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Blog archive for October 2009

HC Gilje: blink @ Hordaland kunstsenter

October 2, 2009

Blink

blink by HC Gilje
October 9th – November 8th 2009
OPENING Friday October 9th between 19:00 – 21:00
www.kunstsenter.no

blink is an exhibition with two new works by Norwegian artist HC Gilje. Like a conductor he directs image and sound through the room to create compositions of new experiences. These are the two most recent projects where Gilje explores different ways of improvising with space.

During an extensive career in the cross disciplinary field working with real time environments, installations, live performance, set design and single-channel video, Gilje has made different spaces come to life. By exploring how audiovisual technology can be used to transform, create, expand, amplify and interpret physical spaces HC Gilje has focused on his research project Conversations with space the last three years during his fellowship at The National Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowships Programme at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts (KHiB).

In addition to the exhibition featuring his two new works the audience can also take part in his wide production the last years through documentation material displayed in the first floor space: Soundpockets, out-doors sound installations; Wind-up birds, mechanical wood peckers; mikro,site specific performance based on microscope textures; nodio, a series of audio visual compositions featuring movement and grouping of images; as well as shift, a diverse collection of video projections on objects and surfaces. The development of specific tools, both soft- and hardware, has been an integral part of his process, which amongst other has resulted in the video projection programme VPT, which quickly gained ground through international users.

Gilje (b. 1969, Kongsberg, Norway) has presented his work through different channels throughout the world: in concert-venues, theatre and cinema venues, galleries, festivals and through several international dvd releases, including 242.pilots live in Bruxelles on New York label Carpark which won the first prize at Transmediale 2003 in Berlin and Cityscapes on Paris-label Lowave. He was a member of the video-impro trio 242.pilots, and was also the visual motor of the dance company kreutzerkompani. He was educated at the Intermedia Department of The Art Academy in Trondheim, Norway 1995-99.

Connected to the exhibition Hordaland Art Centre invites the audience to two public presentations:

  • Artist talk by HC Gilje, Tuesday October 13th at 7 P.M..
  • November 8th at 4 P.M. Line Halvorsen will hold a presentation with video screening of Statens Kunstakademi 100 år by Line Halvorsen and Astrid S. Johansen in the café.

In addition Hordaland Art Centre has commissioned a new text on Gilje’s work by Mitchell Whitelaw: Right Here, Right Now – HC Gilje’s Networks of Specificity which is posted at www.kunstsenter.no.

Opening times

Tuesday – Sunday 12 P.M. – 4 P.M.
The café is open Saturday and Sunday.
All our exhibitions and events are free and open to the public.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Hordaland Art Centre and the Bergen National Academy of the Arts.

Studio and peace of mind

October 18, 2009

For the last year, since the installation at Fjell festning, I have had very little time for my own artistic work. At the same time that I was doing the installation, I was also moving to a new studio space. But that studio has functioned as a storage room only for way to long.

Over the past few weekends I have found some time to set it up at last. It’s not a big room but I think I have gotten the most out of it. Still a few things to do, but the desk is up, a pair of studio monitors, one hemisphere and 7 speakers on the walls for spatialisation stuff.

Studio

The studio

Speaker_layout

Speaker setup for spatialisation

#############################
CUE speakerSetup
#############################

# Module /speakers
    /speakers/type speaker
    /speakers/numChannels 7
    /speakers/speaker.1/position 169.000 247.000 0.000
    /speakers/speaker.2/position 334.000 257.000 0.000
    /speakers/speaker.3/position 435.000 227.000 0.000
    /speakers/speaker.4/position 435.000 47.000 0.000
    /speakers/speaker.5/position 280.500 29.000 0.000
    /speakers/speaker.6/position 103.000 29.000 0.000
    /speakers/speaker.7/position 29.000 159.000 0.000
    /speakers/dump

AC Toolbox

October 27, 2009

Ca-silence

The AC Toolbox is a Macintosh application to assist the algorithmic composition of music. Version 4.4.4 requires system 10.3.9 or higher. It is a universal binary (Intel and PPC). Older versions which will run in MacOS 10.3, 10.2 and 8.6-9.x are also available.

Several models for defining musical events are included. They can be used by defining objects such as sections, shapes, masks, or note structures. It is also possible to play, plot, modify, and examine objects in a number of ways. Extensive online help is available.

In addition to Midi input and output, the AC Toolbox can produce files suitable for use as data in other programs. Score files for Csound and binary OSC files for SuperCollider can be produced. Realtime floating-point Midi output via a firewire interface to a Capybara is also supported.

An important method of creating data in the Toolbox is the use of generators. A number of generators have been included reflecting various approaches to the creation of musical material including tendency masks, stochastic functions, chaotic systems, transition tables, recursive subdivisions, metric indispensabilities, morphological mutations, etc.

The AC Toolbox is implemented in Lisp and input syntax reflects the conventions of this language. It is also possible for a user to extend the Toolbox by adding Lisp functions. Additional generators, tools, and transformers can be defined in Lisp to use with the Toolbox.

Midi input and output uses CoreMidi, QuickTime Musical Instruments, or Symbolic Sound’s Capybara sound computation engine.

The AC Toolbox is distributed as an application. The source code is not distributed. An extensive tutorial in HTML format and a folder of files containing objects related to each chapter of the text is included in the distribution. A PDF version of the tutorial is also available.

The AC Toolbox was developed by Paul Berg at the Institute of Sonology, The Hague, Netherlands.

The screenshot above is Cellular Silence (for John Cage) by Dave Noyze, a composition of algorithmic patterns of notes with zero velocity realized using the AT Toolbox.