Music is deeply tied up with motion; seeing that in a machine is somehow satisfying. Soundmachines, from the enigmatically-titled Berlin studio TheProduct*, is an interactive physical installation made from optical turntables. By moving the “tone arm” – really in this case an optical sensor attached to an extended mount – you can change rhythms and sound sweeps.

We’ve naturally seen many visualizations, tangible and digital, that make loops into wheels. But it’s worth noting the particular connection to a kinetic experiment by The Books’ Nick Zammuto from the film earlier this week. In fact, my one criticism of this piece is that the rhythms are so regular. Some syncopation in a machine like this would be not only pleasing, but immediately visible to the eye and therefore understandable. Perhaps even decoupling the wheels from the motor could allow a user to experiment with sound. That doesn’t mean you have to go from minimal techno to irregular chaos, but there’s quite a lot in between.

That’s not to take away from the impact of this piece, and in particular, the beauty of its installation. The presentation in an iconic object is a message in itself. And the circle remains the ideal design for a looped rhythm, embedded as it is in the repetition we perceive in our world.

http://www.the-product.org/soundmachines

More details:

Three units, which are resembling standard record players, translate concentric visual patterns into control signals for further processing in any music software. The rotation of the discs, each holding three tracks, can be synced to a sequencer.
The Soundmachines premiered on the Volkswagen New Beetle stand at the IAA motor show in late Summer 2011. In cooperation with the sounddesigner/producer Yannick Labbé of TRICKSKI fame, we developed three unique discs, each controlling one track of an Ableton Live Set exclusively made for the Event. The show was supported by a set of realtime generated visuals, running on a 25m wide LED wall.


One/One oneone-studio.com
TheProduct* the-product.org

Client

Volkswagen

Agency

Vok Dams, Hamburg

Sounddesign/Producer IAA
Yannick Labbé yannicklabbe.com

Special Thanks

Matt Karau
 matt.karau.com
Andreas Schmelas invertednothing.com

(See also a compelling-looking visual collage. It’s supposed to be set to John Cage’s “First Interlude,” but because of copyright concerns, is instead (arguably) set to Cage’s 4’33″. Let’s hope they don’t get sued for that.

Continuing our insight into this view into electronic music performance and art through the lens of BodyControlled in Berlin, we’re joined by guest writer Kristin Trethewey. Kristin, a Canadian-born video artist and curator, takes another look at LEAP and BodyControlled, on the eve of its second installment. She gets straight at the question of what “BodyControlled” means, and what it can mean for sonic performance and creation. And I wanted to make sure to subtract myself from this write-up, seeing as I was playing – but see the excellent timelapse of the evening, above. -Ed.

LEAP is one of these spectacular Berlin venues you’ve been hearing so much about. It’s a huge, raw space with a view of Berlin’s landmark TV tower, hosting interesting art events with cheap drinks and the potential for a late-night party. But it’s unique, too, in its focus on electronic arts. And unlike other media arts centers, it’s not filled with computers and half-finished electronic projects. I’ve truly gotten lost trying to find this place (it’s tucked away in a mall), so I would recommend watching the timelapse video LEAP shot that guides you to the entrance before attempting to go there. Tonight is the second edition of BodyControlled, a new bimonthly performance series at the space. This installment, called “matter incompatible,” is held in conjunction with the Transmediale Festival under the satellite program, Vorspiel.

BodyControlled is a series focused on the intersection of performance and electronics. You can expect future programming to focus around ideas of “feedback” and “bio” related electronic performances. In its first installment back in November, a packed LEAP gallery witnessed performances by Robert Henke, Peter Kirn [editor of this site], Stephen Cornford, and Paul Whitty. The event was called “Other Spaces” and took the physical architecture of the gallery as a point of departure. Having the space filled with people made for a secondary concern of space: its use. In a series whose title mentions the body, I witnessed one performance engaging the bodies that were filling the space. Robert Henke’s twelve-hour set activated interactions between the audience, performer, and environment. He moved around, listened and mingled with the audience, even though he had this amazing, souped-up control station complete with ambient lighting.

