Lesley Flanigan ITP

Sound as Place

Our sense of place is constructed by what we smell, see, touch, and what we hear. Sound is perceivable in 360 degrees of space around our physical bodies. Through hearing sound we can know and/or imagine that which we can not see, touch or smell. Sound gives us distance, extends context, and expands our reference of experience. Sound is the narrator of space.

We listen to sound through the tiny tunnels of our ears. It takes only one finger to close off these tunnels, severing our sonic dimension of perception. When we wear headphones, we close our ears to the immediate space around us, but we also open our ears to new space. We change our sense of place while we remain in the same physical location. This new place has no physical construct and no latitude and longitude. Headphones are hetertopias. Foucault coined the concept to describe a site linked to other spaces, while also in contradiction to those sites to which it is linked. A heterotopia is a real space, simultaneously mythic and real.

Headphones are doorways. They close you off to the surrounding world, while opening up a new world perceivable only through sound. As doorways, headphones are place. Like airports or train stations, their "placeness" is not significant in and of itself, but as a space between places. Between destinations.

Physical destinations around the world are known by their name, size, population, landscape, latitude and longitude, and by weather. My mother looks at the weather forecast for New York City everyday although she lives in Tampa. Knowing the weather of New York City gives her a sense of my place. By translating weather data from New York City into sound and sending that sound through headphones, you open a door to New York City.

Headphone Heterotopia
(A project with Gian Pablo Vilamill)

Headphone Heterotopia plays with how our sense of place is constructed by sound. With headphones, cities around the world can be heard through generative melodies based on current weather conditions (temperature, humidity, wind direction, length of day, etc).

Using a php url scrapper to parse data from online weather sources (www.pxweather.abbett.org does all the work of retrieving, parsing and organizing weather data into xml for you!), we call and retrieve weather data through a Lantronix Xport (serial to Ethernet module), and send the resulting numeric data to Arduino. Arduino translates this numeric data into midi values and plays back a corresponding musical sequence. Gian Pablo has done great work developing a circuit that produces musical sounds from Arduino using simple voltage-controlled oscillators and the AD5206 digital pot. With this general set up, we can map weather to music. For example, temperature values could be the frequency range of notes, length of day could be the length of melody, wind direction could effect panning, and other weather variables (humidity, heat index, uv index, etc) could effect envelope parameters (attack, sustain, decay, and release).

Technical documentation will be posted as the project develops.

Posted by Lesley at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For my first assignment in Networked Objects, I worked with Eric Beug to create a networked Pong controller in the form a seesaw. Main components in this system are a Lantronix Xport (serial to Ethernet module), Arduino (programming environment for AVR microcontroller), an accelerometer (sensor to measure direction), and a large wooden seesaw (that we built!).

The circuit for our Pong controller looks like this:

We programmed the Arduino using Tom's code from the book "Making Things Talk", with a few minor adjustments to the senor range.

Movie clip of the circuit and sensor working:
Seesaw Pong Circuit.mov

Movie clips of the seesaw in action:
Seesaw Pong A.mov
Seesaw Pong B.mov

The directions and screen for Pong:

Pong competition in class:

Seesaw Pong controller!

Posted by Lesley at 08:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In understanding my attraction to noise as the core building material of the relationship/communication space...(sculpting voice in the space between), these are quotes I underlined from "The Work of Reproduction in the Mechanical Aging of an Art: Listening to Noise" by Stan Link.

mechanical reproduction has transfigured itself and is no longer reproduction.

the types of noises born with recording were both the difference and connection between an original and its reproduction

noise engenders listening strategies

listeners learned to "hear through" noise.

we know where and when these things occurred and simply drove around them so to speak. We could ignore noise and , as we say, ignorance is bliss.

both were after ideas of authenticity and realism that implied suppressing the artifacts of documentation and transduction.

noise was undesirable in part because it drew attention to the physical apparatus.

in that regard, the ultimate subtext of noise reduction is the realization of an independent, pure, almost sacrosanct, musical object.

retro filtering generates circumstantial listening in which music has been heard in a more sensory, rather than ideal, acceptation. In short, it asserts experience.

nostalgia intrinsically involves the act of remembering, and therefore reflects a consciousness. Indeed, regarding noise as interference with, or degradation of, a signal inherently implies a sentience perceiving it as such. As a barrier to the signal, noise engenders interference with transmission as well as embodying an effort to receive.

noise occasions presence.

retro filtering allows us to hear the recording as a type of narrative world, reconfiguring music as a type of place. The recording becomes a fictional space....

noise can create a context

in drawing our attention to the technology itself, its machines and media, noise becomes a metaphor attaching a kind of tactility to sound.

noise, then, reinforces the authenticity of listening even as it destroys that of the reproduction. This interaction itself is quite significant, as it produces another subsequential component of listening through noise -- that is, a tangible experience of time.

noise tends toward the quality of memory. The interference of noise parallels or even mimics the resistance to recall imparted by temporal remove.

