Case Study : Littlebit x Korg Synth Kit

Came across this on ARS Electronica

Besides the interesting presentation by Reggie Watts, what I found interesting about this synthesizer is that it’s quite bare and the modular possibilities feel endless to me. Visually, seeing this mini analog synth put together and played really brought out a certain very experimental and primitive aspect of sound and technology that I want in my work. Of course, I won’t expect my work to look perfectly polished and the visual aspects will be focused on more.

Mainstream Articles : Clever Attack Uses the Sound of a Computer’s Fan to Steal Data

An article that makes me think more about tangible things that can be transformed into data in our everyday lives.

Clever Attack Uses the Sound of a Computer’s Fan to Steal Data

A hacking method that uses the sound of a computer to steal data which just gives us an idea of how crazy data extraction can get. Nothing around you is safe, everything can be sampled and turned into data.

RA: SOUND ART FROM A PYRITE SUN DISC

Saw this and think that it’ll really be helpful to me.

Ra is a sound object / synthesizer which uses laser for scanning the irregularities of the surface of the pyrite disc and further transforms this data to produce sound. Pyrite disc is a rare form of pyrite which is crystallised in radial shape (as unusual disc spherulites) which also was named ‘pyrite suns’ or ‘pyrite dollars’. The only deposit where pyrites of such morphology are found is in Illinois state (USA). Pyrite suns were formed around 300 million years ago.

more information and images – vtol.cc/filter/works/Ra

Spaces and Tangibility in New Media

Summing up my idea.

My first post here in the FYP group and many more to come.

Brief Description and Key Tasks

-To Display the Physicality of Sound through visuals.

-Create an engaging work that asks for the participation of audiences.

-Making people question the technicality and requirements behind creating new media elements like sound and images.

Our sensory capabilities are what make the human condition so palpable. I want to trigger a certain emotional response from the audiences who are living in the era of digital formats. I want to highlight the significance of the shift of paradigms when it comes to our ways of recording audio information.

What: Potentially through the use manual construct (To Be Confirmed), create a contraption (TBC after Research & Development) that transforms visuals or other tangible materials into familiar music/sounds/soundtracks. As of now, I’m still trying to come up with the medium for input.

Why: To trigger an emotional response that’s more likely to be driven by nostalgia and understanding our feat of transitioning from analog to digital computing.

How: Playing with the unpredictability of the outcome of the sounds, which are not audibly coherent but are interesting results. So I’m looking for more ways to push that idea of physical sampling into a new territory that combines visual with analog sound.

Gamelan: A Perspective in Singapore

Asian_Civilisations_Museum,_Empress_Place_19,_Aug_06

I’m intending to do a Documentary about Gamelan, a Javanese Ensemble Music that consists a variety of metal instruments and its role in Singapore. The film will follow the life of a professional Gamelan player who has played in the ensemble for 8 years.

Some of the struggles that can be used are things like her motivation and how she started playing, the taboos behind the music (Gamelan is pre-Islam, often featured in Hindu and Buddhist Kingdoms before Islam takes over Indonesia as the majority religion. Also, when you go into trance in music, it is considered Haram, etc. ).

Also, it is interesting how youths are starting to get into the music in Singapore and there’s this power struggle between the youths and the veterans. The youths yearn for creative freedom and playing spiritually whereas the vets care about glorifying the community through commissioned performances by the government to fulfill certain “multicultural criteria”. I don’t think people tend to associate this artform with millennials and youths.

Why you should care: You don’t hear about that many things about this type of music thriving in Singapore. I feel that Singapore is a city that’s constantly reinventing itself and I feel that shining light on this one could show off that aspect. One of my friends who’s Singaporean Chinese really dived deep into the music and culture than most people have and I find that it could be interesting to get his perspective (he plays in 3 ensembles).

Access: The friend that I’ve mentioned earlier on has given me the name and contact of the professional Gamelan player who has played for 8 years. So access is not an issue given that there are these contacts.

My perspective: My knowledge of this art form is superficial at most. I’m hoping that as an outsider, I can create an interesting film which educates me and educates whoever that’s watching it as well.

My Thoughts on 52 Percent by Rafal Skalski

Immediately when the film started, I realised that the temperature of the film is cold and it has a very sterile quality. I felt that emotionally, the film was draining due to the dehumanizing of these promising little girls into these live stocks who have to conform to this set of standards in order to become enrolled in this Ballet academy.

On top of those things mentioned by the prof about structuring, threats, drama, reinforcing the drama with little details here and there, one thing that really stuck out for me was the title which used type as image which reminded me, as a design student that a good introduction sequence and title really sets the tone for the film.

At one point , it got to the part where this panel of judges was grading and talking amongst themselves and the sound design became high reverb and it became extremely hollow which in my opinion really worked well for that part.

Will update this with more thoughts if possible…

Project 02: Dictionary Inspiration – Koyaanisqatsi – Life Out of Balance

I’ve previously mentioned that I want to extract elements from films that depict the creative and destructive capabilities of human beings on Earth. I want to create a summary of us using our own films. How accurate can staged scenes represent us. The films listed below are the ones that I’m interested in structurally to create my film collage. I will push the format further beyond just film footages that are edited and mashed together.