Other artists put more emphasis on the manipulation and dislocation of space through the use and abuse of electronics. Kirn worked with a custom rig with tablet-controlled original software built in open-source software Pure Data (Pd), controlled by a tablet running Konkreet Performer. Excerpt:

Excerpt – LEAP Gallery Berlin, 26.11 by peterkirn

Whitty and Cornford actively deconstructed electronics in front of the audience:
it pays my way and it corrodes my soul (2011)

Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty’s performance “it pays my way and it corrodes my soul” seeks out musical material by physically dismembering playback equipment. A reel-to-reel tape recorder is switched on and its mechanism amplified with a variety of microphones while it is taken to pieces. The sounds produced are then fed through an array of pedals: the machine’s belts, gears, switches and casing becoming an instrument subjected to a live audio autopsy

Excerpt:
Excerpt: Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty, LEAP Berlin, 26 November by cdm

Cornford was also interviewed by LEAP for his installation work, featuring repurposed tape machines:

As João Pais, co-curator of the event with LEAP’s Daniel Franke, puts it:

“BodyControlled means the main direction of the series, to present performance and installation works that have a strong, corporal identity. This can be manifested in many ways, not only implying a “moving performer”. The purpose is to avoid the extreme of abstract performances made by a laptop-er, sitting down as if writing emails. In the first event, this idea was shown by interpreting/filling the space of LEAP through a sound-performance (Kirn, Henke), or an installation (Cornford, Mathy, Oliver).”

See also my write-up for ARTSCARDS from last month:
Other Spaces Generates New Spaces Through Sound at LEAP

The second event, “matter incompatible,” draws reference to the Transmediale theme: In/compatible, acknowledging the less clear, even dark forces at play in the artistic and political climate today. Matter Controlled questions the idea of the object or anti-object within sonification. See CDM’s write-up from yesterday:

Watch Artists Talk About Making Sound From Matter; Thursday Event and Stream in Transmediale Prelude

From the Transmediale podcast, some explanations of the theme of the larger festival:

Jacob Lillemose on the exhibition Dark Drives: Uneasy Energies in Technological Times by transmediale

Kristoffer Gansing elaborates on the festival theme in/compatible, as well as the in/compatible symposium: systems | publics | aesthetics.
Tatiana Bazzichelli is the curator for out new project reSource of transmedial culture and speaks about its concept.
Jacob Lillemose speaks about exhibition Dark Drives: Uneasy Energies in Technological Times which he is curating for transmediale 2012 in/compatible.
Sandra Naumann is the curator for this year’s performance programme The Ghosts in the Maschine, which she explains a bit more in detail.
And Marcel Schwierin tells us about his concept for the video programme he is curating for transmediale 2012 in/compatible.

Performances by Echo Ho, Mario De Vega, Alex Nowitz and Ignaz Schick will investigate this blurry region between the immaterial and material. I am curious to see what objects they will bring to play with. As they potentially seek liberation from the physical objects, by reimagining their sonification, I wonder how they are also reliant and maybe even drawn towards their objectification. Bringing these disparate emotions into play is at the heart of tonights investigation. In today’s climate fractures exist between so many aspects of our lives. These performances seek to bring some of them together, compatible or incompatible as we might discover.

You can watch the proceedings via live Internet stream, for the majority of you not in Berlin for the live show.

www.leapknecht.de

More Photos

About the Author

Kristin Trethewey is a Canadian video artist, cinema performer, and curator. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College in Performance and Interactive Media. A multi-disciplinary curator and artist for the past ten years, she has recently completed a residency at the Node Center for Curatorial Arts, was co-Director/co-Curator of the INDEX Festival. She currently lives in Berlin.

In performance and art, sound and music constantly pull against the formless abstraction of the computer, to find physical expression and realization. In physical control, in tangible production, and in exploration of space, artists explore techniques new and old to refine the still-youthful medium of electronic and digital sound. That adventure is at the heart of a new series at a gallery space in the heart of Berlin, LEAP – the Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance, at Alexanderplatz.

I’m pleased to announce that CDM will be partnering with this new performance/exhibition series, entitled BodyControlled, as a media partner. In the shadow of Berlin’s Fernsehturm (TV tower), we’ll get the chance to share the work of an international roster of artists with everyone else, both in live streams and other documentation, as we look at some of the more experimental threads in electronic music today. (I like the symbolism there, at least, now broadcast over the Internets instead of via the air.) Berlin, like my previous home New York, is a convenient international crossroads, a place where you can find face-to-face some of the work from other parts of Germany, Europe, and beyond.

