Garth

Garth Paine
Garth is particularly fascinated with sound as an experiential medium, both in musical performance and as an exhibitable object. This passion has led to several interactive responsive environments where the inhabitant generates the sonic landscape through their presence and behaviour. Garth Paine is internationally regarded as an innovator in the field of interactivity in electronic music and media arts ( some papers here ). He gained his PhD in interactive immersive environments from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia in 2003, and completed a Graduate Diploma in software engineering in the following year at Swinburne University. All a long way from his Bachelor of classical Flute performance from the conservatorium of Tasmania.

=== Map 2- An interactive sound environment installation ===

Map2 was commissioned by the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung (State Institute for Music Research) (SIM), Berlin as part of the Festival of Culture (KUNSTFEST) over the New Year period of the millennium (30.12.99 - 02.01.00).

The work using the interaction between human movement and the creation of music. People can use the impact to effecting the environment and the casual loops that exist between behaviour and quality of environment. Personal aesthetic leads to decisions about preferential behaviour patterns and in term preferential environment - one conditions the other. A realtime sound environment is used realtime music synthesis and video sensing techniques to create the work.

Gestation


". . .the art work . . . is no longer a static object or a pre-defined multiple choice interaction but has become a process-like living system." Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau Art as a Living System 1998

Interactivity has become a major consideration in the development of a contemporary art practice that engages with the proliferation of computer based technologies. Computer based technologies have created a revolution in the fields of animation and image generation as well as sound art and music composition. The computer has opened up a whole new genre where primary composition material can be drawn from any source, and once digitised, becomes a fluid and viscous medium. Garth Paine’s interest lies in placing the exploration of the potential of these technologies within an organic and human framework. His installation work has focused on creating immersive environments that respond to the movement and behaviour patterns detected within them. The body becomes the controller. The organic process of human exploration, cognition and response, becomes the central influence in defining the output of the interactive process.Gestation represents a crucial development in the responsive environment works of Garth Paine. Following on from Moments of a Quiet Mind (Linden Gallery), Ghost in the Machine (Linden Gallery), MAP1 (Next Wave Festival, Span Gallery), MAP2 (SIM Berlin). Gestation has been in development since 1999, and was a major focus of Garth Paine’s work during his  Australia council for the Arts, New Media Arts Fellowship at RMIT in 2000. Gestation will be an interactive responsive environment due for exhibition at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 10-21 December. It will occupy two integrated galleries. One gallery will contain a surround sound field generated in real time using video sensing equipment (visible to visitors only as a small security video camera in the middle of the roof) that maps the behaviour and movement patterns of the visitors to the exhibition on to real-time audio algorithms providing a tight gestural relationship with their movement and behaviour patterns. No pre-recorded material will be used in the generation of the sounds.In the second gallery, a large projected image (see enclosed working image) will represent the development of new human life in response to the activity in the first gallery. Imagery will represent a sea of life forming cells. An added layer to the underlying sea will be the development of new foetuses. Each foetus will start to grow at the point at which the greatest activity is sensed in the first gallery.Garth Paine has been developing this project for a number of years, and more intensely over the last two years. Funding is being sought to facilitate an intensely focused development period for the month prior to the RMIT Gallery exhibition in December 2001. A considerable amount of work has already been done in the areas of the sound synthesis algorithms and video sensing software development. The work has been in development on a part time basis in between other projects. The project will be lifted to a much more complete and sophisticated level with funding assistance providing a secured period of focus in the month prior to exhibition.

REEDS
REEDS Is the first exhibited at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Melbourne,as part of the Melbourne International Festival

A weed, so easily crushed underfoot, can push its way up through a tarmac path, creating a sizeable fracture in what appears to us to be an impervious surface. One might postulate that if the weed could see the bigger picture, it might have decided to grow two feet to the left in the flowerbed or the grass. There is clearly an analogy here to our own birth, in which we appear to have little or no say (depending on one's religious beliefs). {C} It is exactly this chaotic behaviour of the natural world that informs the Reeds project. Whilst human kind tries to harness or tame the chaotic forces of nature, or to explain it in terms of quantum theory and fractals, humanity cannot perceive a truly chaotic state. The forces of nature that dictate the growth of plant life fall into this category. It is not possible for us to predict with certainty the meteorological conditions from day to day, let alone year to year, and certainly not on the micro scale of the weed in the footpath. It is precisely these chaotic variations that are used in Reeds to conduct the sound score - to control and dictate the output of the real time synthesis process. {C} The software design process predetermines the general structure and aesthetic of the sound, but the momentary output is unique. It is unlikely that the combination of wind speed, wind direction, solar radiation, and temperature that occur in this instance will be precisely replicated in any other moment. This chaotic variation is the very source of diversity, which I propose is the structure that creates such beauty in nature. {C} Reeds uses the relatively static external facade of the sculptural form as a way of representing the paradox observed in organic plant life, where the apparently static external face of the plant contrasts the hidden, dynamic activity of photosynthesis and nutrient gathering that keeps the plant alive, and drives it's growth. The reed pod sculptures, appearing as lifelike presence's on the Ornamental lake at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, support two remote weather stations, gathering wind speed, wind direction, temperature, and solar radiation data. The meteorological conditions, vital to the plants' life processes, are transmitted back to a land-base where the data is transformed into eight channels of musical sounds that is broadcast back out to the reed pods. These sounds give a voice to the secret inner life processes of the plant. The viscous and fluid aesthetic of the sound material is an attempt to capture something of both the dynamism of the processes that maintain life and the ever-changing, silken thread that is the presence of life, the life force itself. The fact that the sound material is generated on the basis of meteorological conditions is a way of drawing, as tightly as possible, the bond between the processes of nature and the processors of the Reeds installation. The sound material cannot then be avoided, being the voice of the processes of nature. Sound and music is in many ways a unique media, for it is not an external artefact. Sound literally penetrates the body. It is also impossible to concretely tie composed sound or music to a representation of anything beyond a communication of emotional states and journeys. As an artist my interest lies in exploring ways of contextualising digital art processes within the natural organic environment. I have little interest in the purely synthetic, that is the synthesis of sound or images from purely academic or theoretical viewpoint; but prefer, as is illustrated in the Reeds project, to take a fundamentally organic source as the basis for the synthesis process. In so doing, I hope that some quality of that organic material will permeate the work, thereby bringing the synthetic output at least a small way towards the organic world, and therefore within the human context.

Notes for the Melbourne International Festival Exhibition by Darren Tofts.