novak were in london doing their 3d disco show, so i dropped by to see how it had come on: i saw an early version - possibly the premiere even - back at the reopening of the tyneside in 2008. i was impressed with what i saw and what i knew about its development, so i put a line to create digital motion that there might be a good story in it. which, somehow, just got posted to their front page. read on, and the comments.
that was the positive, here’s the negative. well, it was an outdoor performance, and it rained. which sucks, and its a shame that because of rain cover the audience couldn’t crowd around us performing it, seeing the creative hub and being able to join in with our text clients and general heckling to do this idea or that. but that is life.
what i feel is the real shame, is that despite the promise seen in rehearsal the performance didn’t pick up on the storytelling thread, which is perhaps one of the consequences of having to start earlier. this was to allow the other (truly open-air) act the chance to perform once the rain had passed, and it meant we started in sudden chaos rather than well briefed order, and with me dealing with an unpaired wii-mote that refused to play nice.
similarly because of the earlier start, we didn’t get a slot to properly tweak the canvas to the wall either, so the text was too small for the amount of relief texture we were projecting onto, and our texts weren’t exactly aligned with the wall edge… and so on, its easy to get hyper-critical about these things when you’ve so much time invested in it. i should say that the tech backing was fantastic - shout out to fanny - with the projectors being a dream to use, so bright, crisp and colour accurate.
however, the image quality speaks for itself, so i should stop whining and wait to see it objectively through the footage shot by the mapping documentation team.
after three days of prep, the performance. to quote the internet:
“It is a beautiful project and one that brings together three local illustrators and a poet for the festival performance. Despite some last minute technical difficulties - including rain forcing the start time forward by almost two hours, the show delivers with some moments of true beauty and the six busily active artists and live soundtrack make for an absorbing spectacle.” - lucy benson
lucy wrote that for friend sean healy’s skynoise blog and publication back in oz. so not exactly impartial, but on the flip side that should be in print!
after arriving at this year’s mapping festival and having the plan-the-week meeting with andrew, its the next day and we’re meeting the artists. mapping have curated seemingly a dream-team for us, which really fits the idea we proposed of emphasising the idea of a ‘band’ coming together to tell a story. we’ve always run kinetxt as a longer-form audience-led event/environment, and for this performance we’ve brought it down to 45 minutes and we’re really hoping to somehow create the equivalent of a band performance, but instead of guitars and drums, we have illustrators, a poet, and a backing setup of me, andrew and james of novak, and lots of laptops with lots of custom code and things hanging off them.
introducing the band -
- heike fiedler, a ‘realtime poet’
- thomas perrodin, an illustrator and comic-strip artist
- themes.ch, aka thomas and mathias, already well versed in live illustration as projections, and photographed above checking out our in-development calligraphy set-up.
and as a footnote, preceeding that meeting with andrew came two tweets from me: “writing lists a week before a performance is always scary” and “realising its much less than a week to the performance: even scarier”
6pm: kinetxt is go. and the other innovation: its recording itself, so it can spend the rest of its time at the imageradio exhibition iterating through the opening night’s perfomance.
two anglepoise lamps on the desk, smart and suitably adjustable, but light only seems to be coming out of one of them…
kinetxt has been curated to be part of imageradio: new media in public space, taking place in eindhoven from thursday to sunday next week. so back in the uk for just one day, its off to the netherlands to try and pull it together over there.
check the website for lots of interesting work:
http://www.imageradio.nl/content/blogcategory/24/55/
the two nights of kinetxt[v2] - first as part of the opening gala for the renovated and extended tyneside cinema, and the next night at the baltic centre for contemporary art as part of the thinking digital conference. this is the setup at the baltic, with client macbooks kindly lent by the tyneside cinema.
or strictly speaking, as of this-photo, gateshead. they’re finally about to knock down the iconic ‘get carter’ car park and rooftop restaurant-that-never-was. loving the irony of seeing a derelict shop front ‘well worth it’ just above the ‘danger - demolition site’ sign.
yesterday was a non-stop afternoon at the tyneside cinema’s open house reopening event, demonstrating kinetxt to hundreds of people exploring the venue. some good usability testing, not to mention some last minute fixes to the new kinetxt engine and brand spanking new client. best of all though, was seeing all sorts of people ‘get it’, from kids to grannies alike.
been dragged into facebook to get a peek at the photos, digital politics aside, it’s certainly good when you see the festival director write “this was such an amazing event!”. huzzah!
