The last kira kira, Culture Lab, Saturday 10th December, Newcastle Upon Tyne

I am sure i am going to miss all this.
Kirakira has been really important for me this year. A true space/event for experimentation and getting back to music.
Thanks ewelina, andrzej, ben freeth, ben thompson, helen, marie, adam, lalya, roberto, atau, jamie, posset, mike(s) and all the people who took part to this in the past, since the 4th floor in Newbridge studios…
Farewell!

Selected artistic portfolio

Loom: Chartless Rudderless Night (2012)
a digital choreography by Claire Pencak.
Presented at Alchemy Moving Image Festival, Hawick, Scotland.
4 channels music composed with Helen Papaioannou.

Chartless Rudderless Night is a collaboration between choreographer Claire Pençak, dancers Merav Israel and Will Thorburn, moving image artist John McGeoch and composers Helen Papaioannou and Alessandro Altavista. It is part of the Loom project, and here the loom is inspired by the lighthouses of Orkney. The title is a composite of words taken from George Mackay Brown’s ‘The Weaver’. The choreography conveys the collision of wave on rock, ships that pass in the night, the scanning beam of a lighthouse on dark seas. The sound element draws on the mapping, individual light characteristics and rhythm of the 11 lighthouses of Orkney and is written for saxophone, double bass and digital sound synthesis.

http://vimeo.com/57884333

More info on Helen Papaioannou’s website.

The Loud Self (2012)

Sound installation, transistor radio, radio transmitter, computer connected to the internet, dimensions variable.

Part of the collective exhibition “Reassembling the Self” by Susan Aldworth. Vane Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

Alessandro Altavilla’s sound installation, The loud self, explores auditory hallucinations, phenomena frequently described by people affected by schizophrenia. These hallucinations are often heard as real voices, creating a concrete inner dialogue between the self and other selves. In extreme cases this causes subjects to feel themselves in a state of paranoia or even persecution. The loud selfsearches for people tweeting the phrase “I heard voices” on the internet, which are then spoken aloud by a computer synthesised voice. This voice is broadcast to a transistor radio in the gallery. This work can also be heard every night from midnight until 1am during the period of the exhibition on an internet radio programme at culturelabradio.ncl.ac.uk.

Twiddletone 

Twiddletone are sound artist and composer Alessandro Altavilla, and textile researcher Berit Greinke. Together they develop sound performances using e-textiles and piezo film materials as malleable yet recalcitrant interfaces for delicate digital sound control. Their work aims to improve music quality in e-textiles performances and create visually and sonically engaging live events.

An Arbitrary System for Tuning Fabric (2012)
(w/ Berit Greinke)

Premiered at the exhibition “On Geometry and Speculation” curated by Hicham Khalidi as part of the Fourth Marrakech Biennale (29 February – 28 March 2012).
Performance: Berit Greinke, Alessandro Altavilla, An Arbitrary System for tuning fabrics, 2012, ESAV, 38x54cm, cotton, silver thread, sound synthesis and recordings.

Performance: Berit Greinke, Alessandro Altavilla, An Arbitrary System for tuning fabrics, 2012, ESAV, 38x54cm, cotton, silver thread, sound synthesis and recordings. Photo by Bram Vreven.Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/11602839@N00/6841033322/in/set-72157629610306917/All right reserved.

Performance: Berit Greinke, Alessandro Altavilla, An Arbitrary System for tuning fabrics, 2012, ESAV, 38x54cm, cotton, silver thread, sound synthesis and recordings. Photo by Bram Vreven. All right reserved.

Photo by Bram Vreven

Altavilla’s and Greinke’s An Arbitrary System For Tuning Fabrics is a series of responsive, embroidered textiles for delicate digital sound control. This collaborative project investigates the common grounds of textile patterning and sound sampling with the aim to improve music quality in e-textile performances and to create visually and sonically engaging live events.

