Here are a couple of videos giving a taster of the performance. One is a short explaining the piece and the other is the entire performance.

Please use the link below to download a PDF explaining the performative system that is Methods for misunderstanding the nature of things.

Methods for misunderstanding the nature of things diagram

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In two weeks we have another rehearsal, followed immediately by a scratch performance presented as the closing event for Interact Digital Art’s current exhibition Computer Drawing: DP Henry and Beyond. I’m looking forward to getting together again with my fellow contributors and seeing where we are with this piece, and to hearing the audience’s responses and reactions on 17th December. Get in touch if you’d like to join us.

Khush Nubain

The surface of the Tabla have been rigged with touch points made of copper tape. Every time Rishii touches one of the points whilst he is playing, it sends a signal to the Bare Conductive touchboard. this signal controls the lights which will be seen by the dancer Yuyu Rau and instruct her movement.  The simple act of connecting what Rishii is playing through his Tabla to a computer  has the potential of turning him from a musician to so much more.

As we live through another unfulfilled imagined future day, take a moment to contemplate how you imagine your future to be. Whilst discussing this very matter with Artist and creative technologist Sean Clark, He offered a very interesting insight into how the worlds of Science fiction and real-world constraints of technology and market economics come together.  Sean mentioned that when one looks at the likes of Star Trek or Back to the future, it’s not that we have not achieved a particular technology – it is more to the point that much of the technology has be manifest in a different way.

In may ways the smartphone platform has been used as a technological package to house many of the different things that were envisaged.  Happy BTTFD

The imagined future from an artist perspective is a great paradigm to play with. for me it allows the chance to understand new ways of communicating and enables us to think about history from a multi-outcome perspective. Above all it allows artists to creatively lose themselves in order to find new realities.

Interesting insights on translation from this old Rhizome article titled “Artifacts: A Conversation Between Hito Steyerl and Daniel Rourke”

In particular it is this line that strikes a chord- “One of the biggest misunderstandings about digital information is that it is replicated identically, without loss or transformation. But anyone who works with such information knows that digital practice is constituted – like perhaps any technology – by malfunction. One has to constantly convert information in order to work with it across different platforms and softwares and on the way it is reformatted, translated, compressed or sometimes even blown up, it is enhanced or diminished: it changes. It changes its format or container or outlook or context.

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/mar/28/artifacts/

They talk in the context of glitches but it has relevance beyond.

Looking at ways of creating prints from some of the swarm images created. I got hold of some hand made khadi paper. read it and weep 640gsm. #IsThisEvenPaper????

Been thinking about the text more and more and have developed an alternative text for the performance.

Hello world
#wow
lots of other worlds
I should say
#hello worlds

each distinct
each talking to the other in real time
each with more virtual time that you can scroll through
Oh shit i’ve just #burntMyFood

or was it my fingers when i responded to that dude in the email
who is and isn’t MIchael Green
all in one failed wikileak

do you ever wonder why you are infinitely scrolling through a chronologically illogical timeline
encouraged to hate spielberg for killing a dinosaur
or share a vine of this cat playing the tabla to #thisHashtag

heavy rain from the cloud of meta
You ticked the box and…
Oh you’ve just slipped
and #tumbled
#likeAToddler
faced down into the touch tabla, where skilled fingers attack points to make the beats mean something new

You helped make this
we’re all part of the system
in the algorithm
ye, you’re the bit that makes everything divide by three
keep tweeting and it won’t fade
it’s not open source
just free at the point of use
made of pure freemium
skip ad’s and watch out for the in-app purchases

Follow the wire from the drums and into a box
what inputs
must outputs as something other
#somethingWeirder
same ish data
different code

colours from the box read by eyes glazed with their meaning
High low
loop
loop again and the drums change rhythm
bluetoothed and ready to party on to the final destination

touch the screen
taste the scream
that jolt of excitement when you first enter and see everyone there waving back at you
you’re part of the tribe
connected and visible
or is it…
that jolt of angst when you’re trolled for thinking differently
your one of the vulnerable
disconnect and delete account

Which one are you
the back room bard
poeting on google drive in the vein hope you won’t lose nothing
or the Digital apostate who mourns all things analog
all things that could be understood in linear space

Oh shit i’ve just #lostFeelingInMyLegs
playing GTA all night with my BFF’s one of which is my BBF
I can’t walk now
but, I feel biverse

After two day of working on the touch board (and nearly frying my brain) I’ve just found a very easy way of accessing the touch board from within processing.  Bare conductive created a sketch that turns the touch board into a “HID keyboard” which works like a normal keyboard in that it inputs a limited number of ASCII characters and can be picked up by processing. HMMMMM. the advantage is that one can use all 12 electrodes on the bare conductive board (as opposed to only 8 using GPIO). Still. it was worth learning…..