Ben Freeth

Yellow and Black Substance at the Black Gate

Research trip to the Black Gate….exploring the familiar with… freshly birthed eyes on a cold damp day…random shutter releases…a few tourists pose and photograph each other…a wooden walkway greasy with wet… a creaky trapdoor…blacked out windows shrouded in dust…iron gates…ruined walls…once functional…hemmed in by railway arches, buildings on dean street, road…at a cross roads the quayside, central station, gateshead or city centre…a secret path round the side…an archway hidden from view…a human chod?…yuck…the cobbles before the gate resisting an application of yellow and black paint – peeling and cracked chlorinated rubber eczema…lichens evidence of pure air, plenty of moss…

XOR Ring Modulator

Club Transmediale Spectral Workshop
Soldering Ring Modulator

Field Recorder & RF / EM sniffer

Topology of a Future City at Transmediale

Temporal bandwidth,’ is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar ‘[delta-] t’ considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.

[Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon

Topology of a future city proposes a speculative working group or workshop divining, describing and thus constructing a future city in ruins; a series of descriptive urban vectors extrapolated from ghosted electromagnetic, signal and literary traces.

Borrowing techniques from geophysical archaeology (revealing and mapping of geophysical properties), narrative displacements (filmic manipulations of temporality, science fiction), and coded psychogeographics (tracing signs of underground networks), Topology sketches a model for the future city flaneur.

description;
http://scrying.org/doku.php?id=topology:description

Participants:
Oswald Berthold: mapping of EM events and intensities, long-term logging of geophysical properties

http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~oberthol/html/Public Index.html

Martin Howse: elaboration of psychogeophysical methodologies

http://1010.co.uk/org/

Verena Kuni: psychogeographic play within a ghosted city

http://www.kuni.org/v/kuniver1.htm#Beginn

Danja Vassiliev: exploration of city-structured underground networks and messaging systems, data carving

http://k0a1a.net/

(Physical) Participants

Jaime Forero-Romero: numerical modeling, data massaging, science fiction wrapping

http://www.aip.de/People/JForero/

(Ghostly) Participant

Javier Moreno : math and science fiction

http://bluelephant.tumblr.com/

Final Research Document:

http://1010.co.uk/topology.pdf

Singing Bowls and AKG microphone

Bowed Guitar

Set Up

Bowed Shahi

Bowed instruments for Continuum sound track to create drones. Singing bowls close mic’ed with AKG for intense high pitches. Guitar tuned DADFAD (The Continuum piece is in the key of D) and close mic’ed – produces really resonant drone from acoustic instrument. 

Up coming timings:

Mix 5.1 in Culture Lab Live Room -20th, 22nd, 26th, 27th, 28th February and 1st March

Test Mix and make adjustments in the Planetarium, Centre For Life – 3rd and 4th March

Presentation at Designer Bodies 18th March, Planetarium, Centre For Life

Culture Lab Studio – Control Room

Had an induction using ProTools in the Culture Lab Studio. Can now use the studio to record and edit music etc for the Doing part of the MRes. Digital Media. Thanks to Dave Green for this.

Once Continuum has been finished a 5.1 mix will be created here using ProTools.

Charlemagne Palestine played “Tintabulations For Tomorrow and Tomorrow” on the Tiergaten carillon near to the Haus der Kulturen Welt. 

My expectation was that the carillon would be loud – instead – it was gentle. Many endings turned into unique beginnings, a multitude of notes like droplets forming a stream of sound in which to bathe, softened by a ubiquitous cushion of snow.

From One Too Many – Yvette Mattern’s lasers in the foreground lance through the blizzard. Snow flakes caused interference patterns in the trajectory of the laser beams, a stochastic subtraction of light adding to the uniqueness of the piece.

Staying until the end of Palestine’s performance my nose felt like it could snap clean off from my face! Don’t worry it didn’t…

http://www.transmediale.de/en/thank-you

Magenta is an extraspectral colour! Sir Isaac Newton noticed that it doesn’t exist as a single wavelength in the visible spectrum. One possible explanation for this is that the brain detects light from either end of the visual spectrum (red and violet) and creates a new colour half way between red and violet – magenta.This means that colour perception does not have a one to one correlation with the “real” world… Colour representation depends on the brain and is only experienced in the mind.

Colour is a Quale.

More info at:

http://www.biotele.com/magenta.html