IMDB’s summary

Koyaanisqatsi is a documentary (of sorts). It is also a visual concert of images set to the haunting music of ‘Phillip Glass’. While there is no plot in the traditional sense, there is a definite scenario. The film opens on ancient native American cave drawings while the soundtrack chants “Koyaanisqatsi” which is a Hopi Indian term for “life out of balance”. The film uses extensive time lapse photography (which speeds images up) and slow motion photography to make comparisons between different types of physical motion. In one of the first examples, we see cloud formations moving (sped up) intercut with a montage of ocean waves (slowed down) and in such a way we are able to see the similarities of movement between these natural forces. This technique of comparison exists throughout the film, and through it, we learn more about the world around us. The film progresses from purely natural environments to nature as affected by man, and finally to man’s own manmade environment, devoid of nature yet still following the patterns of natural flow as depicted in the beginning of the film, yet in chaos and disarray. Through this, the film conveys its key message, which is Koyaanisqatsi: life out of balance; crazy life; life in turmoil; life disintegrating; a state of life that calls for another way of living.

And then there’s also more films like this.

Powaqqatsi

An exploration of technologically developing nations and the effect the transition to Western-style modernization has had on them.

Naqoyqatsi

In this cinematic concert, mesmerizing images are plucked from everyday reality, then visually altered with state-of-the-art digital techniques. The result is a chronicle of the shift from a world organized by the principles of nature to one dominated by technology, the synthetic and the virtual. Extremes of intimacy and spectacle, tragedy and hope fuse in a tidal wave of visuals and music, giving rise to a unique, artistic experience that reflects the vision of a brave new globalized world.

Project 02: Dictionary – Film : Our Images

Last week, I had the idea of utilizing and integrating film into the dictionary without any direction in terms of topics. This week, I’ve finally settled down on the topics that I’ll be really interested in for my upcoming FYP. I want my work to be existential, to be about human’s capabilities for creation and destruction and how new media, in its rawest form, can be both detrimental or beneficial for our idea of what existence is about.

My transition from annex 1 to annex 2 sees a change in direction where initially, I had a bunch of categories and keywords revolving around the medium of film at face value. The meanings of the films itself eclipsed the entire idea and intention of even creating the dictionary itself. Why would I need to create a dictionary referencing films to a specific word and idea? Not the kind of intent I’m looking for. Probably been done to death already.

Throughout the week, I constantly sought inspiration from different sources and what captivated me the most was the idea of Synecdoche in linguistics. The way the word “sails” refers to the entire boat and so on. Then I was thinking, is there a way to create a synecdoche of humanity without becoming minimalistic in a way that the meanings , feelings and auras are lost.

I somehow stumbled upon the information about Voyagers 1 and 2, the Pioneer exploration ship and how Carl Sagan was involved in the creation of very specific artifacts to represent humanity as a whole.

This below is from the images on the Pioneer Plaque on board of the 1972 Pioneer 10and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, featuring a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 is intercepted by extraterrestrial life. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft.

The symbols on the top left are hydrogen atoms and the size of humans in relation to the spacecraft are explained.

Sounds on the Voyager’s Golden Records. I think the current year’s graduation show promotional materials are inspired by this.

The pictures that were put on the voyager spacecraft. If the human race manages to kill itself, this is the only thing other life in the universe will know about us. This would be the imprint we leave on the entire universe.

Voyager Media

View post on imgur.com

After going through all of these, I felt like the logical thing for me to do is to use films to represent us. Majority of films are our worlds replicated in an idealistic way (or the other way round) and allow us to dive deep into that sort of fantasy for escapism . However, there are many truths in relation to real life that are inescapable. Our destructive and creative capabilities are what make us human and through film footages, I hope to create an experimental video collage of films addressing those ideas. In a way, it will be a visual dictionary of human existence.

Current ideas about deliverables,

1)Experimental Film Collage,

2)A booklet for dissecting the video

Will keep brainstorming to float the idea better.

The Library of Babel : A library of every possible combination of words and alphabets

This is simply amazing

You can go ahead and try entering your name into it and it’ll be in a specific section, chamber, wall and volume of a book that’s not generated. That means if you come back and check on the same page again, your name will still be there. It’s the universe in this library.

figuratively

The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence – in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be – including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10⁴⁶⁷⁷ books.

Project 02 – Dictionary direction – Film Dictionary

For this project, I’m looking to dive deep into films to create a visual dictionary. With the list of specific words that I have chosen, I seek to find movies that are associated with the words and bring out new meanings through dialogues or objects. So far I’m still looking for methods that are further than appropriation and looking to draw out various elements in films that are not face-value and details that are usually overlooked.

The examples below are some that I’m interested in. They have successfully compiled a series of recipes that are unique to the individual films that they are representing. Food and drinks are some of the things that we tend to overlook in films in this case. However, they can easily encapsulate the aura or spirit of the film. In this case, we often associate Martini Dry with James Bond and White Russian to the laid back attitudes of The Dude in The Big Lebowski.

http://cocktailsofthemovies.com/