Loop.Coop

Our mission is to explore new and exciting musical ground, using web technology, unique live events and immersive experiences.

[loopdotcoop]

View this post on Instagram

Mike Penwolf #Lathing on a Sunday afternoon for #bemusicalchairs - cheers Mike! ⚙️⛓️⚙️ (at New England House)

[loopdotcoop]

Dreaming of a Foldaway Forest

Foldaway Forest is Loop.Coop’s exciting new VR project. I’m Sam, and I’ve been exploring the history of digital ecosystems, and their flaws and successes.

This morning I was entrusted with the task of looking into these fancy digital ecosystem things, and I must say, for someone who hasn’t looked at ecology in depth their entire life, I found the task not a little daunting, but ultimately quite fascinating.

An abstract diagram portraying an ecosystem — Gerard Briscoe, Digital Ecosystems, Imperial College London

So you’ve left your Facebook account logged in at work and somebody cheeky has decided to tell the world how much you love cheese. You’re in an intense campaign on the latest instalment of Call of Duty and the server crashes at a pivotal moment. Your smartphone loses all of its battery as you’re typing out an emergency text. These are all examples of how the smallest disturbance can disrupt the digital ecosystem you rely on every day. What a terrifying notion!

A glitch in Minecraft

I watched Adam Curtis’ All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace from 2011 in order to really get my head around digital ecosystems, and it really opened my eyes to the background and history of the study of ecology. Ecology has a rich tapestry filled with mistaken views and wonderful ideas, just like any other science!

Spaceship Earth, at Epcot in Walt Disney World

But what about establishing a digital ecosystem? I then went a bit further and found a paper in the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia, where I came across the Patch-Corridor-Matrix model, which often places a living thing on a “patch”, establishes a “corridor” or “stepping stone” for the living thing to travel on, and places both of these things inside a “matrix” area that has many variables. 

The best example I could come up with on a computing level was a 3D platform game. For sheer nostalgic purposes I’m going to refer to popular PlayStation hit Crash Bandicoot.

As illustrated by the picture, you can see the common Patch-Corridor-Matrix platform at work. The “patch” is the floor Crash (the living thing) is standing on. The “corridor” is the path that lies ahead of him, complete with boxes for him to smash with his spinning attack, and the “matrix” is the environment that the corridor is in.

Godus (above) is a cross-platform “God-game” (I know, the clue’s in the name), where you are presiding over tribesmen and you must rely on their total “Belief” in you to progress their society and shape the terrain they live on.

The Biomimicry Spiral Model, Gerard Briscoe, Digital Ecosystems, Imperial College London.

In this model, you can see the core aims of a digital ecosystem. In Godus, you learn to identify the differences in the personalities of your tribesman, observe their daily workmanship and attitudes, understand their needs, abstract a plan to better serve them, apply that plan to improve their lives and finally evaluate the effectiveness of that plan.

An abstract visual representation of a Service-Oriented Architecture

The aim for Foldaway Forest is to establish a Virtual Reality platform to emulate a living, breathing ecosystem. It’s a project that we're already working on, and drawing on our research, history, ideas, pros, cons and pitfalls, we are certainly excited to see where it will take us.

Sam Gilbert for Loop.Coop.

[loopdotcoop]

A Certain Kind of Light

Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne. 21st January to 7th May 2017, FREE entry.

Loop.Coop has a look at six whole decades of artists exploring bright, shiny things.

With the upcoming festival season quickly approaching, including the Brighton Fringe and Festival next month, Loop.Coop are getting their Bemusical Chairs project together with full steam ahead. Sam Gilbert’s latest trip to the Towner gallery in Eastbourne saw him figuring out some stuff, which turned out to be the perfect prep for a summer full of art and light. A Certain Kind of Light is a retrospective over six decades exploring artists that have continually throughout their careers played with the basis of human vision as both a material and a subject. I was interviewed by one of the curator’s colleagues shortly after spending half an hour taking it all in, an experience that made me feel weirdly uncomfortable yet nicely valued as a peruser.

A post shared by Slam Gilbert (@slamgilbert) on Mar 28, 2017 at 8:49am PDT

One of the first things you come across is this amazing untitled piece by Anish Kapoor from 1995. A British artist born in India, Kapoor has an incredible affinity for working materials into resembling what humans can only perceive as the void and other such concepts. You can see this in the cheeky video I took above. The photo above it is a series of photographic works by Bristol artist Garry Fabian Miller, and really reminded me of HAL from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Glazer’s Under The Skin visual transitions.

