Technology

Golan Levin likes to talk. His presentation lasted for nearly three hours, covering a historical overview of 'audiovisuality and interactivity' as well as a comprehensive presentation of his work since 1998.

I was thoroughly distracted from what could have been a gruelling experience by the dynamism and sensuality of the ideas and the work presented. << from Audio Visual Environment Suites

This work, done at MIT and Carnegie Mellon Universities in the USA, falls somewhere between software development, research into human interaction and art. He identifies his main focus as developing new interface metaphors where he explores "dynamic, audiovisual substance, gesturally created and manipulated".

Levin reminds us of the recent merging of Adobe and Macromedia and tells us of the importance for him of programming his own software to generate his interfaces. "If you use the same software as everyone else you find yourself dealing with the affordances of these softwares" and the danger of this is that your work starts to look much the same as the same as others using the software.

This may read a bit like a small child's reflections after having been to the fair or circus. I can tell you about lots of bright colours and new sounds / noises and nice people offering me things but there may not be much more to it...

Cybersonica 05 was made up of a number of quite distinct elements. There was the first two days at The Dana Centre and then another existence as The Art at Encompass at The Old Truman Brewery. There were symposia, performances, workshops, exhibits and things without names running throughout.

On the first day I caught parts of a session about Interactive Audiovisual Experiments. I chatted to Chris O'Shea afterwards because I found the ideas behind his work challenged things that bother me about lots of 'interactive' work that I think has a very narrow idea of what interaction involves. Particularly he talked about how important open source principles / ideas are to him.