Week 1 Forum - The Synergy Project

This week we attended "The Synergy Project" which was a presentation about collaboration between people of different skills in technological art (as far as I could tell anyway). There were several speakers who each talked about their own projects.

I particularly enjoyed Matthew Gardiner, creator of mechanical origami flowers amongst other things. One of his projects had a musical aspect to it in that the electronic flowers were accompanied by a percussionist who played a musical score that was dynamically generated depending on various factors. I thought his interest in making art that is controlled by media such as news feeds or weather reports was very cool. I prefer the idea of things that react in some way to the world instead of depending on pure chance.

Ross Bencina, creator of audio mulch (live electronic performance software) was also great though I would have much rather watched him use audiomulch than talk about it. He talked about collaboration in electronic music and experimental electronic instruments and I'm excited that this is becoming more possible as I haven't read very much about electronic musicians working together before. I guess this is one aspect of the shift from programming towards realtime performance.

References: Matthew Gardiner and Ross Bencina. Presentations at The Synergy Project, presented on 7/3/08 at the Sir Hans Heyson Building, University of South Australia

Edited on 4/4/08 to conform to word limit policy