TRACTOR from tsaworks_martin Böttger on Vimeo.
Composer/electronic musician Bruno Dias sends us his latest collaboration, with visualist Martin Bottger. It was a distance collaboration – so just the kind of thing you could be working on with musicians and visualists you know. Bruno writes:
We never had the opportunity to meet face-to-face and this work was carried along the last couples months with Martin working on the visual side in Maya and then After Effects in Berlin and me developing the sound narrative that would then drive the visuals one here in London. I worked on sound using as main tools Ableton Live and its sampler, NI Reaktor, NI Absynth and Logic/Pro Tools for post-production.
This is just the sort of thing you could do pre-rendered in this way, then adapt for real-time use, just as musicians routinely do a “studio” version and then rework it for live.(You might even export OBJ models from Maya and pull them into an environment like Processing, Jitter, or vvvv, if you have the savvy – or use a VJ app to remix, if that’s more your speed.) So, Martin and Bruno, you can take that as a subtle hint for your next step, coming from a real-time evangelist.
I love the description of the, um, fourth-dimensional tractor (maybe it’s my childhood in Louisville, Kentucky spent visiting the huge annual farm equipment show – seriously):
The Tractor name comes from the usually used term for agricultural machines. The visual object on the screen is representative of the axis of a tractor engine. The center of the engine axis. The audiovisual narrative in place characterizes the behavior cycle of Tractor which can be metaphorically compared to the behavior of a Wasp, thus assuming it’s organic and non-linear changes in speed, rotation and movement. This non-linear behavior is shown by the visual deformations that Tractor assumes along the 3:30 minutes. The sound is being used to drive the narrative. It’s not only representative of what is visually happening in scene but also suggestive of what is happening inside Tractor, in areas that are not visually "open" to the viewer such as the central cylinder of the object (or the Wasps heart). I t progresses from an atmospheric sound scape that sets the "mood" in first part of the visual piece to a second moment where the extreme sync takes place representing what is visually going on. The extreme contrast between different shapes and forms reveals what Tractor is in it’s essence: a spatial and temporal distortion machine.
More on the artists:
Martin (currently studing Visual Communication at kunsthochschule kassel)
http://www.tsaworks.blogspot.com/
Bruno (currently working at AKQA (London) as a designer (graphic & sound).
http://www.myspace.com/brunopapas
http://www.rockdabeatnow.org/