Category Archives: Installation

Composition, Featured Composition, Featured Intermedia, Featured Splash, Installation, Music

Precipitation 3

Precipitation 3 is one of a series of musical compositions written for 26 clock chimes as part of the sound art installation, Aqua•litative. With my Precipitation series, I treat the electromechanical structure as musical instrument, navigating through sound with the syntactical construction of code. Compositions played by the sculpture evoke precipitation data of California weather stations by cycling through bits of its data. These cycles create emergent sonic patterns in a continuously evolving play between density and rhythm. Movement flows as collapsing waves, additively striking a cybernetic balance between natural order and mechanic motion.

Aqua•litative is a kinetic installation that renders multiple data sets of California’s water history into a physical experience. The work correlates natural factors contributing to California’s water shortages, outlining the serpentine narrative of water through the translation of data into kinetic movement and acoustic sound.

Installation, Intermedia

Selector

Selector is a live audio-visual performance that uses algorithms to select between various sonic processes. Some of these processes include the selection of audio segments, rapidly skipping like a malfunctioning CD player. Each audio process triggers pulses of projected light. Selector combines the generative selection of audio with the selection of visual code in a tightly synchronized display of sound and light.

Installation, Intermedia

Cloche

Cloche are 3D printed objects instilled with movement data to create combinatorial structures of natural patterns. Motion capture technology was used to extract physical movement from its occurrence in the physical world, recording dynamic qualities like speed, direction, weight, and intensity. Moving back through the virtual filter to the physical world, movement data re-animates a different body– a multiplicitous arc in humans forms. The analog-digital-analog processes filters presence, stripping movement of some information and endowing it with others.

Like movement, sound traverses a similar filtering process. Recordings of 3D object printing, capturing the movement of a form’s creation, are processed digitally and re-amplified in the space. The sounds continue to be filtered by the shape and contour of our physical bodies and the acoustics of the room. The physical-virtual-physical translation process is both known and physical, and at the same time other and immaterial.

Jon Bellona, sound design
Brad Garner, movement design
John Park, movement capture, print, and visual design

Installation, Intermedia

Aqua•litative

Aqua•litative is a kinetic installation that renders multiple data sets related to California’s water history into movement and sound. The installation displays climatological data as a chronological narrative of water in the state by transforming water data into acoustic sounds (ringing of clock chimes) and physical movement (motors moving arms of balsa wood) shown in a gallery space. Precipitation data creates sonic patterns, analogous to rain droplets, in a continuously evolving play between density and rhythm.

Aqua•litative is by Jon Bellona, John Park, and John Reagan. http://aqualitative.org The installation is part of an Environmental Resilience and Sustainability Fellowship, funded in part by the Jefferson Trust and the University of Virginia Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs.

Aqua•litative installed at the Duke Gallery in Harrisonburg, VA

Arduino board layout for the installation.

Installation, Intermedia, Software

Your own Twitter song

CarbonFeed takes your most recent 200 tweets and turns them into a minute loop, a song that changes over your Twitter lifetime. Every time you tweet you generate 0.02g/C02 [1]. Don’t worry too much though. Listening to your one-minute song will eat up roughly 2.86 grams/C02e in electricity, servers, and embodied computer emissions [2].

[1] http://carbonfeed.org
[2] Mike Berners-Lee. How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything. Greystone Books. 2011.

Featured Intermedia, Installation, Intermedia

#Carbonfeed

The project #CarbonFeed directly challenges the popular notion that virtuality is disconnected from reality. Through sonifying Twitter feeds and correlating individual tweets with a physical data visualization in public spaces, artists Jon Bellona and John Park invite viewers to hear and see the environmental cost of online behavior and its supportive physical infrastructure.

CarbonFeed works by taking in realtime tweets from Twitter users around the world. Based on a customizable set of hashtags, the work listens for specific tweets. The content of these incoming tweets generates a realtime sonic composition. An installation-based visual counterpart of compressed air being pumped through tubes of water further provides a physical manifestation of each tweet.

To see a running counter of the carbon footprint of digital behavior, learn more about this project or even listen to a song based on your personal twitter feed, please visit http://carbonfeed.org

#Carbonfeed installed at the University of Virginia.

Installation, Intermedia

Human Chimes

Human Chimes transforms users into sound that bounce between other users inside the space. The sounds infer interaction with all other participants inside the space. Participants perceive themselves and others as transformed visual components projected onto the front wall as well as sonic formulations indicating where they are. As people move, the sounds move and change to show changing personal interactions. As more users enter the space, more sounds are layered upon the existing body. In this way, sound patterns, like our relationships with others, continuously evolve.

The social work dynamically tracking users’ locations in real time, transcoding participants as sounds that pan around the space according to the participants’ positions. Human Chimes enables users to create, control, and interact with sound and visuals in real time. The piece uses a multimedia experience to ignite our curiosity and deepen our playful attitude with the world around us.

The work was commissioned in part by the University of Oregon and the city of Eugene, Oregon. The work was presented as part of the (sub)Urban Projections film festival: Nov. 9, 2011.

Installation, Intermedia, Software

Graffiti

(sub)Urban Projections Film Festival wanted to include live projection bombing in downtown Eugene, OR, and I was commissioned to create an interactive installation that allows a user to paint graffiti upon any projected surface. The human interface uses TouchOSC on an iPad or iPhone, which drives my graffiti computer software. The work was presented each night of the (sub)Urban Projections festival: Nov. 9, 16, 23; 2011, the WhiteBox gallery in Portland, OR Dec. 10, 2011, and the second (sub)Urban Projections festival: Nov. 7, 11, 14 2012.

Installation, Intermedia

Play! Sequence

Play! Sequence is a multimedia installation for iPod Touch, USB camera, and VGA video display and TouchOSC, Max/MSP/Jitter, and Isadora software applications. By creating a multitouch sequencer that controls the playback of audio and video masks, Play! Sequence enables the user to simultaneously interact with the space’s sonic and visual environment.

The iPod Touch provides a familiar language for the user and for the nature of the tactile interactions. The user is allowed to create, edit, and delete three synchronous sequences of sixteen steps, thereby changing the evolution and the complexity of the piece over time.

Each of the three sequences represent a sonic timbre and color mask that mirror the user’s actions. With each sonic timbre, the user has control over pitch, rhythm, and amplitude. The color masks follow the sounds across the screen, repeating from the left upon the start of each loop. The masks help visualize the user’s tactile and sound experience by revealing the user inside the space, and each mask represents one of elements in the RGB color model.

Play! Sequence operates within the framework of natural human interaction, playing off of our curiosity and our engagement with objects that we can creatively control. The user manipulates and interacts with the sounds and visuals in real time, driven by the immediate feedback that the system provides.

Installation, Intermedia

The Goddess Re:Membered

Commissioned for the 2011 Fringe Festival, The Goddess Re:membered is a site specific work and multimedia response to The Goddess, a classic Chinese silent film from 1934. The interactive installation is for video projection, IR camera, Max/MSP and Isadora software. Through public interactions of users inside the space, clues to distant memories are revealed through the triggering of color, sound, and video masks.