And I think we’re going to have a real blast kicking the series off this Saturday night, 8pm Berlin time November 26. The premiere of the series begins with installations and performances that manipulate spaces, real, virtual, and imagined. New works make noises with reel-to-reel tape, code, mechanical percussion, and more. I’ll be playing a live set with Pd, producing granular architectures from the harmonious sounds of piano and synth. And a highlight promises to be Robert Henke (of Monolake and Ableton fame, among other things), performing an epic 12-hour performance from just before midnight to morning the next day. (That leaves ample time for visitors to slip off to Berlin’s legendary club scene – or a nap – then see how things have evolved after dawn, if you so choose.)

Here, we take a first look at some of the artists, whose work can be sculptural, challenging, and adventurous. In the first preview videos, we see artists working with the mechanical qualities of tape and robotically-driven percussion to make sounds in physical space. A diverse program is slated for the coming months, too, so I can promise some diversity in ideas and aesthetic. The lineup:

Performances on the 26th November:
Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty (UK)
Peter Kirn (US)
Robert Henke (DE)

Installations until 2nd December:
Stephen Cornford (UK)
Julian Oliver (NZ)
João Martinho Moura (PT)
Robert Mathy (AT)

Additionally, a recording of Robert Henke’s performance will be played as part of the installation

Let’s have a closer look at some of the upcoming work:

Stephen Cornford, in Binatone Galaxy, spotlights the strangely-beautiful sounds of the mechanisms of tape players, moving them from playback devices into the realm of being themselves instruments. Listen to the video above to hear what a chorus of recycled tape players sounds like, courtesy amplification.

Playing with Paul Whitty, Cornford also makes tape players into noise-making live instruments. One such performance below, though expect each of these to take on their own identity in Berlin this week.

At top, Robert Mathy’s work effectively becomes a “score” for a space, as percussion sets the environment into a choreographed set of sounds. (See also work like David Byrne’s Playing the Building project, which transformed an old ferry building in Manhattan. Here, Mathy works on a smaller scale.)

Volume consists of 24 electronic motors mounted on surfaces with different materiality, which are part of the exhibition room. Each motor is equipped with a small metal spike. When a motor gets activated, the spike knocks on the surface of the object on which the motor is mounted and produce a specific sound. All Motors are connected to a main control, which consists of an Arduino board and some electronic parts.
The score is composed of a series of varying random algorithms. They are diversified in temporal and spatial coordination, as every sound has his individual origin in space. The score is adapted in a new way for every room where the installation is shown.

João Martinho Moura‘s “Supercollider Shape,” above, is a minimal virtual sculpture of sound and imagined ink.

Robert Henke’s program notes:

The music of Robert Henke is preoccupied with the present: how something sounds in that moment and what color and substance convey a rhythmic phrase? Music as a state. Only later will this condition be formulated over time. The artist’s installations are always explicit and in turn relate to the phenomena of temporal change.

The work Microsphere, developed for LEAP, combines both fields and explores the boundaries between installation and live performance. Acoustic sounds from percussion instruments distributed throughout the room are recorded during the performance, slowed down repeatedly, atomized into tiny particles and distributed to many speakers. Over the course of twelve hours, more and more sounds are produced and the result is an ever-growing repertoire of spatial-tonal gestures. The composer withdraws from the machine and lets it develop and change itself constantly over long periods of time. The structure of the performance arises from many variable and instantaneous decisions during the performance. The possible outcomes may be small and delicate, almost inaudible and static, or loud, brutal and full of complex repetitions.

Watch the performances

From anywhere in the world:

Tune in 8p (20h) Saturday (CET) / UTC + 1. Performances at 9p, 10p, and then 11p – 11a. Livestream link:
http://www.livestream.com/leapberlin

In Berlin:

While we remain committed to covering this for the rest of the planet, for those handful of you in Berlin, of course, we’d love to see you in person.

Facebook event

Opening and Performances | 26th November 2011 – 20.00

Exhibition | 28th November 2011 – 2nd December 2011, 12h-18h

LEAP
Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance
(Berlin Carré 1. Stock)
Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 13
10178 Berlin

FREE entry

LEAP isn’t the easiest place to find. Here’s a video to guide you in the door (add the Benny Hill theme music if you feel it’s appropriate):

And, as I say so often … stay tuned.

Full program notes [English] [PDF]
http://www.leapknecht.de/

Drasko Vucevic, Toronto- and Santa Monica (California)-based sound designer and artist/composer, is apparently not only interested in playing alone. His upcoming interactive installation at Toronto’s Royal Music Conservatory will have an audience jamming along live via Twitter. And the artistry is crowd-sourced, too – with a range of artists already onboard, Drasko is calling on musical and visual artists (read: you) to be involved with sounds and visuals.

