Invisible Scenography and Body Syntonic Instruments

I sometimes say that I am an accidental sound artist. I love working with sound, but I'm not a trained composer or musician. I found my way to sound because sound and vibration is a way to convey atmosphere and emotion, and because all the characteristics I love about digital media (it can be manipulated, transferred and stored, projected and moved and looped and stretched and  layered) can be experienced in a very direct physical and emotional way. You rarely only listen to sound. It's a lovely shortcut to what I want more of with respect to art and technology.

This is the real reason why I have been working on SiNK, the software I just released. Broadly I am working towards a tool to make what I'm calling invisible scenography, the ability to use a computer to describe layers of sound and light in a space that others can encounter with their bodies.

 

Alpha Release of SiNK

Very pleased to announce that I am releasing an alpha version of the tool I am working on, including the source code if you are inclined to play with it. All I ask is that if you do anything useful or interesting, you let me know.

Requirements: Mac OSX 10.6+ and a Kinect with the USB kit. 
I do not have any plans or interest in making plans to port it to another system, although if you feel like doing that, be my guest. I'll include your code in the repository and happily promote it.

INSTALLER:
https://github.com/tezcatlipoca/SinK/downloads

SOURCECODE:
 https://github.com/tezcatlipoca/SinK/

Retooling: The Kinect for Art

I’ve been making and showing interactive artworks seriously for a decade now, and there have been some incredible technical advances in that time. Namely, the Microsoft Kinect has made it possible to replace expensive, heavy and difficult to engineer rigs with a small package costing a few hundred dollars. It's great, and a  lot of ink has been spilled about how it's revolutionary.

But as with any new technology, the early examples of artwork made with it are often dominated by what amount to demos: Here's a technology! It does this! Aren't I talented?

What are you in Switzerland?

I recently posted Why are you in Switzerland, which was a personal look at why I left the US and moved to an overpriced and sleepy little city in the Alps. I rather obviously omitted what I am doing here (besides eating bacon and visiting castles).

Since I’ve been accused of being a little obscure about what I do for work I thought I'd put it down for the record: I am a PhD Candidate at EPFL and one of the founding researchers of SINLAB. My post here is to last the duration of a standard European PhD (which is 3-4 years, unlike the 6-25 that is more usual in the US).

So until 2015 or so that means two things:

Why are you in Switzerland?

As most of you know, I’ve relocated from the east coast of the United States to the shores of Lac Leman in Lausanne, Switzerland. The adorable (and far more capable, linguistically and logistically speaking) Anindita has come with me, and so for the next three years the two of us will be addressing you from our secret lair in the Swiss Alps.

This post is long overdue, but part of this whole process was to reboot, spend some time to figure out what I want out of the world, life, the universe and everything. Turns out that (and moving your household overseas) takes a little while. We’ve been busy.