During my last stay in Bretagne I went to LiFE, an ancient dutch submarine basement reconverted in a contemporary art space. The architecture offers interesting perspectives with repetitive patterns. Walls reflecting in the water of the garden on the rooftop are like an infinite corridor to the sky.
I was lucky enough to spend some time in the installation of Jeppe Hein, “DISTANCE”. Like graphically and sculpturally composed roller-coasters with a series of white balls circluating on them, the installation plays with perception of space and time. The structure must have been through a long process of trial and error, the physics behind each xof part of the circuit enabling the balls to follow their path without any malfunction.
Bends, turns, curves, uphill/downhill slope, loops. A ball going through obstacles, following its trajectory, from start to end. Enjoy the walk.
I went to the 2014 edition of Manifeste festival at IRCAM and attended Fundamental Forces, an audiovisal projection by Robert Henke and Tarik Barri. The whole piece focuses on accelerating motion and attraction between visual and sound structures, complex visual shapes and sonic structures emerge as the result of repeated applications of simple mathematical operations, are transformed and thrown around in real time to form an abstract world of floating objects in deep space. The visual component is based on Tarik Barri’s ‘Versum’ computer animation engine, whilst the auditive part is created by Robert Henke, using real time synthesis modules created in Max MSP, embedded in a Max4Live environment.
Adapted for the venue, the premiere of Fundamental Forces benefited of the Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) and Ambisonics techniques that reconstruct the physical properties of a sound field.
Based on Huygen’s Principle, WFS permits to synthesize “sound holograms” by simulating acoustic waves produced by virtual sound sources. A large number of loudspeakers are regularly spaced and used conjointly, each controlled with a delay and a gain to form preserve the fidelity of the spatial image.
Ambisonics is a method of recording and reproducing 3D sound that represents the spatial dependence of an acoustic field as a combination of basic spatial patterns. The sound undergoes an encoding step made up of an ordered series of components called spherical harmonics.
I had a glimpse of the research going on in the studios, from voice synthesis to IRCAMAX audio plugins and gesture-sound interaction. I discussed about works that’s done internally in web sound visualization/generation using low level WebAudioAPI, throw an eye to the open source code made available on the IRCAM github repo.
Recently I helped a friend of mine to develop a website for one of his school works. The aim of the project was to use a blank visual identity to denounce the over-add society.
As the purpose was to show a small amount of content in one page only, I decided to integrate it in an clear and original way. Technicaly speaking, I thought about a 3D navigation system without being forced to use WebGL. Starting by experimenting with CSS transform property only, I managed to create a carousel-like menu by combining rotations and translations.
The result is quite simple, it also works with sounds or videos even if there is only animated content on the website. An interesting feature is that the 3D effect also works on mobile devices as it is CSS only. Plus, you can for example play a embed video and then scroll through the carousel to the point where the video is turned backwards, as if you we were looking behind the screen.
