DataRama 16
DataRama returned for 2012, the open platform to show projects and work with some great innovations in interactive art and design being discussed and demonstrated with some talks from some artists and also where anyone attending can show anything they think might be interesting to those in attendance.
Lalya Gaye was first to speak about their interest in technology, what you can do with it – they originally wanted to be a sound engineer to create interesting sounds but not use computers but instead electronics to produce audio such as putting contact microphones on tap dancing shoes and recording what they got, they also 10 years ago did Sonic City which allows the urban space to played as a musical instrument, and put sounds in urban environments in another project where small boxes whispered sounds that had to be listened to closely to be heard. They’ve also done installations where they suspended dozens of cups filled with fluorescent dyes lit with UV lamps to allow them to glow. They also spoke about projects they’ve been involved in such as Mobile Music Workshops, and Culture Lab – and a major project to create an open sourced synthesizer for less than £10 working with a company called Sonodrome.
Jöelle Bitten was next up who studied geopolitics, the history of techniques and interactive art spoke about their design creating work using audio loops, they created an experience where you here sounds and have to find your way out by finding the different sounds. One of their projects was to record the minute of sound up to the taking of a photograph and the minute afterwards and to show this in a video where the picture slowly zooms into view until it is fully visible at the time the photograph was taken, they are developing a phone application so that the audio and the photo can be captured at the same time, they’ve also created experiences allowing people to use their body to interact with images to reveal a scene.
Lalya and Jöelle then both spoke about their installation in the Tyneside Cinema itself which is on the staircase which when certain steps are stepped on it plays a random sound sample from movies. They chose from three public domain movies: Girl Friday, Plan 9 from Outer Space and Freakster and selected the dialog they wanted to use from that to create the 192 samples needed. The triggers are aluminium foil with an insulating sandwich of perforated paper so when stepped on it would be the signal to trigger a sample. They used Interface-Z to convert the analogue inputs from the steps to a midi signal to a laptop and pd program to then select the sound which would be played from the nearest speaker and the step that made the sound would light up, the USB interface was custom made for them by a French company and the installation has resulting in a lot of running up and down the stairs and the installation runs until the 19th of January.
Lewis Baker then spoke about his recent project to create an audio effects unit they can use on their phone to control a MIDI interface, they want to people to connect their phone via this unit into a rack mount unit. They are building a box to connect their Android phone to a MIDI interface and using a breakout board to send the MIDI signals to any MIDI device and they’ve built an app to send note-on/note-off signals and could hook up the accelerometer the control reverb to for example attach to a guitar so when it is lifted up this would change the reverb of what was being played, they want to have non-techies be able to build their own interfaces, the box they have is an IOIO board and used the library provided, they just need to improve the latency but have made a good start on what could be a very interesting project
