Practical/technical:
- Converted patch used in Kristiansand to PC. I haven’t installed the 3rd party digitizer required for jit.qt.grab so that won’t work. Experienced a few crashes due to this and once XP shut down altogether. Ended up trashing the video tracking part of the patch. In WinMax I get naming conflicts between the McCartney listops and the new Java classes named similarly. Renamed the McCarttney objects “listop.nth” “listop.group” etc. Most of the objects can be changed easily for zl anyway but not nth. In the future I’ll try to give all Max-patches the “.pat” ending so that I don’t have to alter them to get them to work on XP.
- Copied 3rd part externals patches etc. to the Mac that will be used for the installation and got that one working.
- The wireless keyboard and mouse I bought for the PC is basically useless. If I shut the computer down I never know if the mouse and keyboard is going to work afterwards or if it has to be reset. How do you explain to the gallery guards that if the keyboard is not working as expected they have to make sure that the keyboard and mouse is sending at the same frequency as the receiver is listening for (implying that the batteries for the mouse has to be removed) and then click a button on the receiver next on the back of the keyboard (always hard to find) and finally using a pen to click on a hidden button underneath the mouse all in 20 seconds?
- Both the Mac and the PC has been left running over the night. They’d both been running for several hours without any problems by the time I left today.
In Kristiansand I combined a layer using granulated delays and another one based on severely treated music by the late renaissance composer Jenkins for a setup of 7 loudspeakers. This combination apparently doesn’t work this time around. The layer based on Jenkins tends to slow things down and reducing intensity. The room used for this layer will be darker with more intense video projections than last time. It’s strange how the tendency keeps being that I’m removing more and more.
I’ve made another layer though: I’m running the recording of Jon Arne and Jeremy spray painting through a filter bank and a number of granular delays to be played back using four loudspeakers positioned at the windows of the brighter room. This creates a linear movement along the wall a sort of “sound stripe” similar to the visual stripes used by Jeremy and Jon Arne. The irregular rhythm of the recording (spraying – not spraying) works really well.
I’ve got a lot more clarity about how to approach physical movements and gestures in the project this time thanks largely to the reading and thinking I’ve been doing in the last couple of months. There’s a performative element in Jon Arne’s paintings indicating action movement rhythm and time but also irregularity and richness of information. A consequence of working on installation music is that the musician is abandoned as the mediator of the sound. For this project the physical actions of Jon Arne serve to make the resulting loss of performative musicality less difficult to cope with.
For some reason I find Trondheim noisy. The traffic noise is loud and everywhere. I’ve been playing sounds real loud in one of the rooms today and walked around the building to hear how much is leaking out. Once out of the gallery space I can hardly hear it for the traffic. I’m not sure there’s any real difference as compared to Bergen maybe it’s just me being to sensitive at the moment.
