Immersive. Botanical. Meditative. Aleatoric. Awe-inspiring. I keep effusing these odd combination of terms in describing SKOLTZ_KOLGEN, the endearing and impressive collective-of-two from Montreal, Canada. They performed ASKAA for a marathon 5 hours at the CMKY festival, described as an interactive ecosystem inspired by vegetation. JPGs of course, don’t to the experience justice – the visuals hovered, danced and grew throughout my time there, but not in the artificial, randomly animated way some sonified graphics are done. And not being content to just press play on some video loops and walk away, SKOLTZ_KOLGEN actually performs a live soundtrack to accompany the A/V installation. Inside of CU ATLAS’s state of the art Black Box, ASKAA was powered by 3 10,000 lumens projectors, multiple laptops running MAYA rendered video and topped off with contact mic’ed bells, crystals, and wooden boxes routed through NI Reaktor. But technology aside, the space they created allowed one to reflect on the silences in between breaths of a truly living installation. Pillows were scattered around the floor, inviting people to lay back and drift off into the piece. I felt like I was floating underwater and in inner-galactic space simultaneously.
More photos of ASKAA here.
Our inaugural run of Laser Graffiti was a success and such good, clean fun! Graffiti Research Lab originally developed the LASER tagging system that allows people to paint images on entire building facades using a green laser. It even emulates dripping paint! The possibilities of interesting canvasses to project on are endless. I wonder what it would look like on snow.
Kate Lesta, Lauren Higgins and myself presented our version of sustainability and electronic art to rooms full of entrepreneurs and ecopreneurs respectively at both the March Boulder Tech Meetup and the Colorado Green Tech Group meetup. We pitched the Communikey (CMKY) Festival of Electronic Arts: art un constrained by a revenue model.
http://alternativeenergy.meetup.com/171/
I’m presenting at the Boulder Tech Meetup this Tuesday, 3/4 at CU’s Wolf Law!
Along with Kate Lesta and Lauren Higgins, we will talk about the various aspects of organizing the Communikey (CMKY) Festival of Electronic Arts. The zero waste event is a sustainable digital arts festival featuring djs and electronic musicians, digital artists, interactive installations, green panel discussions and software workshops at various venues around Boulder during Earth Day weekend. I’m exhibiting and/or collaborating on 4 interactive installations that examine different notions of sustainability as more than just a buzz word.
My video short, Freegan Kitchen was featured in the New York Times! Its a satire on cooking shows that demonstrates how to make gourmet meals from trash-bin ingredients as a way of commentating on waste & the surprising amount of perfectly good food that’s thrown away.
I contributed two electronic music soundscapes as part of a collaborative sound installation. It was such a success that we’re now bringing CUBO to Boulder’s BMOCA this April.
