First port of call was Stanford University, where I gave another talk in the Intermedia Lab at CCRMA. Always a great place to visit, always interesting people to talk to. Thanks to Jaroslaw Kapuscinsci for inviting me!

Next, two weeks in Los Angeles for further research on Oskar Fischinger for my AHRC fellowship grant. I spent most of my time at the Center for Visual Music in their archive room, looking through scores and other process material. Also a lovely day down at the Fischinger house in Long Beach with Barbara Fischinger. I’m nearly done with this now – I’m excited by what I’ve discovered, and getting into the writing now.

Finally, I went to the SXSW festival to present as part of the Beyond Dance Dance Revolution panel, with Laura Kriefman and Matthew Bickerton who I’m working with on the Guerrilla Dance Project, Dave Glowacki and Phill Tew (Danceroom Spectroscopy) and Victoria Tillotson (Pervasive Media Studio, Watershed). I was only there for a couple of days, but it’s an AMAZING festival, and our panel went down really well.  Need to try and go again next year!

It was a great residency – thanks so much to b>d>s, the National Theatre and everyone else involved. Especially Nick, Sasha and Amina (the dancers we worked with), and as always Phill for his amazing programming skills. We made a lot of progress, getting all four installations working together for the first time (albeit all in one place for the time being). Next stop, Mons in March.

Much more detail can be found on the project blog.

Mostly I’ve been planning next year though, which is going to be really busy! I’ll be going to the US for two more visits to the Center for Visual Music as part of my ongoing research into Oskar Fischinger’s creative process; also presenting my work at Stanford University and the SXSW festival. I’ll be working on the Danceroom Spectroscopy and Guerrilla Dance projects. But mostly I’ll be working on my MADE project me and my shadow, starting at the National Theatre in January. More on that very soon.. (image: Katrin Bethge)

It’s great to be in Istanbul – the weather’s beautiful, the university campus is leafy and calm, just waking up after the summer slumber; and this is the view from my hotel. Also, ISEA is here, starting tonight.  I’ll be too busy to go to all of it, but hope to catch some!

I’ve started a blog for me and my shadow, which will document the project in quite some detail.  I’ve already put quite a lot of stuff on there; you can check it out here.

This informal biennial event explores multimedia work which foregrounds the relationship between sound and image – in areas such as visual music, abstract cinema, experimental animation, audiovisual performance and installation work.

This year will see a partial focus on direct sound – the generation of sound and music from visual material (by various techniques including images drawn or photographed on an optical film soundtrack).

We already have a few key speakers in place, and are open for submissions. For more details see the Seeing Sound site.

There are a few clips online now relating to my recent work on the MADE commission and the Danceroom Spectroscopy project.

For the MADE commission, I’ve made a recording of the presentation I gave in Enghiens-les-Bains to launch the project in June.  It’s not particularly slick, but it serves as an introduction of sorts to the project prior to it actually starting in September.  You can see it here.

There are a couple of clips of the Danceroom Spectroscopy workshops at the Arnolfini (also in June – I had a busy month..).  The first is some material I filmed with my nice new Canon 60D DSLR on the first weekend (music by Lee Malcolm) – the second – from the second weekend – was edited by Becca Rose.  I did the sound for this one as Lee was busy playing Glastonbury.

image: David Glowacki

My work with the Kinect (see post below) is branching out in various directions – I’ll be posting about some more exciting developments very soon.

I’m co-directing some workshops for dancer/ choreographers at the Arnolfini in Brisol, looking at the implications of the Kinect for physical performance.  I’ll be working with David Glowacki, who works in Computational Chemistry at the University of Bristol, and using his remarkable Dance Spectroscopy system.  Also on the team will be musician Lee J. Malcolm.  It promises to be a great art/science collaboration.

There’s nothing on the Arnolfini site yet, but I believe there will be very soon – will link as soon as I can.  The workshops will run in two groups over two weekends: Sat 18 – Sun 19 June and Sat 25 – Sun 26 June, all 12-4pm.  The cost will be £15 per weekend session, and numbers strictly limited. More details anon..

I also managed to squeeze in a little desert road trip, which was great!