Noise renders everything past tense.

noise evokes orgin.

reproduction separates sound from its acoustical, spatial, and temporal orgins

noise makes us aware of media not only as a document, but as a source and a type of action: mediation.

Sound becomes more overtly the effect of an event or object that is itself embodied in noise.

In providing a mechanism for sustaining coherence as well as parsing it; noise provides a type of syntax for both sound and listening. In many ways, noise is the grammar of recording.

noise as a type of sound

noise as noise -- rather than noise as "signal" -- represents a reevaluation of aesthetic context as well as material.

no longer extraneous, noise did not -- in fact, could not -- do what defines it: interfere and degrade.

Distinctions between "sound," "noise," and "music" have evaporated into larger modernist preoccupations with material and structure.

modernist aesthetic, which tends to emphasize the creation of compositional strategies over reception strategies or, more accurately, to vie them as congruent.

recognition of noise as an aspect of reception as well as simply a type of compositional material.

noise occurs not merely passively as something to hear, but emphatically as how we hear something else.

modernism aside, noise embodies relationships between a source and a listener rather than between components of the source.

noise may suggest ways of composing, thinking, and hearing even without its explicit participation: noise as mediator.

the piece is an utterly compelling imposition of musical order on common sounds and noises....

narrowly transcends it's modernist acquisition of sound and noise as material.

rhythm and intonational inflections of speech without necessarily conveying its verbal meaning.

mediating and obscuring

the token of verbal communication in "Smalltalk," on the other hand, confronts the listener with a loss of concrete understanding.

The perception of the intrinsic interference of noise is then heightened when heard to obscure specific meanings, as opposed to the more generic signification of sound and noise.

By what mechanism would a noise model of composition ultimately abandon compositional models of noise?

Noise thinly and seductively partitions perception and meaning, recognition and understanding.

Noise is a style of distance -- a distance that can be meaningfully confused or exchanged with location, memory, presence, absence, temporality, and experience. For listeners, the application of noise, whether literally or as construct, then, represents the activation of the SPACE BETWEEN them and the object. Conversely, for the composer, it is the control of such activation that matters. The crossing of that distance is a drama all the more beautiful for its lack of a stage.

Posted by Lesley at 03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I was 16 and first writing music, I described the process to a friend as being the poking, pulling, and molding of a sphere. Each song I wrote was an airy sphere of sounds, melodies and rhythms I threw into space, and my primary job was to shape and organize all those contents within that sphere.

Noise is a material. Invisible, but just as malleable as any tangible form. I am fascinated by the process of structuring of noise to create a musical experience: hearing noise, deconstructing it, knowing it, building it, juxtaposing it, shaping it, organizing it, composing it.... Similar to the ordering of words to express an idea. Or the molding of clay to represent a figure. Noise may exist outside of ourselves, but we can collect it and use it as any tool, as any extension of ourselves. And unlike words, noise is inherently abstract in its expressive power. Noise is a physical entity we may be surrounded by and fall into, literally pushing and pulling us emotionally far beyond the flatness of words. Noise digs trenches of meaning that words can never touch. Noise is what shapes words in the first place.

Sculpting sound is awareness of form, scale, and context of noise. Form being the structure: the lined and layered sentencing of melody, rhythm, repetition. The narrative in time. Scale being the amplification: the magnifying or the dampening of that which is formed. The narrative in density. Context being the form and scale woven into a space: the caring about instrumentation, telling and listening. The narrative in meaning.

There is the collecting and creation of sounds from outside our bodies. The finessing of noise in the world. But I wonder, what does it mean that our own bodies make noise? What does it mean that we can spit, pound, blurt, scream, whisper out sound, and shape it? Voice, it is our most direct and immediate instrument. In both presence and absence, functionality and disfunctionality, honesty and dishonesty, a voice carries.

Posted by Lesley at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sleep is a space between our conscious and unconscious states of being. In sleep, we are ghosts.


