[spectre] Digicult: Digimag 28/October 2007_English Version Online

[Redazione Digicult]

Sorry for any crossposting

Digicult presents:

DIGIMAG 28 / OCTOBER 2007
http://www.digicult.it/digimag_eng/index.asp

The english version of Digimag, Digicult monthly e-magazine of digital 
culture and electronic arts, is available online

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[INTERVIEWS]:

- RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER - by Monica Ponzini
- PIERRE BASTIEN - by Marco Mancuso
- ANKERSMIT - by Claudia Moriniello
- ROBERT HENKE/MONOLAKE - by Bertram Niessen
- M DOT STRANGE - by Monica Ponzini
- QOOB - by Alessio Galbiati
- SCALI & GOODE - by Silvia Scaravaggi

[REPORTS]:

- ARS ELECTRONICA 2007 - by Tiziana Gemin
- TODAYSART FESTIVAL 2007 - by Marco Mancuso
- HACKMEETING 2007 - by Francesca Valsecchi

[FEATURING]:

- HELGA NOWOTNY - by Luigi Ghezzi
- ESTUDIO LIVRE - by Eleonora Oreggia
- DIAS & RIEDWEG - by Isabella Depanis

[THEMES]:

- LIBERI PROTOTIPI PER LE VIE - by Massimo Schiavoni

[REVIEWS]:

- DEATH 24X SECOND - by Motor

[COVER]:

- Arianna D'Angelica

[TRANSLATIONS]:

- Claudia Contino, Stefania Longo, Ornella Pesenti

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ERIC SINGER, MUSIC FOR ROBOTS
Digicult: DigiMag 27_September 2007
Txt: Monica Ponzini

http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=957

LEMUR, i.e. League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots . A group of artists 
based in Brooklyn who design and make up musical robots, a synthesis of 
musical instruments and technology applied to interactivity and robotics. 
With their robots, LEMUR members are contributing to redefine the shape of 
performances by creating a completely new kind of performer.

Those robotic devices - a group of more than 50 "members"- can both perform 
alone or together with human performers, thus moving forward the borders of 
applied robotics and art. Examples of those robots are GuitarBot , a 
stringed instrument , ModBot and its percussions, the fascinating ForestBot 
with its bells fixed to long sticks, TibetBot , a device inspired by the 
contemplative sounds of Buddhist monks and the complex Lemurtron , which 
combines robots, video interfaces and interaction.

Those were some of the topics we discussed with Eric Singer, the talented 
founder of LEMUR (and of another artist colective, the Madagascar Institute) 
. Eric is a musician, artist, engineer, programmer and untiring creator of 
instruments and musical applications.

Monica Ponzini: You have a pretty interesting background, you studied music 
and computer science. How did you decide to create and develop such kind of 
robots?

Eric Singer: Sort of a natural combination of my interests. For many years 
before I started this project, I was doing other kind of electronic 
instruments to be played by humans. I created synthetic sound and then, at a 
certain point, I thought it might be interesting to kind of reverse that, 
have the information come the other direction, out of the computer and play 
actual physical sounds, that led to robotic musical instruments .

Monica Ponzini: People may have asked you: "Why robots"? Isn't music also 
about feelings?

Eric Singer: Well, they are really just machines, they don't play by 
themselves unless a human tells them what to do.

Monica Ponzini: But isn't the human element missing in this process?

Eric Singer: Not necessarily, we're not bypassing performers. We're adding a 
new kind of performer to the mix- a robotic performer. Some might say they 
do things better than humans, or worse than humans, but to me this is not 
the point, the point is that they do things differently, it's a new way of 
playing music, a new way of composing, a new way of performing and it's a 
process that involves other artists, other performers, composers, designers, 
engineers and other people. So humans are definitely not missing in this 
from this mix. One thing that robotic instruments can do, that humans can't, 
is play in a museum for 3 months. I mean: humans can do that, but would be 
hard to find somebody that would on an ongoing basis. They can respond in 
complex ways to the way humans play, you can analyze human performances and 
extend them to robotic instruments - there's a lot of new territory they 
allow you to explore.

Monica Ponzini: At what point are you in this exploration?

Eric Singer: (Laughs) I think we are at the point we're at. We're not at the 
beginning, middle or end. I guess we're somewhere in the middle. I think 
it's better answered saying what we have done and what we want to do. We 
have done installations in museums, we've done interactive installations 
where participants come in a help generate the music by means of 
interaction, whether is video interacting, or sensors, or things like that. 
We have done installations that are stand alone, where music just play back 
on these live, physical, acoustic instruments, we have done performances or 
pieces that are robotic only, we've done that were composed for the robots 
to play along with other musicians. So, we have covered a lot of ground, a 
lot of different areas, that was one of the things that I wanted to do since 
the beginning. Other things that we want to do are: we want to create a lot 
more music for the ensemble, especially music involving live human per 
formers playing along with the ensemble. We are starting to invite and 
commission other people to come in and work for them and compose for them.

