Month: April 2018

Rob Clouth is an electronic musician, sound designer, and new media artist based in Barcelona. Clouth makes a mix between techno music and IDM (intelligent dance music).

He uses various forms of programming to create his music. He uses sound painting, which means he sculpts sounds by painting their spectrums using a digitizer. I think this is cool, because it’s almost like reverse sound-making, because usually a sound is represented by a sound spectrum, rather than the spectrum being created first.

Clouth also carries around different microphones, just in case he hears a sound he wants to use in his music. He uses deep-ear binaural mics, waterproofed contact mics (I guess for recording sounds underwater), and a coil mic that picks up electromagnetic fields of electronic devices. I think it’s cool how he carries microphones around, similar to how a photographer carries a camera and lenses.

The video above is a piece form Clouth called ‘Islands of Glass’. I personally love how the visuals interact with what is going on in his music. I’m not sure how the visuals were made for this video, but Clouth has recently created another piece called ‘Transition’, which is shown in the video below. In this piece, Couth generates the audio with an algorithm that he wrote to scan through his music collection in date-order. The algorithm takes little slices of audio from each track and stitches them together to form one continuous mix. I like this piece, because the visuals were inspired by the growth rings on trees. Clouth loves how trees encode their own history with these rings, as well as the history of its surroundings.

I love how Rob Clouth combines audio and visuals so well. All of his videos are mesmerizing, and the audio is very unique. You can check out some of his other pieces on his website:

http://www.robclouth.com/#home

 

 

 

Daniel Rozin is an Israeli-American artist based in New York. He studied industrial design at the Bezalei Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, before entering the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU 10 years later. In this program, Rozin learned how to be creative with technology by means of programming and electronics. From technology, Rozin found the creativity to be an artist and he now works in the field of interactive digital art.

Rozin’s work is primarily composed of installations and sculptures that respond to the presence of a viewer. He uses various mediums to create art, from pure software to electronics to static and kinetic sculpture. Oftentimes, the viewer becomes the contents of the piece, as Rozin explained in an interview with Leaders in Software and Art, “The artist creates the premise and the parameters of interaction, the artist’s responsibility is to imagine almost all possible interactions and see that those would yield an acceptable result. It is important for the interactive artist to leave a big chunk of the piece open to interactivity so that the viewer can really change the piece and feel ownership over it.”

The piece above is from Rozin’s “Mechanical Mirrors” series. In this particular piece, he explores the intersection of soft materials and mechanics, but the series uses various materials to act as the mirrors. According to Co.Design, Rozin creates these mirrors by using custom-built software written in C++ that translates data from a camera into simplified pixels, which play across the face of his sculptures in near real time. Interestingly, none of the technology he uses in this series is in the viewer’s line of sight.

I especially like this series, because I think it playfully accomplishes Rozin’s mission of closing the gap between technology and humans, as he said in an interview, “Nowadays we are exposed to a lot of technological wizardry and don’t think twice about it, in fact we have given up on trying to understand it…I try to make technological devices that are simple to understand and rely on our intuition rather than defy it.”

In other works, Rozin continues to explore mirror concepts, since he stated in numerous interviews that his main interest in his art is to explore the way we view the world and create images in our mind; mirrors seem to exemplify this concept.

His website

His Vimeo