Waveform Series by Sakurako Shimizu

Waveform Series is the laser-cut shape of waveforms in sound editing applications by japanese jewelry designer Sakurako Shimizu. She used some human sound sources such as yawn, atchoum, giggle, wow, and the sound of a church bell. And what about the "I do" Wedding Band?

Bell (Cuff)

Giggle - detail view (Necklace)

[more via sakurakoshimizu.blogspot.com]

"Wall of Sound"

Norwegian artist Maia Urstad, created this installation, "Wall of Sound" out of hundreds of CD players stacked in the same pattern of the old stone fences between farms in Norway. Substituting heavy stones for techno-garbage, the artist made a point of creating a modern take on the reuse of electronic waste for infrastructure improvements.

[via makezine.com]

Applet: Cinematic Particles

[evsc.net]

Short description

Film dialog, taken from subtitle files, defines movement and appearance of particles that leave traces on the screen. Smoky watercolor drawings emerge from each movies individual frequency of spoken words and their letters.

How it works

Several particles move across the screen according to their individual acceleration and velocity values. Each particle is fed a letter of the current displayed movie dialog. The amount of active particles is defined by the amount of letters in the subtitle line. The letter influences the particles movement dynamics by adjusting the acceleration value into a calculated direction and changes its size by defining a growing or shrinking rate. Lowercase consonant letters are relocated to the position of the word's starting letter, while lowercase vocal letters bend their path towards the direction of the word's starting letter.

This fixed set of conditions lacks random actions and therefore causes the exact same drawing if run twice. Yet the applet allows the user to manipulate the drawing by either stopping the dialog replay or changing the playing speed. By hitting the pause button, the movie stops and the particles remain with the letter the have been fed right before. This allows the particles to follow their initiated pathways without constantly changing pace and direction.

Movies that are defined by rapid successions of spoken dialog produce drawings that consist mostly of black ink blobs that grow together, as the particles are constantly reset with new parameters. Movies that show long silent pauses between scenes gives particles more time to produce long lines and curves. By altering the replay speed of the movie, size and dynamic of the emerging drawings can be controlled.

Results

Blade Runner (1982) :

[open applet]
[via visualcomplexity.com]

First Look: “The Complete Making of Indiana Jones”

[via libraryjournal.com]

David Lynch - The Air is on Fire

The Triennale di Milano presents David Lynch, The Air is on Fire, a major art retrospective devoted to the multiple facets of David Lynch as a visual artist. This exhibition event brings together the movie director’s paintings, photographs, drawings, experimental films and soundtracks. The public will have the chance to discover and rediscover David Lynch’s fine art, with never-before-seen works, and site-specific installations created specially for this exhibition.

The Air is on Fire takes us into David Lynch’s studio cluttered with paintings, black cupboards full of old files and shelves packed with labelled folders containing hundreds of drawings. This is Lynch’s own beautifully kept personal collection, dating back to his high school years and displayed in Italy now for the first time. Revealed to the Director of the Fondation Cartier, Hervé Chandès, all these works have been gathered together and specially staged for exhibition by David Lynch himself: pictures hung on large metal frames and mounted on brightly-coloured curtains, animated films projected in a tiny cinema evoking Eraserhead (1977), the sketch of a living room turned into a life-size scene. These settings give the visitor a rare insight into David Lynch’s approach to production design and his unique visual style.

[read more]

[David Lynch - The Air is on Fire

Triennale di Milano 9 October 2007 – 13 January 2008

Opening hours: 10.30 am-8.30 pm, closed Mondays]

The target consumers are (not ) audiophiles (?)

"...over the last decade the ranks of true audiophiles have been thinning, in large part because of the growing popularity of MP3 players and iPods. These nifty devices enable you to store thousands of hours of your favorite music and take it with you as you bop through your day. You can listen while shopping, while jogging or even, depending on your job, while at work. No one, not even devoted users of MP3s or iPods, claims that the sound reproduction on these technological marvels is equal to that of the best home CD systems. After all, they work by eliminating some of the digitized sound bits to open up storage space for multiple compressed files of music, rendering the sound a little thinner. Still, for consumers, easy access has trumped high fidelity".

[via nytimes.com]

Chris Kern: FDDM

Evolution of the landscape series. Sound: Jan Truetzschler.



[via cckern]

Ryōan-ji: The Temple of the Peaceful Dragon

"After a visit to Japan with David Tudor in 1962, John Cage became fascinated by Soami's 15th century Zen dry garden at Ryoanji, in Kyoto. The emptiness of the sand, the placement of the stones, and the illusion created by the five islands of 15 stones, rising out of moss within an ocean of white sand, seemed to confirm certain of his ideas about music. In 1983 he began to produce exquisite graphic works entitled Where R = Ryoanji, using stones, pencils and the chance methods of the I Ching. At the same time, he composed pieces for a variety of solo instruments, also entitled Ryoanji." [David Toop]



[Ryoanji official website]

Magnetic Fluid Art

The famous Protrude Flow, permanently exhibited at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, is one of the few spectacular electromagnet sculptures artworks. A black fluid reacts to sounds and voices, and assumes organic, three-dimensional shapes that grow counter to the force of gravity. An interactive installation in which fluid movements of physical materials evoke surreal impressions.




Morpho Towers, Two Standing Spirals is another work of this kind, built by Sachiko Kodama and Yasushi Miyajima, with music provided by Tetsuhide Hidaka. On the usual plate filled with the black fluid, two rotating helical spiral towers are able to spring up trembling magnetic fluid spikes, moving in synch with the music, thanks to finely tuned magnetic fields. The synch with music is accomplished through metadata, so the liquid somehow, embodies the music presence and movement. The same fluid is able to trick gravity, and it represent a liquid materiality triggered by magnetic invisible fields. So the immaterial (digital) communicates with the invisible (magnetic field) generating a temporary material embodiment (the magnetic fluid spikes).

Title link takes you to Wikipedia.



[via neural.it]
[more on YouTube]