Some inspiration
Day 226 @ ITP: RESEARCH ON LIGHT AND SOUND...
Day 225 @ ITP: Live Image Processing & Performance
OBJECT THEATER: FINAL PERFORMANCE FOOTAGE!
A multimedia game show with a questionable screening process for entering a rhizomatic non hierarchical way of being w/ Sam H., Erin C. (Nire), and Camilla P-C for Live Image Processing & Performance ITP-NYU Spring 2018
Day 201: Live Image Processing & Performance
Object Theater Performance
Group Presentation : Erin, Sam, Camilla
DIEZOME
Our project is game of chance, based on a traditional game show format such as Wheel Of Fortune. In the game the contestant is being screened to enter a new rhizomatic world where hierarchy does not exist. With each pull of the lever or roll of the die the contestant is introduced to a new facet of the process to get to the rhizome. A hybrid of digital-analog folklore is woven into the dialog of the game, which will make an algorithmic script to guide us to the end (which is a surprise.)
OUR SOURCES (Myths/folk tales)
Wyrd Sisters or "3 Witches" (Norse) ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyrd_Sisters
Trojan Horse (Roman) ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Horse
Mohini (Sri Lankan) ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohini
Maha Sona (Sinhalese) ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_Sona
Inanna (Sumerian) ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna
Day 195 @ ITP: Recurring Concepts in Art
Source: Mirror Lights – Camilla & Jina
Mirror Lights is a two-person performance using light and acoustic sound to create a virtual reality experience.
DESCRIPTION
One person enters a darkened room, sits on a chair and shines a light at a screen suspended in front of them.
A second person shines a light from the other side of the screen, following the first person’s light’s movements, thereby creating the illusion that the first light is guiding the movements of the second.
The first person’s light is attached to a chandelier of bells above their head, which causes it to chime with their movements, creating the soundtrack for the performance.
Materials: mylar sheets, lights, a found metal structure, wind chimes, chair.
Day 192 @ ITP: Great Heart Project Video
A little belated, here is the video for the project Great Heart, created by Jim Schmitz and myself as a collaboration and presented as a final for our Phys Comp class as well as my ICM class last semester, and was also featured in the Winter Show 2017. We are still planning to take this to an art or performance context some day, to create a more immersive environment using the same concept. In the meantime, this is a shorter and more digestible explanation of what it does!
Day 185 @ ITP: Fungus Among Us
Final Presentation:
"Medicinal Properties of Reishi & An Experiment in Growing and Using Reishi Mushrooms for Immunity"
Slide 1
Slide 2
Slide 3
Slide 4
Slide 7
Slide 13
Download the full PowerPoint presentation PDF here (does not include the Reishi tea, which was poured in class.)
Links cited:
Video: Health Benefits of Reishi Mushroom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm33bzTa8u4
Definition: Polysaccharide
https://biologydictionary.net/polysaccharide/
Reishi extract:
https://nyishar.com/reishi-dual-extract/
Reishi supplements:
https://hostdefense.com/collections/daily-wellness/products/reishi-capsules
https://www.amazon.com/Mushroom-Defense-Formula-Medicinal-Mushrooms/
https://www.amazon.com/Bulksupplements-Reishi-Mushroom-Extract-Powder/
https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Restore-Organic-Mushroom-Non-GMO/
Video: Mushroom Powders Vs. Extracts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzoPoAx9Zuw
Reishi Mushroom Kit that I ordered:
https://www.amazon.com/Reishi-Mushroom-Kit-Growing-Mushrooms/
Reishi Mushroom Tea Recipe:
https://www.mushroom-appreciation.com/mushroom-tea.html
Further research:
http://www.reishi.com/faq.htm
http://www.fungi.com/
During this presentation I also explained that part of my final will be to experiment with growing Reishi mushrooms on my own. I ordered a kit, and plan to start it in May after this semester ends. I also explained how I used to get bronchitis every year my whole life, and that since using mushroom immunity pills (which include a variety of mushrooms as well as Reishi) for maintenance, I haven't gotten bronchitis in 3 years.
I would like to start regularly using and processing dried whole Reishi mushrooms in tea or tincture form (eventually incorporating in the Reishi that I grow myself) to use every day instead of taking the mushroom immunity pills for daily maintenance. Overall I think it will be cheaper and more sustainable to incorporate into a daily routine.
