Interview with Tad Ermitano

Today we speak to Filipino artist Tad, whose work with user-activated solenoid beaters on gamelan instruments is part of the main juried exhibition here at ISEA2008 in Singapore. Popping in on Tad while hard at work in his studio laboratory at I2R, we see a myriad of enginnering tools at his disposal, and him making full use of his rather fortunate position amongst these machines.

Installing solenoids onto the bonang, the saron, the kenong, and the gendang, Taddeus presents interactive systems as musical conduits through which the enterprise of the participant serenades, allowing users to interact with the system, as well as each other in orchestral unity. We speak to Tad today about the impetus for the project as well as his thoughts on the developmental process.

<portions of the interview have been excluded due to constraints>

Q: What got you started on this project?

A: Well i always liked the gamelan. When i first heard Balinese gamelans – differ from Javanese in that they are really fast and orchestral, i really liked the sound of them, the drums are a brilliant mixture of gongs and thunder. And of course, it kind of pains me to admit this, but there is some part of it that has to do with trying to digest or integrate some sense of being South East Asian. I hate that, Filipino or South-East Asian art that tries to be emblem mongering – to do stuff about rice, stuff about gongs, generally waving the third world flag. . . i guess i understand the impulse to do it, but i think basically why i like it is just cos i like the way it sounds and thunders.

Q: Would you consider this a particularly musical piece as compared to the other works you’ve done?

A: Well i guess, cos most of the other stuff i do, i don’t actually bother to make it sound like music, whereas in this case i m actually trying to make it … gamelan like. Its going to be basically so – the xylophone will play lead guitar, the other instruments would fill in rhythm guitar and so on, almost modeled after rock band. I think thats also why i like the gamelan so much, most of it is in 4/4, so there’s a lot in it thats accessible to any body who likes, grew up on rock. Especially Balinese gamelan that is noisy like thunder where there are parts where everyone hits everything. I like the violence.

But that being said, the Javanese gamelan set that i am working on does not hamper the project basically because my requirements are so untraditional. For example, i’m going to play the drum – the gendang but i’m not going to play it to sound like a the way it is played in the Javanese gamelan ensemble. As well as that, there is normally a strictly monophonic melody on xylophone where you have to mute a note as you play the next, but im not going to bother doing that. It’s going to be a really noisy resonant gamelan played improperly.

Q: About the project now, how much emphasis does ‘Quartet’ as an interactive piece place on the audience as participant?

A: I usually like removing the person from the equation. What i like about the gamelan is that it is classical, not romantic in the sense that it’s not about somebody’s feelings about the rain, or feelings about his mother. It is basically about patterns – i like that coldness. In my project, you’ve got an AI controlling the interactivity and algorithms controlling the patterns of music experienced. But yet it’s supposed to be interactive with people in the audience conducting. I guess the project just involves making artificial intelligences play instruments and having them come out physically into the world.

I was just thinking the other day that i want to give logical body. Usually media art is so gossamer, you manipulate pixels and you manipulate logic. More and more im going towards heavy s***, make it heavy, make it matter, make it in matter – flesh of the world, bones of the world.

The good thing about residencies is that i am discovering resemblances, like a secret genealogy where you realize you’re a branch of the tree you never knew you were part of. Theres Trimpin, Ajay Kapoor who was recently in NUS. So for me, this is not really a spin on Trimpin’s works, though it is related to his pioneering work with media and computers interfaces that control physical instruments.

Basically i was just thinking the whole thing is scratching the itch i have of making the image physical. In the Philippines, artists are always putting stuff next to TV monitors and video loops, playing with the idea of real and the virtual. For instance, there’s this guy who put a fan next to to a video of a flickering candle. It was just all about timing, so after ten minutes it would get out of phase. I wanted to make such a virtual image enter the real world by making it perform work, so i put a sensor on the screen and basically found a video of a guy lifting the sandbag. I like the idea of a ghost that works really really hard to life something really really light, so i connected the sensor to a little crank, and every time he lifted the sandbag, the crank rolled up a bit of the red thread. At the end of the work, people see it as a school of red thread being wound by an image. I like that the whole idea of making an image enter the real world – instead of vice versa which we have all the time like the mouse.

Q: So a little more about the installation setup now? What can we expect?

A: There will be 4 screens and under each screen will be one of these gamelan instruments. The interactor will stand on a square and he’ll conduct, with things like claps – and it will start playing. You can make it go faster and slower, or we could have moments where everybody stops except for one guy. In that sense it’s having some robots you’re conducting, and the point is that you’re communicating with something which has a kind of type of intelligence – a shadow of life, and not only are they responding to you like any game avatar, or any non-player intelligent character in a game responds, but its also hitting stuff in the real world.

Basically the videos will just be torsos. . . i don’t know why but it seems important not to show his face (laughs).

