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I’ve been busy playing with some new toys including Supercollider, Unity, Adobe Premiere and ProcessingJS, all of which makes me feel more busy than I heretofore have realized! But it’s important that I give some blog-space to my ‘Transmissions’ show which is going up again in its entirety this Thursday, December 1st at the Design Commission Gallery. The show includes collaborations with Christian Petersen and Amber Cortes.

Come on out! Here’s the flickr from the first show. It’s going to be a lot of fun! Bring the whole family!

I am happy to announce that on November 3rd I will be presenting several works of mine at Design Commission’s gallery Space in the Tashiro Kaplan Building for the Pioneer Square Artwalk.

“Ben Van Citters is presenting his show titled ‘Transmissions’ in the Design Commssion Gallery Space for the November First Thursday Artwalk in Pioneer Square. ‘Transmissions’ consists of several acoustic and visually interactive installations produced in the last six months with Processing, a new media programming language.”

Design Commission is located at:

310 South Washington Street
Seattle, Washington 98104
View Map

http://designcommission.com/

I hope you can make it and I look forward to seeing you there!

This was a project dreamed up and created by Christian Petersen and myself that was shown in Ghost Gallery in Capitol Hill Seattle for most of July 2011. It was part of the Action! Part 2 show.

Although at first the program running the animation started simple, it ended up being fairly complex. The animation shown is reactive to sound and especially reactive to the sound of the triangle shown in the video. We wanted this effect to keep a strong tie between the triangle and the interactive program and also to reduce the effect that background noise might have.
In order to achieve this I created what I’m calling a ‘frequency mask’ although it probably has a more common name amongst audio engineers. The sound produced by hitting the triangle is consistent, meaning that although the volume changes over time the frequencies in the sound stay the same for the most part, so I created a software tool to track the frequencies generated over time so that I might be able to pay attention certain parts of the frequency spectrum and not others.

We went through at least four different combinations of microphones and computers trying to get a good match. Good grief! Well worth the effort, if I don’t say so myself.