggia (IT) a n d Larisa Blazic (SRB).
They met during node.london 2006, after which followed remote and web based contact cross Europe - most specifically London, Belgium, Amsterdam, Italy and Serbia - to the present day. Summer 2009 and the artists, finally neighbours in East London, decided to substantiate their ideas and skills collaboratively through this inspiring and challenging project.
Intersecting different and similar languages, the artists exploit their diverse backgrounds to create an astonishing array of multi-channel experimental electronic music, noise, software, critical theory, net.art, video art, moving image in public space, audio-visual intersections with architecture, data sonification, hacker's prophecies and obscure DIY practices.
Their collaboration also creates a space for this exciting new hybrid work that will use a diverse collection of contemporary and new media art practices to engage with an edge cutting theoretical critic of the global world and its post-industrial psychological and technological syndromes and conditions.
Larisa Blazic (SRB/UK) studied architecture at Belgrade University and received MA Hypermedia degree at the University of Westminster, London. In the 90s, she became increasingly involved in an interdisciplinary approach towards art and architecture, successfully combining architectural design with video and sound. She collaborates on art projects exhibited worldwide, and currently teaches at the University of Westminster where she is developing a series of interactive installations.
Current work is focused on interactive site-specific installation exploring audience participation, real-time audio distribution and networked video installation. Her work explores location as main carrier of meaning, aesthetics of everyday urban experience, creative use of surveillance technologies, real-time video stream and moving image in the context of temporary public art interventions and its communication to wider audience.
Eleonora Oreggia (IT/UK) is a multimedia artist born in Milan and based in Europe, London. She studied Painting at the Fine Art Academy of Bologna and she received a BA/MA Degree with honor in 'Literature and Philosophy' from the University of Bologna (DAMS, Drama, Art and Music Studies), with a thesis in Semiotics of Art. She worked four years as editor and researcher at Netherlands Institute for Media Art (NIMK) in Amsterdam, and she has been Researcher in Design at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2008/2009.
Her work, proposing the use of the net in live composition and live noise, explored the field of remote, connected and dislocated performance, implementing structures of local absence and remote presence through the use of streams and the radio.
Kaffe Matthews (UK) was born in Essex, England and lives and works in London.
Since 1990 she has been making and performing new electro-acoustic music worldwide with a variety of things and places such as violin, theremin, Scottish weather, desert stretched wires, NASA scientists, melting ice in Quebec and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Currently she is researching 3D composition for outdoor enjoyment through Hammerhead sharks in Galapagos and sustainable vibratory interface design with ‘music for bodies’. Acknowledged as a pioneer in the field of electronic improvisation and live composition, Kaffe has released 6 solo CD’s on the label Annette Works.
Her 2004 collaboration Weightless Animals was awarded a BAFTA, she received a NESTA Dreamtime Fellowship in 2005 and an Award of Distinction, Prix Ars Electronica 2006 for the work Sonic Bed_London. In February 2006 she was made an Honorary Professor of Music, Shanghai Music Conservatory, China and in 2009, a patron of the Galapagos shark conservation society.
http://www.kaffematthews.net/biography/
Various martial arts and dance disciplines such as Capoeira, Battodo Fudokan, Chi Gung and Butoh are also a background to this new work.
Requirements
Provided by the artists:
1 x Daihatsu Hijet is a microvan and pickup truck (3 seats)
1 x breakdown cover (Europe)
2 x GPS Garmin
1 x server (xname.cc) based in Amsterdam (NL) offering: storage, streaming, mailing, mailing-lists, hosting and bandwidth
3 x additional streaming servers (giss.tv, hangar.org, dyne.org)
2 x 320 Giga hard-drives for offline editing and archive
1 x fully equipped soldering station (includes two soldering irons
12 x contact microphones
2 x condensor microphones
4 x vocal microphones
6 x accelerometers
4 x hydrophones
1 x MacBookPro laptop running LiSa, Max, PD, Super Collider.
1 x Lenovo laptop running Linux pure:dyne Ubuntu based distribution
1 x Acer Aspire one netbook running Linux Debian
2 x 12 channel firewire interfaces
1 x Peavey midi controller
1 x OSC multi controller
1 x Kaleidoscope
1 x 8 foot wooden/metal/clockwork timepiece
3 x old analogue telephones
2 x Sony A1 hdvcam
1 x Cannon hdvcam
1 x Lumix Stills camera
1 x MacBookPro running OSX and pure:dyne video editing software
Provided by the hosting institutes:
3 x LDP 4000 lumens projectors
3 x Short throw - wide angle lenses
3 x webcams
3 x medium laptops on which we can run PD and stream audio and video
1 x 3 2 c h a n n e l analogue m i x i n g d e s k
8 c h a n n e l s o u n d s y s t e m
2 x s u b w o o f e r s
6 x condensor microphones
All cables to connect
1 x concave reflector
1 x telescope
Fast fat internet connection
Mains electricity
Cables and stands to connect.
Materials to install the equipment as invisibly as possible using found materials.
Material for screens
Installation of screens
Lighting
No theatrical drapes
3 x Costumes
1 x studio space in each location with 24H a day access, internet connection and electronics workshop facilities
Budget
Indicative draft budget:
1. Salaries & Fees:
Artist Fee (3 artists per residency + in kind): (3 x 1000€) x 4 + 3 x 1000€
Engineering Fee: 2000€
Programming Fee: 3000€
Set designer Fee: 3000€
Lighting designer Fee: 1000€
Storage/Labor: 500€
Sub total fees:
2. Production Expenses:
Equipment:
• In-kind (please see full list of equipment provided by the artists):
Micro Van: 200€ per week
Insurance: Van 30€ per month + Equipment (breakdown, theft, loss, accidental damage and in vehicle cover) 50€ per month
Video cameras: 3 x 80€ per week
Microphones:100€ per week
Server hire: 100€
Laptop computers: 4 x 30€ per week
Soldering equipment:10 €
Micro controllers:50€
Studio space:
• Hosts (please see full list of requirements for detailed information):
Projectors: 3 x 450€ per week
Short throw – wide angle lens: 3 x 100€ per week
Webcams: 3 x 10€
Laptop computers: 3 x 30€ per week
8 Channel Mixing desk:50€ per week
Sound system:500€
Microphones:100€ per week
Lighting:
Materials:
Stage production and installation: 7000€
Screens production and installation: 5000€
Costumes: 3 x costumes: 3 x
Sub total production costs:
3. Marketing:
Media Advertising/Publicist: 200€ per day
Programs: 1000 A5@90€
Poster/Flier Design & Printing: 500€
Promo Materials Distribution (e.g. postage): 50€
Sub total marketing costs:
4. Documentation:
Web server hosting: annual subscription 100€
Domain name: 0.5€ registration + annual subscription 20€
Printed brochure: 500€
Sub total documentation cost:
Sub-Total
We understand that travel, lodging and studio facilities will be provided by each Institute at the hosting location. We propose to travel by car to all locations. The car is in-kind contribution by artists, therefore would like to negotiate the travel expenses and redirect them accordingly.
