Installation | peter traub

WoodEar receives funding from Turbulence.org and the NEA

I’m excited to announce that my proposal for a new piece called ‘WoodEar’, has received a generous grant from Turbulence.org with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. Turbulence.org previously funded my 2007 web-based piece, ItSpace.

WoodEar will use data from sensors and microphones embedded in a living tree to drive a physical and online sound installation, and will explore the musical and network mappings that can be created when a tree is considered as a resonant object.

In WoodEar I am not just interested in resonances within the trunk, but in a number of constantly-changing environmental factors that impact the tree’s life and are filtered through its body: light, external sound, wind, and temperature. In addition to a local site-specific installation, sound elements from the tree will be streamed to a website, allowing visitors to manipulate and mix the different musical streams via a browser-based interface. WoodEar will be completed in mid to late 2012.

Pixilerations 2011, Providence, RI

Following a successful showing at SIGGRAPH 2011 in August, the newly rebuilt ItSpace went for a 10-day showing at the Pixilerations [v.8] New Media Fringe Festival from Sept. 22nd to Oct. 2nd in Providence, RI. It is a annual joint festival between the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Brown University. ItSpace was displayed in the lobby of the recently built Granoff Center for the Creative Arts on Brown’s campus.

SIGGRAPH 2011, Vancouver, BC

The second version of my installation, ItSpace, premiered at the SIGGRAPH 2011 Conference held at the Vancouver Convention Center in early August. I had spent the previous several months rebuilding the physical components of the piece from scratch. The original version was completed on a short deadline and used photos glued to paper-covered pieces of foam board. The new version was designed to handle more crowd traffic, as several thousand attendees were expected to file through the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery. The new photo boards were constructed from painted wood with the photos protected from fingerprints and other damage beneath thin panes of laser-cut plexiglass. The convention, as well as its location, was phenomenal, and I saw/heard/played with a number of fantastic art pieces and experimental technologies.

In addition to ItSpace’s gallery presence, it received a two-page spread in a special issue of Leonardo Magazine. You can also hear the recorded descriptions of ItSpace read in five different languages through the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Podcast.

February (2011), sound for an installation by Jennifer Lauren Smith

Earlier this year I had the great fortune to work with Jennifer Lauren Smith, a grad student in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Sculpture + Extended Media MFA program. February is a 10-minute film centered around the inflation and flight of a hot air balloon over the Central Virginia countryside. I was responsible for recording, creating, and synchronizing the sound world of the film (and I rode a hot air balloon in the process).

The finished piece premiered on May 6, 2011 projected on a large screen in the Anderson Gallery Carriage House on the VCU campus. It was installed again in June in the Our Cult’s Classic exhibition at The Boiler in Brooklyn.

ItSpace at SIGGRAPH 2011

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The physical version of ItSpace, my sound installation from 2007 – 2008 that was featured on NPR, has been accepted to the art gallery at SIGGRAPH 2011 in Vancouver, BC. SIGGRAPH is the major annual international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques. This year’s theme, “Tracing Home”, is a great fit with the concepts behind ItSpace. I will be going to SIGGRAPH in early August to help install the piece at the Vancouver Convention Centre where it will be exhibited from August 9 – 11.

My Remote Lecture to Wits

On October 27th I gave a remote lecture to students in the Digital Arts program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. My parents both graduated from Wits and so I had a certain coming-full-circle feeling in giving the lecture there. We used a combination of Skype and native Mac screen sharing to do the talk. I remotely controlled the desktop of the Mac there to run Powerpoint and a Max/MSP example. The Youtube video here is the first of five in a playlist. Many thanks to artist and Wits faculty, Tegan Bristow, for arranging the lecture. From the ‘official’ description of the talk: “In this remote lecture Peter will talk about several of his recent pieces that focus on using physical, virtual, and hybrid spaces as compositional tools. The pieces span several mediums, from online installation to dance performance to site-specific physical installation. He will also discuss and demonstrate the tools, both software and hardware, that he used to create the works.”

Curve

Curve is an installation for four speakers and a long curved wall. It was also the final work of my five-piece dissertation series exploring physical, virtual, and hybrid spaces as compositional tools. The balcony walkway at the rear of UVA’s Old Cabell Hall is bounded by a curved wall creating an intense, prolonged, and stunning echo that varies dramatically as one moves along the space. Curve played with this pronounced artifact along the wall’s 150 foot length. Using four speakers placed along the wall, the piece created an enveloping sound environment that varied as listeners walk from one end of the balcony to the other. In combining the unique sonic properties of the space with precisely tuned pitches, timbres, and rhythms, the installation made audible both the dramatic ricocheting echo and the effect of sound taking 135 milliseconds to travel from one end to the other–a perceptible and musically useful delay. The installation’s swells, drones, pops, pitches, and silences transformed the less-visited rear of the hall into a large immersive instrument.

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listen to a short excerpt of Curve, taken while walking along the balcony.

Curve premiered at the Digitalis 2010 Concert on May 4th. I hope to run it again in the future, as it could be fairly easily tuned to work along other long, curved, reverberant walls.

Installing at the Center for the Study of the End of Things

In February of 2010, two local artists, Ashley Williams and Wes Milholen, organized an art show, The Center for the Study of the End of Things in a soon-to-be demolished former furniture store in Charlottesville, VA. The participants ranged from UVa students to established local artists. Sculptures, paintings, and installations were displayed in a variety of spaces. I was able to take over a small former office space near the center of the building that overlooked the showroom floor. I installed four speakers and a single microphone, put in red lights, and a single bright white spotlight recessed into a portal in the ceiling. The installation, which I titled Sound Study at the Center of the End of Things worked in five-minute cycles. It first recorded audio in the room for thirty seconds, then progressed through a five minute composition based on spectral manipulation of the audio. It was played loudly, and could build to a significant intensity.

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I also performed a half-hour live set with fellow grad student, Erik Deluca (see slide show for photos).

Solera reviewed in C-Ville

Photo courtesy of Dan Addison / UVA Public Affairs

Brendan Fitgerald, a writer for Charlottesville’s weekly Arts/News/Events magazine, wrote a review of Solera for their Nov. 3 – 9 issue. You can read it online at their website:
C-Ville: Feedback Column – Peter Traub’s sound sculpture is something to shout about.

Solera is now down. It ran very well (minus a few bugs that have since been worked out). I’m now on to other projects using the same gear, but am planning to install Solera again in the not-too-distant future, and hopefully in a very public space. I will likely make some changes for the next install based on what I learned from this one – primarily in how Solera encourages participation from the public.

Solera featured in UVA Today

Solera is now up and has been featured UVA Today, the University of Virginia’s main news outlet. Public affairs reporter Jane Ford did a story on the piece as well as my other dissertation works. Read it here.

I had a few problems starting the piece due to some software issues, but hopefully it will run smoothly from here on out. It looks nice hanging in the lobby, as the speakers and suspension system blend in to Ruffin Hall’s open industrial ceiling quite naturally.