VIX Sound+Light+Motion

My first week in New York city has been so busy that I have not had much time to do a retrospective of my eventful week, from August 15th to 22nd at EMPAC in Troy, NY.

I am happy to report that I was successful in creating a “visual music” presentation on 3 screens with one of the aspects controlled in real time using gesture control.

Adafruit shipped my Arduino boards to EMPAC and I was able to research on the internet and receive help from others in the workshop to understand how to make the system work. I chose the infra-red distance sensor and used information from the Adafruit website to help me program the board. My trusty Ubuntu computer handled all of the Arduino code uploading while I ran the Isadora program on the Macbook.

My performance was thrilling for me, but I was inspired and informed by the work that everyone else in the class showed on Saturday, August 21, 2010.

The first work we saw was by Joff, a theatre instructor who has a company that puts on plays in Second Life. The work included a grassy field with images of human figures that were short videos. The figures would fade in, seem to be sleeping, then move in some way, then fade out. We were invited to interact with the figures, but I found it fascinating just to watch them.

It was eerie and engaging as an installation and Joff might develop it further as a performance or to be more interactive. (continue reading…)

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Music and Spoken Word – Improvised, Intense and Infused with fun!

A variety of spoken word artistry provided by:
Max Kala
France Perras
Alice Hamilton
Eric Wyness
T Crane
Music provided by Paul Plimley, piano+guitar; Tommy Babin, upright bass; Phil Emerson, guitar and Victoria Gibson, notebook+vocals.

This event is part of a new summer festival presented by Visions Ouest Productions:
Un nouveau Rendez-vous d’été / A new Summer Rendez-vous
L’ÉTHÉÂTRE 2010

Jeudi 12 Août / Thurs. August 12, 2010

à/at
Auditorium Jules-Verne, Vancouver
5445 Baillie Street, Vancouver (at 37th Avenue, between Oak & Cambie,
close to Van Dusen Botanical Gardens). Skytrain Station 41st. Free parking.

20h00

Tickets : $16 presale online until 6 pm/ Prévente jusqu’à 18h00 ce soir
www.rendez-vousvancouver.com
or $18 at the door

There are two more nights of the festival featuring:
Friday August 13, 8 pm:
Screening of (English subt.) – L’ENFANT PRODIGE / THE CHILD PRODIGY Luc Dionne
Admission: $10 Tickets sold online
Bande-annonce / trailer <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3a3UkDD5gs>

Saturday August 14 – THE CLOSING NIGHT
Screening of PICHÉ, ENTRE CIEL ET TERRE / PICHÉ: THE LANDING OF A MAN
(English subt.) – Sylvain Archambeault
Admission: $10 Tickets sold online
Bande-annonce/ <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAPUeWCaS38&feature=related>
trailer

Followed at 10 pm by L’ÉTHÉÂTROPICAL with DJ Marc Fournier
Une célébration de l’été et un au-revoir à tous les artistes et bénévoles
qui ont participé à L’ÉTHÉÂTRE.

I will miss the extremely fun after party because I will be in New York city.

So you have to come to my show if you want to see me before I go.

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A new venue, a new collaboration and much excitement is planned for August 12th – 8:00pm – 10:00pm.

You are invited to join Paul Plimley, Tommy Babin, Phil Emerson, Victoria Gibson, T Crane and guests at the Auditorium of the Jules Verne School, located at 5445 Baillie Street (between Oak and Cambie off 41st Ave), Vancouver, BC.

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COLLABORATIONS will usher in a series of projects directed by
…PAUL PLIMLEY with musicians TOMMY BABIN, VICTORIA GIBSON and PHIL EMERSON. Guests include Poet T Crane.

“An improvisational feast sure to stimulate on a molecular level!” posted T Crane in his facebook event invitation.

Other poets will also be appearing to interact with the real-time improvisation of the musical ensemble.

COLLABORATIONS is a part of L’ÉTHÉÂTRE, a summer festival that celebrates cultural multidisciplinary experience.

L’ÉTHÉÂTRE runs from the 5th of July until the 15th of August, featuring films, live performances and visual art produced by Visions Ouest Productions.

Tickets are available in advance or at the door. Check the official website – www.rendez-vousvancouver.com for more information.

Here are some photos of Paul, Tommy and Phil taken from their performance as part of the Olympic Cultural Events on Granville Island.

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The piano trio is where my friend Paul Plimley really lives. Yes, I can interest him in electronics; and he does play guitar, vibes and percussion — but he really lives his most joyous moments with bass and drums.

