Concepts » Multimedia Experiments
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Video Mixer
A multi-channel video mixer, not unlike a DAW but for live video. Designed and programmed by Benjamin Robison with hardware support programming by Andrew Papadeas. Our new version with multi-channel input and output as well as a sequencer and fully supported automation is comming soon.
Paradigm 1: The Arcades Project
The Arcades Project features the multimedia ensemble Spiral Blue from a live improvisation at Stony Brook University resulting in a new media infused abstract expressionist piece with both tonal and atonal elements. The video image is a 20 ft wide projection of real-time mixed video and painting.
Andy Papadeas - composer, keyboards, real-time sound design utilizing MAX/MSP, programming
Nilufer Ovalioglu - Visual imagist: video, free style painting, visual design
Benjamin Robison - violinist, composer, programmer, sound/video design utilizing MAX/MSP/JITTER
Paradigm 2: Kinetics
Kinetics is a multimedia experiment I conceptualized and composed for Spiral Blue. The piece features a live quartet playing in ensemble with a MIDI piano part that controls two rings of lights. The audience only momentarily hears the piano part while the performers rely on the sound through earpieces to maintain ensemble.
Benjamin Robison - violinist, composer, electronics design, video editing, programming
Marc Levine - violin
Tam Tran - viola
Vanessa Young - cello
Paradigm 3: Dance Fugue
Dance Fugue is a four-voice fugue written for violin, recorded violin and dancer. I composed three full voices and the rhythmic and gestural content of the fourth. Choreographer and dancer Tiffany Nab and I collaborated over the course of five days to create a visual fourth voice based on gestural equivalents to an improvised melody that was later removed.
Benjamin Robison - conception, composition, violin, video editing
Tiffany Nab - dancer, choreographer
Lawrence Meich - cinematographer
Paradigm 4: Ardesco
Ardesco is a series of short selections from Astralis by the multimedia group Ardesco, which tells stories in light and sound. The selection features a sextet I composed, Glass's Company and ends with a brief solo improvisation that led between my sextet and a duo by Wernick. The animations were projected on panels while the performers improvised
Paradigm 5: Casting
For violin and Tape based on Not Black or White III by Leemour Pelli. Designed with Protools and Kontact II using akg 381 blue line mics, and a Marantz PDM 660 hard disk field recorder.
Casting a line, casting a die, casting a mold. Leemour Pelli's extraordinary painting Not Black or White III has in its way done all three. In the circle of the waltz and the silent passing of the female through the static moment of movement, there burns a truth that set the sounds of Orient into place. For except three, and the voices, all the sounds were found here: Organ, Hook and Hastings 1900, Wind, with crickets, Wine glasses, Old doors and New harmonics. Each sound plays a part in this soliloquy and leads to a sense of the peoples that live and have lived here, some together and some apart.
And then too language. Placing the words so explicit from our most powerful leaders in context. They resonate in ways of which we must take account. And the whale: Here long before man. 'Inarticulate but expressive.' Like music. Like the heart.
By placing her work in the Icehouse Gallery, Pelli cast in the matrix of place and history here for those who cared to see. The World War II veteran, the whaling ship, the immigrant worker, then and now, the wind and wave as background to spirit and the mechanics and inexpressible, unutterable solitude of being and the place and time between cultures.
And hope. In mystery, in faith, in irreducible diversity.
24 minutes.
