Saturday, February 12, 2011

articles on Skinner Releasing Technique

Good overview of the technique: http://www.skinnerreleasing.com/articles/in_its_purest_form.pdf

On Imagery: http://www.skinnerreleasing.com/articles/imageryarticle.html

Archive: http://www.skinnerreleasing.com/articles.html

Catherine Galasso -- choreographing with light

I had a brief email exchange with Elaine Buchkholtz a few weeks ago about the use of light in performance. She referred me to Catherine Galasso's work--and coincidentally I had already found this video clip a few days earlier:



Also found this (which coincidentally is in studio B where we will be performing):

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

ideas for set/installation using photo paper

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_paper




SUN IN A BEER CAN: Last July, Jan Koeman of Middelburg, the Netherlands, poked a tiny hole in an empty beer can, inserted a piece of photographic paper, and pointed the pinhole toward the sun. Six months later (Dec. 23, 2010) he extracted the paper and beheld the result. "This is called solargraphy," explains Koeman. "Every day the sun makes a track across the photographic paper--high in the summer and low in the winter. Daily tracks are interrupted by clouds and, occasionally, absent altogether because of rainy days." It's a low-tech but beautiful way to record the seasons; browse the links below for more examples.



http://www.spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=28&month=12&year=2010

Complex Systems + Art

Complexism is a worldview that addresses the subject matter of the arts and humanities in a way inspired by a scientific understanding of complex systems. In doing so complexism provides a higher synthesis that subsumes both modern and postmodern concerns, attitudes, and activities. Complexism provides an intellectual meeting ground where the 20th century conflicts between science and the humanities can be reconciled.

Philip Galanter

http://philipgalanter.com/

Super Stretched Songs

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=133123382&m=133162597

http://www.quietamerican.org/introduction.html

super slowed down songs
slow down movement
speed up movement - contrast

sonoluminescence installation




Despite all claims that modern technology lays to interactivity, a truly encompassing and stimulating sensory experience in exhibitions of media art is extremely rare. By chance INMYX stumbled upon a work that is an unusually successful blend of art and technology at the Natural Habitat exhibition in Amsterdam’s Montevideo/Time Based Arts. The Camera Lucida by Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand requires utter darkness, and our wait in front of a small chamber - the installation only admits a few people at a time - was well worth it. Once inside, Dmitry first invited us to sit and get accustomed to the total lack of light, before he led us to positions with our noses just centimeters from what seemed to be a huge fishbowl perched on a high pedestal. Then, without much ado, the play of light and sound began. ...

http://www.xymara.com/inmyx/index/inmyx207/ae-200702-index/ae-200702-cameralucida.htm

More on sonoluminescence

Sonoluminescence can occur when a sound wave of sufficient intensity induces a gaseous cavity within a liquid to collapse quickly. This cavity may take the form of a pre-existing bubble, or may be generated through a process known as cavitation. Sonoluminescence in the laboratory can be made to be stable, so that a single bubble will expand and collapse over and over again in a periodic fashion, emitting a burst of light each time it collapses. For this to occur, a standing acoustic wave is set up within a liquid, and the bubble will sit at a pressure anti-node of the standing wave. The frequencies of resonance depend on the shape and size of the container in which the bubble is contained.

Some facts about sonoluminescence:

* The light flashes from the bubbles are extremely short—between 35 and a few hundred picoseconds long—with peak intensities of the order of 1–10 mW.
* The bubbles are very small when they emit the light—about 1 micrometre in diameter—depending on the ambient fluid (e.g., water) and the gas content of the bubble (e.g., atmospheric air).
* Single-bubble sonoluminescence pulses can have very stable periods and positions. In fact, the frequency of light flashes can be more stable than the rated frequency stability of the oscillator making the sound waves driving them. However, the stability analyses of the bubble show that the bubble itself undergoes significant geometric instabilities, due to, for example, the Bjerknes forces and Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities.
* The addition of a small amount of noble gas (such as helium, argon, or xenon) to the gas in the bubble increases the intensity of the emitted light.

Spectral measurements have given bubble temperatures in the range from 2300 K to 5100 K, the exact temperatures depending on experimental conditions including the composition of the liquid and gas.[1] Detection of very high bubble temperatures by spectral methods is limited due to the opacity of liquids to short wavelength light characteristic of very high temperatures.