Drasko has sent along extensive notes, so I’m going to let him speak for himself:

I am working through both Drastic Music and Eksperimental (my companies) to create an interactive installation experience for this year’s TEDx Toronto conference taking place at the Royal Music Conservatory.

I am also doing an interactive music performance – an audio visual performance with a complete 3d/visual journey, which allows the audience (physical and digital) to collaborate with me by triggering audio and video elements in real time through their tweets.
So far, I have a few great artists contributing their time to create some beautiful visuals for this first of its kind interactive real-time jam.

Installation [Call for Audio]:
The installation concept is based around redefining collaboration. We are doing this by using real-time data (motion, color, sound, light) and tweets relating to TEDx to trigger, control, manipulate and compose audio elements on our back-end audio library (ableton). This is all happening through Processing, Max 5, Arduino, Ableton.

The massive back-end sound library contains loops, melodies, soundscapes, fx, you name it – produced by some great artists. The beauty of this is also that artists which have never before collaborated, will be remixed and mashed up solely by the audience, in relation to key words, discussions, movement, etc.

So far, the artists contributing audio content are:

Yoko K
Trifonic
Richard Devine
Drumcell
Audioandroid
David Della Santa
Darrin Wiener
Audionerve
Box of Toys
Lodewijk Vos
Matt Davis
Adrian Ellis
Andrew Lauzon
Drasko V

Performance [Visual Call]:

As I mentioned, my performance will be very interactive, musically and visually. Both audio and video elements will be triggered based on tweets in real time. I have some great visual artists contributing their time, such as Murat Pak, Yongsub, Charlie Vicetto, etc, but am looking for more, to create elements for the performance. They would of course get the great exposure of TEDx brand, be mentioned everywhere online, and will be in the final video spread throughout blogs once we launch the digital music version.

So how does the call for works … work?

The TEDxToronto conference is on September 23. Here’s how all the pieces come together for that and how to submit:

Musical system uses a massive library of sound structures – loops, melodies, fx, soundscapes and more – triggered and manipulated solely by tweets (relating to TEDxToronto) and motion, color, sound and light within the RCM venue.

Over 12 compositions will be recorded on the day of the conference. The arrangement, structure and sounds used will depend only on the key words used in tweets, the types of emotional replies, and physical interactivity within the venue.

Beauty of having some great artists be remixed and mashed up by the general public, in a very subliminal way. (again – Through their emotional replies, and physical movement)

This posting is a call to artists who may wish to apply to contribute their audio content and be a part of the soundtrack we will create that day. They should contact drasko (at) drasticmusic (dot) com with a link to their portfolio and we will take it from there.

Our installation progress may be followed on my personal site (drasko-v.com) or via Drastic Music or Eksperimental blogs.

We plan to expand the installation idea and bring it online for an ever-changing musical universe manipulated by truly organic methods (digitally and physically).

Interested to see how this will all come together. We’ll be watching. If you submit, and if you attend, let us know how it goes.

More on Drasko:
http://drasko-v.com/

In the latest example of kinetic, sound-producing sculpture, an Arduino-controlled organ of moving cans makes eerie, beautiful descending noises. Jakub Koźniewski, a member of the panGenerator collective, sends in details of that group’s work, sponsored in this case by the stuff in the cans:

Kinetic audiovisual installation for burn
displayed during burn Selector Festival 2011

Movement of the cans is controlled by 9 independent servos connected to the Arduino board while the sound is purely analogue – air pumped by 9 ordinary mattress pumps blows into the “whistles” at the top of plexiglass pipes. Tone is modulated by the current position of the can.

Lots of soldering, gluing, screwing, cutting and coding

Worth viewing as it sounds really terrific; I’d love to hear it in person. The additional music bed is nice, as well: it’s Krzysztof Zimmermann, from the label Few Quiet People.

Thanks, Jakub!

Granular synthesis, as described by Iannis Xenakis, imagined sound as constructed from elementary elements. In the work of Zimoun, elementary sonic grains are physical. An undulating wall of cardboard rubs surfaces against one another to form a chorus of sound. Cotton balls roll against boxes in throaty clouds of sound. Wires wriggle like some sort of insect antennae. Below, the newest video of his work, in which cardboard petals form an animated wall of rustling noise.

The results, powered by simple DC motors in kinetic musical action, recall some kind of natural, organic colony. Assembled in structures sculptural and architectural, this is real-world synthesis, constructed mechanically in motion.

