blake carrington || blog

You Would Do As Well Never Moving From Here - a performance for voice and laptop

"You Would Do As Well Never Moving From Here" is an investigation in perceptual detachment in an expanded time and space. The work’s central element is a single phrase sung by a group of vocalists, which is recorded and stretched to 60 times its original length. These grains of audio are then manipulated, resulting in sounds that are at times completely detached from the source recording. Each performance is improvised according to a pre-arranged structure, which is reinforced by projected imagery of a mountain expedition trapped in a blizzard.

The central phrase is taken from Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities. In the novel, the traveler Marco Polo speaks with the aging Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, describing each of the cities of the Khan’s kingdom. Kublai, vexed by Marco’s fantastic descriptions of impossible spaces, responds, “My gaze is that of a man meditating, lost in thought --- I admit it. But yours? You cross archipelagos, tundras, mountain ranges. You would do as well never moving from here.”

Click here to view documentation clip.

Click here to download Granular Extender Max/MSP/Jitter patch.

-posted Thursday May 8, 2008-

Progress Filter Decay - an installation with cockroaches, acrylic vitrine, laptop, 6-channel sound

The movements of live Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches, a species that hasn't evolved significantly in 400 million years, modify 6 archival pieces of audio that speak to different ideas of progress from the human perspective.  Volume and white noise level of each sound channel is determined by the position and speed of the roaches inside a clear vitrine.  Thomas Edison speaks about the march of technology in his speech "Electricity and Progress". Astrophysicist Neil Degrasse-Tyson recounts historical examples of how religious thought has impeded the progress of scientific knowledge. John Cage questions the need for progress in his "Lecture on Nothing". Author Steven Johnson exposes London's 1854 cholera epidemic as a key moment in medical advancement and urban living. George W. Bush describes successful and unsuccessful points of progress in Iraq. And, the Travel Channel's Samantha Brown tours the exotic and virgin lands of Latin America.

Click here to view documentation clip.

-posted Thursday May 8, 2008-

Moby: The Mobile Projection Unit

Moby is a tool for the post-industrial explorer used for guerrilla projections and performances in urban and suburban spaces. Heavy-duty tires rip through blighted landscape, power unit and computer hardware remain safely inside, and the speaker and projector work in tandem up top to bomb your neighborhood.
Created in collaboration with Avalanche Collective.

Click here to download pdf with images and info.

-posted Wednesday March 5, 2008-

ATS01: Wisp

ATS01: Wisp is the first in a series of experimental works exploring methods of directly transcoding audio signals into video signals. A taped sound piece provides source data for a video synthesizer created in Max/MSP/Jitter. By increasing and decreasing the amount of light received by a single photocell sensor, which inputs data into the software via an Arduino microcontroller, a number of variables are manipulated. The resulting real-time video signal invokes geographic and architectural imagery, moulded by scanning movements of the sound waveform. The synthesized topography becomes a residue of the waveform, decaying into wisps.

Click here for performance footage.

-posted Wednesday March 5, 2008-

ATS02: Catch

The second in the live transcoding series. Audio input is fed as floating point data to Max/MSP/Jitter's [jit.catch~] object, converting it to minimal imagery that perfectly reflects the amplitude and waveform characteristics of the original sound.

Click here for output video signal with stereo sound.

-posted Wednesday March 5, 2008-