Still image from "In Sleep"

Using a camera programmed to capture only moments of change (movement), I documented a night of sleep, amounting to roughly 5,000 photographs over the course of 7 hours. In sequential order, these photographs reveal a body shifting in and out of visibility, between active and deep sleep.

Side by side in both their original and inverted states, the sequence of pictures reference language and/or code. Viewers move back and forth, in and out to decipher the story behind a night in sleep.


"In Sleep"


"In Sleep" at ITP Winter Show

"I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!" - Alice in Wonderland

Close up of "In Sleep"

Posted by Lesley at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have spent the past couple weeks organizing my documentation and thinking from the past several months of projects. Cleaning mental house.

But now it is time to emerge from this house cleaning and start building again. I need to step up to the next round of thoughts.

BUILD, DON'T THINK. This is the mantra for the month of February.

I need to walk around some flea markets, build some noise making circuits, and take some shit apart. I need to get my hands dirty. I need to be on auto pilot.

I also need to research other artists. I need a stack of books/papers at home that I can flip through and draw connections without any pressure. These need to be BOOKS AND PAPERS, not online internet crap. I must be able to sit on my floor and physically roll around on my reading.

I must not concern myself with the final goal. I have curiosities that need to be tinkered with to find out what I honestly care about right now.

TIMELINE:
February - start running "BUILD DON'T THINK"
March - focus on breath "WHERE AM I NOW? WHERE DO I WANT TO GO NEXT"
April - rhythm, auto pilot, focus "GO THERE"

GENERAL WEEKLY TIMELINE:
Sunday - bunch, walkabout, collecting
Monday 10-6 Pcomp lab
Tuesday 10-6 Pcomp lab
Wednesday 12-7 Pcomp lab; evening 7-10 Thesis chat
Thursday 12-3:30 organize documentation of progress, 3:30-6 Thesis Class
Friday OFF
Saturday - Networked Objects, POT LUCK

UPCOMING DEADLINES:
Feb 14th: 3 object sketches based on sound
Feb 21st: 3 object sketches based on mechanics
Feb 28th: must have a solid series of integrated object sketches to talk about.
March 6th: Be able to discuss clearly the context of my concepts. -- other artists.

Posted by Lesley at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For more documentation go to www.seseyann.com/plinkjet

PLINK JET
By Lesley Flanigan and Andy Doro

ABSTRACT
Plink Jet is a robotic musical instrument made from scavenged ink jet printers. Plink Jet explores instrumentation as a process of structuring noise to create a musical experience, and performance as a relationship between human improvisation and machine order. Plink Jet also explores ideas concerning curiosity, invention, and expression regarding the role of technology in our everyday lives.

Keywords
Interaction Design, Repurposing of Consumer Technology, DIY, Performing Technology, Robotics, Automation

1. INTRODUCTION
Plink Jet is a robotic musical instrument made from scavenged ink jet printers. The mechanical parts of four inkjet printers are diverted from their original function, re-contextualizing the relatively high-tech mechanisms of this typically banal appliance into a ludic musical performance. Motorized, sliding ink cartridges and plucking mechanisms play four guitar strings by manipulating both pitch and strumming patterns like human hands fingering, fretting, and strumming a guitar. Plink Jet is designed to play itself, be played, or both. The result is an optionally collaborative performance between both the user and Plink Jet, with the user choosing varying levels of manual control over the different cartridges (fretting) and string plucking speeds (strumming).

2. INTERFACE
Plink Jet is designed to play guitar strings both manually and automatically. The interface consists of four toggle switches, four three-way switches, four dials, a single six-position rotary switch and a single power switch. Each of the four toggle switches and three way switches is associated with a single ink carriage. The rotary switch allows the user to select different pre-programmed patterns while a carriage is under automatic control.

2.1 Fretting
The guitar strings are strung across the printer mechanism where an optical sensor used to be. Cartridges slide up and down the strings and touch the strings just enough to change the pitch, similar to a slide guitar. The farther away the cartridge is from the plucking mechanism, the lower the pitch of the note.

Each carriage is controlled by a toggle switch and a 3 way switch. Toggle switches control whether its associated inkjet carriage is under manual or automatic control. While under manual control, the back and forth motion of each carriage is controlled by a three-way switch. While under automatic control, the carriage is controlled by a micro-controller containing programmed patterns of movement.