The work is elegant, graceful, and witty, not cold and aggressive as are so many sound works. The sounds can be delicate – even assemblages of electric fans.

Zimoun is a Swiss artist whose work has been presented around the US and Europe. He also records music, some of it in surround.

http://www.zimoun.ch/

I hope to see these works in person; if they’re this moving in Internet videos, I can barely imagine seeing them up close. I’ll let the videos speak for themselves.

Clavilux 2000 – Interactive instrument for generative music visualization from Jonas Heuer on Vimeo.

Think of playing musical notes for a moment, or close your eyes while fingering a piano keyboard. Odds are, some visual – however abstract – pops into your mind. Visualizing musical notes is second nature in the digital realm, once a note and an image can each be represented with numbers.

Clavilux 2000 by Jonas Friedemann Heuer is one of the latest works to run with the idea. As you play notes, beams of color drift up from the keyboard. In 3D mode, those beams take on a lovely, subtle quality. The model itself isn’t new, owing the notes-as-lines model to player pianos (or even music boxes), and recalling light organs. But there is something intuitive about this model – and I can imagine it being a terrific way to encourage someone to practice. (Well, that or else it could be distracting while practicing!)

Description. Thanks to Yifan Mai for the link; via infosthetics.com, a fantastic resource for exploring ways of visualizing information.

Clavilux 2000 is a music visualization installation that produces generative real-time animations of music. It consists of a computer running vvvv patch hooked up to a MIDI keyboard and projector. Every note played on the keyboard produces a stripe, whose proportions and color correspond to how the note was played. For instance, the color is mapped to the tonality of the note via the circle of fifths, thus visualizing harmonic consonance and dissonance. Besides looking really cool, it also thus creates unique “fingerprints” of each performance.

Clavilux 2000 is extremely close in design to a key 1995 work by media artist Toshio Iwai, known most recently for the Yamaha Tenori-On and Nintendo-published ElectroPlankton DS (each of which uses ideas from the earlier project). Piano–as image media and related works employed both inputs and outputs. (in the installation, visitors could use a trackball to enter note events visually on a screen; in performance with Ryuichi Sakamoto, the work used a piano. In each, events fly off perpendicular to the piano keyboard as beams of light, just as in the work here. That’s not a criticism, incidentally – even without seeing Iwai’s work, it’s a logical solution, because the keyboard organizes notes into an array of thin rectangles (the keys).

Unfortunately, Iwai’s work is not well-documented online; videos of these pieces have been removed. I do have a few resources for you, however. At bottom, there is a video of a 2006 Ars Electronica talk on the visual interface for music. (I have some video of Toshio’s similar thoughts around the launch of the Tenori-On which I should publish.) And for more:

Toshio Iwai talking about the visual-musical interface[artintelligence]

Toshio Iwai keynote at Futuresonic [pixelsumo]

http://www.nydigitalsalon.org/10/artwork.php?artwork=57

Austrian Composer Peter Ablinger has transformed a child speaking so that it can be played as MIDI events on a mechanically-controlled piano, making the piano a kind of speech speaker. Via Matrixsynth, the readers at Hack a Day get fairly involved with how this may be working.

It seems not quite accurate to describe this as vocoding in the strictest sense, so much as a simple transformation to a (much) lower frequency resolution – that is, the 88 keys of the piano. Ablinger, for his part, describes the events as “pixels.” It’s pretty extraordinary that without a bandpass filter, you get something approximating the noisy sibilance of the speech, but this seems to be the result of having lots of events (that is, lots of resolution in terms of time). Edit: Listening again, the short answer to how you can hear so much of the voice through the piano seems to be, you can’t; the original is almost certainly mixed in. It’s nonetheless an interesting effect, and I’d like to hear the piano on its own. In other words, the basic process is, 1) convert the sound spectrum of the recorded voice to a series of MIDI events, and 2) play back the translated MIDI file. You can see that the MIDI playback is accomplished with Pd (Pure Data) running on a Windows Linux/KDE netbook, though it’s not clear what was used to do the original conversion. (The screen shot with side-by-side audio and MIDI appears as though it may be for demonstration purposes, only.)

Correction: The work is absolutely done in custom software developed by the composer in Pd (Pure Data). It’s an ideal tool for the job, and free and open source. I wouldn’t dare try to replicate the results here, but this is fantastic inspiration for playing with sound in Pd.

