On that rainy Sunday evening June 3 we visited “Sensors and Gestures” at 3LD. This performance evening was part of NYEAF07 and programmed by Harvestworks. We arrived soaking wet but were excited about what this evening had in store for us. 3LD is a fancy place that looks a bit like an igloo, probably heavily sponsored but I guess the high admission fee ($20) also helped to keep the place fashionable. Carol Parkinson, executive director of Harvestworks, introduced the artists and their performances and she did so by reading pre-written texts from paper.
First up was a short film by Henry Threadgill. According to many websites and bio’s Threadgill is a respected composer, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader who has won numerous awards and who’s music has been performed by the most acclaimed ensembles of the past two decades. I personally didn’t understand why the movie was shown there. First of all, though this might not be blamed entirely on Threadgill, it is very strange to watch a film on a screen that is being projected on from the back. The effect of this is that right in the middle of the screen (depending on where you are seated) all you see is a big bright white spot without any contrast. Not to waste too many words: the only thing I enjoyed about this short film was that it was,… indeed,.. short. The soundtrack was a bit annoying and sounded like a first experiment with electronics. When the movie was over Threadgill left immediately.
The next performance was by SSS which stands for Sensors Sonics Sights and is, according to their website, “a trio performing visual music with sensors and gestures. They create a work of sound and sight, a laptop performance that goes beyond with the intensity of bodies in movement. Going beyond media: music that is more than a soundtrack, images going further than video wallpaper. A three-way conversation modulating sonic and luminous pulse and flow.” Cecile Babiole uses ultrasound sensors to control the visuals of the performance. Laurent Dailleau was playing the Theremin and Atau Tanaka was using Biomuse to turn his body into a sound controller. The performance didn’t always come together as musical compositions but mostly remained a collection of (sometimes really nice) sounds. The visuals were fantastic to watch and Babiole did a very good job in a “less is more” kind of way. What I found a bit strange about this performance was that they used all these sensors and controllers without overcoming some of the typical problems of the laptop musician: “During a live performance with laptop, the audience has difficulty connecting the visual input (the physical gestures of the performer) to the auditive output (the sound they hear coming from the speakers), as they are used to do with musicians performing on acoustic instruments. What the audience is seeing does not correspond to what they are hearing. Because of this, the surplus value of attending a live performance is often unclear or unsatisfying. These problems are caused by the overwhelming amount of possibilities that the laptop offers for music making and the diffuseness of its functionality as such. With a laptop as a musical instrument, the relation between input and output is ‘modular’; it is dependent on the used software and other settings, which are normally invisible to the audience. It is possible to visualize this input/output relation. The physical gestures used by the performer to operate a laptop are of a very small nature and mostly take place behind the raised screen; therefore, they are invisible to the audience. This can be overcome by using external controllers that demand larger physical gestures, again making the relation between the visual and the auditive, the input and the output, more clear to the audience.” (Edited from a text by Arthur Wagenaar, Aliona Yurtsevich, Henk van Engelen, Jense Meek and Thomas Bensdorp for HKU, KMT). First of all, in the performance by SSS, although they were using controllers that demand larger physical gestures, the relation between what they were doing on stage and what you heard coming out of the speakers remained mostly unclear. Also I didn’t really feel that the controllers that they used added much musical expression in the sense that there were little subtleties to be heard in the sounds that required the use of lets say EMG biosignals in stead of a panpot or something. Overall the visuals were great and some of the generated sounds as well, especially those coming from the Theremin but the whole performance lacked musical coherence and good compositions.
After a short break Miguel Frasconi was trying to perform “Out of Edges: for gesturally controlled surround sound matrix” with the use of the Buchla Lightning MIDI controller. His setup failed on him so there is little to say about it. Of what I heard and saw I can only say that I didn’t get it anyway.
The final performance of the evening was by FAIR USE (Luke DuBois, Matthew Ostrowski and Zach Layton). They had nice videowork going on for the two pieces they did. They used existing film material (I think from Blade Runner and Metro but I’m not quite sure) and processed this quite heavily. Matthew Ostrowski used a P5 Glove to control his Max/MSP patch.
Overall I had expected more of the evening. It didn’t seem like very cutting-edge as you’d expect from the NYEAF. Maybe the words Heinrich Heine once said about Holland now seem to be true for NY: When the world comes to an end, I’m going back to New York, because everything happens 10 years later there. Okay,.. Heine said 50 years and that would be a bit too much. Actually I’m sure that New York is much more on top of things than what has been shown this evening at 3LD. Hope the rest of the NYEAF and especially the NIME conference proves me right in this.
