Andrew Benson

This video was debuted as a looping video installation included in the Uncharted show at Hayes Valley Market, May 2008.

I just finished building, or rather stitching together my first complete wearable device, the Whisper audio wristband. I have researched and experimented with soft electronics, interactivity, sensor technologies, and conductive fibers for some time now, but this is the first standalone device that I have created that incorporates all of these concepts. Whisper was conceived as a simple wearable audio device that would be lightweight, comfortable, and provide an engaging and simple interface that was capable of producing interesting noises. I had recently been working on AVR code for sound synthesis for my Whispering Islands installation, and saw this as a good opportunity to try and create an interactive and wearable unit. The synthesis is done using an AVR ATTiny45 chip programmed to run a simple FM routine using a 256-point sine wave table. Carrier frequency is controlled by the brown button-knob, and the FM modulator frequency and amount are controlled by the pressure sensitive fabric pads. The tiny speaker will resonate with certain settings, creating some occasional loud squawks. Otherwise, the device creates some quiet, but subtly wonderful sounds.

Heather Brubaker and Marie-Claire Miesels recently curated me into a group show called “Uncharted: Imaginary Landscapes” at the Hayes Valley Market in SF. I found out about the show the day after my daughter Djuna was born, and convinced myself that I could put together a video, site specific sound installation, and some paintings by the time Djuna was a couple of months old. After having focussed so heavily on painting this last year, I really wanted to spend some time experimenting and doing a multi-disciplinary project. I had also been working on some code to run various synthesis techniques on tiny AVR chips, and wanted to try incorporating that into one of my felt and thread installations. Originally, I was going to make stuffed island forms with embedded circuitry and have them floating on the thread meshwork. However, after playing around with that I determined that it looked to plushy and instead developed the felt island structures by handstitching together bits of felt to resemble forms from some of my paintings. An attiny26 chip provided 7 channels of randomly dispersed chatters and noises that were played through tiny cellphone speakers embedded in each of the islands.

I also installed a 3-minute video loop that I recently finished, and a pair of acrylic-on-paper works.

When working on various signal-based sequencing and playback projects, I have found that there are a couple of tasks that required objects that aren’t available in the standard distribution of MSP objects. I have put together a small collection of MaxMSP objects that perform some basic tasks that I find useful for doing signal-driven sample playback of different kinds:

• wait~ - outputs a stored value at the end of a ramp - sort of like a really special sah~. helps to prevent clicking when randomizing or changing parameters of your sampler or granular voice
• shot~ - signal-triggered, uninterruptible ramp output. Length in milliseconds. busy output helps when trying to manage polyphonic setups.
• cshot~ - signal-triggered, uninterruptible sample counter with synchronous ramp output. Length in samples. I’ve always wanted a signal-triggered sample-counter.

Download Mac UB Objects

This small collection is still a work in progress, so any feedback or complaints are welcome.

I just recently started doing some field recordings again, after spending a long time in pure synthesis land. I needed a good pair of mics for doing stereo recordings, so I grabbed a couple of good quality Panasonic electret capsules and soldered them to a length of cable from a pair of broken headphones. To protect the wiring (and make them look a little more stealthy) I mounted the capsules inside 1″ pieces of a ballpoint pen barrel. A little hot glue and some tape, and I had some really good sounding stereo mics for doing field recording on the sly with my MiniDisc.

slurp_splat is MaxMSP/Jitter patch and GLSL shader that is used to create abstract and fluid real-time imagery through the leveraging of OpenGL hardware accelerated processing and drawing tools. This patch is provided without much documentation or support, but is rather meant as a demo of some of my current practices in creating video processes. I’m pretty sure the shader won’t run on Mac PowerBooks, so I imagine a lot of older or lower end video cards won’t be able to run it. Maybe at some point I can come up with a version that will run on PowerBook, but that will probably take some trial and error and empirical debugging.

“proximity” is a piece created by Alison Sant and Rick Johnson where Alison walks around the city with a vest embedded with proximity sensors and cameras. The cameras are turned on whenever someone enters a specified personal distance. The resulting tape is mostly black screens, interspersed with some short clips of people walking past. I was introduced to Alison and Rick by my good friend Stijn, who was going to help them out, but was off in Belgium for the summer. I created a new brain for this piece, which consists of an Atmel ATTiny26, a couple of Sharp IR rangers, and a relay. The nice thing about working on this project was that it has forced me to review a bit of electronics, and Rick and Alison are very nice people as well!

I will be in a show called “Excavations” at Johansson Projects Gallery in Oakland,CA. The show opens May 12th, with a reception that evening and also another one on June 1st during the Oakland Art Murmur, 6-9pm. The gallery will also be open Thurs.-Saturday, noon-6pm, during the rest of the show. This is the first show at the new gallery, and will include work by eight other artists in various media. My contribution to the show is 16 paintings, 9 video pieces, and one felt and thread landscape installation. For more info, check out the gallery website.

The series “tiny continent” is a set of photographs of ephemeral sculptures created by stacking and clustering little bits of model-making wood and other bits of material. This investigation started as a game that I would play in my studio as part of the process for making other work. While I was photographing works for an upcoming show, I decided I should also start documenting these little piles that appear in my studio. The documentation and presentation of this as an art project changes the context slightly and even calls into question my own assumptions about what “my work” has become. In some ways, these little one-minute sculptures are the most vital and personal work that I am doing. It is a little window into my larger artistic process.

To be shown at the show “Excavations” at Johansson Projects, I have produced an edition of 50 DVDs complete with hand-printed silkscreen cover insert. The “cloud gardens” video series comprises a collection of work done in developing real-time video and audio synthesis and processing modules using MaxMSP/Jitter visual programming environment. The nine videos represented were projected in the gallery as part of the work that I have contributed, along with several paintings and a site-specific installation.

If you are interested in screening these videos or purchasing a copy of the limited edition DVD, please email me for info.