A post shared by Slam Gilbert (@slamgilbert) on Mar 28, 2017 at 8:50am PDT

Totality, a piece from the 2016 Arts Council Collection by Glaswegian multi-disciplinarian Katie Paterson, is a huge mirrorball in a single room with two projectors bouncing light off it. It creates this incredible placement of yourself in context with the universe, a truly staggering display that left me in complete amazement. My favourite part of the show, almost interactive and very much inspiring.

The former image is Peter Lanyon’s Colour Construction, another sculpture from the Arts Council Collection, dating back to 1960. The use of materials made me reminisce heavily about my dads former days working with stained glass in the garage when I was a kid. I can’t remember who did the other one, but it reminded me of the inside of a gobstopper.

A post shared by Slam Gilbert (@slamgilbert) on Mar 28, 2017 at 8:53am PDT

This starkly graphic clip depicts the Runa Islam installation Stare Out (Blink) from 1998. A trick that happened whilst watching this, I genuinely believed my brain filled in the positive colours when the white blank screen cuts in, halfway through the video. The film is of a negative image of the face of a young woman, which I found hauntingly compelling.

The image below is a collection of sculptures toward the end of the exhibition, and includes crafts from mainly Roger Ackling, and the centre-piece of the room (as focused on in the centre of the image) Cube of Man by Shirazeh Houshiary. These beautifully crafted wooden sculptures were a delight to behold and they truly use natural light to showcase the mastery and craftsmanship of the artists. We hope the craftsmanship shows in our wood-crafted Bemusical Chairs project as much as it does in these beauties!

You can catch “A Certain Kind of Light” at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne from 21st January 2017 to 7th May 2017, 10am-5pm Tuesday to Sunday. Admission is FREE. Keep posted for more arty goings-on!

[loopdotcoop]

A Bewildermazing Story

When you bring something from the digital world into real life, rather funny and sometimes peculiar things happen. 

the Bewildermaze project is a colourful concoction of a small team’s vision, lots of recycled materials and sounds, some 3D scanning, various other curious people and good fun times. We designed and produced an interactive technology unique to Loop.Coop, a maker-day, a modular installation structure and an interactive showcase event at Otherplace @ The Basement in Brighton.

At Loop.Coop, we’re really interested in creating spaces where anyone can listen, see, create, share, inspire and collaborate, Places to join in and play. The Bewildermaze project and event experiment with haptic interactions, sound visualisation, having a good play as grown up kids and just letting whatever shapes and sounds evolve, evolve! The intention is to express this idea of collaborative experimentation, while demonstrating some of the digital and sculptural technology we had been working away on in the studio.

So as you wonder through the space at the Bewildermaze final event, you see mystical creatures and plant life sculptures sat around every corner with vivid moving images depicting these life forms projected on and around them. You also come across small hanging cardboard cubes which soon appear to be the controllers for the sounds you are and the projected imagery. These cubes have different textures on each face and piezo pickup microphones on the inside attached to these faces. As you tap, scrape and rattle the cubes, the projected images react as sound visualisations of the vibrations fed into the piezo microphones.

The installation itself has been created with modularity in mind. The hexagonal structures with their voile fabric walls and ceilings have a skeleton of bamboo and are able to fold down quickly and simply, much like umbrellas. Each structure spans 3mx3m and can be hung at any desired hight from a ceiling or frame structure. The walls can be easily moved around to form all sorts of shapes, creating walkways and projector screens and rather importantly in this instance, computery equipment and cabley veils. 

The interactive objects were created during our “Make Amazing Stuff Day”, a kind of hack day where we gathered a bunch of curious minds to try out the whole process and see where it takes them. We had four different maker-stations, one for sculpture, one for surface decorating, one for audio recording and one for programming. The makers built their sculptures from recycled findings, made them wildly pretty with paint and glitter, recorded bewildering found sounds and finally used a 3D scanner to capture the object into the digital world and have it unite with its audio.

Bewildermaze was a darn ambitious project, we were really interested to hear what people made of it. We invited peers within our Brighton based digital and creative networks and provided a space for socialising to encourage feedback and ideas to flow. The approachable and experimental nature of the event gave way for lots of generous comments about the playfulness and opportunity for growth of the project. With the intentions we had developed the project from, we feel we opened up all the right questions and excited exactly the right kind of curiosity from the visitors.

Here’s something quite lovely that our host at Otherplace@thebasement had to say about us...

“loop.coop transformed our venue into a tactile playground, allowing participants to completely immerse themselves in the world of the installation and creating something unlike anything else we’ve hosted.”