Also, a note on our mycelium growing project:
I am continuing to try to spore my mycelium experiment from class, though it appears to be stuck where it was. The spores are not spreading beyond the middle layer of the tupperware container I chose to house it in. I allowed more oxygen in but no further growth has appeared. I was definitely inspired to also make an art object inspired by it but focusing on Reishi seemed to be closer to my heart for this project, and I most likely would not have thought of trying to grow my own if it were not for this class and our experience with growing mycelium.
I think if I had focused on an art object I would have perhaps turned my piece into a plant holder or something practical that could live in my home to remind me of mycelium and its ways. However I think the readings and work in this class has solidified that I will be thinking about mycelium in relation to many things from now on.
Day 182 @ ITP: Fungus Among Us
Slater, Lauren. "How psychedelic drugs can help patients face death." NY Times (2012).
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/magazine/how-psychedelic-drugs-can-help-patients-face-death.html
Once the drug took effect, Reamer lay there and rode the music’s dips and peaks. Reamer said that her mind became like a series of rooms, and she could go in and out of these rooms with remarkable ease. In one room there was the grief her father experienced when Reamer got leukemia. In another, her mother’s grief, and in another, her children’s. In yet another room was her father’s perspective on raising her. “I was able to see things through his eyes and through my mother’s eyes and through my children’s eyes; I was able to see what it had been like for them when I was so sick.”
If psilocybin can so reliably induce these life-altering experiences, why have the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have taken magic mushrooms recreationally not had this profound experience? Grob explains that in addition to the carefully controlled setting of these studies and the opportunity to process the experience with the researchers, the subjects are primed for transcendence before they even take the drug. “Unlike the recreational user, we process the experience ahead of time,” Grob says. “We make it very clear up front that the hoped-for outcome is therapeutic, that they’ll have less anxiety, less depression and a greater acceptance of death.” Subjects, in other words, intend to have a transformative experience. Grob says that psilocybin taken in this setting is “existential medicine.”
Perhaps end-stage cancer patients are able to capture enduring benefits of psilocybin precisely because they are processing their drug experiences again and again with research staff and in doing so are changing the way the brain encodes positive memories. The phenomenon might be similar to how other memories work; when we remember something sweet-smelling, the olfactory neurons in our brain start to stir; when we remember running, our motor cortex begins to buzz. If this is the case then merely recalling the trip could resurrect its neural correlates, allowing the person to re-experience the insight, the awareness, the hope.
Griffiths continued: “When you make people less afraid to die, then they’re less likely to cling to life at a huge cost to society. After having such a transcendent experience, individuals with terminal illness often show a markedly reduced fear of dying and no longer feel the need to aggressively pursue every last medical intervention available. Instead they become more interested in the quality of their remaining life as well as the quality of their death.”
In a future still far off, Grob imagines retreat centers where the dying could have psilocybin administered to them by a staff trained for the task. Doblin asks: “Why confine this to just the dying? This powerful intervention could be used with young adults who could then reap the benefits of it much earlier.” The subjects who have undergone psilocybin treatment report an increased appreciation for the time they have left, a deeper awareness of their roles in the cycle of life and an increased motivation to invest their days with meaning. “Imagine allowing young adults, who have their whole lives in front of them, access to this kind of therapy,” Doblin says. “Imagine the kind of lives they could then create.”
If David Nutt, in Britain, is able to prove the efficacy of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, would the F.D.A. ever consider approving it for that use? And if that ever were to happen, what sort of slippery slope would we find ourselves on? If, say, end-stage cancer patients can have it, then why not all individuals over the age of, say, 75? If treatment-resistant depressives can have it, then why not their dysthymic counterparts, who suffer in a lower key but whose lives are clearly compromised by their chronic pain? And if dysthymic individuals can have it, then why not those suffering from agoraphobia, shut up day and night in cramped quarters, Xanax bottles littered everywhere?
Besides, Grob told me, scientists are still at the very early stages of this research. “Twelve people,” he says of the size of his study. “One study with 12 people is not very definitive.” And yet, talking to him, you can hear a hint of excitement, something rising. “We saw remarkable and sustained changes in cancer patients’ spiritual dispositions. People’s entire sense of who they are has been altered in a positive manner.” He is looking forward to the day, he told me, when Griffiths and Ross “crunch their numbers” from their current studies. Grob says, “From what they say they’re seeing, it all sounds very positive.” Perhaps, then, we need not understand precisely how and why psilocybin works, accepting, as Halpern puts it, that “when you combine the chemical, the corporeal and the spiritual, you get a spark. You get magic.”
