Thursday, June 22, 2006
Though imperfect, we managed to conduct a grand event on campus today. Grey clouds rolled in about an hour or so before the show, as I could tell they would this morning, and it started to rain shortly thereafter but nothing at all like yesterday. At about 4:30 or so we started setting up and by 5:30 things were happening and quite a few folks—curiosity seekers, colleagues, students, friends—were hanging out wondering what the commotion was about (indeed it did get very noisy). We put all the gear on tables in chairs in case the sky completely let loose, and it did rain and thunder a bit during the proceedings but just lightly (and only loudly when I mentioned Mahathir in the Terangganu poem, lah!).
Glad to report that no serious tech problems were encountered—everything worked alright, although sorry to say it wasn’t all applied perfectly. Quite a few people commented that the quality of the sound(s) could have been better. To me, everything sounded alright at the time (and on the MiniDisc recording the words and sounds tussle a bit with each order) but given the cavernous indoor/outdoor space, I knew that this could be a problem. In hindsight I’d’ve turned the speakers around to face the area where most of the audience was. Siew Wai was a terrific accompanist, adding just the right amount of accentuation, and though the crowd noticeably thinned as time went on (the Malaysia poems take more than 45 minutes to read through), the gig was a real success in practically every way. The students I have been working with had quite a few comments to share, including expressing some disappointment in that they wanted more activity in the performance, which made me realize that I had spent so much concentrating on the texts, sounds, and images that I hadn’t put enough a lot of focus onto actually performing. I did make some gestures towards performance (wearing different hats and an oversized pencil around my neck, spontaneously picking up and walking around with a durian, and so on), but could have done more with movement, spent some time having images projected onto me, had other voices come in (they suggested having someone sing the Koran at various points), but will have to do that type of thing another occasion. All good food for thought. One thing that may emerge from it is that the students may try their hands at producing a studio version of the works, so that everything “can be controlled” and here’s hoping they follow up on that idea/possibility.
In all, the reading of the poems, in conjunction with the sounds and images went well. I’m proud of all of the work and believe that less than a handful of words are out of place at this point (no problems with the sounds or images). That the words were muddled a bit during the performance I can live with, and even though the presentation wasn’t flawless (had “ups and downs” as Sau Bin put it), it was totally worthwhile, as it has already—as soon as the show was finished—opened up instructive dialog about both digital performance and multimedia art and presentation. There’s no other way to make this happen besides experimenting and putting work out there. It was a nice scene, afterwards, with all of the family and a few friends there—the students opened up the perfectly in-season Malay durians and we all stood around eating them and talking for awhile after the gear was put away.
This was really only part of the day’s significant activity. In part to distract myself from the weather, and in part to be moving forward, I used the earlier part of the day to finish as much of the database interface as I could. I re-worked the opening page, created the basic index (for readers who want to consume the work in a straightforward rather than random way), and a production credits section. If all goes according to plan tomorrow, I’ll have the java program, the .txt files, and will be able to have the beta version of the project ready shortly thereafter. Even if the (inter)active version of the database isn’t immediately ready for the WWW, I plan to post all of files it contains within the next couple of weeks. I’m also anxious to begin showing the manuscript of the poems around a bit too, and am considering putting together a limited edition cd-rom of the database for those interested in such things…I may have just enough time to do that in the few weeks we have left here, but maybe not; we’ll see…
Glad to report that no serious tech problems were encountered—everything worked alright, although sorry to say it wasn’t all applied perfectly. Quite a few people commented that the quality of the sound(s) could have been better. To me, everything sounded alright at the time (and on the MiniDisc recording the words and sounds tussle a bit with each order) but given the cavernous indoor/outdoor space, I knew that this could be a problem. In hindsight I’d’ve turned the speakers around to face the area where most of the audience was. Siew Wai was a terrific accompanist, adding just the right amount of accentuation, and though the crowd noticeably thinned as time went on (the Malaysia poems take more than 45 minutes to read through), the gig was a real success in practically every way. The students I have been working with had quite a few comments to share, including expressing some disappointment in that they wanted more activity in the performance, which made me realize that I had spent so much concentrating on the texts, sounds, and images that I hadn’t put enough a lot of focus onto actually performing. I did make some gestures towards performance (wearing different hats and an oversized pencil around my neck, spontaneously picking up and walking around with a durian, and so on), but could have done more with movement, spent some time having images projected onto me, had other voices come in (they suggested having someone sing the Koran at various points), but will have to do that type of thing another occasion. All good food for thought. One thing that may emerge from it is that the students may try their hands at producing a studio version of the works, so that everything “can be controlled” and here’s hoping they follow up on that idea/possibility.
In all, the reading of the poems, in conjunction with the sounds and images went well. I’m proud of all of the work and believe that less than a handful of words are out of place at this point (no problems with the sounds or images). That the words were muddled a bit during the performance I can live with, and even though the presentation wasn’t flawless (had “ups and downs” as Sau Bin put it), it was totally worthwhile, as it has already—as soon as the show was finished—opened up instructive dialog about both digital performance and multimedia art and presentation. There’s no other way to make this happen besides experimenting and putting work out there. It was a nice scene, afterwards, with all of the family and a few friends there—the students opened up the perfectly in-season Malay durians and we all stood around eating them and talking for awhile after the gear was put away.
This was really only part of the day’s significant activity. In part to distract myself from the weather, and in part to be moving forward, I used the earlier part of the day to finish as much of the database interface as I could. I re-worked the opening page, created the basic index (for readers who want to consume the work in a straightforward rather than random way), and a production credits section. If all goes according to plan tomorrow, I’ll have the java program, the .txt files, and will be able to have the beta version of the project ready shortly thereafter. Even if the (inter)active version of the database isn’t immediately ready for the WWW, I plan to post all of files it contains within the next couple of weeks. I’m also anxious to begin showing the manuscript of the poems around a bit too, and am considering putting together a limited edition cd-rom of the database for those interested in such things…I may have just enough time to do that in the few weeks we have left here, but maybe not; we’ll see…
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 7:58 AM 
