Thanks to everyone who came down to the Botanics last Sunday! Patrick and I had a drop-in session to show off our Secret Sounds of Spores installation, and we both felt that it went really well.
We got lots of great video and photos, which we will be going through in the coming days. In the mean time you can see this video (featuring a glimpse into a fascinating tangential conversation I had with Paul Stamets) that Patrick put together showing everything in action:
I’m posting this from the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens, where I’m busy installing my latest installation, The Secret Sounds of Spores. Followers of this blog and my twitter feed will no doubt be aware of this project, as I can’t seem to stop talking about it! In a nutshell, I’m working with mycologist Patrick Hickey to make a musical installation using mushrooms.
I’ve made yet another video about it all, this time going into more detail about how the software works:
The installation is part of a whole show about mushrooms – From Another Kingdom: The Amazing World of Fungi. It is opening tonight at the John Hope Gateway of the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens.
Maybe I will see you there! Don’t worry if you can’t make it, the installation will be up for a few weeks at least, and it’s free. Let me know if you happen to find any mushrooms that you want to stick in the installation, we’re going to need a lot of them in the coming weeks!
For the past few weeks Patrick Hickey and I have been working more and more on our Secret Sounds of Spores project, which is coming together nicely. For those of you just joining us, we are building an installation for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh which will create music from falling mushroom spores. You can see these spores if you shine a laser underneath a live (or recently deceased) mushroom, and I’m building custom software that will analyze them and trigger a series of strange musical instruments that Patrick and I are building. My previous post explains the concept a bit more, and here’s a new video that shows some of the instruments in action:
Patrick and I will be giving a demonstration and explanation tomorrow night, the 15th of July, at the Apple Store in Glasgow. The event is free and begins at 6pm. We will be showing off a few of the instruments, I’ll be explaining how I’ve approached the software, and if this rain continues we shouldn’t have any trouble finding some mushrooms!
edit: as I’ve said in the comments, thanks to all who came by! I’ll post photos as soon as I get them from the Apple Store, in the mean time here is one of the mushrooms set up with the laser:
I’m working on a project right now with Patrick Hickey, founder of Nipht Technologies, which involves building an installation that will create music from mushrooms.
This all came about when Patrick showed me some videos he had made using closeup footage of a laser pointed underneath a protected mushroom – as you will see in the footage below, it’s absolutely gorgeous. I loved how shining a laser revealed a whole hidden world that to me had an intrinsically artistic and musical quality.
Anyway, we decided to collaborate and make an installation that would turn the patterns of those falling spores into music. We were awarded an Alt-W grant from New Media Scotland for the idea, and we have been working on it for the past few weeks. This video gives a bit of an introduction to what we are doing:
One interesting (and unexpected) outcome of tracking the spores to make music is that you end up with a really fascinating data set. This image represent the notes on a piano roll being triggered by three different mushroom spore video feeds – you can see the different patterns created by the different mushrooms.
It’s a big project, and it will take a few more blog posts to explain it all, so if you have any questions please let me know and I will address them as well as I can!
Posted on
Friday, May 28th, 2010 at
8:41 am, filed
under Music, Seznec Brothers.
I just got back from a few days with my brother recording some great new music together with percussionist extraordinaire Paul Clifford. I’m really looking forward to editing and mixing those new tunes. In the mean time, here’s a (slightly strange) music video I made of a new Seznec Brothers tune:
You can also watch a video of us playing it together at home. This version has a pretty different feel:
You can download the mp3 of the video version here!
Readers of my twitter feed will remember a series of tweets a few weeks back about my performance at the Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow called Exercise Magic!!
This performance was part of a Cryptic Night with fellow artist Rachel Maclean. The night featured videos by the both of us (including my “Penalty Shootout” and “A story about techno”), a wacky Q & A session, and my performance, which was specifically commissioned for this night.
Exercise Magic!! was based around an exercise video (Real Results with Beverley Callard). I donned a specially designed suit designed by Kristina Johansen containing Wii remotes – you can read through the process she went through to make it on her website. The wiimotes, and a wii balance board on the floor, sent data to custom built Max/MSP/Jitter patches, which controlled the video and audio in real time based on my movements. If you’re interested, you can see a screenshot of that patch in my previous post.
The performance started off with me entering the stage and warming up, before beginning to exercise along with Beverley and Co. Slowly, though, my movements started to create strange sounds that clashed with the perfect world of the video. Eventually the lines began to blur between who was controlling who – was I following the video, or controlling it? Throw in some jamming remixes of the exercise music and you get the idea of Exercise Magic!!
I hope to do this performance again at some point soon, and develop it even further. For now, here is a video that shows the first couple of minutes…it was very dark in there so it’s not great quality, but I hope you get the idea.
Anyone in Glasgow over the next week can drop the Centre for Contemporary Art on Sauchiehall Street to say hello to the Gelkies! It’s all a part of the leadup to this Thursday, when I’ll be showing work and performing at Cryptic Nights at the CCA. I’m sharing the night with film artist extraordinaire Rachel MacLean, and we’ve got lots of wackiness planned. We’ll both be showing some of our videos, and I’ll be premiering a brand new performance called “Exercise Magic!!”, which I’ll write about more soon. It involves Wiimotes, an exercise video, and spandex. A screenshot of the Max/MSP/Jitter patch I’m working on, for those of you into that kind of thing!
A few weeks ago I got to attend the astounding TEI Conference at the equally astounding MIT Media Lab. It was awesome for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which was because I got to present some great work. I was working on a project by Sarah Kettley and Martha Glazzard of Nottingham Trent University, who have been developing custom built knitted stretch sensors which can be embedded into clothing, a project they call “Aeolia”. It’s pretty sweet.
