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Contents © 2008 Golan Levin and Collaborators
Golan Levin and Collaborators
Projects
Sort by : Author | Date | Name | Type
- Solo
- 07 2008. Double-Taker (Snout)
- 05 2008. Poster design for Maeda lecture
- 01 2008. Solo exhibition at bitforms gallery
- 12 2007. New Year Cards
- 11 2007. Opto-Isolator
- 11 2007. Eyecode
- 11 2007. Interstitial Fragment Processor
- 05 2007. Ghost Pole Propagator
- 09 2005. Scrapple (Installation)
- 01 2004. Civic Exchange Prototype
- 09 2002. Axis
- 03 2002. Stria
- 10 2001. Dendron
- 02 2001. The Role of Relative Velocity
- 01 2001. Obzok
- 08 2000. Segmentation and Symptom
- 03 2000. Audiovisual Environment Suite
- 01 2000. Yellowtail
- 09 1999. Banded Clock
- 02 1999. Floccular Portraits
- 01 1999. Floccus
- 12 1998. Stripe
- 09 1998. Meshy
- 04 1998. Directrix
- 01 1997. Blebs
- Tmema (Golan Levin & Zachary Lieberman)
- 11 2007. Reface [Portrait Sequencer]
- 08 2006. Footfalls
- 08 2004. Motion Traces [A1 Corridor]
- 05 2004. The Manual Input Workstation
- 05 2004. The Manual Input Sessions
- 02 2004. Interactive Bar Tables
- 12 2003. Messa di Voce (Installation)
- 09 2003. Messa di Voce (Performance)
- 07 2003. Amore Pacific Display
- 09 2002. Hidden Worlds of Noise and Voice
- 09 2002. Re:MARK
- Other Collaborations
- 10 2007. IEEE InfoVis 2007 Art Exhibition
- 04 2006. Signal Operators
- 02 2006. The Dumpster
- 09 2005. Ursonography
- 09 2005. Scrapple (Performance)
- 03 2004. Finger Spies
- 05 2002. JJ (Empathic Network Visualization)
- 02 2002. The Secret Lives of Numbers
- 09 2001. Dialtones (A Telesymphony)
- 05 2001. Alphabet Synthesis Machine
- 03 2001. Interactive Logographs
- 09 2000. Scribble
- 07 2000. Introspection Machine
- 12 1999. Slamps
- 09 1999. Dakadaka
- 01 1998. Interval Projects
- 01 1997. Streamer
- 08 1996. Rouen Revisited
- 05 1994. Media Streams Icons
Ursonography
2005 | Jaap Blonk and Golan Levin
Ursonography (2005: Jaap Blonk and Golan Levin) is a new audiovisual interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, a masterpiece of 20th Century concrete poetry in which speech is reduced to its most abstract and musical elements. Dutch sound poet and virtuoso vocalist Jaap Blonk has performed the half-hour Ursonate more than a thousand times; in this presentation, Blonk’s performance is augmented with a modest but elegant new form of expressive, real-time, “intelligent subtitles.” With the help of computer-based speech recognition and score-following technologies, projected subtitles are tightly locked to the timing and timbre of Blonk’s voice, and brought forth with a variety of dynamic typographic transformations that reveal new dimensions of the poem’s structure.
Ursonography was commissioned by the 2005 Ars Electronica Festival, and has been performed at: Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria, 9/4/2005; Ultrasound Festival, Huddersfield, England, 11/2005; The game is up! Festival, Vooruit, Gent, Belgium, 2/16/2007; and Artefact Festival, STUK Kunstencentrum, Leuven, Belgium, 2/18/2007. Video documentation of the Ursonography performance has also been screened at: Digital Transit: Austria at ARCO, Madrid, Spain, 2/2006; The WSOA Digital Soiree, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2/2006; and NetCultureSpace, Vienna, 7/2008.
The following 6'15" YouTube video shows excerpts of the Ursonography performance from its premiere at the Ars Electronica Festival, September 2005 in Linz. The same video can be downloaded in better quality at the bottom of this page. It is essential to note that the poem's text was not added in post-production of this video: all dynamic typography in this concert was generated automatically, in real-time during the live performance, using custom software that responded to the timing and dynamics of Blonk's speech. Close synchronization of the text with the performer's voice was achieved by linking a score follower to a real-time syllable detector.
Additional Resources
Acknowledgements. The artists are indebted to Gerfried Stocker and Horst Hörtner of the Ars Electronica Center, Linz, for commissioning, supporting and hosting the development of this performance project, and to Pieter-Paul Mortier for hosting the performance at STUK, Leuven. We also express our gratitude to Andrew Wilson Howitt, for his critically informative PhD thesis, "Automatic Syllable Detection for Vowel Landmarks", and to Dr. Isabel Schulz of the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung, Sprengel Museum Hannover, for her kind permissions to allow reproduction of our performance of Schwitter's poem. The Ursonography performance is typeset in Sabon, by Jan Tschichold (1964), an updated version of the font which Tschichold used to design the original printing of the Ursonate in 1932.
High-resolution images of Ursonography are available in this Flickr photoset.
Images (click to enlarge)
Explanatory overview only
[720x480, .mp4, 0'43''; right-click to download]
Highlights from Ars Electronica premiere
[360x288, .mp4, 6'15''; right-click to download or watch on YouTube]
Complete Ars Electronica premiere, 4 September 2005
[480x384, .mp4, 22'10''; right-click to download]