For the Art Generator project, I construct a human-powered generator, and ask electronic artists to create pieces to consume the generated electricity.  These consumer pieces are created, added, removed and interconnected over the duration of the show, as an ecosystem of electron-using creative work and workers.  Power is only available, that is, the art is only generated, when an interested interlocutor puts their own energy into the pieces.

This piece was shown as part of Exit Art's Electric Lab show, September 2007. Participating artist (aside from the general public):

LoVid
Rich Miller
Ian Curry 
Greg Shakar
Paul Davies 

A video documenting the piece (Includes content from the Exit Art Podcast): 

A time-lapse video of the Exit Art install (Thanks for your help Corey!):

A multimedia walking tour of New York City, augmented by the use of portable media devices. Sites relevant to the original 'Ghostbusters' compose the tour path, with video content relevant to the film, geography and history of New York comprising the tour. Watching film footage on a portable media device, while standing in the site of its creation some 20 years ago, 'media memories' become real memories and mediated experience becomes actualized.

ghostbustour is an attempt to re-attach ‘media memories’ with our real experience of space and time.

Growing up in a media culture has created fictional recollections within us all that are owned by others (through copyright) and that exist outside of ourselves. Never-experienced depictions mix with our real memories; spaces represented on film and television create the potential for an impossibly distant deja-vu. On a 'ghostbustour' viewers are presented with actual and mediated locations from an archetypal 80's film that created media memories of New York City for an entire generation.

(With Rob O'Neill, Tom Ainslie, Melissa Barrett Lundquist, Lia Bulaong, Mike Horan and Derek Wang.)

ghostbustour was premiered in September 2007 as part of CONFLUX 2007!
A little WMMNA love (thanks Regine!)

"Just as the audience began nodding along, Allen dove even deeper into the sounds, working single tones like the sonic equivalent of clay, shaping drones from raw static, feedback and electricity." - Marc Weidenbaum

circuitMusic is a platform for improvisational audio circuit building with raw op amp components.  It is live audio circuit construction, signals laid bare, experimental music.  Performances consist of audio circuitry, breadboards, and other raw electronics.

Couple of pics from the Vertices's show at Galapagos:

Photos from a circuitMusic/season of the bit performance at Vertexlist's SELF 2.0 opening party:

Photos and sound from a circuitMusic performance at the Columbia Music Center's FÜN Night:

Pictures from a circuitMusic performance at the Tank's Bent Festival @ Eyebeam:

  

circuitMusic at Society La Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT) in Montreal
(Midnight Poutine's write up):

circuitMusic at tranzducer.001 at LEMURplex in Brooklyn:  

 

circuitMusic at Eyebeam's The Upgrade! in NYC:  

Older Stuff:

Microphones, symmetrically affixed to buildings and architectural elements, capture a unique, large-scale, three-dimensional sonic imprint.  This stereo field is then edited as a composed electroacoustic piece that serves to highlight the spatial image of the original field recording.

Buildings imaged so far include the Military Island U.S. Army recruitment center in Times Square, and the building at 258 East 58th St. near the entrance to the 59th Street Bridge.  These composed pieces are being presented as part of EspaceSono at the SAT Galerie in Montreal.

Season of the Bit

Season of the Bit is a DJ act and research project featuring video game and chip tunes from the 70's and 80's, a collaboration with Michael J. Horan.

Photos from a circuitMusic/season of the bit performance at Vertexlist's SELF 2.0 opening party:

The "first lady of the internet," was a Playboy's Miss November 1972. Her turn-offs include "Men who wear shorts with white socks and black shoes." Lena's issue was the most widely circulated issue of Playboy ever, selling 7,161,561 copies.

A single scanned image of Lena's Playboy appearance subsequently took up favor amongst digital imaging researchers. It has been used as a comparative standard in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of image compression tests, publications and shoot-outs.

"Killing Lena" is a rendered video series in which Lena's most famous photo is repeatedly exposed to the compression algorithms she unwittingly helped to develop.

 

Killing Lena (2007, 62.7MB, 5:49 min.)

