Developed by New York-based media artist Aaron Sherwood, 'firewall' stems from a performance piece being developed as
purring tiger (with kiori kawai) titled 'mizalu', which will premiere in june 2013. During one scene in the performance dancers
press into the spandex with the audience facing the opposite side. 'mizalu' is about death and experience of reality,
so this membrane represents a plane that you can experience but never get through. as hard as you try to understand what’s
in between life and death, you can never fully know.
purring tiger (with kiori kawai) titled 'mizalu', which will premiere in june 2013. During one scene in the performance dancers
press into the spandex with the audience facing the opposite side. 'mizalu' is about death and experience of reality,
so this membrane represents a plane that you can experience but never get through. as hard as you try to understand what’s
in between life and death, you can never fully know.
Made using processing, max/MSP, arduino and a kinect, the piece measures the average depth of the spandex from the frame
it's mounted on. If the material is not being pressed against, nothing happens. when someone presses the panel, visuals react
around where the person applies pressure, and the music is triggered. an algorithm created with max allows the music to speed up and slow down and get louder and softer, based on the depth. This provides a very expressive musical playing experience, even for people who have never played music before. A switch is built into the frame which toggles between two modes with the second mode a little more aggressive than the first.
http://aaron-sherwood.com/
These are excerpts from Purring Tiger’s very first performance recorded in the GCC Sloan Theater on February 25, 2011 . Kiori’s movements are tracked via webcam and generate sound based on how and where she dances. Sherwood improvises along with her movement generated music using found sound percussion, homemade shakuhachi flute, acoustic guitar, toy glockenspiel, Moog, and voice - all going through Pauline Oliveros' Expanded Instrument System. The images from the webcam were projected, manipulated, and mixed with other footage.All of the programming was done with Max.