Once again, a delayed post-mortem about an amazing event. We staged a Max/MSP vs. Pd grudge match last night at InterAccess. Yes, a performance of live programming. Surprisingly, a night of programming was fun!

There’s a writeup about it here, and see photos of it at the InterAccess Flickr pool.

The Yonge–Dundas installation was mentioned in the Toronto section of last Saturday's Globe and Mail. It's probably behind a paywall by the time you read it, but a tasty quote from the article says:


Rad!

After much ado, the microphones are I think being installed today. The whole thing will be operational for testing on Thursday night, and officially running as of Friday.

Part of the function of this blog is to keep a record of things I've been up to, and sometimes that means telling you, um, a month late. January was busy!

Saturday, January 19, 2008
Yes u can has art Pd Workshop
Fava
Edmonton

Friday, January 18, 2008
Fava's Art's Birthday
The Artery
Edmonton

Performed an ABBA tribute with video artist Kelly Bolen.

Tuesday/Wednesday, January 15, 16, 2008
Yes u can has art Pd Workshop
Alberta College of Art and Design
Calgary

Saturday/Sunday, January 12, 13, 2008
Yes u can has art Pd Workshop
EMMEDIA
Calgary

Friday, January 11, 2008
Artist talk and performance
with Adam Tindale
EMMEDIA
Calgary

Friday, January 4, 2008
I/O Media with Zimoun
Interaccess
Toronto

Monday, December 31, 2007
New Year's Eve
The Tranzac
Toronto

Dafydd Hughes and I mounted Auld Lang Syne version two, a New Year's clock that never reached midnight.

The Warbike is showing at InterAccess!

If their exhibition, Sound Cycles, the Warbike and Jessica Thompson's Soundbike are available for your riding pleasure.

The bikes will be available until December 1, 2007. So go get that ride! And, the bikes, I must say, are really pretty.

There's going to be an opening at InterAccess on the night of Nuit Blanche, September 29, 2007. So come and give 'er a whirl!

Yes, The Wireless Art in Toronto Squad (namely me, Dory Kornfeld, Edward Nixon, and Michael Pereira) of Wireless Toronto will be doing a garage for Alley Jaunt this weekend (August 11 and 12). Come and rprznt!

Two things for the elctroacoustic symposium currently going on at the Faculty of Music at UofT.

Thursday, August 9
Angelus Novus electro open mic
Interaccess
9 Ossington Ave.
21:00-midnight

I'll be either doing i swallow or playing with I/O Media.

... and I'll be chairing a paper session on instruments and installations on Friday

Friday, August 10
Instruments and Installations
with James Hearon, Akito Van Troyer, Eric Leonardson, and Micheline Roi
University of Toronto
Faculty of Music
Edward Johnson Building, Room 300
11:00-12:30

I/O Media will be playing at the Electric Eclectics festival this weekend, and it will be awesome.

Things gone unreported in the last four months:


Performances I did

Other things of note

The I/O Media Collective will be holding the next in their successful series of improv events this Friday, March 23 at InterAccess Media Arts Centre.

Come for a VJ'd, circuit bent, dance, and audio improv experience.

I/O Media Aboveground @ InterAccess
9 Ossington Avenue
Friday March 23
9PM - 11PM (sharp!)
pwyc

Live electronic Audio/Video and dance improv

Featuring:
Dafydd Hughes
Rob Cruickshank
Michael Trommer
Mandelbrut
David McCallum
Kristin Trethewey
Oliver Heinrich
Rob King
Julie Lassonde

And a belated notice,

I/O Underground happened two weeks ago. Surprise!

I'll be doing a Pd Workshop at Video Pool in Winnipeg next week! I've been told that it's free, so, holy crap, what are you waiting for?!

I'll go through the basic syntax of Pd, and basic video mixing skills, and maybe a little bit of audio, if they're nice.

Thursday, Feb. 8, 2007
7pm-10pm

Friday, Feb. 9, 2007
7pm-9pm (maybe it'll start at 6)

at Video Pool
# 300 - 100 ARTHUR ST. in Winnipeg

Saturday, February 24, 2007
Pleasure Dome's New Toronto Works screening
Latvian House
419 College St, Toronto
2000h
cover?

I'll be starting off Pleasure Dome's New Toronto Works show with a performance of i swallow, this thing that I've done several times and shown to friends but not yet documented on my site. There's a screenshot to the right—yes, that's my mouth.

Come on out and support local Toronto artists!

Friday, January 19, 2006
I/O Media Aboveground with special guests Smash and Teeny
at Interacess
Queen and Ossington, Toronto
2100h sharp!
pwyc

Hark! I'm doing an installation at the Tranzac with Dafydd Hughes for New Year's Eve in Toronto! Wish I had the time for more information, but I'm working on it.

Drumheller will be playing. $10 pwyc. uh… we've just wired up a turntable to play at whatever speed we want in whatever direction. Be prepared!

So I apparently lost track of time, and Making Room is this weekend! I'll be giving a talk about the Warbike for the Dorkbot presentations. Have I mentioned how grateful we all are to Kristin Trethewey for running Dorkbot?

Sunday, December 3rd, 2006
Making Room
Dorkbot Talk
224 Wallace Ave., 2nd Floor
Toronto
1330h
Free?!

Friday, December 1, 2006
I/O Media
at Interacess
Queen and Ossington, Toronto
2000h
Free!

The theme this time is solo. So come to make some effin' noise.

Friday, November 3, 2006
I/O Media
at Interacess
Queen and Ossington, Toronto
1930h
Free!

The theme is "found speech samples," as Rob Cruickshank brings a reel-to-reel tape with someone practicing as a flight attendant, and I bring a recording of my neighbours acting like fucking children and screaming at each other.

