The Royal Academy of London’s “Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined” exhibition has been gathering laurels from press and public alike since opening late last month. There’s not too much information about its contents online--the exhibition description over at the RA’s website is remarkably undescriptive--but this makes sense, considering its significance is activated only through individual experience.
And to elevate that experience, the Academy is teaming up with Time Out: London to host an one off event this evening, ripe with bands, new installations, interactive performances--a night of cocktails and culture. If you’re fortunate enough to be attending, we suggest you keep an eye out for Felix Faire’s audio-visual interactive installation Contact, which he’s been piecing together with the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Interactive Architecture Lab as part of his Masters program.
With a few contact mics, a loop pedal, a projector and a LEAP Motion controller, Faire has essentially provided the surface tools to turn any hard, flat area into an instrument. Emphasis on the word “surface” in that last sentence, though. When live it seems to have remarkably few components, but its incorporation of Arduino processors and Piezo sensors and guitar pick-ups and music programs like Ableton Live and MAX/MSP weaves a richly complex series of behind-the-curtain computation--all of which are intrinsic to Contact’s portability and efficacy.
It functions, more or less, like this: contact microphones throw vibrations from your fingernail taps and wrist bumps through classic instrument patches like the 808 kick drum (if you’ve ever listened to hip-hop or “felt” the stereo of a car three lanes away from you, you know what this sounds like). A loop pedal at your foot lets you control the cycle of your beat, allowing you to then compose harmonies with free-air hand gestures and motions. So it’s actually pretty intuitive: percussive hits generate percussion, air-strums and plucks create chains of melody.
Watch the video below to see how it all came to fruition.Making: CONTACT from Felix Faire.Once that’s clear, check out this one to see Contact in action.CONTACT: Augmented AcousticsfromFelix Faire.Over at Felix Faire’s website, you can see how Contact is a natural result stemming from his fascination with audio-visual relationships. But you can also tell he’s after something more than just simply replicating what an Xbox One can do. It’s the process of embodying synaesthesia, of studying where the streams of aural and visual experience collide, and extracting from that collision a syndication where colors and sounds are distinctly linked together, almost creating a meta-sense.God knows how many years off we are from actually achieving that sense, but tonight at least you can dance to something like it.Images via CREATIVEAPPLICATIONS.NETFollow Johnny Magdaleno on Twitter: @johnny_mgdlno
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