For the tracking system, I2R has a processing group and they do a bunch of computer vision gestural tracking tools, so they’re coming over here to use it. This is one of the more ambitious projects iv done in terms of all the stuff i have to built. The last time i tried to deal with images coming into the world i had just had one sensor, this time i have 15 sensors and 4 instruments – kind of a sudden jump. But I want to do it so that when it changes not all of them change at the same time and there is some variation in the way the music is played.

Q: Where do you position yourself in the sound art fraternity?

A: I’m not sure mainly because I’m not really conscious of my place in a sound art fraternity. This has got to be a work of sound art, but it’s not about making music, because at the very most i am innovating at 2 levels – not muting the keys or, playing it badly, and using triplets in the gamelan, putting something like an African vibe in there.

In that sense its a lot more about Alien intelligence in machines. Up until recently, i could describe myself basically as a video artist – now i describe myself as a media artist. I’m not conscious about using sound as my medium, its just something that comes out usually just because of the fact that i like sound.

One of the things that i wind up doing, is trying to create more bridges of meaning that can be but are not necessarily tactile, allowing the audience to perceive more order in the sense of a particular sound being connected to something else. One thing i did was i got this timer from a washing machine- there were switches opening and closing, sort of like a music box. I thought it looked like a hardware sequencer so i attached the switches to a keyboard that i had stripped and taken out the circuits. Every key had electrodes so you could switch on and off a key by opening and closing a circuit. I just exposed the electrodes and attached the washing machine timer to the keyboard and basically had it play music. Of course i added a little piezo electric microphone to it as well so you could hear the mechanical sounds and then hear the electronic sounds that it was conducting.

So even conceptually, there is a connection between what you’re hearing on stage, that something has to be happening. You have to be percieving information together with the sound, and that’s my problematic – what other information can you give the audience! The perception of order produces pleasure.

Tad Ermitano’s work Quartet will be exhibited in the National Museum as part of the ISEA2008 main-juried exhibition. Come experience the interactive gamelan orchestra from the 25th July to the 3rd August 2008.

More information about the process can be found at the artist’s Blog site at http://cavemanifesto.blogspot.com/

For more information about the artist and project please visit the ISEA2008 main site. Keep checking this site for latest updates and developments in the buildup to the exhibition.

 

Interview with a Bridge Guru

Today we have a chat with ever cheerful Aussie bridge symphony director Jodi Rose on her upcoming project at ISEA2008 in the backdrop of the newly opened Keppel Bay bridge.

Jodi Rose’s work in Singapore has taken her to the major pedestrian bridges throughout the island including those at Boat Quay and Robertson Walk, Keppel Bay, the SAFTI link bridge, and even the newly opened bridges at Hort Park.

Q: So whats the deal about bridges anyway? What sparked off an interest (artistically and aesthetically) in focusing on bridges?

A: The idea originally came while studying sculpture at art school in Sydney in the mid-1990s. One of the lecturers for a course in public art had given us the exercise to come up with an idea for an artwork in public space which had absolutely no constraints, wasn’t limited by feasibility, practicality or any other real-world concern.

Looking up at the new Glebe Island (Anzac) Bridge as it was being built over Blackwattle Bay on my way to art school everyday, the particular mix of public sculpture, sound art, and deconstructive theory swirling in my sleepy brain led me to wonder, in an idle moment of curiosity; how would that big harp-like structure of cables and concrete sound? Could I link together bridge cables around the world as instruments in a global symphony?

The first recording I made while the Anzac Bridge was still under construction, taking a team of radio producers and sound engineers from the ABC National Radio with me to best capture the industrial yet ethereal voice of the cables.

Bridges continue to fascinate me on both an aesthetic and artistic level, as they are everywhere, and make a perfect instrument to stage a Global Symphony work. Everyone responds differently to the project, depending on their own focus and interest, and most people have a favourite bridge, or bridge story to share, and the continuing interest and creative engagement from many people, both collaborating and appreciating, keeps giving me new energy and perspectives to explore. Bridges are loaded with symbolic meaning, they speak of connection, crossing borders and cultures; they are a threshold between worlds, states of mind and consciousness, and a liminal space ‘in-between’ places.

According to Heidegger, the bridge ‘creates a location, it brings together many places, both near and far, and is a meeting point for the earth and heaven, divinities and mortals’.

Bridges are familiar, yet unknown, they are the pinnacle of engineering at their time of construction, and become monuments to the past, they are deeply local and iconic to a place, and yet also universal. They carry poetic metaphors and romantic conceptual philosophical meanings.

Q: A global bridge symphony implies a collaboration and alliance in sonic properties across geographical boundaries. How political would you consider your work to be? Any plans to record sounds of causeways?

