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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.

I’ve been hard at work!

Hurricane Irene August 17-28th 2011 from Ben Van Citters on Vimeo.

I have to give a good amount of credit to the work leading up to this Hurricane Video to my good friend and former roommate Alex. He has been interested in the weather for a long time and he asked me if there was some way to make animations of the stills from http://www.goes.noaa.gov/ available and so I tinkered around a little bit and quickly got a program together that periodically visits the site and caches the images. Next, I built a program that takes the stills and converts them into movies. Before too long we hit hurricane season and we’ve been enjoying our bird’s eye view of the clouds.

Now for some music:

Fungal Abyss Visuals from Ben Van Citters on Vimeo.

Fungal Abyss is a Seattle band that recently had a residency at The Comet Tavern. They played several Wednesdays in a row at The Comet and Christian and I were lucky enough to get asked to provide visuals for their performance on the 17th of August. This video shows only my contributions (and in fact just shows the reaction of my program to some of their pre-recorded music playing through speakers). The show was lots of fun. This work is also my first attempt to give some control over the visuals to the operator of the software.

Crypts Visuals from Ben Van Citters on Vimeo.

This video shows some work that I’m doing for the band Crypts, another local group. The visuals shown here are prototype work for a concert coming on October 20th at Showbox SODO. I’m really excited for this concert and I have a lot of big ideas I hope I can use.

I have a few things to say about this little app. While I have had a keen interest in interference patterns and moire patterns of all sorts for a long time there is a story behind the genesis of this particular example. On vacation in Florence, Oregon last weekend I stumbled into a local gallery and saw something similar to what I have created here. It was a kinetic sculpture made of wood that moved via pulleys and gears I assume (I couldn’t tell exactly what made it move the way it did). I thought to myself that I should share this artwork with some friends back home and so I got my camera out but was immediately accosted by one of the staff at the gallery who insisted that this particular artist did not want their work filmed or photographed. As a result, I have no record of what the artist’s name or what the name of the piece was and I must say that I was very jarred by the whole experience.

So here is my humble attempt to recreate in a digital medium the unknown kinetic sculpture. Moving the mouse up and down changes the speed of the motion. Enjoy!

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Each line is an approximate half of a circle and there are two sets of lines, evenly spaced, that move against one another.