Working with Sarah and Peter Gregson, cellist extraordinaire, I developed some custom software (using Arduino, Max/MSP, and Ableton Live) which allowed Peter to manipulate his own playing through his movements in real time. Here’s a video we made during rehearsals:
I don’t have a video of us showing it off at the conference, unfortunately…it was just too busy! But I think it went really well and if all goes well we’ll be developing this project further.
This trip was possible thanks to support from the Scottish Arts Council and New Media Scotland.
The rest of the conference was absolutely fantastic, the highlight for me being an incredible “bodyhack” studio workshop with Daito Manabe + company. The TEI folk made a great little end-of-conference video about the studio workshops (featuring music by yours truly!):
Last year I was lucky enough to be the Digital Media Artist in Residence at the University of Abertay, Dundee, a position funded by the Scottish Arts Council. It was an amazing experience for me and my career, and it officially culminated in the production of my first solo gallery show, which took place at the Hannah Maclure Gallery. This show was called “Gelkies”, and opened in November 2009. The show was presented as a sort of zoo, with the eponymous Gelkies being strange creatures native to rural Scotland. I even made a nature documentary about them:
Here is a video that documents the installation itself:
Tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk about the Gelkies to the fabulous folks from Central Station as part of their exciting Dundee Pop-Up tour. Looking forward to it!
Posted on
Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at
12:07 pm, filed
under Music, Seznec Brothers.
I always love reading what happened on this day in history, and today is particularly fun. On this day in 1785, French inventor Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American doctor John Jeffries crossed the English Channel in a hot air balloon, marking the first aerial crossing and setting an example of Franco-American cooperation that I can’t help but be proud of. Ballooning was all the rage at the time, according the Blanchard’s wikipedia entry:
The early balloon flights triggered a phase of public “balloonmania”, with all manner of objects decorated with images of balloons or styled au ballon, from ceramics to fans and hats. Clothing au ballon was produced with exaggerated puffed sleeves and rounded skirts, or with printed images of balloons. Hair was coiffed à la montgolfier, au globe volant, au demi-ballon, or à la Blanchard.
Monsieur Blanchard made a career out of ballooning, and ended up touring America and Europe, wowing George Washington and four future presidents on one day alone. He also teamed up with Sébastien Lenormand, the inventor of the parachute, endorsing it as a great way to escape safely from a hot air balloon (the parachute had been invented as a means to escape from burning buildings, but Blanchard had a one-track mind). Blanchard took his obsession slightly too far, and eventually had a heart attack whilst inside the balloon and fell out and died. His wife suffered a similar fate a few years later (which was documented by Norwich Duff, born down the street from me in Edinburgh), though not before she was proclaimed the “Official Aeronaut of the Restoration” by Louis XVIII.
For his part, John Jeffries studied medicine in Edinburgh, was a Loyalist who was involved in the Boston Massacre trial (he testified that in Ireland the soldiers would have fired even sooner) and was a surgeon for the British Navy during the occupation of Boston. Also, this fascinating article claims that he and Blanchard pretty much hated each other, and may have killed a small dog during their journey.
All of this reminded me of another balloon journey that took place much later – the ill-fated attempt by S.A. Andrée and his two assistants, Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel.
Mr. Andrée was a Swedish engineer with a passion for ballooning who got caught up in all of the turn-of-the-century excitement surrounding polar exploration. He combined these two interests and formulated a plan for travelling across the North Pole in a balloon from Sweden to Canada. His plans were based on completely unproven and blatantly impossible theories (steering a balloon with ropes, for example), but his enthusiasm appealed to the Swedish power structures at the time, which were concerned that their supposedly inferior neighbors Norway were winning the polar exploration race (who eventually won is disputed, but the Swedes certainly didn’t end up doing that well at all). The Swedish Academy approved his plan and funded his project.
The expedition was doomed from the start. The balloon couldn’t hold air, the steering mechanism didn’t work, they didn’t bring enough food, and their clothing was totally unsuitable. After a disastrous first attempt, one of Andrée’s assistants quit, and was replaced by Knut Frænkel (who seems to have been younger and less critical). They finally took off in 1897. The steering ropes and seven hundred and forty kilograms of weight were jettisoned within a few minutes of takeoff. The flight lasted 10 hours, followed by 41 hours of bumping along the ice before they landed. The three of them wandered around the ice floes for three months (with Knut taking lots of lovely photographs) before dying, probably from contracting a disease by eating raw Polar Bear meat. Their bodies were found 33 years later and they were returned to Sweden as national heroes.
And 75 years later, my brother Cory and I read about this expedition and wrote a song about it! It’s called “The Ballad of Knut and Nils”, and you can listen to it right here:
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The song features me on guitar, recorded in Pittsburgh, and my brother on a Bolivian Charango (which was subsequently destroyed by British Airways). It is on our album “Sediment”, which you can buy simply by emailing me (rolo at theamazingrolo.net).
I also can’t help thinking that this all somehow relates to Mujik, with the balloon thing and all. Hmmmm.
The Amazing Rolo is sound designer, musician, and digital artist Yann Seznec. He is based in Edinburgh, and is currently guest lecturer at the University of Abertay Dundee, where he recently completed the Digital Media Arts Residency. He specializes in interactive installations, ragtime piano, Wii music software, and sound art.
For the past few weeks Patrick Hickey and I have been working more and more on our Secret Sounds of Spores project, which is coming together nicely. For those of you just joining us, we are building an installation for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh which will create music from falling mushroom spores. You can see these spores if you shine a laser underneath a live (or recently deceased) mushroom, and I’m building custom software that will analyze them and trigger a series of strange musical instruments that Patrick and I are building. 
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