The following message was posted to: dance-tech dear all, in case you missed Matt Mirapaul's ArtsOnline article last Monday (Oct.14) in the New York Times on "3d music," ," an interactive orchestral work and performance environment written and designed specifically for the internet, please take a look at the article http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/14/arts/design/14ARTS.html or, of course, at the work itself: http://www.ntlworld.com/3dmusic. I'd be interested in discussing it, when more of you have seen/heard it. In conjunction with this project, let me mention that I saw a broadcast on German television this summer, a concert in Berlin created jointly by the Huelgas Ensemble (conductor: Paul van Nevel), which specializes in medieval and Renaissance music, and software programmers/digital artists from the ZKM in Karksruhe (Jeffrey Shaw, Bernd Lintermann, et al). The production is called "Utopia Triumphans", and the ensemble performs the polyphonic music live. (no weblink to be found, so far, Huelgas is with Sony Classics artists, http://www.sonyclassical.com/artists/huelgas/). It's not interactive directly, as far as I can tell, or created for the net, but for live performance. It conjoins this enormously beautiful, and stunningly sung polyphonic work (for 40 voices) with large-scale real-time processed digital 3D images (projected via two projectors, audience wears these stereoscopic glasses), and what you see, if you want to watch and not just listen, are surreally floating, self-generating, ever-changing and moving architectures that Lintermann wrote/coded with his genetic algorithms. Lintermann, as some of you may know, is working with choreographer Nik Haffner on a fascinating project called "Time Lapses" (also at ZKM). At times I found the moving 3d projections very mesmerizing, meditative, at other times the images are not as strong as the music and the enormous, espansive space the voices create (normally the ensemble performs in cathedrals of course, this concert was at the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin). Rather, the architectural lines and blocks seem to create recurring chunks of gothic (vertical) flotsam...... Thinking of "3d music", the collaborative project by Gabi & Terry Braun with 3d designer Eduardo Carrillo and composer Sam Hayden (and London Sinfonietta), this makes me wonder how, indeed, one delves into musical "landscapes" and vocal architectures via "real-time" virtual/game world-like environments that are processed, I assume, in some conceptual relationship to the harmonic architecture of the music and music score.......... and what are the rules with which one learns/explores to look/listen for distributed, nonlinear dimensions of the music in the journey-like game worlds? In this respect, I found it very stimulating, this past summer, to see a renewed debate, in German reviews/newspapers, on "Die Renaissance der Virtual Reality im Computerspiel" [The renaissance of virtual reality in computer games], as Konrad Lischka argued in the FR, and on the new "picaresque" travel or journey romances in some of the games which are not shoot them up games. (The examples discussed this summer were "Morrowind", "Neverwinter Nights," but the commentator also discussed the new LAN parties that are popping up and replacing rave culture). The commentator links the "game journeys" to Renaissance novels or travel literature such as Richard Hakluyt, "The Principal Navigations," and the episodical writing of John Smith's "A True Relation" (1608)..... hmmm. it seems we have some interesting re-connections with medieval and Renaissance art at our hands here. I'd be interested, for example, in what the composers and virtual environment designers amongst us think regarding this return of a kind of narrative. Lev Manovich, when he came to visit the documenta XI in Kassel, seemed quite disappointed with the digital art work that was shown there; he didn't mention the very popular, always crowded computer-game room of Chinese artist Yang Fudong, and, indeed, there was very little Renaissance sentiment, but explosively kinetic wild chases and shoot them ups. more on documenta later, with regards Johannes Birringer osu-dance & technology http://www.dance.ohio-state.edu/Dance_and_Technology/enX.html ---------------------------------------- The Dance-Tech mailing list has recently moved to a new address. To post a message, send email to dance-tech@dancetechnology.org. To unsubscribe, send email to lists@dancetechnology.org, with the words "unsubscribe dance-tech" in the message body. ----------------------------------------
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