We're planning to start a series sometime in the fall called "Resident", 
which will invite people to apply and, when selected, they will be able to 
come in for a month and use the robots and the other kind of electronic 
instruments that we have and create performances and at the end of that 
month there will be a show where they showcase their material. And we want 
to create a whole array of other instruments, with different tonalities and 
different playing methods.

Monica Ponzini: You've created lots of single robots as well as a complex 
system as Lemurtron. Can you talk about it? Where did the inspiration come 
from and did you develop it?

Eric Singer: That's our umbrella installation, to kind of integrating pretty 
much everything that we did. The robotic instruments are arrayed around the 
space, a lot of the hung from the ceiling, a lot of them around the 
perimeter; at the center of the space, on the floor there's a video 
projection, and that's done by bouncing a projection off of a mirror that 
reflects it on the floor, so we can project whatever kind of video and 
therefore whatever kind of generated video interface we want on the floor; 
overlaid on top of the video is a video tracking mechanism, so there's a 
camera looking at the video on the floor; the camera's picking up only 
infrared light and we basically flood the scene with infrared light which 
reflects off people that walk though the video and walk over the video, that 
way the camera can see the people, but is not interfered with by the video 
projection.

The idea came from talks with other artist, I've done video tracking 
software for a long time, I created an early video tracking plug-in to a 
program called Max, that allowed people to track video and movements in a 
video image and convert them into sound, and now that's a product called 
Cyclops.

This system uses more sophisticated tracking methods and a program called 
Jitter. What this allows us to do is put any kind of video interface on the 
floor, have people walk through it, interact with it. One of the first ones 
we've done is like a game spinner, but you can kick it virtually. The 
computer that's generating the spinner is also watching for movement, when 
someone moves in the direction of pushing this arrow, it will spin, the 
spinning of the arrow will then generate a musical sequence played back by 
the robots. That's one example of what you can do, there are many other 
things that we wanna do: we want to allow people to play virtual billiards, 
virtual balls, kick them around this video area. so it's a video interaction 
space and it's also an interface into playing the robots.

In addition to that, we have a network interface that will allow people to 
log on and take control of a video camera, move that around the room and 
view various robots and the upload files to play the robots back; so we'll 
have a specification published and composers can log on and by uploading 
files they can play the robots and hear the results back live through 
streaming, so a lot of people around the world can play the bots. And also 
probably we'll have an interface where you and interact with them and play 
them, so if you're not a composer and you just want to see what they sound 
like and play some musical games on them, you can do that as well. That's a 
sort of on-going development, we've done various versions of that at various 
times, at some point we hope to get funding to do that as a permanent 
installation here

Monica Ponzini: Besides this project, do you have any other plans for the 
future?

Eric Singer: LEMUR is my plan for the future, continue to create the kinds 
of instruments that I and other member of the group want to create, show 
them around the world as much as possible. We also do art and technology 
education, so we want to continue that, we want to bring other people into 
stage performances, also have the space open as a gallery, it's really just 
keep doing what we're doing on a grander and grander scale

Monica Ponzini: Do you have an international network?

Eric Singer: We've done gigs around the world for years, we've traveled with 
robots, we're receiving invites every week to various festivals. It gets a 
bit of money to get the robot oversees, but we hope to do that more and more

Monica Ponzini: Where did you find more interest for what you do?

Eric Singer: I can't say there's any one place that there's more interest 
we've had. We've been in Asia, Australia , Eastern and Western Europe . 
We've not been in Russia , Africa, the Middle East or South America . These 
are all territories to "conquer".

Monica Ponzini: In your opinion, what's the future of interaction between 
humans and machines, especially from a creative/aesthetic point of view?

Eric Singer: I don't think anyone can say what the future is.

Monica Ponzini: But how do you immagine it?

Eric Singer: More and more pervasive interaction. For better or for worse 
computers, data collection, is going on everywhere - I read an article once, 
someone talking about pervasive computers, and had been saying that someday 
there would be computers in doorknobs, then, as he was going in his hotel 
room, swiping his card, he realized that there already are-. Artistic 
interaction with computers is exploding now the means to do it is getting 
easier, less expensive, the tools are getting better and easier to use, so 
more people are able to do it. you don't need a degree in electrical 
engineering -even though it helps-, but we're teaching people how to work 
with microprocessors and program, and create interactive art, video, sound, 
music. All I can say about it is: it's gonna keep going and becoming more 
pervasive.

www.lemurbots.org

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DigiCult is a cultural project involved in digital culture and electronic 
arts. DigiCult project is directed by Marco Mancuso and based on the active 
participation of 40 professional people about, who represent the first wide 
Italian network of journalists, curators, artists and critics in the field 
of electronic culture, and on a multitude of updated strategies around new 
media communication and networking activities. DigiCult is a web portal but 
is also the editor of the monthly magazine DigiMag, discussing with a critic 
and journalistic approach, about net art, hacktivism, video art, 
electronica, audio video, interaction design, artificial intelligence, new 
media, software art, performing art. DigiCult produce an electronic music 
and audiovisual podcast and the newsletter international service DigiNews. 
DigiCult is involved in side-activities like media partnerships and 
journalistic/critic reports, consultancy and curatorial activities and 
ITalian artists international promotion

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