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.

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.

The spazkron control is a gestural, wearable performance instrument built around a hacked USB game controller and 2 piezo contact microphones, as well as a custom sound synthesis patch built in MaxMSP.

The most conspicuous aspect of the device is the pair of long wooden dowels that extend from the abdomen of the performer. These are attached to patches that contain the analog joystick elements from the game controller. The sticks function as long joysticks that protrude from the body. The 4 axes provide analog values that are mapped to various functions in the audio synthesis software.

The contact mics are embedded into felt wristbands that are worn by the performer. Sound is triggered by striking or scraping these contact mics against the sticks. The Max patch performs envelope following on the incoming signals. The resulting envelopes are used as parameters for various sound generation functions, in addition to volume control. This offers the performer a great deal of expressivity and subtlety.

In building this controller, I was interested in creating something that required a certain amount of physical engagement to make it function. I am primarily interested in performing complex, spazzy noise stuff, so I needed a controller that expressed that sort of physical movement. Because of the nature of the device and its relationship to the body, the performer must twitch, contort, and flail in order to really engage the full complexity of the system. I was specifically not interested in a controller that was polite, reserved, and cool. I wanted my device to force clumsiness and absurdity upon the situation, which is something that is often missing from experimental electronic music.

Jeff Kaiser has a brief blurb about a recent performance here

MIDget is a simple, inexpensive sensor interface based on the AVR ATTiny26. In its current incarnation, 8 of the 11 available ADC channels are used. This means that you can connect up to eight sensors, knobs, or whatever to the board. The MIDget sends the 10-bit ADC value as 2 separate MIDI CC messages (1 for LSB, and 1 for MSB). This allows you to bypass the 7-bit resolution limitation inherent to MIDI CC messages for projects that require greater sensitivity. These 2-byte messages can be put back together inside of MaxMSP.

Since the ATTiny26 lacks a proper UART (just has USI), a software implementation based on the Atmel AVR307 application note was used. Since this code was written for the IAR Compiler, I had to port it to work on AVR-GCC. Once this was completed, it was fairly easy to get MIDI messages sending from the chip.

Getting the ADC code to work was a little more tricky. I was originally using the Procyon “a2d” functions, but for some reason these were not working for me. So, I spent a bit more time and worked out my own ADC functions that turned out to be much smaller and efficient code than Procyon. It’s nice to actually understand how that stuff works instead of just taking advantage of a pre-made function library.

I’m still working a couple of bugs out of the circuit, but in the end the circuit itself should cost less than $10us to build. Download Source Code(gcc).