La fressa d'en Glen

After a long span of lots of hard work (more about that in the coming month) but no performances, I had not one but two gigs this week, performing with my co-conspirators from the wú:: Collective, Alex and Roger.

First, on Wednesday, we took part in the SubverJam session (in polite company, referred to as a New Media Art event), as part of the closing of the 2013 WeArt Festival. This involved a multitude of groups (at least six or seven), all jamming together, firing on all cylinders with audio and video “injections”. Barcelona’s newly-opened El Born Centre Cultural proved to be a fantastic venue.

The El Born CC is an impressive new art and culture space, located in the historic el Born market. The market was closed (as a market) in 1971, saved from destruction by neighbourhood protest, renovated and used for various events before being slated as a new library in the late ’90s. As work got underway on the library, they unearthed an important Catalan archaeological site that needed preserving (though there was debate about that, too). The library plan was eventually scrapped, and finally in September 2013, it opened as a beautiful new cultural centre, designed around the archaeological site, which occupies most of the interior space.

The WeArt event was in the centre’s “espai polyvalent”, Sala Moragues. In this large space, there were six smaller projections (one for each group: three each on opposing long walls), plus a big (6m-wide) projection at the far end of the room. The folks from Telenoika were doing video mixing and manipulations on the the large screen. On our wú:: screen, I was projecting images from an openFrameworks application I created, taking input from webcam and pre-recorded video, manipulating it with GLSL shaders and live audio input (as well as my own live inputs and coding).

Audio came from re-jigged turntables and diverse analog gadgets on which Alex and Roger were performing, as well as a SuperCollider program I’d prepared for the occasion. The only problem is that, with so many groups, it ended up being…quite loud. It was difficult to hear your own contributions (hard even to think!), so mostly we just played and experimented with audio through our own headphones, while I also manipulated the video projection, responding to the room noise ambience. I got a few nice comments about my low-key visual effects. The event was open to the public for a couple of hours, during which we all “did our thing”. The publicwas free to wander around, look at what we were doing, interact and ask questions. At the peak, the room was fairly full (one or a few hundred people?). For my taste, it was a bit too loud and unstructured, but most spectators I asked told me they were enjoying it. I must be I’m getting old.

Our main focus this week, however, was a performance on Saturday (November 9), with New York-based sonic artist Thessia Machado. This was at Homesession, a small art loft in the Poble Sec neighbourhood. Thessia has been there for a couple of months on a residency, and during that time built some new instruments that amplify and manipulate the sound from simple bumping/scraping/vibrating/clicking objects. The objects are a mix of repurposed electrical mechanisms and hand-made paper sculptures. She was asked to perform three sessions at the conclusion of her residency, and invited wú:: to collaborate with her for one of these events.

We used a similar setup to the WeArt show. For our half-hour set, Alex and Roger played modified turntables and various analog effects and filters. Thessia performed with her new instruments, and although I was prepared to contribute some SuperCollider audio, in the end I mostly focused on visuals, which were projected on a wall of the gallery. In the days after the WeArt gig, I was able to refine my GLSL shader programs further, and also get live input from two webcams. I could trigger them based on audio input (for example, a camera would fade in more as one performer or another played sound snippets).

I started with a base of procedural noise and added in the camera images, some soft glitchy effects that deliberately misused the webcam data, kaleidoscope-y effects and a few other manipulations I’d written in OpenGL’s shading language. The images were also distorted and pulsed using audio control data piped in from SuperCollider. Mostly, I spent the time finding interesting things to look at with the webcams.

After several changes of plans (on our side) in the preceding week, and much patience from Thessia, I think we can safely to call the Homesession performance a success. An “intimate” crowd (aka one or two dozen people) were witness to our Saturday evening playtime.