A: In general, I don’t consider my work to be overtly political. It has a strong conceptual-aesthetic and philosophical axis, which does have an inherent political aspect in that bridges are built for a certain purpose, to be functional, and their aesthetic qualities are usually visual. They are certainly not built to be listened to, or played as ‘instruments’, and by intervening in this system of use and functionality, with a whimisical, poetic and sonic aesthetic use, I think that creates a gap in the political-economic power system that is built into bridges. Re-framing the urban environment, and a very utilitarian object in a completely different direction that it’s orginal purpose is also a kind of culture-jamming.

Bridges are not built to be listened to – but I hope in the future that they may be!

I would love to see bridge design start to incorporate the sonic qualities of the structure.

No plans for causeways at the moment, or buildings, or tunnels – I have enough bridges to stay occupied for life, and people keep building more, which is fabulous.

The economics and politics of building bridges is often controversial, but once that dies down they tend to become emblematic of their location. Power and wealth come together with poverty and homelessness, on and under the bridge, and I find that inherent politics is also played out in my life as a precarious worker and cultural nomad. The choice to live as a freelance artist is one that brings certain privileges, access to places, experiences and creative possibilities in a very fulfilling enagagement with the world, but it also carries certain stresses – economic, geographic, and ecological; where the issues of living in a sustainable manner with a distributed community are highlighted.

I believe that it is one of the functions of art, besides expression and communication, to take you to places outside the mainstream expectations of being a productive, functioning member of capitalist society, that you are not driven by the desire for wealth, status or power, and have the freedom to explore other aspects of the world, ephemeral, abstract, esoteric – although in the process of course you may produce cultural capital and cultural objects, and hopefully generate some income along the way, although there are myriad different approaches to being able to sustain life as an artist, working in different areas.
Freedom of imagination is a gift not to be taken lightly. It’s open to everyone equally, although of course it is influenced by access to knowledge, education and economic factors, but in the end, your life is expanded or limited in accord with your capacity for imagination and corresponding courage. I hope that my ongoing committment to this project single-mindedly and wholeheartedly, is inspiring, and creates a small gap in the fabric of social expectation – no dream is too crazy, if I can do this, you can do anything!!

Q: Have you encountered a silent bridge?

A: Yes, quite a few bridges have not been in the mood for singing at the time of my visit.

Some of them along the Singapore River, as we discovered, and also the My Thuan Bridge in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam; and others that I forget right now.

Part of the process is finding the resonant parts of the structure, and when there is no vibration audible through the steel or cables, I am disappointed, but it is also a very Zen reminder to accept what is there. If there is a song inside the bridge, I will listen, but if it prefers to stay quiet, then I respect that! I know I speak about bridges in a slightly anthropomorphic fashion, which comes from my belief that the sound of the cables really is the voice of the bridge. In the sense that voice = breath and vibration, this makes perfect sense, and as John Cage says, ‘There is a spirit in everything, that is released by it’s being set into vibration’. Hence the vibration of the bridge is it’s voice, and spirit.

Q: A bridge brings together two places, possibly quite different as opposite banks of a river often are. Do you see sound as art a possible medium for promoting cohesion and a collective identity?

A: The frame of mind in which interesting things germinate is often more
confused and desperate than organized and confident. (Randy Thom)

I think that sound art definitely brings people with similar interests together and it is a very dedicated and passionate worldwide community – although I wouldn’t make any claims for engendering coherence, as there are many different approaches, philosophies and niches that can all gather under the term ‘sound art’.

Q: Lastly, which bridge in your experience is most memorable and why?

A: The best bridge experiences I have had so far in terms of the actual sound are Brooklyn Bridge & Golden Gate Bridge, which both have exposed steel cables that burble and chatter and screech – and Anzac Bridge, the first one I ever recorded, and still one of the most spectacular. In terms of place, the Novy Most in Bratislava, for the exceptionally cool bar on top of the bridge – you catch a lift up in the pylon to the crazy UFO shaped bar (it’s called U.F.O!) and drink cocktails with names like velvet sarcasm, while looking out over the Danube, an upside down 14th century castle, and on the other side, blocks and blocks of 60′s concrete tower apartments.

The My Thuan Bridge over the Mekong Delta in Vietnam is still the only one where I have bought a mango and had a wild motorcycle ride down from the bridge, and the Mega Bridge in Bangkok was the most exciting experience structurally, as the engineers took us for a ride in their crane up to the top of one of the pylons – 250m high – to see the cables being installed inside. That was amazing. I’m looking forward to the quintessential singaporean bridge experience, and hope it is still possible to throw apples or oranges from the lovers bridge!

Jodi Rose’s work Global Bridge Symphony will be exhibited in the National Museum as part of the ISEA2008 main-juried exhibition. Come listen to the secret language of bridges in their sonic utterance this 25th July to the 3rd August 2008.

Jodi with Keppel Bay Bridge engineers and managers at the newly opened Keppel Bay Bridge

For more information about the artist and project please visit the ISEA2008 main site. Keep checking this site for latest updates and developments in the buildup to the exhibition.