2.2 Strumming
The guitar strings are plucked by motors outfitted with a single thin metal strip that strikes the string as it rotates around. Four dials control the speed of the strumming motors. This happens irregardless of whether the associated carriage is under manual or automatic control.

2.3 Amplification
Inside each ink cartridge is a piezoelectric microphone used to pick up the sound of the guitar string being plucked as well as the ambient sounds of the sliding cartridge. Like an electric guitar, Plink Jet has a single half-inch output jack used to connect to an external amplifier.

3. TECHNOLOGY
The printer carriages and motors are from four inkjet printers. The controlling circuits and electronics are custom-designed. The optical encoder of each inkjet printer has been removed and replaced with a tunable guitar string that uses actual guitar tuning mechanisms built into the machine.

3.1 Circuitry
While under manual control, Plink Jet’s circuitry is completely analog. The only digital element is the micro-controller used in automatic mode.

3.1.1 DC Motors
A DC motor connected to an H-bridge chip controls the back and forth movement of each carriage. While in manual mode, the three-way switch controls the H-bridge with a 5VDC. While in automatic mode, the H-bridge is under the control of the micro-controller.

3.1.2 Stepper Motors
The strumming mechanism is driven by stepper motors, normally used for the docking procedure of the ink carriages. Each dial is attached to a potentiometer which controls the speed by changing the voltages on an oscillator chip. The oscillator signals are connected to hex divider chip, which acts as a stepper driver. The stepper signals are then relayed through a Darlington array before triggering the stepper motors.

3.1.3 Micro-controller
Plink Jet uses an ATMEGA168 chip containing six pre-programming patterns to control the fretting when a carriage is in automatic mode. A six-position rotary switch selects which pattern to use. When a carriage is in automatic mode, the ATMEGA controls the associated motor’s H-bridge.

Plink Jet at ITP Winter Show 2007

4. STRUCTURE AND IMPROVISATION
Plink Jet explores instrumentation as a process of structuring noise to create a musical experience, and performance as a relationship between human improvisation and machine order.

Structuring noise is fundamental to instrumentation and musical composition. As an instrument, Plink Jet amplifies the ticks, clicks, and hums of an ordinary printer. The incorporation of a guitar string highlights structure inherent in a mechanized system by relating pitch and rhythm directly to the mechanics. We made a musical instrument by designing an interface that gives a person playful control over the mechanical operation of these printers and combining the mechanical components with those of a traditional electric guitar.

Numerous options for playing Plink Jet back and forth between manual and automatic control creates a dialog between the player of Plink Jet with the robotics of the mechanisms themselves. Reflecting upon this interplay between a mechanical presence and human player, Eric Singer of LEMUR has said “I believe it is an entirely new experience for the human players. The robots create a physical, responsive presence (unlike synthesizers) which can profoundly affect the humans interacting with them. Because they move as well as sound, they take on a personality of sorts, and inspire the human players in a unique way.” [1] Intuition, playfulness, and improvisation are key concepts embodied in the operation of Plink Jet. Beyond its direct mechanical relationship to a human player, Plink Jet references a musical collaboration between members of a band and between a single musician with his or her instrument.

5. REPURPOSING OF CONSUMER TECHNOLOGY / DIY
Plink Jet also explores ideas concerning curiosity, invention, and expression regarding the role of technology in our everyday lives. The repurposing of consumer technology is a growing trend for artists and technologists in the DIY genre exploring circuit bending, hardware hacking and retro-engineering [2]. Artists who have used the mechanics of printers for producing sound include Paul Slocum with his dot matrix printer and Eric Singer's scanner-inspired musical instrument, GuitarBot. The innovative American composer Harry Partch also built many of his instruments out of trash and his own carpentry. Plink Jet’s emergence from the process of hardware hacking offers it for consideration as an Infra Instrument, a concept developed by John Bowers and Phil Archer. Infra-instruments come from beneath and are below the standards we would want of well-constructed instruments, but they are a valuable addition to the NIME research agenda with concern for technology, musical practice, and playful aesthetics [3]. Inside an ordinary ink jet printer are the same toy-like, clockwork mechanisms that have delighted people and sparked imaginations for centuries. In the creation of Plink Jet, we have investigated how human improvisation can interact with these mechanical forms. Plink Jet transforms the predicable function of a printer into a unique and irreproducible performance.

6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Danny Rozin, Todd Holoubek, Tom Igoe, Gian Pablo Villamil.