Bone, Eugenia. "Can Mushrooms Treat Depression?" NY Times (2014)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/opinion/sunday/can-mushrooms-treat-depression.html
A study published last month in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface compared M.R.I.s of the brains of subjects injected with psilocybin with scans of their normal brain activity. The brains on psilocybin showed radically different connectivity patterns between cortical regions (the parts thought to play an important role in consciousness). The researchers mapped out these connections, revealing the activity of new neural networks between otherwise disconnected brain regions.
The researchers suspect that these unusual connections may be responsible for the synesthetic experience trippers describe, of hearing colors, for example, and seeing sounds. The part of the brain that processes sound may be connecting to the part of the brain that processes sight. The study’s leader, Paul Expert at King’s College London, told me that his team doubted that this psilocybin-induced connectivity lasted. They think they are seeing a temporary modification of the subject’s brain function.
The fact that under the influence of psilocybin the brain temporarily behaves in a new way may be medically significant in treating psychological disorders like depression. “When suffering depression, people get stuck in a spiral of negative thoughts and cannot get out of it,” Dr. Expert said. “One can imagine that breaking any pattern that prevents a ‘proper’ functioning of the brain can be helpful.” Think of it as tripping a breaker or rebooting your computer.
A range of studies have suggested that controlled doses of psilocybin can help the user escape cognitive ruts of all sorts. One study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2012, rated the vividness of autobiographical memory of subjects on psilocybin and found the drug enhanced their recollection, and “subjective well-being” upon follow-up. The researchers concluded that psilocybin might be useful in psychotherapy as an adjunct therapy to help patients reverse “negative cognitive biases” — a phenomenon common in depression by which one has a greater recall of negative memories than positive ones — and facilitate the recall of important memories.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting 16-year-olds take magic mushrooms. I’m not suggesting they be used to party at all. What I am advocating for is a mind open to the possibilities of their use to help people in need. Because illiberality doesn’t cure disease; curiosity does.
Claire Evans, "Livin' in a Mycelial World" Science Blogs, 2011
http://scienceblogs.com/universe/2011/07/17/living-in-a-mycelial-world/
a visualization of the network structure of the Internet by Hal Burch and Bill Cheswick, courtesy of Lumeta Corporation.
Stamets, who calls mycelium “Earth’s Natural Internet,” puts it this way:
I believe the invention of the computer Internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven biologically successful model. The earth invented the computer internet for its own benefit, and we, now, being the top organism on this planet, [are] trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere.
Going way out, dark matter conforms to the same mycelial archetype. I believe matter begets life, life becomes single cells, single cells become strings, strings become chains, chains network. And this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe.
Mycelium, an intertwined network of cells permeating virtually all land masses of Earth, is not something to take lightly. It literally engulfs the soil beneath us in a sentient web, rising up beneath our footsteps, hungry for nutrients. There is something beautiful and horrifying, ancient and keenly technological about these organisms, a complexity it may take a psychedelically-informed, non-institutional mind to fully appreciate.
Day 181 @ ITP: Live Image Processing & Performance
A/V Concert Reviews (in progress)
2/21/2018: AMC Theaters in Times Square with visuals by Undervolt.co artists
Hosted by The Clocktower
Sun Ra Arkestra with visuals by Sabrina Ratté and Peter Burr
I actually ended up going to several audio-visual concerts this semester, so I chose to use one set from each concert I that attended to talk about for this review. I'll start this one off by saying that is is one of THE most epic audio-visual performances I had ever seen IN MY LIFE, and I almost didn't go to it due to a scheduling confusion, and I'm glad our class urged us all to attend one of the three nights hosted by Clocktower and Undervolt & Co at the AMC movie theater. I'm sure all the nights were great, but I only made it to the one headlined by the Sun Ra Arkestra with YATTA opening, which was also wonderful, but for this I will focus on the Arkestra's performance and accompanying visuals by Sabrina Ratté and Peter Burr.
While the 15+ person Arkestra would also have been "enough" on its own any day to energize a whole movie theater worth of people, I feel that the live visuals behind them did serve to beautifully support their horns' shrieks and wails and cosmic vocal utterings, like lightning supporting a thunderstorm (or something like this...what are other natural phenomenons of audio and sound that this could be compared to? The sun glistening on a roaring waterfall?).
I thought Sabrina Ratté and Peter Burr did a great job of using what I am assuming was raw visual synthesis and a lot of knob turning on a modular video synth like the LZX synthesizer, following along with the movements of the Arkestra's admittedly very extended set artfully, punctuating it or mirroring it with colors and patterns that seemed to ping and reverberate off and with the music. This pairing of sound and visuals kept the energy up, up, up just like the Arkestra's music did, almost dipping in just a few moments but then rising to the top and staying there or going even higher than before, until it reached a point of feeling effortless, with an extremely positive and high vibration ultimately achieved by the end of the night.