 

Tea with Mei Kei Lai

Mei Kei Lai is a Macau based researcher, designer and lecturer who is here in Singapore as part of the ISEA2008′s main juried exhibition. Her project entitled Does it make Scents to Have Fun is an ingenious pun on the use of scents/smells as the main interface for interactive design, joining a host of new media projects strategically positioned at the intersection of game design and technology, merging and maintaining the ludic spontaneity of the former while keeping close to hand the latter’s unrelenting progress.

Today we have a chat with Mei Kei Lai over melding aromas of chamomile and earl grey.

<portions of the interview have been excluded due to constraints>
Q: What got you started working on smells as the main tool for interaction?

A: Well, one of the reasons is i started on this project during my post graduate studies in London, so this exhibition is just to further this idea. Cos i don’t come from a graphic design standpoint, i think that most people just believe what they see – a kind of visualization generation, so i’m just wondering if visuals can tell you everything. It would be nice to see a picture, or a movie that had some smell! But after i started the research i realized that it wasn such a new idea! (laughs) Anyway i just started working on smell and tried to create some fun out of it. I would not consider myself a gamer, nor a game developer, i just want to make things that people can have fun with!

Q: For the exhibition this year, how does smell play a role in your installation?

A: For ISEA2008 the installation piece is a game thing- and smell is the interface. You will see I use smell as a core feature. In the past i have found a lot of models that just use smell as a reward, for instance, if you see a picture of an apple, you can smell the apple; but i find that many people do not really accept this. Most of them question “Why do you make it, does it make any sense? ” So i try to use smell as part of the core features, that the game cannot play if there is no smell. This is the way when i think about the project.

Q: Is this your first time exhibiting such a project?

A: I did two scenarios before. One involved moving towards a tree, and you had to decide what was falling out of the tree based on smells that were expelled during the installation – whether they were citrus or something like lavender. You had to discriminate the smells that were present.

The other one had a game scenario – husband and wife. The story went – husband is at a party and he gets drunk. and he has to go through a whole lot of women to find his wife by smelling them. I found that people liked this game the most. The game’s context/story was played rather than just a direct interaction. People still enjoy the first game, but the second was a lot more well-received.

There was a introduction/training into the smells in the first game. but the second game is more of a recognition cos as the start of the game, the smell was presented when the fictional protagonist kisses his wife in the initial parts – so it was more of a matching thing, essentially.

Q: So how about letting us in on how the installation would look like?

A: I’m trying to work with spray bottles, i try to avoid using air fresheners. Working in the space though, smell lingers and so i need to have a good ventilation system to prevent the smells from mixing up, maybe ill put a fan behind it. From my experience, it would probably work out, i’ve had installations where people just laughed at the smell cos it was so unexpectedly funny. There was a previous installation called Smell me, where i put two speakers out and a keyboard.  The air fresheners were put on the side while the speakers were put in front of the users, and at the beginning, the visitors were not aware of the location of the air fresheners -they thought the smell was coming from the speaker box!

But i try to move beyond this simple interaction to try to allow the user the control to decide what kind of smell is generated, instead of something i design. For example, i try to work on a game of hide and seek. there are two players involved – you have your own smell, and i have my own smell. So in a simulated city we have to find each other. Wherever you go, wherever you have been, the place will have your smell. So at each station or corner, the computer will register the smell and could be an indication of where the person is going. These are just some of the concepts that i can look into, but at ISEA2008, ill just be focusing on a desktop game, which is an installation connected to a computer indoors, with of course the spray bottles.

Q: How receptive is Macau to the emerging electronic arts scene?

A: The media arts scene is thriving in Macau, they do have exhibitions. But for most academics, for instance in the polytechnic i teach at, most media graduates become designers not artists. Most of them go to web design companies, or TV stations.

Q: I’ve never seen any Macau movies though..

A: Oh no, Just for news. (laughs) Even the people in Macau, we dont watch Macau programmes, just the news reports. We get our programmes from HongKong. The other thing is there are quite a lot of casinos there – most of them have very big screens outdoor, so some of my graduates do this kind of motion graphics for the casinos. For those interested in media arts they go into it mainly on a freelance basis. But most of the artists right now in Macau create basis installation artworks rather than interactive art. I personally am more into interactive design, as i am more interested in how the participants get involved and become part of the art work. There are also a group of people doing video art.

Mei Kei Lai’s work Does It Make Scents To Have Fun will be exhibited in the National Museum as part of the ISEA2008 main-juried exhibition. Come experience a more intense level of gaming immersion in this olfactory treat from the 25th July to the 3rd August 2008.

For more information about the artist and project please visit the ISEA2008 main site. Keep checking this site for latest updates and developments in the buildup to the exhibition.