One Windows tool that’s capable of the job is TS Audiotomidi, as observed by Hack a Day spacecoyote. Whether or not that’s what’s at work here – and it may well be – that utility is itself interesting. Edit: Yeah, far more likely the whole thing was done in Pd. And Pd should be up to the task.

TS-AudioToMIDI

Of course, this is to say nothing of the lovely work done on the mechanical piano. It’s a beautiful piece. Here’s hoping some government bureaucrats got the message of the declaration. Now, we just need a chorus of something really loud – say a thousand trumpets – shouting out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Inside a computer, digital music is entirely unseen. But translate it into the tangible world, and it can be anything you imagine – not limited by acoustic reality or practicality, music can become three-dimensional sculpture.

For artist Christopher Bauder and composer Robert Henke, ATOM’s light and sound sculpture found a three-dimensional matrix of balloons as its medium. Flashing in hypnotic patterns and moving into different configurations, accompanied by live laptop music from Henke (aka Monolake), music and visuals become an inseparable fusion.

ATOM received its North American premiere at Montreal’s MUTEK in May. That turned out to be perfect programming, as it placed ATOM in a week that featured complementary work from artists Artificiel. Henke says some of his matrix manipulations – and even the specific Max/MSP patches from ATOM – came from collaboration with Artificiel and their light bulbs. For their part, at MUTEK they unveiled a new audiovisual etude called POWEr Play involving a live-sampled Tesla Coil. The science fair ethos of ATOM and POWEr Play could have been gimmicky or overly fixated on spectacle, but in these pieces, it was anything but. Both works contemplated their subject matter so thoughtfully that balloons and electrical coils seemed perfectly natural media for the audiovisual imagination, and audiences were left marveling at phenomena in a way too rare in 2009.

Video episode at Blip.tv [includes mobile/desktop video downloads]
YouTube Part 1 and Part 2 (if you prefer YouTube for viewing)

It’s worth downloading the video above and really getting to soak up some of this piece when you have time. I also have an audio interview of a conversation with Robert and Christopher immediately following one of the performances.

You’ll hear Christopher’s voice first, followed by the unmistakable percussive enthusiasm of Robert. For me, the best part of the interview was hearing them discuss whether you should notice some of the unintentional randomness of drifting balloons or technical hiccups, and how they structured the work formally with a palette of possible balloon patterns.

Download the audio interview

[podcast]http://createdigitalmusic.com/files/media/podcasts/2009/06/cdmsounds_atomhenkebauder.mp3[/podcast]

For more on POWEr Play, see my Montreal flat mate Greg Smith writing for Rhizome – and stay tuned for the CDM audio interview, coming next week:
power play – artificiel at mutek [Serial Consign Blog]
Variable Frame Rate: Multimedia Performance at MUTEK 2009 [Rhizome]

More information:
Atom project Information at monolake.de
Text interview by Bertram Niessen for Digimag magazine, October 2007, also at monolake.de

Artists Gijs Gieskes’ sequencers are almost like physical, mechanical software, an expression of musical structure in object form. As such, even as they make strange sounds, they become musical sculpture. His latest Servo Sequencer combines optical and mechanical process, as frequency circles spin on a turntable and tone arms float above them.

The Servo Sequencer is built for exhibition use – meaning, yes, he’s brave enough to let you play with this contraption. Sequence the arms using buttons, then adjust the volume mix and placement of each arm using the joystick.

Serv Seq from Gijs on Vimeo.

This project is unusually well-documented. Gijs provides complete specs, the script that controls the arms, and even a little web app that generates those lovely patterns.

http://gieskes.nl/instruments/?file=serv-seq

But for those of you near the Netherlands, you should go check this out in person. Updated: The piece will be part of an exhibition in Breda through August 23, with multiple opening events featuring local artists from Eindhoven and Breda, plus live performances and concerts including Gijs and his talented brethren and neighbors.

Here & There Exhibition, mu.nl [Info in English]

The events:
Opening Part 1:
KOP, Breda
Thursday 25/06 08.00 pm

MU, Eindhoven
Friday 26/06 08.00 pm

(It’s a bit confusing as the events swap between Breda and Eindhoven — there’s a second opening Saturday July 25. Gijs explains “the first [opening] is in breda (thursday), then a day later (friday) in eindhoven, where my machine will be. and then a month later its the other way around.”)

You know, Breda. Like, right … here. We’ve got a number of readers in the area (whom I suspect know more or less exactly where this is); let us know if you make it!