Piece Of Mind – Second Run at the International Csound Conference

The Mixed-media installation I did with Carlin at the Jewett Art Gallery was selected to be presented at the International Csound Conference!

It went off amazingly well, with some superlative reactions. I shall be posting a longer article about it, what went right, what went wrong, the joys (and not so many joys) of moving audio processing from MSP to Csound (it WAS after all the Csound Conference!), as well as posting pictures and videos. Incidentally I also moved the video processing into OpenGL with some great results (although I did fall back onto jitter for chromakeying, didn’t get the same effects with shaders). And divided the work among three laptops communicating via UDP. Ideas which paid off since the audio patch did crash once (due to one of my restless buddies trying to hurry up and get his turn at the installation), and it only needed me to deal with that one aspect of the installation, while all the video work, cameras, tracking patches run unaffected. In the end, it went off far more smoothly than I had imagined. Only thing left was to streamline the user interface which still needed assistance (it was after all just a MIDI controller repackaged).

It was humbling to get the really positive feedback I got from the really big names that were there at the conference, but what was most touching was the smiles with which everyone came out of the installation room. Apparently the room had been dubbed ‘The Happy Room’ in other parts of the building. Which was ironic since I had found it pretty creepy when developing it.
But the gravity of the situation is worth writing about. David and Tom Zicarelli checked out my installation!  And so many other big names. I was freaking out shaking hands with these people, introducing them to my work.
But there are two reactions which would genuinely stick with me, perhaps for a very very long time.

One came from a very highly respected woman in the art community, who recited a few lines into the microphone with utmost grace before she went into the room, and upon coming out looked at me with these genuinely smiling eyes – It’s beautiful.
She repeated that six times before she went back upstairs. I counted. And each time my heart tugged in joy.

The second from a child who would not have been more than 5. He came out of the room, Daddy following behind, jumped a little step in the air with his arms flung open – That Was Awesome!