Audiovisual Collaboration: Building & Performing (phase 1)

About

CAMP is a residential arts facility in the French Pyrenees. It's a place where great art is made, new movements are formed, new ideas are explored and groundbreaking people are nurtured. CAMP is located in Aulus les Bains, the last village before the France/Spain Pyrenean frontier chain. The location is spectacular - we are nestled at 750m above sea level, surrounded by snowcapped peaks over 3000m high, ancient forests and cascading waterfalls. There are eagles, lammergeiers, vultures, ibex and bears. Walk out of the residency, and within ten minutes you are completely alone in one of the most beautiful mountain landscapes in Europe. Aulus les Bains is also a spa village - there are hot water springs, and a thermal spa in the village to take advantage of the healing and relaxing properties of the water.

Workshop dates: 01/06/2022 - 07/06/2022

This is the first in a two-week series exploring the space and connections between audio and visual art - the second workshop is here. Both workshops stand alone, they are complete events within themselves, and can be taken separately. However, for maximum depth of experience we recommend signing up to both and staying two weeks. What's more, if you sign up to both, you get a 50% discount on the second one and free accommodation in between the two sessions! Just book workshop 1, and drop us a line for your discount code.

This workshop is aimed at musicians interested in adding visual dimensions to their work, visual/installation artists interested in delving into sonic elements, and anyone with an interest in exploring the space where audio and visual arts meet, whether in a live performance, installation or studio/workshop environment.

Over five days, you will explore a wide range of subjects, techniques and approaches, with expert guidance from three of the most exciting artists in this field: Dejha Ti, Tom Scholefield (aka Konx Om Pax), and Tarik Barri.

Day 1 & 5

Kicking off and closing the workshop, we have two days with the award-winning conceptual artist Dejha Ti. In Dejha's workshop, she will unveil a birds eye view of her techniques used for highly reactive projection environments for music. Areas covered are:

1 a) a comprehensive reactive technical workflow between musician and visual artist; 1b) connection of musical instruments (including electronic instruments, Ableton and acoustic drums) to media playback server; 1c) connecting media server to musician/stage position over long distances;1 d) workflow for creating midi cues in Ableton to output to the media playback server (Note: Resolume Arena 6 will be the media server of choice for the workshop, however these techniques are relevant for those using alternate media servers like TouchDesigner, Modul8, VDMX, etc); 

2) Video mapping your set and DMX controls in Resolume Arena 6. Quick review for alternate options for mapping such as Madmapper 

3 a) Prepping and exporting video content in Adobe After Effects and/or Premiere 3b) Setting up your workspace in Resolume and connecting your controller 3c) Ingesting live camera feeds into Resolume 4) Alternative projection surfaces, display and lighting options

Dejha Ti is a multi award-winning Los Angeles and Berlin based conceptual artist with an extensive background in immersive art and human-computer interaction (HCI) creating multifaceted digital-physical worlds. In addition to her immersive art practice, her collaborations in music date back to 2008, manifesting in immersive interactive stages and performances, time-based visual albums, music videos, and web experiences. Selected collaborations include Amon Tobin, Ableton Loop Festival (LA), BET, Madame Gandhi, Robot Koch x Little Ashes, Underoath, and Rick Feds. Her practice focuses on how art and technology can be harnessed to form new digital architectures and push beyond the spectacle of novel technologies.

Dejha has a collaborative practice with her wife Ania Catherine, and together they've been called "the two critical contemporary voices on digital art’s international stages” (Clot Magazine), an "LGBT power couple" (Flaunt Magazine) and listed as one of the "7 emerging artists to watch in 2022" (Contemporary Art Issue). With no allegiance to anyone medium, the duo creates large scale works merging environments, performance art and creative technology. Notable works include "Soft Evidence" supported by the EU Commission and MediaFutures; "On View" commissioned by SCAD Museum of Art; and "I'd rather be in a dark silence than" commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art. In 2016 the duo founded their art house Operator which executes their multifaceted works.

Dejha speaks internationally and has been presented in programmes such as BBC, Bloomberg ART+TECHNOLOGY, Christie’s Art+Tech Summit, SXSW, Ars Electronica, Mutek Montreal, Electronic Beats, Crypto and Digital Art Fair as well awarded by the Lumen Prize (Immersive), ADC Award (Gold Cube), and S+T+ARTS Prize (Honorary Mention).

Days 2 & 3

The next two  days of the workshop will be presented by Dutch audiovisual composer Tarik Barri. Tarik creates AV works using software he programs himself, and has collaborated with Radiohead, Atoms for Peace, Sote, Nicolas Jaar, Monolake and others. Since 2015, he has toured as part of a trio with Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich in a series of concerts featuring Yorke's Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes project.

In Tarik’s own words - “The power of visuals within the music world is in many ways remarkably unexplored. While I never totally understood why this is the case, as an audiovisual artist I did spend much time focussing specifically on fusing these art forms into one. The biggest obstacle I encountered was the difference between the methods for creating image and sound.

Even though both could be created on the computer, there was a huge gap between the types of software used in their creation: the ways of thinking they required, the way they deal with time, the room they provide for spontaneous decisions, etc. For some time however, computers have become so powerful that this gap has become unnecessary. Music and visual software developers have been a bit slow to catch on to this fact though, leaving it up to programmer-artists to program their own solutions.

Having mostly technical artists enter this field however results in a specific kind of thinking and aesthetic, very focussed on technical achievements. It limits the diversity of people and artistic expressions I see around me: it gets quite boring. To help solve this problem, I’m one of the co-developers of Videosync, which allows people to use the music software Ableton Live to create realtime visuals and close the gap between image and sound, free from the technical barriers normally surrounding this field.

During this workshop I will introduce you to the Videosync software and dive deep into the many possibilities that this type of creation allows us to discover.”

Day 4

During Tom Scholefield’s workshop, he’ll be gathering field recordings and imagery from around the CAMP location to process into a site specific piece for projection. We will be focusing on traditional key frame animation mixed with 3d and learning how to prepare sound and visuals for a live performance.

For Tom (aka Konx Om Pax), the language of design and music production cross over. As a producer, he’s released two LPs on Planet Mu, the first of which was a resolutely melancholy and grainy take on pastoral IDM, shaped by living alone in Glasgow. The result of a move to Berlin and subsequent embrace of more rave tinged signatures, his later releases (Caramel and Refesher) present a fresh take on advanced dance music that is hard to tame. Saturated neon colours, classic ’80s sci-fi and early modernist cues are recurrent themes in a vivid aesthetic that’s instantly recognisable and helping shape the looks of Oneohtrix Point Never, Hudson Mohawke and Kuedo.