Catalog of the exhibition

Chrome Live Workshop  (KHiB, 2012)

(w/ Berit Greinke)

In Chrome Live workshop we investigated visual and audio pattern creation in real time through colour chromatography and participatory sound design.

http://chrome-live.org

Amplifying Textiles ( KHB, Berlin, 2011)

In Amplifying Textile workshop students augmented textiles and were involved in sessions of participatory sonic interaction design. While learning basic sound programming in Pure Data and physical computing platform such Arduino, students applied their fresh knowledge to design textile/sonic working prototypes, carefully combining synesthetic interactions between tactile qualities of fabrics and imagined sounds.

Project blog and website: http://twiddletone.wordpress.com

The Quiet Walk  (2011)

(w/ Tom Schofield)

The Quiet Walk is a pedestrian exploration of urban space, driven by sonic information captured by a mobile device.

Instead of using a geographical reference in order to navigate around the city, the mobile suggests to avoid particular noisy areas of city, giving directions to reach quiet zones.

The data collected generates a constantly changing map of the city according to its sounds.
The Quiet Walk transforms the user into a temporary cartographer, technologically aided and at the same time detoured, drifting on the thresholds of acoustic territories, aware of the continuously changing soundscapes of the city.

September 2011. Newcastle Upon Tyne.

The Flying Ear (2011)

A tour of the sounds of the city through the ear of a balloon.
Latex balloons, six meters audio cable, semi-binaural microphones, audio recorder, headphones.
Commissioned by Newcastle City Council, for the exhibition Creative Stuff in Public Space (May 2011), part of the festival Invisible Architecture, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Sept. 2011.

Osmosis

A site-specific installation by Ewelina Aleksandrowicz, Alessandro Altavilla, Andrzej Wojtas.

Osmosis a response to the physical and infrastructural characteristics of 5 Forth Street in Newcastle UponTyne, a space carved from one of the main railways bridges of the city.The passage of the trains above the space will work as a sonic catalyst for an exchange between the outside and inner spaces.

Jul 2011. Culture Lab On Site, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

Video documentation available at http://vimeo.com/28506897

Taranto Sonora | SonorApuliae (2010) 

A workshop on acoustic ecology, sound walks and improvisation in the old town of Taranto, southern Italy, in order to create a sound map of the city. August, 2010.
The workshop has been organized by Lab Lib and Francesco Giannico. Worked as assistant of the workshop and co-director of the final improvisation performance, held by the participants of the workshop itself. Mainly non-musician dealing with the sound recorded during the 6 days of Taranto Sonora.

Documentation and website onhttp://sonorapuliae.altervista.org/.

Photo by Sante Cutecchia, editing by Francesco Giannico. All rights reserved.

ELC
Workshop on electronic noise instrument making, addressed to inexperienced people.
Commissioned to a team of 6 artists from the North East by Copeland Borough Council.
Whitehaven, Cumbria, United Kingdom. June 2011.

ELC is Alessandro Altavilla, Ewelina Aleksandrowicz, Andrzej Wojtas, Benjamin Freeth, Ben Thompson, Jane Dudman.

Documentation available at http://niochnioszki.net/elc.html

Archipel

Sound design and sound track for Archipel, a short movie directed by Giacomo Abbruzzese, produced by

Le Fresnoy, Studio National Des Arts Contemporains. Lille, France, May 2010.
Awarded with the first prize at Turin Film Festival 2010.

For more information and trailer:  http://vimeo.com/14090946

http://www.giacomoabbruzzese.net/

All rights reserved.

Super Corpore (2009)

An Arduino and Max/MSP based real-time reactive musical instrument designed for dancers and actors, developed with Giuseppe Salatino. Taranto, Italy, 2008.

A complex system of flex sensors and accelerometers are connected to the body articulations of a performer.
Super Corpore has been used for several contemporary dance gigs, in particular with the dance group “Res Extensa”, by Elisa Barucchieri (Bari, Italy).
Super Corpore is my final thesis project of B.Mus. in Music and New Technologies, in Conservatory of Music in Bari, Italy.

Osmosis, on Culture Lab OnSite Vimeo Channel

:: OSMOSIS ::

A site-specific installation by Ewelina Aleksandrowicz, Alessandro Altavilla, Andrzej Wojtas.

//

Osmosis is a response to the physical and infrastructural characteristics of 5 Forth Street in Newcastle Upon Tyne, a space carved from one of the main railways bridges of the city.

