EYAI is a non-profit organization and as such they needed a website that could be used as supporting material when applying for grants or requesting funding. The client had a good idea of what they wanted, they came to me with some some example sites and an extensive collection of great photographic content. The budget was limited, so I wanted to focus my design time on creating a system that would simply present their material as clearly as possible. As a result, the first round of design mockups were clear and concise but relatively plain and unadorned. The client felt this approach looked too cold and clinical for the site to gain the trust of potential donors so subsequent design revisions incorporated references to the graphic language of similar organizations in the field. The challenge of this design task was to strike a balance between this rich organic esthetic and the clear presentation of the photographic content – to include the organic colours and textures of Africa without letting these graphic embellishments steal the show. In this case the limited budget was itself an asset as it forced us to keep focused with our design time and work towards a design solution as efficiently as possible. The result is a site that is both esthetically rich and graphically concise.

The site is built with WordPress, a popular open-source content management system. This means the site owner can easily log in and add or change content without hiring technical staff – keeping ongoing operating costs to a minimum.

Check out the site at eyai.ca.

After spending some time with this gear-pile, I started to see there was a conceptual connection between these technologies. All of them were extending human perception through some dimension or other : they allow us to hear and see things at a distance across time or space. And most of them use electromagnetism to do it. This idea of using electromagnetism – an invisible, primordial force – to extend human experience and capability got me thinking about the development of these media technologies in terms of magic and science fiction – a machine that would magically transport you to some hocus pocus galaxy. “Dimension X” is this machine.

The installation at VIVO consisted of four parts:

• A number of "oscillovisions" – old computer monitors transformed into oscilloscopes
• An analog wave synthesizer used to create sound to feed the oscilloscopes
• A video feedback loop that projected an image of the installation back onto itself – creating an illusion of infinite regression
• A wall covered in old gear from VIVO’s archive.

Though I no longer have access to VIVO’s full archive of gear, I do have the other three parts and intend to use them in various configurations in future installations.
For example, recently the Oscillovisions were used to generate visuals for live music at the 2011 SquareWaves festival.

This coming Thursday, Dec. 15th, I’ll be displaying Dimension X in a relatively stripped down form : the Oscillovisions and the sound generator at eatART’s "art with energy exhibit".

Designing for Menuito has been great : the team is tight and the work is multifaceted. There’s been all kinds of stuff to design on this project : the marketing site, the back-end of the application, the business cards and many of the original designs that are included with the product. Todd’s excellent work in planning these various elements makes the design work easy, and Tylor’s ability to make everything go let’s me keep my focus on what I’m good at : front-end design and coding.

Sound/Proof
an exhibition of sound art by Frederick Brummer

Feb 12 – March 13
Café for Contemporary Art
140 East Esplanade
North Vancouver

with live performances by:
Feb 12th Jesse Gentes, Destanne Lundquist
Feb 19th Julian Gosper, Keenan O’Connor
Feb 26th Control Voltage, Spectrum Interview
Mar 5th Kristen Roos, Josh Hite, Corner, 30stone

performances begin at 8pm
more info: http://cafeforcontemporaryart.com/

This show is a big deal, not for the world at large but for me personally. My “sound art” has evolved from a penchant for creating my own instruments. It’s been a real surprise for me to see this obsession transform into an artistic practice. So, for me, putting on my own solo show symbolizes the crossing of a threshold from a private garage tinkerer to a public “professional” artist. ( I put “professional” in quotes because I think “profession” usually implies the generation of some kind of income. ) But even though the show is ostensibly “solo”, the instruments I create are made to be played so I’ve invited a number of my musical cohorts and collaborators to join me in a series of weekly performances. Without the contribution of these talented peops the work doesn’t make nearly as much sense.

Nonsensical or not, the show is open to the public during daytime hours so if you happen to be in the hood please drop in and take a peek and a poke at some of my musical inventions. Or come out on a Saturday night to see them in action.

Before the renewal, Emily Carr’s website had some obvious shortcomings. Despite the University’s status as one of Canada’s leading schools of art and design, there was very little artwork shown on the site. Our work was cut out for us. The driving goal of the new site design was to bring the school’s most valuable assets to the forefront – namely their students, faculty and staff, and the artwork they produce. With the help of Emily Carr’s on-staff web developer David Ayre we reworked the site to allow staff, students and faculty to create their own profile pages on the site where they can share images, videos, audio recordings and writing about themselves and their work. To further strengthen this new focus on the artistic nature of the site’s content we developed a system whereby members could create little doodles while using the site. Limited to a 10 by 10 grid, these doodles are simple little works of pixel art that we call "10x’s" ("Ten By’s"). These 10x’s can be left as comments on other content, used as avatars, or created as works of art in their own right. Another feature we added to the site is called "site activity". Whenever someone adds a new artwork, creates a new 10x, adds a profile or posts a news item, a link to the new item is displayed in the sidebar which is displayed on every page of the site.

The result is a website that showcases the artwork and the people who make it, while making it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for – be it course descriptions, information on admission, or university news.

Our work on the site’s redesign received honorable mention in the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada’s Graphex 2010 – Design Competition.

“Organized by contributing electronic music practitioners and interdisciplinary artists, the festival debuts an eclectic variety of works featuring new music performance and experimental multi-media collaborations.”