Writing in Nature, chemists David J. Flannigan and Kenneth S. Suslick describe a method of determining temperatures based on the formation of plasmas. Using argon bubbles in sulfuric acid, their data show the presence of ionized molecular oxygen O2+, sulfur monoxide, and atomic argon populating high-energy excited states, which confirms a hypothesis that the bubbles have a hot plasma core.[2] The ionization and excitation energy of dioxygenyl cations, which they observed, is 18 electronvolts. From this they conclude the core temperatures reaches at least 20,000 kelvins.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence

Ask the Internet round 2: Does light make sound?

http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-246914.html

Francis Dhomont: Les Moirures du temp


Recording from Other Minds archive by composer Francis Dhomont, Les Moirures du temp (The Shimmering Ripples of Time)

Les Moirures du temps (The shimmering ripples of time) (1999, rev. 2001)
In the same way that the eye perceives the changing play of light on the various shapes and textures, the ear picks out the sparkles and shimmers that the minute variations of related sounds can produce. Uneven flattening of the grain, dull and bright areas, wavy parts, changing, gleaming. Reflections. These terms, borrowed from our visual perception, find their equivalents in sound: changes of a spatial nature become alterations of time. Much of the processing of the material in Les Moirures was realized in Paris with the INA-GRMs SYSTER real-time system. Certain sound types and features particularly meaningful are privileged, such as the harmonic timbre, percussion/resonance, accumulation, movement (trajectories, swirling) and contrasts of dynamics: the very things that give sound a texture and that make it shimmer.
Francis Dhomont

http://www.archive.org/details/FranciscoDhomontOM10

Ask the internet: Can light make noise?

for the most part unscientific, but people's gut responses are revealing. also several different ways to think about light here.

http://www.answerdigger.com/914498/Can-light-make-noise

Mission Transcript Collection



Not sure how this factors in:
http://www.ehartwell.com/Apollo17/MissionTranscriptCollection.htm

Does light make sound?

Does light have weight? Does light make sound?

First, what is weight? Stand on the bathroom scale and you get your weight. Take that same scale to the Moon and your weight changes (it's lower). Gravity is weaker on the Moon.

Weight is force. In physics we talk about mass as the property an object possesses that is the same under all magnitudes of gravity. If you know the strength of gravity at a particular place and you know the mass of the object, you can calculate its weight.

Light is made up of particles called photons, and photons have no mass, so they have no weight. However, a strong gravitational field can bend light and that sounds like they do have mass. Why is that? Einstein says that mass and energy are equivalent. Light has energy, so its path can be changed by gravity.

We say it has no mass and no weight because it has no energy associated with zero velocity. We call this the "rest mass", and for photons the rest mass is zero. Ordinary matter like protons and electrons have a rest mass, so we say they have nonzero mass and nonzero energy associated with zero velocity. Protons and electrons respond to gravity the way we expect particles with mass to respond, and they are the reason each of us has mass and weight.

Sound, unlike mass, is a characteristic of the medium. If you can get air molecules to move together to transport momentum through the air, that motion is sound. Moving air molecules is what the speaker in your radio or phone is designed to do, and electromagnetic fields working with a magnet make the speaker move. Photons are the carriers of electromagnetic fields, so in that sense they can create sound by interacting with objects having mass. The photons we think of as light would be harder to harness in this way, but you can bet that somewhere someone is building a very small device to do just that.
Source: NASA
http://www.wisteme.com/question.view?targetAction=viewQuestionTab&id=16142

Sonoluminescence






http://io9.com/#!5553121/sonoluminescence-when-sound-makes-light

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Lumen

I am sort of retroactively starting this blog to document my work process in creating Lumen. Lumen is a duet for two women and moving light source that was curated onto the 58th ODC Pilot Program.

My original statement about the piece was as follows:
Lumen, a duet for two performers and a moving light source

Lumen, a unit of luminous flux, measures the power of light perceived by a human eye. I would like to make a piece in which humans both receive and emit light, and light itself becomes a moving object, its trajectory choreographed in interaction with the performers. I envision a duet in which one of the performers wears a light source, such as a simple headlamp or bulb, illuminating the second performer and the space between them. Questions motivating my investigation include: How does light create space? How does light move, shift, and shape our experience? How do we interact with light? How does light affect how we interact with each other? How is light performed, and how does it become a third performer, a separate presence and entity? Beyond this formal investigation in moving light, I am interested in how the act of lighting one another might cause the performers to reveal interior landscapes, inner thoughts, and imagined worlds. In working with these questions I hope to move from a formal exploration of light as a performance element, to a deeply internal and personal process, merging the formal and the emotional, the external and the internal.

Here's the shortened and tightened blurb for the ODC PR:
Lumen, by Katharine Hawthorne, is a duet for two women and a moving light source. Lumen, a unit of luminous flux, measures the power of light perceived by the human eye. Lumen, a dance, examines the power of light to reflect and redirect.