#principal project

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[A man standing in a kitchen, caption: Well, this is our principal project at the moment.]

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On March 13, 2020, the third Volcano Theatre Axe Head to Everything Swansea College of Art group show opened. The fifth of Axe Head Collective’s shows, featuring twelve artists, it was a great validation of four years of the creative camaraderie of three of my fellow College alumni and myself. With lockdown looming, the opening had all the atmosphere of a fin de siècle party, with heavy drinking and a pronounced lack of social distancing and buffet etiquette to the fore. Meant to close on the 19th, the show – with the closure of Volcano to the public that week - entered a sort of lockdown limbo, frozen in time for weeks, further unseen, forgotten, become art of the void.

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The work of Japanese artists celebrating the work of poet Shintaro Tanikawa that bears some resemblance to an installation I might create for my 0-1 work.

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Publicity for the two festivals exhibiting my Welcome to the Lockdome video, created for my Principal Project, will appear in this year: 

...this year's Fringe Arts Bath festival, featuring work created with crack live coder Charlie Kramer

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COVOID-20 Series I

A manipulated photography lockdown art  series that begins the journey out of my MArts work to new horizons, but absolutely still true to a theme involving light. Images created from abstracted night photography techniques and then processed through multiple app’s. 

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Welcome to the Lockdown- 0 - 1 Binary Performance

Binary performance created collaboratively during lockdown, and seeking to express a planned, postponed live SHIFT performance by digital/binary means by UK conceptual artist Jeremy Gluck @nonceptualism and live coder Northwoods (Charlie Kramer). Translations of texts concerning healing as art and digital emptiness into binary rendered into audiovisual output. Aporetic, tensive work addressing issues of machine-mediated communication.

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GOD LOVES ME, PROCESS and SEPARATE YOURSELF:

Instamemes derived from the IWL/no-production workflow, as the energies continue to morph and fluctuate. Using the Kafka app to create #instaart reflecting the momentary impulses and images that arise in the mind, invented and published in minutes. A useful counterpoint and pause to the more involved video making to resume soon.

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Charlie Kramer aka NorthWoods - live coding/electronica/ambient! Charles is into Live coding, ChucK, experimental, ambient, granular synthesis, field recordings, bent EDM, fretless guitar, circuit bending, Nixon remixes. 

It was Charlie who responded to my call for collaboration on 0delete1 and within  hours was sending me prototypes processed for excerpts of my relevant work I had first translated into binary code. Explaining his process he said:

[The program] reads in the data and converts it to decimal. There are a couple settings I play with during the video: use the data as midi input; use log of data; use square root of data; play more than one note at a time; pan it by frequency; and change length of note. I also have a Processing sketch running that responds to frequency...it's pretty crude. No effects and no randomness. (I also realised now I didn't scale the panning for the log and square root versions correctly; I'm scaling by the max and min of the raw data)...what you see in the video is me changing the settings and relaunching the code, sometimes with more than one version running at once.

I make no pretense of understanding all of the above, but there again I don’t need to understand any of it. Finding a skilled and enthusiastic collaborator to cover the technical end of realising my work I was redoubled in motivation.