100 Acorns

Watch Piece V

Watch two people arguing on the street.
Check how you feel about them.
a) Fly up about ten meters over their heads.
Check how you feel about them now.
b) Fly up as high as the Empire State Building
See how you feel about them now.
c) Fly to another planet.
See how you feel about them now.

I posted about Yoko Ono's conceptual instruction artworks earlier. She's now posting on her 100 Acorns blog one instruction piece a day for 100 days. Here's her introduction to the project:

It's been 44 years since my book of conceptual instructions, GRAPEFRUIT was first published in 1964.

On 15 June 1968, John Lennon & I planted two acorns for peace at Coventry Cathedral. It was the first of our many Peace 'Events'.

In the summer of 1996, I picked up from where I left off, and wrote 100 ACORNS.

Starting on the 40th anniversary of the Acorn Peace Event on 15 June 2008, I will publish here an 'Acorn' every day for 100 days.

After each day of sharing the instructions, you should feel free to question, discuss, and/or report what your mind tells you.

I'm just planting the seeds.

Have fun.
Love, yoko
June 2008

[via Rhizome]

Subway ventilation bag art

Taking a cue from Marilyn Monroe's famous subway grate scene in The Seven Year Itch...... Artist Joshua Allen Harris creates street art by tying plastic bag animals to subway ventilation grates.

[via Make]

Fake living statue

Living statues (where street performers pretend to be statues for tips) are hugely popular in Barcelona. A few weeks ago artist/prankster Mark Jenkins set up a real, non-kinetic sculpture that appears to be a "living sculpture."




[via BoingBoing]

Jan Vormann's new work

Jan Vormann (who I posted about earlier here) has some new, kinetic work on his website.

The Simple Suicidal Systems are mechanisms that perform actions that will eventually lead to their destruction.

Rat
Motor (90 degree movement), razorblade, plexiglass, wood and cage

Fox
Motor (circular revolution), metal-saw, plexiglas, wood and cage

Parrot
Motor (90 degree movement), steel-sphere, plexiglass, wood and cage

Portrait of the artist

Arcy Douglass has posted a great set of photos with comments (almost a slide lecture) on Port: click here to see.

Arcy says:

The reason that I chose these images in the post is that they all convey a story. They seem to be closer to conveying an idea about a person or work rather than simply documenting an experience. The ideas in these photographs seem to me to be essentially about place.

Most of the images are of artists and architects at work (or in the buildings they created). I noticed that there are no images of a woman in the role of creator, only as a subject. So let me add one of Louise Bourgeois:

Ethan art news

Artist/curator Sachiko Hayashi included Self-Portrait in the Net Gallery of Hz Journal's July issue.

I was selected to be a LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots) ReSiDeNt this fall. The month-long residency (ReSiDeNcY?) culminates in a musical performance. I'm very excited about the opportunity! More details to follow, but for now let me just say it isn't coincidental that I've been frequently blogging about sound art, musical instruments, & vocoders lately.

Read (or listen) to an interview Matt Fisher did with me for Muster Magazine. (It's a bit painful, to, you know, read your... what you say, like, verbatim :)

Benjamin Rosenbaum (who was my collaborator on Anthroptic) and I have a new work that will be coming out in December. The project was commissioned by Turbulence.org (the same folks who commissioned Self-Portrait) and will be hosted on their website.

Vocoders redux

While flying back from vacation, I caught up on my New Yorker reading on the plane. The June 23rd issue had an article about voice recognition & synthesis that included mention of voders (the topic of my last post) as well as von Kempelen's contraption:

In the late eighteenth century, a Hungarian inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen built a speaking machine by modelling the human vocal tract, using a bellows for lungs, a reed from a bagpipe for the vocal folds, and a keyboard to manipulate the "mouth." By playing the keys, an operator could form complete phrases in several different languages.

Reader po8 had a great comment/correction regarding my description of vocoders:

It looks like your description of how a vocoder works was taken from the Wikipedia article. Sadly, that article appears to be more-than-usually broken. (Why would one *ever* filter a given frequency with bandpass filters at other frequencies? This is just called "attenuation", and there's easier ways to get it.) Fortunately, their first reference link is to http://www.paia.com/ProdArticles/vocodwrk.htm, which provides a clear explanation of how a particular analog vocoder works, and confirms my recollections of the process.

The traditional analog vocoder is indeed a two stage process. In the encoding stage, human speech is sampled by a bank of fairly narrow bandpass filters at frequencies chosen to capture important speech features, and then the amplitudes of the filter bank outputs are measured.

The compression that was the target of the original algorithm comes from the fact that the amplitudes of the signals coming out of the filter bank carry most of the speech information, but are smooth in such a way that they can be compactly represented and transmitted infrequently.