[loopdotcoop]

Is that a shiny new #VR website in the making I see...? (it is) #webdesign #ideas #vrwebsite #loop.coop #digicatbrighton (at The FuseBox)

[loopdotcoop]

Brighton: Music City/Digital City

Brighton: Music City / Digital City is an event hosted by Digital Catapult Brighton this Thursday (26th January), exploring how the city’s vivid tech and music scenes function together, and how opportunities for cross-pollination might to evolve. We’ve booked our tickets and are so so curious as to who we might meet there!

It’s a pretty special setup here at Digital Catapult Brighton. The initiative encourages startups and organisations like ours to play with new and emerging technology, and to collaborate with like minded people. We are one of eight VR Residents — artists, game designers and innovative businesses with a rainbow of different VR-ish ideas.

At Loop.Coop, we are super passionate about collaboration and we’re always looking for exciting connections between technologists, musicians and visual artists. For example, we’re planning to add some audio to our interactive digital sculpture Bemusical Chairs when we bring it to to music festivals this summer. Hopefully the Music City / Digital City event will help us find some more musical friends to play with :-)

The event is sold out right now, but never ever say never — tickets may be made available at any time, so nip over to Eventbrite and register.

[loopdotcoop]

A watercolour tree goes on an #experimental #3D journey into Blender and beyond today #loop.coop #digitalcatapult #brighton (at The FuseBox)

[loopdotcoop]

beNEWsical chairs!

Last summer left us beaming with great vibes, after all the positive response for Bemusical Chairs at Shambala and The Open Market. So much so that we’re jumping into a 2017 filled with plenty more colour-filled ideas, stuff-making, fun-sharing and festivalling.

We reckon we can take this illuminating bubble to all sorts of places both geographically and imaginarily, it’s an exciting time to run free with Bemusical Chairs. This week we are asking ourselves a bunch of questions: • How does a light eight feet above your head make you feel in comparison to the one low to the ground snaking around your ankles? • Creating ethereal lofty spaces makes one do a lovely day-dreamy, stargazer stance, right? • And the intimacy of close quarters gets us all warm and whispery, doesn’t it?

All these conversations zipping around got us playing with colourful straws to start exploring some spatial possibilities.

We’ll be sharing our creative journey in the coming weeks and months. To find out more about Bemusical Chairs and the story so far, see: bemusicalchairs.loop.coop 

[loopdotcoop]

I see this and I think of colour, control, chaos, aliens, the past and the future.

An expression of evolution, MutatorVR seems to strike quite a magical balance of visual loveliness and something along the lines of organic chaos.

This virtual world places the human amongst evolving shapes and forms, their unnaturally accelerated development is determined by the movement of the handheld controllers. While this interaction has its restrictions, the meditative repetition permitted by that very restriction looks incredibly satisfying. This curious situation is the kind of stuff we would love to be seeing more of in VR; a bold mergence of nature and technology, encouraging the most wonderful queries and debates into where and when in the world we are at.

If you can, visit  NUA before the show ends this Saturday (14/1/17), we would love to hear your first-hand thoughts! MutatorVR, we missed out on visiting you in Norwich, please please come see us in beautiful Brighton!

[loopdotcoop]

Andrew Hair is the creative genius behind ‘Symbiosis’, an open-world music game where the environment flourishes or withers in response to players’ choices. We at Loop.Coop have been working along similar lines with our Looptopia project, so it greatly excites us to find an artist who shares our outlook.

Andrew is a sound designer for games, art installations, audio-visual shows, and moving image, and recently graduated from Brighton Uni. “I’ve been intrigued by the development of music discovery/creation in game environments for a while now (I had a minor plug.dj addiction a few years ago!)”

Symbiosis is a visually stunning geometric landscape where gentle sounds shimmer and chime around the player. By gathering and planting seeds, the player can influence how the soundscape develops. This parallels ecosystems in the real world: “If the player chooses to neglect the world in favour of personal indulgence, the environment will respond with a desolate, dissonant soundscape. Conversely, if we neglect our own needs, we will struggle to even hear the world around us.”

Visit Andrew Hair’s website to download Symbiosis for PC, and find out about more of his marvellous audio creations!

[loopdotcoop]

‘Ouija Key’ is an audiovisual web app delight, which invites your fingers into a playful and addictive musical experience!

As you tickle, slam or scrub your keyboard, the screen fills with fluid visuals, synchronised to an array of electronic audio clips. Each sound rings with atmospheric swooshes and buzzes, organic and synthesised, mysterious and alluring. The animations flurry with graphic sophistication, beautifully overlapping each other and building a wonderfully satisfying experience. At Loop.Coop we love how accessible and inviting this app is. It screams to be interacted with!