7. REFERENCES
[1] Lotti, Giulio. LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. < http://www.simultaneita.net/lemur2.html>.
[2] Ramocki, Marcin. DIY: The Militant Embrace of Technology. <http://ramocki.net/ramocki-diy.pdf>.
[3] Bowers, John, & Archer, Phil. Not Hyper, Not Meta, Not Cyber but Infra-Instruments. <hct.ece.ubc.ca/nime/2005/proc/nime2005_005.pdf >.

Posted by Lesley at 03:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

www.seseyann.com/sculptingvoice

A night of performances exploring how voice can be shaped, destroyed, orchestrated and processed to build space

A voice is as unique as a fingerprint and speaks in both presence and absence. In an evening of performances ranging from the sublime to the insane, performers use human voice to shape audio, video, theater, and sculpture. Performers include R. Luke DuBois, Lesley Flanigan, Andrew Schneider, Adam Parrish, Nick Hasty, Nancy Garcia, Mike Dory, Christopher McDonald, and Dafna Naphtali.

curated by Lesley Flanigan

Posted by Lesley at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sculpting Voice, Space Between, Headphone Space

these are all titles I love, for projects themes I work with.

Space Between refers to how we know the world through the stories told in the relationship space between people, objects, ideas. This intersecting space is full of momentum, communication, and feedback. Work in this category is object based. Sculptures are kinetic and built to be directly operated by people. As mediating objects, they physically reflect a relationship the between the operators (both in functionality and disfunctionality), using metaphors of sound.

Headphone Space refers to how mediating technologies affect/skew our perceptions. This category works specifically with headphones, as a familiar consumer device, that skews our perceptions with sound.

Sculpting Voice refers to structuring of noise to tell a story and viewing sound as a material that can be shaped. Work in this category is sound based, both instrumental and performative. A voice is as unique as a fingerprint and speaks in both presence and absence. People have a voice. Inventions have a voice. We tell each other's stories as we seek our own.

Posted by Lesley at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A series of performances mediated by modified headphones, exploring the spatial relationships of people with other people, physical environment, and personal narrative.

A series of musical instruments exploring an intricate synthesis of machine and human voice.

A series of kinetic sculptures exploring the communication space between people using metaphors of sound and instrumentation.

A musical instrument that reflects a relationship space between two people.

A composition reflecting the process of structuring noise to create music, performed by a choir of hand made speaker feedback systems and a choir of singers. (Finding and making something out of nothing)

Posted by Lesley at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Oh man, this is tough. The name "thesis" is such a heavy. Really, what I am doing is just another project. But outlined here are some things I think about in terms of how and why I work on what I do.

The most fundamental question I ask is this: can we ever genuinely communicate our selves to another person?

My work explores relationships between people.

I have used metaphors that have include water, sound, mechanics.

I am interested in taking apart, building, structuring -- to tell a story.

Structuring of noise to create something musical. Composition.

How things work. Widdle away. It’s about archeology. Finding the history…the essence of something, and blending it with the essence of something else to discover something new. Synthesize —put something together, to make something new out of different parts.

This is how we work as people. We take in the world. We think. Make sense of it. Invention is communicating what we’ve learned…the process by which we are learning. A relationship is a synthesize between two (people, things).

I care about beauty…magic. Finding something special and highlighting it. I am not a minimalist artist, but I believe in a minimal approach to seeing … simplicity in complexity, complexity is simplicity. Set theory.

I believe subtraction is stronger than addition. I like synthesis. I want a voice.

How things work. Why things work.

I like intent. Thoughtfulness. Order that opens space for change and growth. Honesty.

Sound as music is intuitive. It is alive. It is electricity. It is energy. It is time. It is heart.
Water as an element is intuitive. It is alive. It is momentum. It is energy. It is time. It is body. It is density.
Mechanics as the order of process. Function vs disfunction.

Circles. Momentum. Rhythm. Lyrical -- poetic.

A series of performances mediated by modified headphones, exploring the spatial relationships of people with other people, physical environment, and personal narrative.

A series of musical instruments exploring an intricate synthesis of machine and human voice.

A series of kinetic sculptures exploring the communication space between people using metaphors of sound and instrumentation.

A musical instrument that reflects a relationship space between two people.

An instrument. What is an instrument???? Extension of self. Vocal extension, physical extension, emotional extension….

Simplest idea is the best….let it breathe.

Posted by Lesley at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)