This year I played some music with the VEE, did a presentation of my electro-acoustic drum-synth contraption at the Synth Symposium, performed a weird transdimensional performance piece with Benjamin Beardsley, and even took part in the modular synth jam at the end. We didn’t really do posters this year, but I did update the website a bit. The original website was a collaboration between myself and Haig Armen.

For more on squarewaves and how it came together, check out this interview.

Here’s some photos from Squarewaves 2010.

Instrumentation

The proposed piece will be performed on invented instruments which combine visual, cymatic, and electro-acoustic elements. These instruments are based on an electro-acoustic instrument known as a “speaker/drum“. A speaker/drum is a drum fitted with a drum skin on one end and a speaker installed into the other end. The result is a drum which can be played both as an acoustic instrument and an electric one, as it can be either struck on the head or resonated via the embedded speaker. Additionally, by placing objects on the drum skin a variety of acoustic and kinesthetic effects can be generated.

In this piece, the speaker/drum becomes a cymatic visualization system by adapting two new attributes: water and light. By sealing water within a container and placing it upon the resonating drum, cymatic patterns are created within the fluid. Placing a light-source within the drum allows these cymatic effects to be highlight and projected.

For proof of concept, see these videos:

• Sound in Water
• Cymatic Water Instrument

The piece will be played on two of these speaker/drums. Each drum will receive a separate audio signal, creating two distinct electro-acoustic cymatic visualization systems. Audio signals sent to the drums will be generated by mechanical sources such as metronomes, clocks, and turntables, as well as percussively controlled contact mics. These mechanical sources will in turn be processed electronically to create a wide range of sonic and visual effects. Futhermore, each of the speaker/drums would be monitored by one or more video cameras and projected in order to enlarge the cymatic visualizations.

Music

The musical aspect of the piece is a soundscape inspired by the concept of Time. It begins quietly in a darkened room. At first only acoustic, mechanical motion is heard. Lights within the drums are faded up on still water. Tones are injected and the water begins to resonate. The piece langours here in harmony for some time. As the mechanical sound sources are mixed in, an emergent circadian rhythm is observed within the water. Elements of analog synthesis and electronic processing are introduced to the rhythm, increasing in tonal and dynamic range. As the piece nears crescendo, the audio signal to each drum is intermittently cut completely, shifting focus now to one of the instruments at a time. This new movement builds until it is cut off entirely and the piece ends again in darkness with only the mechanical motion audible.

Artist Bio

Frederick Brummer is a musician, designer, and sound artist.
In a previous life he toured the European underground, performing live electronica to ravers and bass freaks.
Feeling a need to make electronic music more tactile, Frederick began building electro-acoustic synthesizers out of magnets and drums.
Since his first piece showed in 2008 his work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and events including the Surrey Art Gallery,
Science World, the New Forms Festival, and the Western Front. Frederick’s work leverages strange integrations of high and low tech
to produce fantastic contraptions from an adjacent reality where “digital” still means “fingery”.

Related Work

• Speaker/Drum
• Untitled Drum Machine
• Untitled Drum Machine, recording
• Electro-acoustic Drum Kit

check out our tracks on SoundCloud : http://soundcloud.com/30stone/

[30stone now has it's own website at : thirtystone.com]

Both band members are multi-instrumentalists – which is a fancy way of saying we’ll mess around with any instrument you put in front of us – but for the most part Holly sings and Frederick plays drums. In the studio we take full advantage of digital sound production techniques, but we hope to keep the live show rough and ready.

gigs

• March 12th, 2011. At 2916 Commercial Drive, with mattyfromlife, Risa & Obediya Wonderful, Tarran the Tailor, King Ore, 30stone, Taal Mala. Event Link
• March 5th, 2011. At the Cafe for Contemporary Art, with Corner, Kristen Roos and Josh Hite
• Our first gig! August 21st, 2010. At the ZooShop, with Vincent Parker and Bartel

]]> http://overmindproductions.com/30stone/feed/ 1 http://overmindproductions.com/cymatic-experiment-02/ http://overmindproductions.com/cymatic-experiment-02/#comments Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:51:26 +0000 admin http://overmindproductions.com/?p=366 I’ve got a little further with my cymatic plans. Putting the light source inside the drum definitely seems to work better. I got some strips of LEDs because I thought they’d fit well in the drum but it turns out the multiple points of light the LEDs create aren’t as effective as a single source when it comes to projecting an image. Still quite beautiful though.

This is one short clip from a session I did the other day. I’m working on editing a bunch of the footage together to use in a proposal for an upcoming festival.

This is rough, but I’m excited by how easy it was to make this much progress. I’m hoping to develop and refine this into a sound art installation which gives control of the pitch and velocity of the sound to the participant/viewer.

This is how I hobbled this experiment together. I used my speaker/drum setup, which emits sound within a drum. I put some water in an extra drum skin, and sealed another skin on top to make a kind of drumskin sandwich. The drumskin sandwich becomes a kind of petri dish for the water. Place it on the speaker/drum et voila! L’alchimie!

I think this would be much more effective if I put a light source directly into the drum, but this is prototype action! That’s right. So I used this image projector for tracing that I had handy. Now that I know the basic premise works I’m going to see if I can find an opportunity to build this nice for an event or installation.