It makes me very proud to say that one of my videos, “A story about techno”, is included in the massive and groundbreaking show currently on at the National Galleries of Scotland. The show, Running Time, is the biggest ever exhibition of Scottish video art, and the first ever dedicated exclusively to artist films in Scotland. The show has been going for a couple of weeks now, and each week there is a new theme. This week’s theme, within which my video is included, is Sound and Vision. From their website:
Sound and Vision explores the influence of sound and music on artists’ work, revealing a distinctive stylistic approach to film-making. Artists such as Katy Dove and Craig Mullholland integrate experimental music into their practice whilst others, including Sam Spreckley and Will Duke, use a range of manipulated sound recordings to create unsettling soundtracks.
If you happen to be in Scotland be sure to check this out, it’s at the Dean Gallery and is completely free!
Posted 9 months, 4 weeks ago at 6:07 pm. 1 comment
This week I was very happy to present at The Sounds of the Silents, an event at the University of Edinburgh about the history of film sound. There were some amazing lectures and demonstrations from historians and foley artists and more. My presentation was about the Lumièrophone, a screen that I made with Kristina Johansen. As you can see from the photo, this screen has light sensors sewn onto the surface. These sensors control a synthesizer I built that generated sound based on what was projected on the screen. All the sound was thus generated in real time, and without any computers or anything, just a 9 volt battery and some speakers. The Lumièrophone (named after Auguste and Louis)was designed especially for the showing of an abstract film by Walter Ruttman, and I think it worked very well! You can see a video for yourself:
Posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago at 8:25 am. 1 comment
I feel very honored to be involved in Rough Cut Nation, a brilliant show that’s happening right now at the Nation Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.
In a nutshell, the Rough Cut Nation project is a bunch of Scottish artists who took over the Portrait Gallery, which is closing for renovation at the end of the summer. They covered the walls with their work, which looks absolutely brilliant. I got involved by making an interactive temporary paint installation!
Check out the video I made, featuring music by the one and only Handface.
Together with Kristina Johansen, we also made a glove using conductive thread and embedded LEDs to make the interaction a bit more natural:
I originally got in touch with Richie Cumming, the organizer of the show, to help him set up a sensor system for switching on some UV lights. The idea was that they would light up every so often to reveal hidden textures on the walls that were painted with UV-responsive paint. Long story short, we ended up not going with that plan, and instead I built something that was a lot more interactive and loads of fun to play with…I got some UV LED’s from Patrick Hickey at Nipht Technologies and turned put them into jars and boxes with little buttons. When brought near the walls they made the phosphorus paint glow in lovely magical way.
The jars and boxes felt a lot like futuristic spraypaint cans…I started thinking that maybe the different types of containers I put them in each represented what spraypaint cans will become in various divergent futures. Hmmm.
In any case, the UV LED things fit really well with the whole show, because it gave people the opportunity to paint the walls themselves in a fun and temporary way. It went down a storm at the opening on Friday!
Rough Cut Nation will be open to the public until August 30th, and it’s free! It’s also your last chance to visit the Portrait Gallery for a couple years, so get in while you can. There’s also a nice little café they’ve set up just for the show. You can find out more on the Rough Cut Nation Page of the National Galleries of Scotland website, and on the National Galleries Blog!
Many of you already know what I’ve been working on for the past few months with Jon and Mike – Mujik, a charming and fun music toy for the iPhone. We have submitted version 1.0 to Apple and we are just waiting for them to approve it and put it on the app store. In the mean time, here are two sneak peek videos that show what Mujik is all about…check back very soon for more details. Lots more to come!
Last week I was sorry to miss the amazing sounding Unique Beats festival of electronic music here in Edinburgh. I was able to make a few short appearances via video, though! Here is the first video I made for them, a tutorial explaining how I made the Wii BeatLooper in MaxMSP:
Here’s a demo video of a new mini piece of wii music software, made in preparation for my trip to the Maker Faire next week. The BeatLooper is a fun scratching looping device! I’ll be posting this software very soon, along with the Max Patch, and of course there is much more on the way!
Posted 1 year, 3 months ago at 9:20 pm. Add a comment
On the 28th of January 2009, Dundee United and Glasgow Celtic battled to a 0-0 tie in the semi-final of the CIS Scottish League Cup. The game thus went to penalty kicks.
Celtic won, but not before every player on both teams (including the goalies) took shots in what must have been one of the most epic penalty shootouts in Scottish (if not world) football history.
Watching the coverage I was struck by how the camera angles were always very similar for each penalty. I edited the footage and layered each of these similar camera angles on top of one another to create a composite version of the shootout, compressing the 24 shots into one. The angles were all different lengths, so sometimes you only see one or two layers, and occasionally you see many. I did a similar process with the sound, although I wasn’t quite as rigid, as you will hear.
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 7:42 am. 2 comments
It looks like a video of mine will be shown in Glasgow next week…
As we speak is an artists video screening night in Glasgow dedicated to the promotion of new contemporary video works. The next one will take place on January the 20th 2009 in Stereo, Renfield Lane (behind Central Station). Free entry.
To celebrate, here is the video that will be shown, for those of you who can’t make it (including me, unfortunately!). It’s called “Darkness”, and it’s a strange abstract sci-fi short story about what would happen on a planet where sound and light do not act in the same way they do on Earth.
The concept of a planet where light and sound are reversed is an idea I’ve had for a while…it has some pretty interesting implications, and I find it generally fascinating to think that light is made up of vibrations, just like sound, but that those vibrations are so fast that we can’t hear them. That has always seemed rather arbitrary to me, and I love to think about what life would be like if we had evolved to hear the frequency band that we now perceive as light. Even more fascinating, perhaps, is the idea that everything is made of vibrations anyway, as illustrated by string theory.
But I’m getting out of my depth! Back to the video…whilst sketching out the concept for “Darkness” I wrote a short story and made an image to explore the ideas. The short story eventually turned into the narrative for the movie, and you can see that image here:
Posted 1 year, 7 months ago at 5:45 am. Add a comment
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.
It makes me very proud to say that one of my videos, “A story about techno”, is included in the massive and groundbreaking show currently on at the National Galleries of Scotland. The show, Running Time, is the biggest ever exhibition of Scottish video art, and the first ever dedicated exclusively to artist films in Scotland. The show has been going for a couple of weeks now, and each week there is a new theme. This week’s theme, within which my video is included, is Sound and Vision. From their website: 
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