The trio with Barry Guy, Paul Plimley and Lucas Niggli was one of my personal highlights from the 2010 Vancouver International Jazz Festival. They reached the highest levels of improvisation in ensemble performance where they meshed into a texture of beauty and complexity that shone with emotion.

Lucas Niggli is a Swiss drummer who plays with style and delicate strength. He stretches the boundaries of percussion while playing in the pocket for the band. This balancing act displays the greatness of a drummer; too much steady time keeping and the innovative spark fades, too much of stretching one’s own personal boundaries and the connection with the ensemble is lost.

The photos show the level of communication and emotion present in the Ironworks as each of these expert musicians wholeheartedly joined their considerable individual talents into a cohesive whole.

Barry Guy (below) is a bass player living in Switzerland, who plays with Lucas often. This evening of music allowed him to display many extended techniques and timbres. He played with intelligence, skill and unrepentant emotion. His composition, Fixed, Fragmented, Fluid; had been played as one of the festival opening works in a larger ensemble that included this trio. That was structured improv, but this was free and he was able to fly with his fingers and bow with authority.

There was a Canadian pianist who completed the trio named Paul Plimley. I must admit to being biased when I write about Paul, but I have seen him play in Vancouver many times, and grace the stage of the Ironworks with other trios. This was one of the best performances I have ever witnessed from the maestro. The combination of Barry Guy and Lucas Niggli challenged, supported, encouraged and battled with Paul in the most delightful way possible. There was always a spirit of fun and several times the joy crackled in the air like electricity.

I was a photographer that evening, soundless and motionless focusing on the light and motion as I was transported by the music.

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There are other photos of a larger ensemble concert featuring these three musicians taken by Chris Cameron posted on the Coastal Jazz website here.

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Guru Mandala -- Victoria Gibson

EMPAC — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center

My application to attend the summer intensive workshop has been accepted. August will find me in New York at one of the most advanced media arts centres in the world learning sophisticated control technologies. This workshop is intensive, going from 10am-10pm for 7 days on campus in residency.

LIVE.MEDIA + PERFORMANCE.LAB

8/16 – 8/22

The workshop addresses emerging and professional art practitioners, scientists, researchers, and students from different backgrounds in performance and new media committed to sharing their interest in developing a deeper understanding of composing work focused on real time, interactive or time-based experiences and multidisciplinary collaborative processes (video, sound processing, projection design, lighting, choreography and directing).

This workshop will assist me in realizing my Immersive Environment Instrument (IEI) and possibly lead to collaborations with other media artists that attend. An opportunity that has come along at exactly the right time to help me create my vision requires some pre-production consideration.

A Macbook Pro looms in my future, but I will still try to program and control my sensor array with Ubuntu.

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Vocals have always been a large part of my performance practice and I have been working on developing even more techniques in vocal improvisation. Every Saturday at 10am, I am now practicing with the Voxy Choir, directed by Kate Hammett-Vaughn and Carol Sawyer. This ensemble offers workshops every week to stretch our performance preconceptions by introducing us to teachers outside of the mainstream of music.

Kate and I have known each other since I used to write reviews and the Women In Music column for Nite Moves magazine in the late 1980′s. More recently, I recorded, mastered and co-produced her CD, So Lucky To Be Me. Kate is a great vocal teacher and very well connected in the Vancouver and Canadian jazz community. This enables her to bring in a variety of talent to lead workshops with Voxy Choir such as her long time musical collaborator, Ron Samworth.

I only met Carol Sawyer recently, but she impresses me with her diversity in artistic practice that encompasses video, photography and other fine arts as well as her imaginative performance art.

Workshop leaders outside of music have included Jay Hirabayashi, best known for his work with Kokoro Dance and  a young man from the theatre, who I was introduced to as Paul. This Saturday, May 8th;  the workshop was at The Western Front with NY performance artist/composer Shelley Hirsch.

Shelley Hirsch was in Vancouver to perform on the Friday evening as part of the Voice Over Mind Festival. Some members of the Voxy Choir, including me, had also participated in part of the festival at the Chan Centre on Wednesday evening under the direction of DB Boyco and Christine Duncan. Shelley will be continuing to perform locally in Seattle, WA and Victoria, BC.

The mixed choir was drawn from Voxy and DB’s students, including members of the Roundhouse Senior’s choir. We sang an adaptation of Songbird, written by Vancouver performer/composer Takeo Yamashiro for the Songbird Oratorio, a homage to the plight of birds surviving the encroachment of urban development. This composition was followed by a conducted improvisation led by both choir directors. I sang in the low section, as most of the choir could only sing in the upper range and I have worked hard to expand my range in the low part of my voice.

