Adventures in moving images
A selection of key works from the Warp and onedotzero catalogues. Ground breaking music videos, compelling shorts, animations, and motion graphics from Europe and Japan. Featuring music by Franz Ferdinand, Mogwai, Aphex Twin, madvillain, dj format and more.
The Friday Digital Soiree
23 September 2005
15:00 - 16:30
The Convent Seminar Room
All Welcome!
Thanks for Orlando Truter for the loan of the material we will be screening this Friday.
just went through spam on here, wow, we need to install that karma app… there was one out of fifty that was not spam…
anyhow, tomorrow:
You are invited to The Friday Digital Soiree at Wits Digital Arts:
Visual Music: Synaesthetic video from Austria and Mexico
In both Vienna & Mexico City new experimental spaces have developed in which audio and visual arts overlap. These groups of artists have started dissolving traditional rhythmic patterns and structures in the search for new modes of expression. At this Soiree we will be screening a selection of the most interesting work happening in this area.
The Friday Digital Soiree
16 September 2005
15:00
The Convent Seminar Room
All Welcome!
Thanks to Michaela Grill (My Kingdom, Austria) and Rodrigo Sigal (D.A.M, Mexico) for the material provided for this Soiree.
MTKIDU blasted onto the Joburg scene with their first performance at the new Berlin Bar in Melville on Tuesday 26 July 2005. The duo, consisting of ex-Wits Fine Arts student Murray Turpin (DJ MT) and WSOA Digital Arts tutor and Flash artist, Nick Nesbitt (KIDU), put on an absorbing display of quirky but sinister visual sequences integrated with completely fresh beats and samples.
MTKIDU in their performance at Berlin. DJ MT in the foreground; Kidu in the back. Photo by Christo_D
Since then they have been on a nation wide tour sponsored by Nike and leading Joburg Interactive Design company, Trigger.
Kidu reports: “MTKIDU was formed mid last-year in the search for a sound and visual language that was both experimental and dark…
The first chapter was conceived, under the title, Tales from the Dark.
Experimenting with live visuals (simple line animations built in flash) and audio manipulation (our own beats performed with a sampler, turntable, cdj’s and that Casio keyboard you lost when you were 5…).
We planned a series of dark events which would expose the dark landscape and introduce viewers to our uneasy dark pop hits composed for South African boys and girls.
MTKIDU in their own image. As seen on the Durban leg of their national tour.
Expect an album out early next year on an enhanced DVD, TFTD animations and interactions included.
We also have a website under construction… link to be announced…( Keep watching www.atjoburg.net for updates - Ed
On their national tour, Kidu reports: “We were asked to do our live show and control the multi-media for the Nike City Sessions parties around the country. The City Sessions parties are a brave way of speaking back to Nike’s youth target market. The reason being is not only do they get precious information about their clients such as names, contact details and interests they also get to meet them in person and reward them for using their interactive/mail advertising as a interesting and alterative way of creating a awareness for their brand.
MTKIDU - another image from their Durban performance.
The party was an invite-only event and guests who were cool enough to be invited, received an email confirmation that they would be accepted into the party. The parties were spread out over three weeks in three different venues across South Africa. We and other VIP guests were given promotional Nike t-shirts. Buttons and other goodies were given out to the elite guests. The entire event was subtly branded with icons that had been pulled from the Nikes fresh new soon to be released street clothing range. We realised that we were selling our souls to Satan because we were working for the evil corporation called Nike but we need to buy a sampler, and anyway Nike + Trigger = not so evil. So in closing sorry small sweatshop children and thank you Nike/Trigger for supporting South African digital art. Check out our new track called Nudark on the new SL cd out this September. Love Kidu.”
So the party’s over and the circus has left town. joburg feels emptier without the 40+ foreign musicians who joined local musicians and electro-accoustic enthusiasts in four days of sound experimentation. Without exception everyone (South African and foreign) has been overwhelmingly positive about the experience. Students and those teachers who did attend have been buzzing with energies and ideas transmitted by the performances and workshops that Festival Director, Dimitri Voudouris, packed into the four short days of the Festival.