Osmosis investigates the surfaces of the Culture Lab On Site space as a vehicle for acoustic information, sensed from the outside.
It works as the passage of material from a space with a substantial concentration of sound and events to a dispersed outside.
Osmosis uses the space as a big container of resonance, generated by an horizontal array of 11 piezo speakers placed on the wall, an audio feedback system (2 active speakers, 1 sub, 1 large diaphragm microphone) and 10 window transducers.
The visitors interact with the installation from outside the space, by listening to barely audible sounds and are invited to touch the glass in order to experience tactile sounds emitted by window transducers.

In order to document and build a database of user generated maps, the idea is to generate a simple data visualisation made with Processing and upload it on a specific wordpress platform (probably on a separate account).

For testing purposes,

This applet is from Tom Carden
http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/

This is just an example, not related directly with the data generated by my iOS application, just to the test the integration on a wordpress.

The idea is to use the GPS data sent from the iPhone to a web server.
A processing sketch reads this file and display a visualisation on the wordpress sketch.

More info on the Facebook event

Culture Lab presents a compelling exhibition of interactive technologies, new media and art practice.

Render 11 is about challenging performances, innovative live media, expanded realities, audiovisual feats, interactive technologies and many more perception-altering notions. //

This student-led exhibition sees creative minds grapple with ever-evolving, playful and critical ways of creating and questioning. Hosted, supported and organised by Digital Media at Culture Lab (Newcastle University), Render 11 features the work of Digital Media.

Render 11 is looking for volunteers to help with the smooth running of this event.

The exhibition will run at specific times during September 22^nd to 24^th.
Some help may be needed during the setup in the week beginning 19^th.

If interested in helping out please contact alessandro.altavilla@ncl.ac.uk

Further details will be discussed closer to the event.

Thanks in advance for your help (but we will also say thanks at the time, and probably after).

The digital media students.

This festival hosts a roster of really interesting artists, some of them Culture Lab based, like the same Will Schrimshaw, Lalya Gaye and our special guest Berit Greinke.
The rest of the line up is just incredible and I am really pleased to take part of this festival:
Amenity Space
Justin Bennett
Fabric | ch
Martin Howse
Katie Lloyd Thomas
xsite architecture

The Flying Ear leads a remote and detached soundwalk of the streets of Newcastle Upon Tyne. Walkers’ ears are stretched above their heads, elevated to new heights with the help of balloons. Walkers are able to explore vertical acoustic spaces otherwise inacessible to the ear (at least without a ladder).

The Flying Ear, Alessandro Altavilla

It’s tour based and you need to book it if you are interested to take part (please, it would be awesome and the balloons are really nice!). It will run only on saturday 10th September, from 12 to 14.
An article about this event has been publish on the issue of September 2011 of The Wire.

A site-specific installation by Culture Lab researchers Ewelina Aleksandrowicz, Alessandro Altavilla, Andrzej Wojtas.

Osmosis is a response to the physical and infrastructural characteristics of 5 Forth Street in Newcastle Upon Tyne, a space carved from one of the main railways bridges of the city.

Osmosis – Culture Lab On Site, 5 Forth Street, Newcastle

Osmosis – Culture Lab Onsite, detail

A documentation video will be posted soon.
Have a look also on Tikul’s blog for other info.

As the externals are not part of the standard distribution of PD vanilla, they need to be compiled on the phone before being usable.
The external should be already available as a .c file to be added in one of the Xcode project folders.
For example, i put my externals in my branch of ofxpd, in order to make them available for other projects.

The file to modify in order to build this external is the main .c of pure data (called m_pd.c) adding the following code at the very end of the file (after void pd_init):

void mess_init(void);

void obj_init(void);

void conf_init(void);

void glob_init(void);

void garray_init(void);

void extras_init(void);

void pd_init(void)

{

mess_init();

obj_init();

conf_init();

glob_init();

garray_init();

extras_init();

}

void extras_init() {

fiddle_tilde_setup(); //fiddle~ is the name of the external

}

yeah, the gps is working on the iThing.

I just followed this simple Core Location Tutorial, not an openFrameworks one, however.  It gives also a basic introduction to interface building with Xcode on iOS.