And… what's that…? they're doing it again. Time to get my recorder!

Friday, October 13, 2006
I/O Media
at Interacess
Queen and Ossington, Toronto
1930h
Free!

Same kinda deal as last week. Leslie Spit samples, etc.

The added bonus is that my birthday is the 14th, so maybe we have an obligation to get hammered.

Friday, September 22, 2006
I/O Media
at Interacess
Queen and Ossington, Toronto
1930h
Free!

We'll be using the samples from the Leslie Spit that we recorded last weekend. Remix TO!

Cancelled!

Well, the event's not cancelled, I just got too sick to travel to New York. But you can still go see the show; Nim is awesome!

Sunday, August 27, 2006
Goodbye Blue Monday
1087 Broadway - Bushwick, Brooklyn
9 p.m.
cover?

Playing with nim (Alex Berman), on the same bill as Brian House, both old Flexing Swine band mates.

Will you be in New York City? Come see me in New York City! I'll be playing in New York City, the city that loves to be New York City!

Friday, May 26, 2006
I/O Media
at Interacess
Queen and Ossington, Toronto
2030h
Free!

Open media jam. Come one, come all! Yes yes yes!

Well, I'm still waiting on some photos from the cricket performance. But I did manage to just encode the recording of the show.

It's only an hour and a half of the three hour or so performance, but I think it gives you a good impression of how the thing sounded --- although, actually being there and seeing the crickets in the room is a bit of a different experience.

It was only recorded on the internal mic of my MP3 player sitting right beside the cricket terrarium. You'll hear some girls yelling in the recording. Them girls were doing some performance art in the room beside me. You could get upset that they're muddying the performance and the recording, but I think in some sense it makes the performance and the recording a little more authentic. The performance was supposed to be just the recording of the crickets, but I found that the terrarium resonated when the girls shrieked, pulling them into the mix. They added a different dimension to the sounds, giving me a broader palette to work with. We focus too much on trying to get things sounding "perfect" that we forget that the live experience is far from perfect.

Friday, April 21, 2006
I/O Media
at Interacess
Queen and Ossington, Toronto
2030h
Free!

Open media jam. Come one, come all!

Well, the cricket show was kind of a odd. I mean, it was great. Because it wasn't set up in a traditional performance environment --- that is, there was no performer/audience division, no stage, and no defined set time --- it was a completely different experience from what I was used to.

I find that during performances I can get kind of antsy, wondering if the audience might be bored. This is a bad thing if you make minimal music. But because I had all this time to myself, and patrons came in and out of the space, I didn't feel any pressure to keep anyone happy: if I wanted to keep one loop running for an hour, that was my choice.

I was asked exactly what I was doing that night, and I came up with the term "performative installation." Maybe it was just performance, who knows.

Except, by the end of the performance some of the crickets had started eating each other. I felt a little bad about that. But hey, at least they died for art.

One event I forgot to mention, and another I'm catching just in time. Upcoming:

Saturday, March 25, 2006
Arthaus
at the DeLeon White Gallery
1096 Queen West at Dovercourt, Toronto
1930h - 22h
Free!

An all-encompassing performance night organized by Rahim Ladha. I think I have a room to myself on the second floor. Expect music involving live crickets.

Previous event:

Friday, March 10, 2006
I/O Media
at Interacess
Queen and Ossington, Toronto
21h
Free!

Open media jam, like the Hugs events I did in Gbg.

Events acomin'.

Friday, February 17, 2006
I/O Media
at Interaccess
Queen and Ossington, Toronto
20h30
Free!

Open media jam, like the Hugs events I did in Gbg. Same people involved in the Ambient Ping show last time.

In other news, I've started playing Capoeira, and my school is having a fundraising Valentine's party this Saturday, Feb. 18. 8pm, 1222A Bloor (just west of Dufferin), Toronto. So come on out and see people spinning and kicking and stuff.

Another belated event roundup. On October 29, 2005 Alex Berman, Lalya Gaye, and I did the fourth installment of Alex's Random Access Memory series, further documenting the inanity of his everyday life.

At Göteborgs arbetareteater, the locale of a Klubb Koloni event, we taped PC speakers and tape players underneath benches outside of the venue. People could sit on the benches and listen to messages left on Alex's answering machine. If you've ever heard Alex's audio blog, you know he's got some weird friends that leave weird messages.

The installation was a success because every single thing was stolen by the end of the evening. If people stealing your art isn't success, I don't know what is!

Alex (my regular accomplice, Nim) and I played at Gothenburg's night of culture, Kulturnatta on my birthday a few weeks ago. <some poor photos are up, thanks to Lalye Gaye>

The show was at the yuppie lounge venue Respekt. Any of you aware of Gbg's cultural lore will probably have heard of the infamous v/vm show for the 2005 film festival. Essentially v/vm and the opener for the show, Pistol Disco, were screamy noise bands. Why were they billed for this yuppie lounge? who knows.

After Pistol Disco, from Gbg, screamed their set, everyone in the audience stood around wondering what was going to happen next, unaware that the management had actually refused to allow v/vm, who came all the way from the UK, to play. And that was it. Be wary of Respekt.

Alex and I were a little worried because our set was not exactly, um, melodic. Everything turned out to be okay. We played on old tape-recorders that controlled filmstrip-like projections behind us of photos of our family, etc. (The flyer up top is Alex's niece and an old photo of my father.) At the end we stormed off like prissy rockstars while the projection said "Vi har inte glömt v/vm på filmfestivalen" (we haven't forgotten v/vm at the film festival). We didn't plan to do that, I swear!