(continue reading…)

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Now I have chosen to go with Photoshelter to host some of  my galleries, I will be uploading more events that I have photographed. Now I have completed the Canadian League of Composers event that occurred at the Western Front back in January. See my progress on my Photoshelter  homepage here.

Soon I will have other galleries hosted. I realized after I started this account that I could easily host this level of  photo storage and slideshow view on my own site. So here is a slide show of the Canadian Composers I photographed in January. If you are pictured and you would like a copy, please contact me. You are welcome to copy the image off the site but please credit me if you use it professionally. Most of these photos are untouched and would benefit from an application of graphic design skills. I am willing to trade or accept an honourarium for the work.

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I attended several events during the Vancouver 2010 Cultrual Olympiad and my friend Paul played with Phil Emerson and Tommy Babin in the trio, “String Stories”. The light was very tricky and I am still getting used to my new 50mm 1.8 lens. My Nikon D50 did the best it could in my hands and this is the result. I learned a lot from taking these photos, but they still preserve some great moments.

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One of the other really cool shows was Umalali, a group I had connected with at the 2009 Folk Music Festival. I have yet to obtain permission to post images from this concert, but here are the pictorial  examples of Olympic Security – Belize style.

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Have to get back to music now.

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My photography has moved to the level where I am being paid for photos and several of my friends are interested in the documentation of their concerts and events. It is a lot of work to process RAW photos and develop them with a degree of individual care that they deserve if they are not going to be used. They should also be custom formatted for print or web publishing and there are a number of other considerations. Now I take a lot of photos, processing was becoming too time consuming. I had to find out what other photographers were doing to manage this situation.

Welcome to Photoshelter, a very cool photo host that is as professional as you want it to be. This is a custom search box to check if you  are listed in a photo on the site. Here is my homepage – VIX.

Right now, I only have one gallery of Viviane Houle, Stefan Smulovitz and Dider Petit playing as a trio at the Light Gallery on Monday. I have posted a couple of the photos with their permission. In the top photo Didier was acting tired and critiquing Stefan’s laptop offerings (below). It was all in good fun and the concert was amusing.

Their intent was humorous, right from the start, as the first piece was an accompaniment to the performed text of the clause in the artist’s contract that restricts their right to criticize the Olympics, the sponsors or anything else about the “Big O”. The rendition was quite sardonic, but did not constitute a violation, as they were just reading the contract. There are some rumours that the Olympics have copyrighted our year, so that it is an infringement to use Vancouver 2010 in this sentence. I guess this is permitted use because I am talking about this concert that was held as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

I have to confess I did not watch the hockey game, but I love the Cultural Olympiad. There is more, yes, much more. HIVE3, one of my favourite theatre festivals is part of the fun and John Kosrud strikes again with the Ice Age March 20th in North Van. I have been busy this weekend with concerts by Paul Plimley and a new music group from Taiwan at Performance Works on Granville Island. I am getting into the action while I can because with the Arts cuts after the Olympics leave town, it is going to be a lot quieter than usual in Vancouver.

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The Waldorf Hotel pub is quite a nice venue and it was really fun to play with the Mud Bay Blues Band. This band has been around for many years and the players have a smooth familiarity with each others playing styles.

A friend of mine came down to enjoy the music and took a few photos – check them out here. It was very generous of him to document the event as he usually specializes in nature photos and not people.  I guess we were down to earth enough for him to accept us as part of the scenery.

This Friday night was really fun, as I had the opportunity to play my original music that is closest to my Blues heritage.  I hope I have another chance to play with this group and I will post future events in advance.

Tonight Paul is playing at Performance Works as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

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Everywhere is Vancouver there is evidence that the Olympics are here. From the eternally crowded transit to the spotlights lighting the night sky, this party for the world cannot be ignored.

Paul and I went to see Laurie Anderson last night at The Playhouse, playing at the same time next door at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre was Neil Young with rumours of Lou Reed being in the group. As we walked to our ticketed event, we passed pavillions with free shows going on continuously.

There is so much going on, it is hard to choose what to see. So far, I have participated in Sonic Genome with Anthony Braxton, attended Yaletown Live on my way to see the ticketed event Sound Gallery at the Roundhouse, danced to the sound and light of the Drum & Light festival hosted by John Kosrud and Hard Rubber Orchestra and walked past really long line-ups into other pavillions.

Friday, Feb.19, at 8pm I will attend Marathonologue, a fusion of Javanese gamelan, Scots highland bagpipes and Japanese Taiko drumming. This is Michael O’Neill’s full-length performance piece, which also features Alexanra Dulic and Ken Newby contributing their visual projections. There has been a dominant theme of visual projections as there are large led and flat screens everywhere you look.I will add photos to this post, but now I have to go to work.

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