In the decoding stage, of a traditional vocoder, the band amplitudes coming from the encoder are used to modulate sinusoids at the bank center frequencies, recovering enough of the original signal that the speech is understandable. This also gives the vocoder its characteristic "choir" sound.

In electronic music, one typically uses a second filter bank to filter frequencies out of a musical source such as a guitar chord, and then modulates the output of the second bank with the amplitudes from the first bank. This is how the sort of "talking guitar" effects one often hears are produced.

While LPC etc are technically vocoding, they bear so little resemblance to the original technology that they are usually referred to by other names.

Vocoders

Vocoder effects are familiar to us in the form of robot voices or musical effects such as Peter Frampton's "talk box":


They work by determining a base frequency of a voice and then measure the spoken words in terms of variation from that frequency. Then, the synthesized playback is done by generating the base frequency and varying it according to the measurements. For effects like Frampton's, the playback varies a musical tone (such as guitar chords) instead of generating & using the base frequency.

Development of the Vocoder began surprisingly early--1928. Bell Lab engineer Homer Dudley created the vocoder as a way of encrypting speech for secure radio transmission and compressing speech for transmission over telephone lines.

More precisely, a Vocoder is the component that analyzes speech and a Voder (Voice Operating Demonstrator) is the component that recreates it. The early voders were manual filters (requiring a trained operator) consisting of consoles with fifteen touch-sensitive keys and a foot pedal.

Voder operator in 1939 and as demonstrated at the 1939 World's Fair:

A sound sample from Dudley's 1939 Voder, with introduction (170k au file)

Obsolete.com writes:

Werner Meyer-Eppler, then the director of Phonetics at Bonn University, recognised the relevance of the machines to electronic music after Dudley visited the University in 1948, and used the vocoder as a basis for his future writings which in turn became the inspiration for the German "Electronische Musik" movement.

Add-Art

Earlier I posted about Add-Art, a FireFox browser extension that replaces advertisements on websites with curated art.

Well, the latest version of Add-Art includes an enhancement done by yours truly... Add-Art will now automatically download new art shows when they're available (instead of requiring the extension to be re-installed).

Incidentally, the current show (curated by Charles Broskoski) is clever... it is a collection of solid black paintings done by artists such as Malevich, Rauchenberg, & Rothko.

Install the extension

Laurie Anderson's "Hearring"

I'm a huge fan of Laurie Anderson and her Hearring (1997) always makes me smile (it plays her voice repeatedly saying, "Hey you! I'm right behind you!"). The wearable art was done in an edition of 150 for Parkett magazine. Inexplicitly, the edition is not sold out (perhaps art collectors think of Anderson a musician?) and a Hearring is available for the bargain price of $600.

To create the piece, Anderson worked with jeweler Josiah Dearborn and engineer Bob Bielecki. Bielecki has collaborated with Anderson before on such things as her magnetic tape violin:

Out of office

I'll be on vacation (in Charlevoix on Lake Michigan) for the next week and a half... I'll be making occasional blog postings, but not at my regular pace.


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Kinetic Sculpture

The Guggenheim... uh, I mean the BMW museum in Munich recently opened.

Included in their collection is a kinetic sculpture made from 714 metal balls.


See the sculpture in action (and listen to telephone hold muzak):



[via Make]

Souveniers

Michael Hughes has an amusing on-going project, he buys souvenirs of landmark and use them to mask the real thing. More photos here.

Thanks to Leisure Guy for pointing this project out.

Fake LED clock

I like how this emulates a segment LED clock.

Off for the 4th

Back on Monday!

Rotating skyscraper

The Dynamic Tower, designed by Italian architect David Fisher, is being built in Dubai with another one planned for Moscow. The floors, powered by the wind, rotate independently from one another to drive electricity-generating turbines. A rotation takes about an hour. I wonder if an apartment-owner can lock the apartment's position when desired.

Another unique feature is that the floors are pre-fab units--apparently a first for skyscrapers.

Tim Prentice

Tim Prentice is an amazing sculptor in the spirit of George Rickey. He says he steps out of the way and turns the art over the air and let it make the design decisions. The results are beautiful.

Be sure to check out his website... his home page video of his Cilli Opener is particularly striking.





[via Make]

Creepy robotic water snake

ACM-R5 is equipped with paddles and passive wheels around the body. To generate propulsive force by undulation, the robot need a resistance property as it glides freely in tangential direction but cannot in normal direction. Due to the paddles and passive wheels, ACM-R5 obtains that character both in water and on ground.

The control system of ACM-R5 is an advanced one. Each joint unit has CPU, battery, motors, so they can operate independently. Through communication lines each unit exchanges signals and automatically recognizes its number from the head, and how many units join the system. Thanks to this system operators can remove, add, and exchange units freely and they can operate ACM-R5 flexibly according to situations.

[via jwz by way of Make]