It was four days of continuous highlights. For a detailed and insightful review of the broader programme see Nathaniel Stern’s piece on Unyazi in www.rhizome.org. But I’ll just enthuse about Prof Halim El-Dabh and the way that he used the sine wave generator that we sourced for him from the workshop of the Wits School of Electrical Engineering. I presumed he would use it at some point in his performance; never realising that it was his instrument, and that he would play it for entire pieces, like during his awesome duet with the trombonist, George Lewis. Before he caught his plane back to the USA, I asked him if he would kindly autograph the machine before we returned it to the Engineering store. So now the machine is now back in its place on a shelf of lab equipment; nobody except you (dear reader) aware of the inscription under its belly. And nobody, except those lucky enough to hear Halim play the machine, are aware of what sonic worlds have been explored with this piece of technology.
Halim’s inscription. In English and Arabic: To the sine wave generation.
Halim El-Dabh playing the sine wave generator at the first African electronic music festival in Johannesburg, 2 September 2005.
(All pictures by Christo_D on Nikon D70. dohertyc@artworks.wits.ac.za)
Check out Nadine Botha’s poetic/ascerbic/inspired blog coverage of the Festival at
American trombone legend, George Lewis with South African drummer Louis Moholo after their historic performance with an interactive “virtual pianist”. Entitled “At Home in the World” it is the first in a new series by Lewis in which human improvisors engage in dialogue with a computer-driven, interactive “virtual pianist”, realised in MAX/MSP.
Composer/percussionist Lukas Ligeti is an Austrian currently based in New York. His brilliant performance with an electronic marimba drew on his experiences playing and teaching in Africa as well as the high Modernist tradition.
Part of the capacity audience which filled the Downstairs Theatre at Wits for Lukas Ligeti’s performance on the last day of the Unyazi Festival.
Video artist Billie Roisz (with Michaela Grill in the background), members of the Austrian group My Kingdom for a Lullaby, at work on the 45 minute live audiovisual/experimental electronica improvisation “Johannesburg 2″.
The video technology used by Billy Roisz and Michaela Grill in their performance.
Gerhard Roux (Computer programmer - EyesWeb Software) and Mario Cronje (Technical Supervision) during the performance of “Colours” by The Kemus Ensemble from Stellenbosch University. The piece, composed by Jan-Hendrik Harley and John Pringle, is an interpretation of the seven prismic colours, for live and sampled percussion and live and sampled viola with visuals.
Johannesburg electronic composer, Chris Wood, in performance with vocalist Belinda Blignaut. His composition, “Seeing Is Not As Simple As It Looks” explored the meaning of ugliness and beauty using sound together with visual projections.
Computer programmer and musician Albert Sapsford silhoutted against the visual projections during the performance of “Seeing Is Not As Simple As It Looks”.
The cables during Pauline Oliveros’s performance of “Sounding In The Sonosphere” using her unique Expanded Instrument System (EIS) Originally comprised of hardware including tape based delay systems and analogue signal processors, EIS has now been developed within the MAX/MSP programming environment.
Pauline Oliveros gave a powerful workshop on the application of the Expanded Instrument System to an audience of students and fellow musicians in the Wits Amphitheatre.
James Webb and James Sey concluded the Unyazi Festival with a performance of “The Utopia Travelogues”, the second volume of “The Compendium of Imaginary. Using electronics, radios and narration they presented extracts from the author’s sinister travel diaries and the various soundscapes discovered with them . . .
Please note - it was not possible to photograph the following performances at the Unyazi Festival:
Stephan Rak - “Tracy”
Brendon Bussy - “Tick” & “CMYK”
Yannis Kyriakides - “Wordless”
Jurgen Brauninger & Sazi Dlamini - “Yinkosi Yeziziba”
Ulrich Susse & Jurgen Brauninger - “anywhere far”
Zim Ngqwana - “Live interactive improvisation”