Projects
Mixing Realities: Developing digital environments for performance and community settings
Mixing Realities: Developing digital environments for performance and community settings
This project explores the generation of visuals and audio from live sound and physical movement. Building on existing proofs-of-concept, I will develop a series of tools for creating mixed-reality environments for musicians, performers, and community participants.
This project will explore the generation of live visuals and music from sound and physical movement, using widely available and accessible technology: simple webcams and microphones.
I’ve developed some basic tech demos during recent residencies at XR Stories (York) and Labo Bosa (Sardinia) which explore these ideas. These use a very basic visual programming environment, however, which I’ve quickly reached the limits of.
Explore
£5,000
Aims of the project
This project will level up this practice by moving the system to Unity, a modern graphics environment, and developing much more sophisticated visuals.
This will be used to develop interactive mixed-reality environments within which musicians, performers and the public can exist and explore. The goal of this project is to create usable tools for real-world performances, and to consult with stakeholders in education and community music contexts to explore their application and development in those wider contexts.
Meet the artist
Desmond Clarke
Lead Artist
he/him
Desmond Clarke (b. 1989) is an artist working with ideas of automation, generation and iteration. His work spans a wide range of mediums and styles, from data-driven installations to algorithmic drawings, but its ultimate goal is always to use art to explore the novel structures, relationships and spaces available to us as 21st century humans, and to better understand what it means to live in a world defined by data. What does it mean for art when a thousand realisations of a brief can be generated at the touch of a button? What can exploring the mathematical structures underpinning our world tell us about ourselves?
Since completing a PhD in algorithmic composition at the University of York in 2016 he has worked as a freelance artist, musician and educator. He currently teaches on the music BA courses at the Open College of the Arts and at the University of York.
Recent projects include a series of pieces using video scores to explore the boundaries and overlaps between notated and improvised music, and a growing body of work using technology to develop interactive performance environments.
