Wednesday, July 2, 2003
Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, WA

 

Speakers:

Reek Havok, ‘Space Thrust’: Seattle-based Reek Havok is widely recognized for his pioneering work with electronic music instruments and digital sampling in the music industry over the past 22 years. Reek shares one of his most unique creations, “Space Thrust”, with the dorkbot community. Space Thrust was designed to be a Rave song, originally created in 1991. Its uniqueness comes in the creation of its instruments, which comprise sounds that are literally not from this planet or even our solar system. The sounds in Space Thrust were derived from recordings done by Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, an astrophysicist and composer, for her “Music of the Galaxies” CD. These recordings are of raw data, high frequency radio waves from Galaxy UGC 6697 which resides approximately 180 million light years from earth. These radio waves, originally in the gigahertz frequency range, have been sub-divided many times to bring them into the range of human hearing. Reek will explain the how he realized the musical content of these unique sounds and created 11 unique instruments for utilization in this piece. Reek will also show some unique Prepared Piano samples he designed with Patrick Moraz for the John Cage Tribute CD, “A Chance Operation”.

Marta Lyall, [Talk title coming soon]: Marta Lyall http://www.envaren.org/envaren_art/ is a locally-based artist "whose practice integrates scientific investigation, cultural taboos surrounding science and art, and social patterns which emerge from these areas. Unlike many artists currently working in relation to science, her work involves the use of scientific methodologies within an artistic domain. This often brings up issues surrounding the authority of science, and questions the exclusionary perspectives of one of our most valued cultural domains. Her work involves the appropriation of found scientific processes and searching for ways to identify the assumptions they contain. She is particularly interested in the mineral of bone, (hydroxyapitite), and has incorporated it into a 19th century electrochemical process commonly used for plating metals. Using this method, she creates formations which attach to biological structures, such as existing bones or the structural components of eggs. It was interesting to her to learn that similar material practices are currently being used in material science and biotechnology for the creation of miniature electronic circuits which can be grown and then reabsorbed in the body. Throughout history, people from different fields of study within the same culture are often attracted to the similar methods and materials. This simultaneity is not so mysterious as it is functional. It is often based on our current medical knowledge, intuition, and our technological development of apparatus for observing biological phenomena within our own bodies."

Casey Muratori, ‘Games You Can Play With Your Own Shadow’: "On average, how much fun would you say you have with your own shadow? A modicum? A smidgen? None at all? If you're like many americans, you probably suffer from what is known as "uninteractus shadowitis", a severe condition of boredom brought on by the fact that your shadow doesn't play jump-rope with you, or let you be a super-model, or tend your garden, or even fly. But you will be happy to note that thanks to this year's Indie Game Jam, you can now do all those things and a whole lot more.

Each year in the spring, Chris Hecker and Sean Barrett invite professional video game developers from all over the country to come to a barn in Oakland, California for the four-day "Indie Game Jam". Each year there is a central technological theme, and the objective is to produce as many different, fully playable games as possible within that theme (and in only the four days allotted). This year's theme was "games you can play with your own shadow." The equipment necessary to play the games is quite simple: a firewire camera, a projector, and a computer. The projector projects the games onto a screen, and the player (or players) stands in between the projector and the screen, thus injecting their shadow into the game's display. The firewire camera continuously captures the screen and feeds the results back to the computer, which the game uses as input. So, quite literally, you play each and every game with your shadow - no mice, no keyboards, no gamepads :)

In this 30-minute DorkBot presentation, I will be demonstrating some selected games from the 14 playable ones we created. I'll give a brief overview of the system we used as a harness (called Shadow Garden), and I'll discuss the lessons we learned about designing interactivity around the novel input device that is a player's shadow. And, space permitting, we'll have a fully running version of a few of the games available for everyone to play into the wee hours of the night."

Reek Havok will be performing after the meeting with his Psycho-Groove rig affectionately known as “Merurglys 4”.

Join us for beer, music, conversation and mingling after the speakers have spoken - and bring work-in-progress for peer review and comment during this last part of the evening if you like: we'd love to see what you've been working on!

Reek Havok: Rock musician Robert Palmer once described Reek Havok as "...a Sound Scientist from the future". Reek Havok has been involved in music technology for over 22 years. As a pioneer in the electronic drum movement in Los Angeles in the early 80’s, Reek’s involvement as a drummer, programmer, Sound Designer and consultant has landed work with Motley Crue, YES, Robert Palmer, REM, Earth Wind and Fire, ELP, David Lee Roth, Patrick Moraz, Eurythmics, Madana and countless others where he has been awarded 4 Platinum records for his bleeding edge concepts and sounds. Reek has created custom sounds for Yamaha, Simmons, Dynacord and E-Mu Systems and produced sounds for software tittles, theme park rides and TV and motion pictures including the Cult Classic “Carnasaur”. Living in the Pacific North West for the past 10 years, Reek worked as a sound designer and composer for Microsoft’s Digital Backlot and was the Interactive Technology Specialist for EMP’s award winning Sound Lab.

Marta Lyall: Marta has been on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington. She has also lectured and exhibited her work in Japan, Poland, Slovenia, as well as the United States.

Casey Muratori: Casey Muratori develops character animation software for RAD Game Tools, Inc., in Kirkland, WA. The Indie Game Jam is an invitation-only annual event. After only two years in the running, it has already been widely covered by the gaming press and has inspired similar events all over the world. The full source code and assets for all games developed at the Jam are posted to SourceForge a few months after the Jam concludes. More information about this is available at http://www.indiegamejam.com (the 2003 sources are not yet posted, but should be within a few months). Shadow Garden is an art installation engine developed by Zack Simpson (a veteran Jammer himself). It has been shown at galleries throughout America and Europe, and was a show favorite at SIGGRAPH 2002. It is licensed through his company at http://www.mine-control.com.