An excellent addition to the app is live collaboration between multiple players. Groups of friends can jam together in real time in virtual private ‘rooms’.

Behind Ouija Key is Josh Humphris, a brilliant sound and visual artist who we discovered at the Brighton Uni end-of-year show in May. His previous work includes the EP ‘Moses Jam/Infinity Loop’, released in 2014 — two tracks which shimmer with beautifully indulgent sounds.

Try out Ouija Key for yourself and create your own sparkling audiovisual flow. We really look forward to finding out what Josh Humphris does next!

[loopdotcoop]

Kate Jefferies and India Scrimgeour are two recent graduates from Brighton University with powerful skills in design, art direction and photography. Together, they’ve produced an exceedingly satisfying audio visual pleasure, ‘The Doors of Perception’.    

This collaborative piece poses questions about the reality of our senses. As Kate and India explain, “The context in which we see and hear something can alter how we perceive it. Our intuitive faith in our senses hides the fundamental question; do our senses convey reality?”

We at Loop.Coop have always been interested in visualising sounds, so we love the playful way that this piece toys with the viewer’s expectations. Watch the video and open your ‘Doors of Perception’ now! 

And visit Kate and India’s websites to find more from them…

[loopdotcoop]

Azy is a wondrous artist. Her creative strengths lay in illustration, character making and animation, and boom out with vivacious spirit and energy, spinning us through a spiral of childlike joy. 

We especially love the brilliant combination of the real world with her cartoon world, using collages of photography and illustration. 

Plenty more of Azy’s work can be found on her website — prepare to be whisked away into a dreamlike state of authentic doodle fun!

[loopdotcoop]

Another artist who grabbed our attention at the Brighton Uni Graduate Show is Steph Hope. She generously spreads her talents over many creative forms — film making, illustration, animation, music, and comedy!

Her work is delightful, playful, a little dark but very humorous. We love it all and want you to check her out…

But first, feast on a few of her videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVRHKQzHKlM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u03dqW-WRWA

[loopdotcoop]

Vicky Stevenson is a very interesting artist indeed. Her piece, ‘Swap With Me’ at Brighton Uni Graduate Show, stood out as an especially joyous collaborative project.

Vicky has spent the last few weeks art-swapping: illustrations, photos, jewellery, skills, wisdom… dozens of wonderful and eclectic contributions traded with people all around the country.

Focusing on the idea of sharing and swapping rather than buying, Vicky creates a gentler kind of economics that warms the heart. We love how it encourages a vibrant and more accessible sort of art, and we can’t wait to find out what she gets up to next!

Venture onto the ‘Swap With Me’ tumblr to see some of her amazing swaps, or visit Vicky’s website to explore her other projects.    

[loopdotcoop]

Julie-Ann Pedida is a recent Brighton Uni graduate who greatly excites us at Loop.Coop! 

We love the way she courageously builds such bright and captivating formations. They remind us of something found on an unknown, but very intriguing planet! 

Julie-Ann not only hatches wonderful 3D forms, she also produces fabulous illustrations, film, flipbooks and masks.

To gaze and wonder at her magical creations, visit her website now!

[loopdotcoop]

Being fans of the digital, the crafty and the anthropoids, we at Loop.Coop have become very fond of the delicate and playful but environmentally minded, ‘Computer Component Bugs’, pieced together by UK artist, Julie Alice Chappell.

Dragonflies, butterflies, bugs and beetles are the end result of her tinkering. After walking around Portsmouth, discarded computer components, mobiles, gadgets and gizmos come into her possession every day.

Within Julie’s hands, tiny, complex, and sometimes quite intimidating circuit boards transform into the intricate detailed patterns we see in nature. The once deemed obsolete computer parts now have a new lease of life, and rather than laying dormant and becoming something potentially dangerous to the environment, they are recycled and reformed into beautiful and permanent sculptures.

Julie creates these critters in the hope of highlighting the threats to nature our lifestyles sometimes pose. Our appetite for technology and modern gadgets is growing, and encouraging planned obsolescence: “the absurd practice of designing products purposely to have a limited life span in order to maximise profits”.

‘Computer Component Bugs’ are thoughtful and charming delights that we love. If you’d like to see more, visit Julie Alice Chappell’s Facebook page, or visit them in the wild…

‘Computer Component Bugs’ can be seen in Portsmouth at Island Pictures and in the Sustainability Centre in East Meon, Hampshire.