Benjamin Van Citters

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
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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.

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.