I appreciated that the images were abstract, all colors and lines and shapes made of different combinations of the two, and I think that worked very well to not distract from the music or act as a counterpoint but instead acted as an extension of their bejeweled and sparkling costumes and energy of their sounds, making the wallpaper or theater's screen come alive with lights that seemed to almost emanate from the sounds themselves. It also made me think how effective it is to have the visuals really BIG. I'm really so glad I went!
2/9/2018: The Spectrum with visuals by Jim Tuite
Hosted by Pas Musique
Lauds
This is a show that I also played at, hosted by Pas Musique, who also run the label and platform Alraeleon Musique. The venue Spectrum used to be housed in an apartment on the Lower East Side and it has since moved to a new location on Flushing Ave near the Navy Yard in Brooklyn. Pas Musique has been working with the owner of The Spectrum in both locations to host this series called Ambient Chaos, where ambient music (sometimes very quiet and meditative, sometimes noisier or even jazzier or more improv-based, so really covering the "ambient" spectrum) is paired with live visuals by different resident artists.
For this night it was a pleasure to work with Jim Tuite, who I have seen do visuals numerous times, and see his how his process worked over the course of 4 sets. I talked to Jim some afterwards, and he said that he really tried to listen to each musician and come up with a palette that was suited specifically to their music, which I see again as a beautiful way to support the music and act as an extension of it. Often in these music venue environments I have found that visuals are seen as secondary or unnecessary, but even if things CAN happen without them, in this night at least I really felt that the pairing is what made it special, and though Jim was responding to the music and not the other way around or in between, it still felt like an equal footing.
I enjoyed how he did change it up for each performance, using VDMX to trigger clips and add audio-reactive (I think?) elements that mirrored the music in subtle ways, playing with space and fields of vision, where the foreground would continuously melt away revealing some figures beneath or something almost recognizable, only to then go somewhere totally different and wash the brain with abstract color fields and shapes, to then return to something almost recognizable like people walking around on the street...Genevieve (Lauds)' music was also a beautiful layering of tones and textures both smooth and rough that seemed to fit perfectly with the visuals Jim chose for it, and it felt particularly meditative to sink into the visuals during her set.
2/3/2018: Zip: UNCOMPRESSED未压缩_Vol.3 at The Three Legged Dog
This night is another example (like the Clocktower/Undervolt & Co. series at the AMC theater) that I probably wouldn't have known about or gone to for sure if it were not for our class and encouragement from fellow ITP classmates to check it out. Again, I'm really so glad I went. I chose to focus on the second set of the night, because it seemed very mysterious to me and I had not heard of any of the artists, and it seemed to be one of the most non hierarchical arrangements of an audio/visual performance that I have seen.
I think this was in large part due to the installation of the space, an immaculate 3 surface projection studio where the audience member's were asked to wear cloth booties so as not to scuff the projection surface on the floor, which made it obvious that they had considered the projections to be an essential part of the experience. It felt like a new kind of venue or experience, and a treat. Because of this the visuals felt so "immersive" (big buzz word there!) in conjunction with the sound (which also had a great system setup it seems), and one did not feel more in the forefront than the other, as I usually feel in music venues that the music is the obvious first priority, with visuals as an afterthought. It felt that this set was a *true* audio-visual performance where both were totally intertwined. I'm not sure if there was any direct interaction like audio reactivity happening with the visuals, but it felt that there was.
The three participants sat on the floor, and it was hard to tell who was doing what, though two had laptops and one had a modular synthesizer setup. The sounds were electronic washes and bubblings that created a ambient soundscape that was almost tactile, washing around us, with at times an acoustic instrument introduced on top, such as a flute or harmonica, which brought it to this almost ceremonial place with the DMT-esque visuals. While I say the visuals looekd DMT-esque they however managed to stay clear of full-on cheesy psychedelia, instead creating an elegant place that also seemed to be tracing the very fabric of the universe, drawing on psychedelic experiences or tropes that we see in pop culture, but again without going too far. Some of this kind of imagery might also just be what visual engines are capable of in terms of basic visual synthesis, hence we see them a lot (such as mirroring, for example) but done in different ways and with a different touch. In this case I think the video artist had a very nuanced touch and also used a lot of variation to create a feeling of a "journey" which was very special and unlike anything I had seen exactly. Because the projects were covering two walls as well as the floor, it also really felt that we were IN the projections, and that added so much as well. I would love to see more venues like this starting to pop up in cities or places everywhere.