Ernesto de Sousa happenings
Today starts a series of events dedicated to the 15 years of the Ernesto de Sousa Scholarship. This scholarship is specially dedicated to intermedia arts and have been supported by FLAD, Gulbenkian and Phil Niblock, who has tutored all of these students in NY. For this event a series of installations and concerts are happening in Espaço Avenida, in Av. da Liberdade 211. I’m playing too. Here’s the program:
A New Controller - using the Wiimote for Free Gesture Performance
A week before the N.I.P. crew arrived at Amsterdam I was already at Steim , experimenting with a new controller for my performances. Since I’m mainly interested in free gesture interfaces, like the Theremin, this new controller is also using this principle. For some time I ruled out tracking systems based on computer-vision because I felt most of them were inappropriate for the level of interaction I desired. They were always too dependent on environmental conditioning (like light) or two slow or imprecise.
The winter N.I.P. session outcomes
Again the N.I.P. crew was together at STEIM (Amsterdam). This time around we concentrated essentially on theoretical thinking about performing with new media. A very good exercise was to build some mind maps and find out about the different issues that each one of us is concerned about. One word that sticked to my mind was “fragility”. Is fragility what makes us interested in performance per se? Knowing that the performer is expressing his own thoughts and ideas into an improvisational scenario and that it can all just go wrong.
NIP residence @ STEIM
The NIP group is currently at Steim in Amsterdam, reflecting on Performing with New Interfaces.