References:
http://photoshopnews.com/2007/04/24/geek-love-the-lenna-story/
http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~lmpo/lenna/Lenna97.html
http://www.hacksaw.org/~thomasc/old_mit/stories/lena.html
http://www.lenna.org/playboy_backups2/31a.html
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/lenna.shtml
http://ndevilla.free.fr/lena/

Notes on recursive compression

In performance, the piece involves a number of common electronic appliances, placed in different areas of the stage or room.  Each device is activated or manipulated based on a pre-planned cycle, a precise and clocked on/off timing interval.  Each device is mic'd, processed and augmented by a synchronized background track.

The piece was directly inspired by Cage's performance of "Water Walk," on TV's I've Got A Secret.  Archival footage of this performance circulated around the internet after WFMU's Beware of the Blog posted it in April 27th.  There are also relationships between this piece and my 2003 piece 'introducing.'

I developed this class as a way of looking at the many performance topics in interactive technology which are not addressed by staged or theatrical contexts.  Looking at interactive art and design challenges as performance engenders a powerful way of analyzing and developing work.

Exercises include writing audio/visual code that performs itself, creating a narrative object, sketching a technological "augmentation" for an existing performance tradition or style, creating a framework for improvisational performance for yourself and others, and creating a novel digital form of performance notation or documentation.

Class documents are here. 

Electronic Music Performance Summer Session I is being held as a Masters class in coordination with the 2007 New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference in NYC.  Students of the class are required to attend NIME conference events as context research for their own work.  Additional class meetings serve to direct final project work in electronic music performance interfaces and augmented instruments.

The course website and resources are available here.

The class website is here. 

In the Spring of 2007, we had a public showing of student work from current and prior semesters at LEMURplex in Brooklyn.  A few pictures of the event are here, and other documentation of the show is being collected here. 

Check out the great video Lindsay Farrel made of the Spring '06 Class Projects (Thanks Lindsay!). 

Music in performance is the primary subject of this class.   We will approach questions such as "What is performance?", "What makes a musical interface intuitive and emotionally immediate?" and "How do we create meaningful correlations between performance gestures and their musical consequences?"  Students design and prototype a musical instrument - a complete system encompassing musical controller, algorithm for mapping input to sound, and the sound output itself.  The class culminates in a musical performance where students demonstrate their instruments.

Please see the class website for more information.  The active journal of class proceedings is here.  

googlesomethingforme

Google moved in next door.
Howdy neighbor:

The Google New York offices lumber next to my little apartment building in south Chelsea.  They're pretty good neighbors - quiet enough - although the incredible number of over-sized paper lanterns they've installed on their fourth floor blast through my windows like a second sun: 

You can be a good neighbor only if you have good neighbors. - Howard Koch 

googlesomethingforme is a website where you can ask question specifically directed at Google employees.  At www.googlesomethingforme.com, you can 'google' the human beings behind the world's most popular search engine and, hopefully, get answers.  

To ensure my neighbors are aware of this new line of communication, I will be marking the launch of the googlesomethingforme website by hanging a large banner directly in front of Google's office windows in Summer 2007.  It will look like this:

More than anything else, Google's ominous presence 20 feet from my front window has made me wish I communicated with my neighbors more.  Hundreds of presumably fairly intelligent people are holed up behind a that gigantic brick facade.  It seems like an untapped resource - a situation ripe with possibilities beyond what's available at http://www.google.com.  Sure, I could use Google-the-search-engine, but I'm interested in these people next door and what they might have to tell me.  The people behind the algorithm, behind the people behind the algorithm - I bet they have a lot to say for themselves.

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor. - Eric Hoffer

Below is a growing collection of attempts at characterizing my relationship to my most inquisiturient of neighbors, employing as many of the tools they've developed as possible. 

Google Image Search    

Google Maps

LINK 

Google Earth

NIME 2007 Conference website 

ITP NIME Class Site 

Students in the class are partners in the development of a world-class resource on sensors and input devices, the Sensor Workshop Wiki.  The class website is here.

posters by Jamie Allen, Donny Tsang, Evan Alexander