2011 Year End Review

2011 has turned out to be a pretty dense year. I think it’s always worth reflecting on what’s been accomplished over the last cycle. Here are most of the major projects I helped push forward this year.

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This was a huge year for Recombinant Media Labs. Or new mobile surround-cinema apparatus, the Cinechamber, made its debut this year to a European festival circuit supported by the ECAS network of festivals. We started out 2011 for a month long residency at Club Transmediale in Berlin. Then later on in the fall we set up at two more festivals, ORF-Musikprotokoll in Graz, AU and Cynetart in Dresden, DE, some of our best shows ever.

In the middle of all of these we developed a host of brand new 360-degree 10-screen content from Egbert Mittlestadt, Fundamental Forces (Robert Henke and Tarik Barri), Signal, Edwin van der Heide, Lillevan and Fennesz, Subshrubs, Lawrence English and Werner Dafeldecker, Louis Dufort, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Jade/Pita, and Naut Humon / Peter Tscherkassky.

Development for some exciting shows in 2012 has been progressing as well, stay tuned for some major announcements for future audio/visual casualty.

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The momentum at Keith McMillen Instruments also keeps building. While I largely removed myself from day-to-day operations at KMI this year to pursue some other projects, the stellar team that was built continues to grow and push out great products. This year saw the unveiling of the SoftStep to the world at the Winter NAMM Show. The SoftStep saw major press and uptake over the year, and has gone on to become one of our most popular products.

The later half of 2011 saw the introduction of the QuNeo, and subsequent groundswell of support for its kickstarter project to fund tooling for production. This innovative controller takes the Monome concept and adds pressure sensitivity over four points, making each pad like a joystick. It also features a gradient of multicolor LEDs under each pad giving a variety of feedback options.

Finally, we successfully completed the primiere of the first string quartet for K-Bow augmented sensor bows in conjunction with the Kronos Quartet and composer Doug Quin, Polar Suite. This is a landmark for live ensemble-driven electronic music performance and hopefully paves the way for even more ambitious projects with Kronos.

Violinist Jon Rose and I developed Palimpolin, an improvisatory solo work for processed violin. This work uses the K-Bow system to process samples and spatialize the sound over a  quadrophonic system with realtime control from the instrument.

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The majority of last year I stepped into projection mapping and architectural projection fully, completing many projects in conjunction with Obscura Digital. In May we completed the world largest projected surface, the Coca-Cola Skyscraper in Atlanta, GA, for their 125th Anniversary celebration.  The fall saw the completion of the interior projection mapping for the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Symphony, a show completed with orchestral accompaniment.

For the 40th anniversary of the United Arab Emirates we completed two simultaneous exterior projection jobs; the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and Fort Al Jahili.

Back home we unveiled Illuminique, a holiday show in the historic Emporium Dome inside the Westfield Centre Mall in San Francisco.

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Fabricatorz also made great strides forward this year on all of our many projects. In early January we helped create An Open Web, developed at a book sprint in Berlin in a weeks time. We also had some time to throw together a web based visualization of the book as it was being edited, wall.fabricatorz.com/.

Later in March I was fortunate enough to be able to get involved with the HyperAudio project with Henrik Moltke of the Mozilla Foundation. We completed a proof-of-concept for a rich HTML5 javascript system using an audio file as the timeline. This demo and a creative meeting later led to an interactive RadioLab

I gave a presentation about HyperAudio at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 Montreal. Fabricatorz also rolled out several releases at LGM, including major updates to the Open Clip Art Library, the release of the Open Font Library, and updates to Aiki Framework.

We also saw the launch of the MilkyMist video synthesizer. This innovative box contains an FPGA that is programmed to be optimized for video processing. But, its also a complete FPGA system-on-a-chip development board. Even more exciting; its all open-hardware and open-software, schematics and source code are all freely available.

Finally, movement continued on the Sharism project, including the release of our Beta Site. There will be many more Sharism events in 2012 as this project grows.

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In September was the primiere of Active Ecosystem installation at Sacramento Airport, a 14-screen interactive environment attached to a glass elevator shaft, with artists Camille Utterback and Michelle Higa. The piece reacts to time of day and elevator movements, painting stylized natural scenes inspired by the Sacramento airport inside the new SMF Terminal B.

At the new Nokia headquarters Obscura set up the Nokia Horizon Line installation, a linear canvas of micro-tiles visualizing information about Nokia customers world wide. We also   put a smaller multitouch installation for Lexus at the Concourse d’Elegance in Carmel, CA.

I was also honored to be added to the ME’DI.ATE Art Group’s Advisory Board this year. They produce the annual Soundwave Festival, one of the best festivals for emerging arts in the Bay.

Although I didn’t do as many speaking engagements this year, I did contribute to Hot Spots a projection mapping panel at the San Francisco Art Institute; presented some Kinect based projects at the Art && Code 3D conference at CMU, and was on a Digital Marketing Roundtable with the Society of Digital Agencies.

The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts had an amazing year of educational workshops, events and exhibitions. We recently had our 2nd annual Galvanize Gala which provided a great deal of support for a fantastic 2012.

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Of course all of these projects were made possible by a huge assortment of people, way too many to list here. Allow me to generally express my gratitude to everyone I’ve been fortunate enough to work with in 2011; we’ve all done some amazing things!

Forward.

The Season for Giving

As the end of the year approaches, some of you may well feel inclined to part with some of your hard earned money to some charitable causes. I would like to suggest a couple of organizations that are deserving of your patronage this holiday season. All of the following are 501(c)3 organizations.

