Wesley Smith (US)

"Descent" performance

Descent is a parametric, gestural exploration of the continuum between rhythm and pitch. Gestures made on a 2D canvas map in to patterns of frequency and duration with correlative visual representations of size and color. As gestures are built up over time, they can be looped, expanded, contracted and shaped by moving them through the canvas.

Descent is composed using the LuaAV audiovisual scripting environment.

"LuaAV" talk outline

LuaAV is an application for the production, research and deployment of computational media art works. It is software for exploring ideas - designed to be modded - where every aspect is open to interpretation. LuaAV extends the Lua scripting language by adding sound and graphics modules for real-time audiovisual processing. Lua provides a stable and robust platform for the experimentation and production of everything from long-term installations to large-scale multimedia systems to live coding and other performance sensitive computing contexts.
LuaAV is an open-ended, continually evolving (even during run-time) piece of software. Our recent work with LuaAV focuses on enabling creative computational systems without sacrificing performance. Creative systems require a high degree of reconfigurability and dynamic evaluation, permitting a kind of creative emergence where the software evolves at hand of the user while it is running. Such systems typically have an attendant loss of efficiency due to their dynamic nature. In LuaAV, we have employed the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) to give us the flexibility we desire as well as the efficiency we require for real-time audiovisual computation.

LuaAV has enabled in a number of projects over the past 2 years throughout Asia, Europe, and the US. Currently deployed projects include:
- The Common Data Processing and Display Unit (CDPDU): http://arcticperspective.org/news/cdpdu-icc-tokyo-and-futur-en-seine
- Artificial Nature: http://artificialnature.mat.ucsb.edu/

Biography

Wesley Smith is a PhD candidate at UC Santa Barbara's Media Arts and Technology Program where he is researching systems of spatial computation through spatial algebras and computational models of molecular biology. Wesley is a co-developer of the LuaAV real-time audiovisual composition environment, which he uses to produce his performances and installations.

transLAB http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~marcos/trans_site

http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~whsmith
transLAB: http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~marcos/trans_site