Manchester’s Futuresonic conference featured some of our favorite people. Fortunately, while none of Team CDM could be there, we do get to live vicariously through others:
Toshio Iwai traced his work from childhood to present-day in a talk. Our friend Chris O’Shea has copious notes and images on the talk at Pixelsumo, and Régine Debatty has her own take on We Make Money Not Art. Mr. Iwai also performed at the conference; he describes his experience on his blog.
Speaking of the blogosphere, we often get so caught up in novelty that we miss the history of media art and interactive multimedia performance. It’s nice to see some of his earlier works. Chris helpfully points us to Toshio Iwai’s 1997 collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, which transformed a grand piano into a visual spectacle, as described in the Ars Electronic archives. Iwai’s course took him from visuals into music, the kind of cross-media trajectory familiar to some of our readers here. Part of what’s exciting about being alive in the digital age to me is this new Renaissance, in which so many of us navigate into unfamiliar media and rethink what they mean to us.
If you missed Manchester and happen to live in Boston, don’t miss Toshio Iwai at SIGGRAPH and MIT. (And tell us how it goes.)
WMMNA also has an extensive description of Atau Tanaka, whose research has covered a broad swath of interactive music creation. His latest project: a mobile music device with “body input”, using sensors, accelerometer, and gyroscope data, for music making from children to professionals. Hard to know exactly what this would be like without more details, but it sounds promising.
Lastly, from Régine we have notes, images, and links on Zach Lieberman talking about how to “make the invisible visible”, from interactive visuals that let you draw with your voice to augmented reality.
If you aren’t already familiar with these works, they’re well worth your time. Anyone else go to Futuresonic and want to report back yourselves? Anyone going to SIGGRAPH next week in Boston?