greg jenkins - composer and performer

greg jenkins composes directly with the inherent musicality of sounds, making harmony, melody and rhythm subservient to sonic texture and spatiality. He will often extrapolate sonic minutiae into whole compositions for example by "zooming in" on a tiny fragment of recorded voice then using this as the basis of a droning musical weft.

greg also likes to hit things; things such as suspended arrays of inverted flower pots; things such as beer kegs; and things such as midi percussion controllers which allow him to subversively remap non-percussive sound objects to percussive performance gestures. He frequently makes use of "micro-gestures" - subtle physical manipulations of computer hardware which control software synthesis engines allowing him to perform directly on the software in real time. greg is also known as "cactusman" due to his penchant for using a cactus as an amplified acoustic instrument.

Mars Hill Cafe in Parramatta will be organising and hosting a local music competition that will allow up and coming and established local music acts to perform several acts each in the popular Church Street cafe. They will compete for the chance to record a 3-track EP recording session with 2 tracks from the competition and a third recorded studio style in the performance space. Supported by a grant recently awarded to Mars Hill Cafe by the Parramatta City Council, the 10 best acts from the competition will be recorded and released on a compilation album later in the year.

Local Musicians (from any suburbs covered by Parramatta Council) are encouraged to apply. Styles included will be: Singer/Songwriters, Folk, Acoustic Rock, Jazz, Blues, Rock, Acoustic and Country. Applications for the competition will be taken throughout August and single-song auditions will be held on the 25th of August. Each artist chosen for the competition will perform 3 songs each for the final competition on the 23rd of September. Mars Hill Cafe is a popular Parramatta music and arts venue, located at 331 Church Street. Further information about the competition and details on how to apply can be found on the website www.marshillcafe.com.au

Watch the video

part of the video, audio performance by Somaya Langley who uses gestural movements combined with accelerometer sensors attached to her outfit, and David Wolf who provided the visual feast to accompany the soundscapes. part of Electrofringe 2006 festival in Newcastle, Australia, on sunday 01/10/2006.

http://www.thisisnotart.org/

http://www.thisisnotart.org/Members/ben/david-wolf-and-somaya-langley-tba/

TBA explores sonic city spaces through a gestural interface. In the current sociological climate, the city can be an alienating yet sonically rich space. Individuals potentially relate more closely to the city, the buildings and architecture than they do to the other inhabitants. However, the city is an ever-changing environment demolishing buildings, resurrecting monuments simultaneous moments of destruction and resurrection. Using footage of Newcastle as well as abstract and generative 3D systems, elements are combined and manipulated in real time using custom built applications developed with Quartz Composer and Max/MSP.

click on the image to goto the video player page

I've been spending the Christmas break learning more about interactive quicktime, max/msp and isadora for creating music and video and publishing them on the net. Below is the first piece I've created. I went a bit overboard on the effects in Isadora but it's an original piece and I learnt from it so I'm happy with it overall from a learning experience point of view.

How I created it:
- first I took videos with my dvd camera
- then I used DVDx to convert the .vob files to mpeg2 files which quicktime could open. when I installed winamp a couple of weeks ago, I noticed it can display video now also, though strangely, sometimes the winamp videos were upside down whilst they played correctly orientated in quicktime. (perhaps I used strange setting whilst encoding?)
- then I imported the video into isadora, and patched up a storm whilst trying out some of the effects
- I can only save 5sec clips from isadora as I'm using the trial version whilst I work out if I'll use it regularly in future. I'm hoping to learn how to do similar tasks in jitter (max component) as I'll have more control of what I'm doing, even though it's very quick and easy to get things done in isadora without having to know the code. still yet to decide on this.
- once I had the processed video clips, I opened them in quicktime again and joined them together - hence the rough edits
- then I made a couple of text tracks in quicktime and added these in. I tried out the eZediaQTI app whilst learning about the text tracks but decided on doing them manually in quicktime and editing the controls with notepad.
- next, I opened the gps data music patch I made in max/msp and ran it with the soundwalk recordings I made the other week whilst at Mission Beach in Auckland. unfortunately, the mic was picking up a lot of noise from the wind blowing past the mic pickup so there's a lot of distortion. I filtered some of this out in audacity and flattened the audio into one track.
- then I added the audio track to the video with text quicktime movie
- then uploaded the finished piece to archive.org using ourmedia and viewed source on the movie's ourmedia page & copied the quicktime player code here

well, I'm sure there's a quicker way of doing it! which requires less processing and time, but this was an exercise in creating an original piece from start to finish. as you can tell, I'm not a designer or very good programmer either, but I'm happy to finish number one. here's hoping the subsequent efforts will improve and be done more efficiently. I could have used the original unprocessed videos but they seemed a little plain. need to find the right balance I guess..

here's a screen shot of the isadora patch:

I went to 2005 electrofringe a few weeks ago in Newcastle, Australia. I haven't finished going over my notes or posting some of the links to the artist's projects, but one of the workshops I went to was on Quartz Composer hosted by dpwolf. The software runs on a MAC, which unfortunately I don't have. :( perhaps if we get a project bonus this year I might be able to save up for one so I can try the software (and also max / msp }. anyway, I also came across the name dpwolf on the videoblogging mail list and low and behold it's the same person. he seems to do some work with Adrian Miles, who does some great projects with video and interactive quicktime and media in general. small world. I'd love to do the course Adrian teaches but can't afford to give up work to do it fulltime. due to excessive work commitments, I had to drop the Internet Communication course I was doing at CQU. now that I've finally upgraded my (this) site and moving most of my projects online (so as not to be so dependant on my laptop in case of travelling without it), I'd like to experiment more with blogging, videoblogging, podcasting and digital art and music projects (in addition to listing other people's projects on the site), hence, why the blog posts here have now become more personal. I've been reading about and been across these media for a while but haven't had much time to play myself, so that's the goal for the next year (& hopefully continuing onwards).