Friday 8 – Sunday 10 September (Photography Studio):

Point Line Piano (VR Installation)  – Jarosław Kapuściński & OpenEndedGroup (Marc Downie, Paul Kaiser)

Point Line Piano is a VR project that reimagines the composition, performance, and reception of piano music by fusing its modes of creating, playing, and listening. As you interact with it, your ears, eyes, and hands act in concert. You start by drawing lines freely in the space around you, sparking musical notes that are notched as points on the lines as you draw them. These notes quickly accumulate, forming distinct melodic phrases and rhythms, while the computer generates an intricate audiovisual dance all around you. The work enables a spatial and full-body experience of abstraction not found in any other medium.

Jarosław Kapuściński is a Polish-born intermedia composer and pianist. He presented his works at numerous art and music venues worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, National Arts Centre in Canada, EMPAC, ZKM, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He has received awards at the UNESCO Film sur l’Art Festival in Paris, the VideoArt Festival in Locarno, and the International Festival of New Cinema and New Media in Montréal. Kapuściński has lectured internationally and is currently Associate Professor at Stanford University.

Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser have collaborated as OpenEndedGroup since 2001. Working in a broad variety of media and venues:, they make art for façade, gallery, dance, stage, 3D cinema, print, and virtual reality. Their works respond to a wide range of materials — drawing, film, motion capture, photography, music, and architecture. They frequently combine three signature elements: non-photorealistic 3D rendering; the incorporation of body movement by motion-capture and other means; and the autonomy of artworks directed or assisted by artificial intelligence.

OpenEndedGroup’s films, installations, stage works, and VR pieces have premiered in such venues as MoMA, Lincoln Center, the Barbican, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Hayward Gallery, Sadler’s Wells, and the Berlin, New York, and Rome film festivals. Eight of their 3D digital films were the first of their kind to enter MoMA’s permanent collection.

Saturday 9 September (VP Studio):

Traces, Molten – Bret Battey

Traces, Molten is an audiovisual installation for two-HD-screen-wide projection (3840×1080) and stereo sound. It invites contemplation of a continually transforming immersive sound and image landscape, driven by mathematical processes. Perhaps this is a glimpse of the exquisite, molten dance of millions of sub-atomic particles — or traces of an intangible order underlying the cosmos.

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,

And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the

rim of the farther systems..

…

See ever so far, there is limitless space outside that,

Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.

— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Traces, Molten was created for the British Science Festival 2022, held in Leicester, UK, in collaboration with De Montfort University.

Technical Details

I developed the visual material with my custom OptiNelder plug-in filter for Apple’s Motion 5 video effects software. We see the activity of hundreds to thousands of mathematical algorithmic agents exploring an input image. It uses new functions the were developed for my piece ‘Estuaries 4’, where these functions try to find the peaks of a mathematical function. In this case, the target function was one called the ‘eggholder’, commonly used for testing optimisation algorithms. The eggholder function shape changes slowly as its parameters are gradually altered. Abstract textures arise and transform as the Nelder-Mead agents ceaselessly hunt for — and occasionally actually find — the shifting peaks of this invisible system underneath.

The music was created primarily through computer-based manipulations of recordings of flute sounds played by flautist Jen George and layering of metal percussion (saw blades, Tibetan bowl and pentatonic drum) performed by Deniz Ertan.

Bret Battey (b. 1967) is Professor of Audiovisual Composition at the Music, Technology, and Innovation Institute for Sonic Creativity at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He creates electronic, acoustic, and audiovisual concert works and installations, with a focus on generative techniques. He has been a Fulbright Fellow to India and a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and he has received recognitions and prizes from Austria’s Prix Ars Electronica, France’s Bourges Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique, Spain’s Punto y Raya Festival, MADATAC and MuVi4, Abstracta Cinema of Rome, Amsterdam Film eXperience the Texas Fresh Minds Festival, the International Computer Music Festival, and the Red Stick International Animation Festival for his sound and image compositions. He pursues research in areas related to algorithmic music, haptics, and image and sound relationships. He completed his masters and doctoral studies in Music Composition at the University of Washington and his Bachelors of Music in Electronic and Computer Music at Oberlin Conservatory. His primary composition and technology teachers have been Conrad Cummings, Richard Karpen, and Gary Nelson. He also served as a Research Associate for the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media.

Sunday (VP Studio):

Oden – Simon Connor & Andrew Brooks

Oden is an immersive and intimate audio-visual installation of landscape; a collaborative project between composer/sound artist Simon Connor and filmmaker Andrew Brooks. The work is a study and a reimagination of Odin’s Gully, located in the evocative landscape of the Peak District, UK. Connor and Brooks gathered material from this unique site throughout the seasons, filming and field recording using spatial audio techniques. The sound of Oden is informed by an ‘integrated’ approach to the soundtrack; weaving together environmental sound, musical instrumentation, and sound design, in a reciprocal arrangement. Oden features musical performances from members of the BBC Philharmonic and music faculty from the University of Salford. The visual aesthetic shares resonances with landscape film and ecocinema; encapsulating long takes and a contemplation on the details of nature, akin to a moving photograph. The unique sound of Oden is experienced via headtracked binaural audio, providing increased realism whilst listening and experiencing the work.

This textural combination of sight and sound, presented in an installation environment, is intended to enable a contemplative, and enriched multimodal perception of landscape.

For more information on Oden, see: https://simonconnor.co.uk/oden

Simon Connor is a composer and sound artist based in Manchester UK. He is also a practice-based researcher and lecturer in Music Technology at the University of Salford. Simon’s creative practice informs his recently awarded PhD research, undertaken at the University of Huddersfield. This research explores new methods for composing landscape, via the integration of field recordings, musical instrumentation, sound design and moving image. Simon’s work has been featured on BBC Radio 3, and collaborative film projects have been screened/performed internationally, including CPH DOX (CPH), DOKU Arts Festival (DE), FILAF International Art Book and Film Festival (FR), Alte Schmiede (AT) Flatpack Festival (UK), the ICA London (UK). For more information see https://simonconnor.co.uk

Andrew Brooks is a photographer, artist and filmmaker, who uses digital technologies as a prism for seeing and experiencing the world, particularly natural and urban landscapes. Taking inspiration from paintings within the Romantic era, Brooks uses small details and studies of the landscape to create larger scale works that become an interpretation of that particular location. Through the process of building images, the forms and rhythms of nature and the city are often imagined or re-imagined scenes. This heightened sense of place feeds into audience’s interaction with the work. www.andrewbrooksartist.com