Soundwave / ME’DI.ATE

The MEDIATE group is responsible for the biennial Soundwave festival, which is, in my humble opinion, the most interesting festival in the Bay Area, and curatorially has some of the best emerging talent in interesting venues and performing under well-planned settings.

Soundwave is MEDIATE’s acclaimed biennial festival of innovative sound, art and music. Soundwave is a multi-venue and multi-date sound performance series happening over the span of two months every two years in San Francisco USA. Each season investigates a new idea in sound and invites diverse multidisciplinary artists and musicians to explore the season’s theme in new and innovative directions. It is a project dedicated to challenge and inspire artists and audiences to look deeper into the sound medium and discover new connections to sound making and the sound experience. Soundwave was awarded Best Sound Sculptures – Future Classic by San Francisco Magazine’s BEST of 2007 issue. It has been featured on SPARK*, KQED’s (PBS) television arts show and Educator Guide on Experimental Music, SF Weekly, SF Chronicle, BBC Radio 3 (UK), San Francisco Bay Guardian, 7×7 Magazine, SFist, WNYC Public Radio, ResonanceFM (UK), KUSF, KALX, KPFA, amongst others.

Donate to MEDIATE.

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts continues to be the top game in town for a community focal point focused on digital arts, in a city ostensibly at the forefront of technological innovation. Your donation allows us to support our year-round exhibitions, events, workshops, panels and lectures focusing on digital culture at the intersection of art, science, technology, and society.

Here are just some of the things Gray Area has produced this year:

Exhibitions

Future/Canvas 2: The Emerging Medium of iPad Art
TRANSMUTATIONS: Sound, Data, and Mechanics
Zimoun: Solo Exhibition
Milieux Sonores: Sound and Imaginary Space
SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures

Educational

Arduino 101
Visualizing and Mapping Data
Buildling Augmented Reality Apps with Layar
Real-time Video Manipulation in Quartz Composer
Digital Cartography, Interactive Mapping, and Data Visualization
Summer of Smart Mayoral Forums
Cinema Speakeasy
Introduction to Touch Designer for Projection Mapping
Dr. Hubert Burda on the Digital Wunderkammer
Atom(tm) / Senor Coconut Live!
Sound Research Meetups
Introduction to openFrameworks
Max for Live Hack Night
Immersive Audio Environments for Composition and Simulation
Game Based Learning Salon
Breakneck Prototyping with Microsoft Pure Data and Kinect
You get the idea….

BEAM Foundation

The BEAM Foundation is a music technology think-tank led by electronic music innovator Keith McMillen. It’s prototype technologies have spawned the successful spin-off business Keith McMillen Instruments which has produced a successful line of products targeting live electronic music performance.

BEAM’s mission is to create the conditions that will spark a new music movement based on the tools and techniques of the 21st century. Based on the concept of enhanced instruments coupled through an intelligent network, BEAM’s musical vision encourages formal structures that are reactive to improvisation while modifying timbral detail and ornamentation resulting in a new complexity and intimacy.

NoiseBridge

Noisebridge is an educational space for technical-creative projects, collaboratively run by its members. A 5,600 square-foot space located in the heart of San Francisco is a locus for all manner of creative exploration from programming to electronics to languages to boardgames. There is invariably a gathering of creative people learning together at all hours of the day and night at the space, and it contributes a vital grassroots community foundation for the arts scene in San Francisco that we would be much worse off without.

Donate to NoiseBridge

LongNow Foundation

The LongNow Foundation was founded in 01996 to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common.

Their Long Term Thinking Seminars are among the best and most interesting speaking lineups around the Bay, if you haven’t checked them out, do.

Donate to LongNow

826 Valencia

826 Valencia is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students ages six to eighteen with their writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. Our work is based on the understanding that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success and that great leaps in learning can happen when trained tutors work one-on-one with students.

Donate to 826 Valencia

UAE National Day Fort Al Jahili Architectural Projection Mapping

In another effort with Obscura Digital, Fort Al Jahili in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates was illuminated with a artistic montage of country history for the 40th UAE National Day Celebration. In contrast to our other contribution to the festivities, the Sheikh Zayed Mosque illumination, this show delved deep into Emirati culture to bring the story of a unique monument to life on its facade.


This historical show opens with a powerful symbol of pride and strength: the Falcon swooping across the vast dunes of the nation moving into a visual representation of the journey of the UAE through historical images. A spectacular montage of light reveals a lifelike underwater scene, which seamlessly transitions into a beautiful night sky of the Arabian Gulf representing the significance of the early pearl trade. The early life of Sheikh Zayed is also illustrated in artistic Bedouin and falconry scenes, followed by the navigational devices and night skies, caravans of camels and negotiations of historic significance. The sand dunes transition to reveal daytime at the Fort like curtains opening onto a desert oasis scene. Here we see the aflaj – irrigation system, which consisted of underground tunnels that channeled water from the aquifers to the oases. This water enabled for date palms to be planted, gardens to flourish and farms to develop, encouraging the settlement in the area.

The show concludes with a quote of Sheikh Zayed of peace and unity: the tribes of the UAE coming together, the founding fathers, His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan and current leaders of the nation. With the backdrop of history, we see the flag waving in the wind in star filled night sky over Al Ain.

This show was a smaller scale than the mosque projection, but added an important element to to festivities for a more intimate audience in a closer community. The project consisted of 5 projections of 18,000 lumens each, and was controlled and mapped with Derivative’s Touch Designer software toolkit, our go-to weapon for this kind of task.