Happy Wednesday Everyone!! Now, brace yourself....coz this is a long one!
Most of you will know that I'm a bit of a tech geek. I'm no technician but give me a cool new piece of gadgetry or application and I can be playing away for hours!! (And I'm pretty handy at fixing things too!)
One of the things I love most about new technology is how it has influenced artists and creative thinkers to create and share their work. It also opens up whole new platforms and experiences for audiences to access or manipulate it too. I know it can be a scary thing for some people so I'm going to give you a few examples over the next while of projects and platforms using technology that I think are pretty cool...and you can make up your own minds!!
Q:Hi Marc! Thanks for ‘chatting’ with us about SATSYMPH. Can you tell us a little bit about the project as an introduction?
A: Yes, of course! SATSYMPH is a collaboration between , and Bristol based poet Ralph Hoyte and coder Phill Phelps, that will allow people to create their own “satellite symphony” through an iPhone app. A complex virtual sound-world of music and poetry and everything in between and beyond will be triggered by satellites, depending on the direction in which the user moves.
SATSYMPH has been shortlisted for the £50,000 Performing Rights Society New Music Award, dubbed by the press ‘The Turner Prize for New Music’! The judging panel said “it harnessed current technology in a creative way”. There are five shortlisted pieces in all. The award will be won by the project judged to represent the most pioneering music in the UK today and the prize money used to make the project a reality.
For the first time this year, the public will be able to watch films about the shortlisted entries and vote for their favourite idea to be developed and realised by the end of 2011. (The public vote counts as one judge.) The SATSYMPH team considers that a win will give context-aware media another boost to really push this technology over the threshold to wide public interest and acceptance.
To vote for SATSYMPH visit: http://www.prsformusicfoundation.com/newmusicaward/vote.htm
Q:Where did the concept for the project come from? How did you ‘choose’ you partners?
A: Ralph Hoyte, one of the SATSYMPH collaborators, was in on the beginnings of this new media form (‘pervasive’ or ‘context-aware media’) and was exploding with excitement at its potential to revolutionise the way artistic and literary content are created and experienced. A chance introduction on the doorstep of the Bull Hotel in Bridport, Dorset, after a PVA MediaLab event led to the discovery that Ralph and I were both thinking very similarly about how contemporary music and contemporary poetry were and could be structured.
In my own composition work, I was already thinking about how I could create music that you could ‘enter’ at any point; that had no beginning, middle or end and could be experienced differently with each hearing. I had gone so far using live musicians and conventional methods but ultimately couldn’t capture what I was trying to achieve. In talking to Ralph about the potential and possibilities in context aware media, a whole new world of creative possibilities opened up.
Our other very important collaborator, introduced to me by Ralph is Phill Phelps who will write the codes to make SATSYMPH function in an array of technical ways, delivering the complex inter-relationships between our vision of word, music fusion, landscape, location and position. But Phill is also a musician and brings with him a great deal of creative input. Indeed, Phill composes with binary codes to build structures in very similar ways to the music and word structures Ralph and I make to populate SATSYMPH. The three of us see our interdisciplinary work as being without boundaries. Music, word, landscape, coding and the composition of all of these are fused into one process where each of us has an expertise but where the vision and creative process is shared.
Q: Is all the technology ready and available for you to embrace or did you have to create elements yourselves?
A: All the technology is pretty much out there as open source, but we (and especially Phill) are working very closely with Calvium in Bristol (part of Pervasive Media Studios) who are developing a new platform for context aware media delivery that will serve as next generation development. At this stage we have trialed a pretty sophisticated scooping model using current technology to learn how to set up and experience these mediascapes.
Work of this kind is still in its infancy and the challenges are not only in developing the technology but how individuals relate to and use this technology for a meaningful, engaging and dramatic ‘art’ experience.
Q: How much has the advancement of technology and new media shaped your practice?
A: That’s a really big question. The answer: a great deal!
Technology has influenced my practice in many ways across the years, ranging from computer software that could be used to notate music and manipulate audio and digital material – the rise in sampling sounds, electroacousmatic techniques, being able to produce CDs on your home computer – the vast amounts of time saved as the donkey work was taken out of a range of processes – all these technological advancements have impacted upon my practice as a composer and painter.
However, as I suggested at the top of this interview, whilst I had ideas and concepts about how I wanted my music to develop, the search for the means to deliver these musical ideas had reached an impasse. It was through Ralph’s introduction of context aware media that a whole new horizon of possibilities became apparent.
Q: Some critics think that using technology as a basis or engagement point takes away from the ‘art’. Do you agree?
A: No, absolutely not!
Technology in all its forms has been instrumental in moving the arts and music forwards ever since man used sources other than his own voice to create sound. It was ‘technology’ and man’s inventiveness that developed a whole range of instruments away from things that could just be struck. For instance, that drive for innovation much later facilitated the dramatic and expressive change from harpsichord to piano, which subsequently influenced the way so much music was written and conceived.
It was technological advancements that enabled the creation of the symphony orchestra, born over time from a developing understanding of acoustics and instrument making. And then, much later, there’s technology used in electronic music making; synthesizers, electric guitars, the recording and amplification of music onto record, then cassette tape and finally compact disc, DVD and Blue Ray – welcome to the digital age! Developments from story telling, theatre to moving image and the silent screen to Hollywood Block Busters! – all these developments changed what was possible, how we consumed and experienced art and how we conceived creating it.
And one final thought on this.
Good technology does not make good art! Technology is a means to an end, a way of delivering (and sometimes generating) content to make a truly inspired work of art. Technology is not necessarily the end in itself. If you pour s**** work or ideas into the most fantastic technological delivery, you will still have s*** work at the end of it. It will always be necessary to seed technology with great ideas, whatever the art form.
