TT3K brings to the outdoor stage at Space 4 Art, an 18,000-square-foot center for art and culture in the East Village, the 20th Century masterwork, Showgirls (1995). 
www.female-expat.org. A collaborative project with artist Joelle Dietrick. I designed and built the community audioblogging system for this project, which allows low-bandwidth users worldwide to blog community audio. The design emphasis was on ease of use and universal access: all that is required to use the system is a microphone and a web browser, and audio content is compressed and streamed.
During the summer of 2010 I was an artist-in-residence at High Concept Laboratories in Chicago, IL. My time there was spent developing my interactive sound and light installation Flox. Flox explores multi-modal interactivity by asking visitors to engage their bodies with an interactive environment that presents them with increasingly complex sonic puzzles.
The system uses four interconnected overhead cameras and a custom computer vision application to persistently track users withing a large gallery space. Please see this paper for a detailed discussion of the mechanics and technology behind the piece.
My friend Jeremy Bessoff produced a short film Flox:
Kuklos is a large scale, site-specific sound installation developed at Lucerne Valley Flats, California. Linear time in music, as we tend to think of it, is changed by distance into something like the ancient Greek notion of cyclic time, recurrent and fluid. The piece takes place within a circle on the desert floor that is about a 3/4 miles in diameter, an area large enough to use the speed of sound through air as a compositional element. Speakers ringing the installation space produce moments of synchronous and asynchronous sound events that evolve throughout the day, allowing visitors to discover resonant nodes, beating patterns, and interesting phasing relationships within a giant organized sound field.
A modular, solenoid driven electroacoustic instrument. My travels through Java and Bali and studies of Indonesian classical music led to some attempts at original gamelan compositions. The purpose of this project was to design and build an electromechanical array of striking apparatus that could be controlled with a computer sequencer via microcontroller, and then to compose for it.
Memory Theater is an interactive sound installation that places a human voice reciting passages describing Giulio Camillo's Memory Theater, an imagined historical structure dedicated to the art of memory. This narrative is fragmented into clouds of words, phrases and phonemes presented inside an evolving algorithmically generated soundscape that is internally consistent yet often indistinct, like a dream or a fading memory. A video camera analyzes the room for the movement and orientation of the installation's visitors, whose dynamics drive the evolution of the soundscape. The voice and spoken text remain fragmented and unintelligible while any movement or activity is detected. The collective stillness of the room provides clarity.
Now largely lost to time and obscurity, Giulio Camillo was once one of the most famous minds of the 16th Century. This piece''s title is borrowed from his ambitious project to build an amphitheater full of objects and imagery that would serve as a vast mnemonic repository, and which would facilitate incredible feats of memorization. In fact, Camillo's Memory Theater was never built, and so exists only in the form of the original architectural plan. In this sense Camillo's theater is both a literal mapping of mind to form and a figurative portrayal of man's relationship with the imagined.
{Percept} is based on a pen and paper exercise I created years ago that was turned into a an interactive multimedia installation during a collaboration with William Brent in early 2006. The piece uses 4 walls of projected video and 4 channels of spatialized audio to create a completely immersive environment. Sound content is provided by visitors to the installation, who are asked to contribute by interpreting abstract concepts with sound before entering the installation space. These renderings are processed, and all aspects of the installation evolve according to how visitors interact with the system.
Technical Notes
Wrangling 4 walls of realtime interactive video, adaptive audio processing and surround sound spatialization, not to mention the user interface and voting functions, all requires a lot of computing power. To accomplish this, {Percept} uses 6 networked computers, all of which share data, report to each other on their status and continually adapt to the actions of visitors. Components for the installation are shared by machines whenever possible (the user interface, voting system, and system logic are all hosted on one machine for example), but further consolidation proved impossible within the limits of our hardware.
The innards: Max/MSP and Jitter is used for video processing, audio recording and playback, sound synthesis, user interfaces, system logic and health monitoring. Audio processing and spatialization are done in Suppercollider. Communication between machines takes place over switched ethernet via CNMAT''s Open Sound Control. I created an overview diagram for the entire system, which you can view above.
Video Clips
Taken at Collision Symposium, 2006.Percept Move (hi res, 25MB) | Percept Movie (low res, 7MB)
A multimedia urban intervention of transitional spaces, in this case a ruined gas station in downtown San Diego. This work extends organic, site-specific video processing onto the cracking walls of non-spaces. In becoming transient yet viable gathering centers, non-spaces allow for a new knowledge of decay, reuse and in-betweenness within areas of increasing density. See the promotional flyer for this event.
A collaboration with composer Nicholas DeMaison. Three Years of Light explores the possibilities of gesture and enactive approaches to composition and performance. We have created a piece for prepared piano, electronics and two performers, one of whom plays at the keyboard and another who prepares and deprepares the piano throughout the piece. Our setup involves an array of microphones that sample sound for processing and spatialization. A video camera arranged with a top-down view of the inside of the piano feeds a computer which captures and analyzes the movements and gestures of the performers. This allows for different regions of the soundboard to be mapped and played, not only by physically manipulating the piano preparations themselves, but also via the movement of hands, arms and body, as they move across the computer's visual field. For example sound can be spatialized and "thrown" around the room by sweeping one''s arms. A gesture memory system allows for these gestures to be remembered by the computer and referred to later in different ways throughout the piece.
Video from the premier performance, with:
Julia DenBoer, piano
Jennifer Torrence, percussion
Jason Ponce, electronics
Trashtalk Theater 3000 is an interactive cinema experience that invites the audience to submit their own subtitles, thoughtful observations and/or snide commentary directly to the screen as films are viewed. This allows for alternative, group-articulated interpretations of the typical movie watching experience. The effect can be silly or serious, profound or hilarious, all depending on the film, the mood of the audience, and how quickly the crowd can think (and type) on its feet.
Please visit the TrashTalk Theater website for more information, bookings, etc.
flox
kuklos
percept
Jason Ponce is a multimedia artist, musician and interactive arts researcher. His sound and video installations have been produced internationally and highlight the many intersections between art and science, especially interactivity, gesture and cognition. He is co-founder and Creative Director of What Where, a not-for-profit arts organization that specializes in the creation and production of boundary-pushing musical works, including contemporary opera and experimental multimedia theater.