Later this month, James Bulley and I will be debuting a new collaborative work at a Barbican Lates event, curated by Off Modern as part of the OMA/Progress exhibition.

Entitled "Maelstrom", it is a multichannel sound installation that uses real-time YouTube uploads as its raw material, using them to resynthesize morphing banks of chord sequences. These are then spun rapidly around the listener by a multichannel system of repurposed speakers, creating a tornado of audio data.

From the press blurb:

Over 48 hours of user-created audio is uploaded to the internet every minute, a figure that is increasing exponentially. Maelstrom is a sound installation that draws on this material in real time, constructing shifting walls of sound from thousands of audio fragments.

By organising these fragments based on their tonal attributes, they collectively form a vast instrument, whose properties are affected by global internet activity. A score composed specifically for this instrument voices an endless series of chord variations, dynamically generated by an array of live processes.

Maelstrom builds a tornado of tonal cluster chords around its spiral speaker system, engulfing the listener in the swirling mass of information that is now an integral part of our day-to-day lives.

Off Modern Late is on Thursday 24th November, in various spaces around the Barbican Centre, from 6.30pm onwards. Entry is free.

More info: The Barbican, Off Modern.

Yes, another one. For those around East London over the coming weeks, I have a digital print in the exhibition Cats and Kittens, opening at Barden's (N16) on 14th July.

Untitled (Digital Photographs, 2002-2011) compresses 11,000 digital photos taken over 10 years into a single poster-sized image, incorporating a line of pixels from each in sequence.

It's not reproducible online due to its large scale and detail, but can be seen from late next week (details on poster below).

In the culmination of a busy few weeks, I have another new digital installation opening this Friday. Horizontal Transmission is a semi-interactive sonic ecosystem based on bacterial dynamics, somewhere between a VR game and in silico systems biology simulation. It's an extension of research that I've recently been involved with in conjunction with the pioneering Division of Mathematical Biology at the National Institute for Medical Research.

It's a part of A Theory of Everything, at Deptford's Core Gallery from 24 June to 10 July, alongside a number of other works based on physical patterns and the empirical search for unifying scientific laws.

More on the piece:

Bacterial organisms exhibit a trait that is unique within the living world. As well as inheriting genetic properties from parent to child, bacteria are able to exchange genetic information with their neighbours, via packets of DNA known as 'plasmids'. This enables bacteria to temporarily adopt characteristics which may give them a competitive advantage in a hostile environment. Plasmids can be seen as semi-beneficial parasites which hop from bacterial host to host, giving rise to complex evolutionary patterns.

"Horizontal Transmission" (2011) simulates these dynamics in a 3D space, representing populations of cells both visually and sonically. When sound is detected from the gallery space by the attached microphone, it is transformed into a plasmid and deposited in the virtual space. This can then be assimilated by the bacterial population, who then mimic these sounds in their inter-cellular communications. The bacterial world can be explored using a 3D control interface, with which an observer can navigate through the population, observing cellular dynamics and communication patterns.

There are subsequently a number of informal salons featuring the artists and scientists involved. Find out more on the A Theory of Everything blog.

From next week till mid July, I'll be showing some new work as part of M∴M∴M∴, over at Hackney's Apiary Studios.

Ordering #1 (Sans/Soleil) is a reworking of Chris Marker’s "Sans Soleil" (1983) in which the film’s frames are sorted in order of luminosity and projected as a loop. It cycles from the black frames of its opening to those of maximal brightness, and again in reverse.

More information: M∴M∴M∴

The Goldsmiths Digital Studios (GDS) is a new audiovisual interaction laboratory here at Goldsmiths, University of London. We're celebrating its opening with GDS EXPO 2010, a day of seminars, installations and performances taking place next Wednesday (17 Feb).

As part of the launch, I'll be showing a new AV work in the studio's ambisonic space, hooking into the 3D motion capture and projection system. Above is an advance screen grab; more info, video and code coming soon...

Read a couple of weeks ago but forgotten until now: the IHT reports on a Science article [subscription required] in which Toronto researchers track the migration patterns of birds over thousands of miles, using tiny backpacks that are light enough for songbirds to carry but still accurate enough to track movement remotely within a few miles.

One of their key novel findings is the distance that such birds can travel in one day: up to 370 miles, much larger than previously thought.

One boggles at the potential future uses of such technologies.

Research from Cornell University, and published in this month's Science (requires subscription), indicates that there is purpose behind the mosquito's buzz besides keeping its human neighbours awake at night: male and female mosquitoes induce harmonic convergence within the frequency spectra of their hums as part of their mating practice. Contradicting earlier research which suggests that males have a highly limited hearing range whilst females are entirely deaf, both sexes were shown to modulate their buzzing frequencies to enter into harmonic love-making.

More info, and video, on Wired's Not Rocket Science.

Recently demoed at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a control device that could rival the Wiimote for gestural input: Sixense's TrueMotion, which uses a wireless handset coupled with a (presumably USB) base station to determine motion and position information. The big leap here is the latter: the Wiimote's accelerometer can only give relative motion data, and absolute 3D positioning is nigh on impossible to derive from this without some inaccuracy and drift. Some positional info could be gleaned using the Wiimote's IR LEDs, but this was still less than ideal and had the inherent limitations of a line-of-sight system.

The TrueMotion device functions by locating the handset within a magnetic field, which appears to give snappy and precise location data. It reminds me of the Ascension Flock of Birds sensor, which I briefly played with a couple of years back, albeit without the clunky serial I/O and hefty pricetag: the TrueMotion is estimated at $100 for a base station and handset. There's an interesting interview with one of the Sixense chaps over at Engineering TV.

I'm looking forward to get more info on this as it sounds like a potentially paradigm-changing controller for audio and video. Transmission range? Multiple devices/base stations? Proprietary drivers? We shall see, as it is due to hit the market later this year.

New stuff, and some old:

• erase labs are an ancient gathering ground for experiments and web doodles, defunct until recently when I was encouraged to revive them by the simple starfield CSS sketch. All source code provided.
• In my day job, as web developer at Goldsmiths art college, we've just relaunched the Student and Staff parts of the site, the first phases of a comprehensive restructure/redesign. It's quite an improvement.
• Photos are also now up from the Ad Hoc gig at Cybersonica Çonic Social. Good night in a good little venue.

Accompanying text and images are now available for Subtext, the major project that I've been working on over the past few months. It's the first time that I've been involved in creating real, physical objects for an exhibition - not to mention the first complex electronic project that I've built - and so required a significant number of skills that were formerly alien to me. Thanks to all of the people who assisted in picking up said skills.

The images documenting the process should give an insight into what the installation looks like in action, in the absence of a good-quality video.