Music for the Street

This was an experimental composition using chance and rules to make a melody and choose phrasing of notes at random. 

First Rule- Note selection is random. First note was A, from there a coin is flipped. Heads means up, tails goes down, then I rolled a dice to dictate how many semitones in the decided direction the next note would be, and continues. (octaves are irrelevant as the keyboard used was too small) 

Second Rule- Traffic Dictates phrasing, as close to possible the cars and trucks cue me to play each note 

Third Rule- Single takes, Each recorded channel had to be in the first attempt of playing (3 total)

Fourth Rule- An Instrument that I am bad at; this was played on Pianica and Conga. I am terrible at all keyboard related instruments (this keyboard was even labelled) and I pretty much gave up playing any percussive drums with excessive impact after breaking my pinky finger a couple years ago.

Fifth Rule- Hold notes until the next car passes. (as much as possible)

So the chosen melodic structure is played as is on the left lane, and played in reverse on the right lane (these tracks are panned in the coinciding direction to enhance this). Conga is just played in the center lane. My expectation was that the random notes would produce a very tense and suspenseful harmony. But on the contrary, the wavering of my breath combined with the focus of the cars passing ended up giving it a somewhat relaxing quality (I suppose that will be up to you).

Modern Man in The Age of Technology

This is my first project for my collage course I'm currently taking. My source material was  from a few movie posters for a film called The Postman (Il Postino) from 1994, national geo from 1989, and some other misc advertisements for cars mostly (the large text) from the mid to late 80s. The original image for the poster was the main figure offering a flower to his lover. I chose to remove him from the initial space and explode his head into a deconstruction of his unconscious mind.

Recently I had to opportunity to collaborate with my good friends Connor Olthuis, and Matt Tavares during an art show in hamilton. I had a bit of a rough time with my equipment, everything seemed to break the week before along with the night of. That being said we still did a fun little set of noise. Matt had just learned some live coding the week before, so he was messing around with that, Connor was running his bass through some heavy effects, and I was mixing a sound patch I made in max along with the output of my sound sculpture. The whole night was awesome, lots of really great music/ noises were made along with some really cool projections. You can check out where I've stolen my pictures from , and see many more here > http://camillejodoineng.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/lairlayer-2/

This is my face stuck in my sound sculpture

This is the mechanics of it, basically just some old guitar and bass parts along with a piece of pvc that I covered with rosin and attached to a motor. Although it is a fairly consistent drone, because of the slack of the strings and the rough blobs of rosin covering the pipe, the sound is more dynamic then I was expecting. The idea was to have I flipped over the opposite way that it is shown here, to conceal the workings, just to have some small bolts and the drive shaft apparent from the outside. The issue is that the rosin rains down and makes a mess so usually I opt to just keep it vertical. I would have taken more photos but thankfully Camille has already done such a nice job of documenting things ( Thanks!)

Camilles blog http://camillejodoineng.wordpress.com/

Connors site http://connorconnor.com/

Matt's Band http://badbadnotgood.com/ (Free downloads of both albums available!)

Connor Crawford also did some awesome projections that evening, here his site
http://www.imagearts.ryerson.ca/ccrawford/

First Regiment Infantry Armory

So this is my final project for my camera art class. I have to give credit to Connor Olthuis, who showed me this technique of modifying pictures with TextEdit. So basically I've been trying to break some rules I have set up in my head, one being that when combining digital media and analogue media I like to have most of the final being a work of my hand in whatever analogue medium I'm using. That being said, the matt medium transfers were a bit sloppy so my imperfect hand was still somewhat apparent. I also don't tend to like using appropriated images but my aim was to do something I normally wouldn't. This was sort of my low tech photo editing that I did, the process was going to wikipedia and getting a random article then using a photo from that page to edit and modify. The first page I got was Richard Nickel.

"Richard Stanley Nickel (May 31, 1928 – April 13, 1972) was an American photographer and historian of Polish descent best known for his efforts to preserve and document the buildings of architect Louis Sullivan."


 So after that point I opened the Jpeg I selected in TextEdit, and copy and pasted the entire wiki article into the code of the image repeatedly and randomly and saved them multiple times under new file names. It creates a kind of fun interplay from the addition of information which results in this digital decay, also appropriate for the content of the original image (which was an Armory being torn down). Then I opened the pictures in MS Paint and did a print of each document over 4 pages on velum. Then I taped them together and masked the edges with painters tape and did 15 coats of matt medium to joint the separate the pages. Once finished the velum could be removed to have a crude enlargement of the original document using a standard black and white laser printer. This photo doesn't really do it much justice, I forgot my camera so I had to use my phone, more documentation to come later perhaps...?

The name of an artist which came up during critique was Rosa Menkman,(http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com) whom also uses this type of process (obviously much more refined and controlled). You may want to check out if your interested in this process. I've just taken a quick look and am putting this on here partially as a note to self to check out her work more, after a brief skim looks like I will be looking at her stuff more.

An Instance of Being Delayed

Showed this piece today, critique was really positive. I don't think I even got a negative comment come to think of it, or if I did I was too tired to notice or have conveniently blocked it from memory. Anyways, this is some church organ sampled off a record and along with some flute and bass clarinet I played then sampled again. The initial concept was to build up this lo-fi beat I had made with samples and live recordings of multiple layers of instruments and sounds. So while I was recording the flute and clarinet I was listening to this beat which inherently influenced how I was improvising. So now that the original beat is gone I like to think the essence and idea of that silly little loop I was playing along with still gets infused into the track now. The original application of delay to this track was accidental, I was trying to try it out on the flute and I accidentally put it on the master track. So then I extended the duration and experimented with layering delay lines both synced to tempo and frequency. I had wanted to play with repetition and duration and push this simple idea into a bit more of an extreme so if your interested in really listening, I'd recommend hooking up the stereo and putting it at a decent volume and just sit and listen for the full piece. I hope you enjoy, thanks for listening and reading my rambling introduction.

 Delayed Delay by OwenArdal

More sounds

Just a quick procrastination post, I should be finishing my essay so less ramble this time. This was just a single take using an electric guitar, with a loop pedal and I think there was also a tremolo pedal in the mix too. I was just simply hitting notes with the volume down and pulling it up to remove the attack, which makes it not really sound that guitar like at all. This was from first year I think...?

 WHOMPWHOMP by OwenArdal 

Throwback- Fishman

So this has become somewhat of a joke around the Integrated Media (INTM) department incase you weren't aware...This was originally an assignment for Non-Traditional Art class in high school. This was  Fishman's second appearance in a work, the first being in a collaborative comic strip with Sam Rosenberg, where animal-human hybrids lived in a world fueled by Wu-Tang...or something of that sort (Sam wrote it, I Illustrated it) The idea was to incorporate serialism in our work and I did this by showing specific parts of Fishman (eye>foot>hand>mouth) in a specific order repeatedly. The cutaways were too rushed so other then the main walkcycle of Fishman's whole body I didn't like it. I ended up chopping up the video and just using the Fishman loop as a screen saver. Then last year in Hybrid Media Lab we needed some footage to remix with a MaxMsp patch Daniel masterminded so I submitted Fishman. Dan loved Fishman and borrowed him for one of his later patches in the course, and I continued to incorporate Fishman into every assignment till the end of the course. Fishman even made it only Bentley Jarvis' computer and he would use Fishman for his demos; Bentley even mused about him being the INTM mascot. I think everyone in my department is probably getting sick of Fishman other then a few loyal followers whom cheered as he came onto the projector in between other student work at this years INTM halloween social. Anyways, if your reading this thus far, your also probably aware that I'm rehashing this idea because I've become absolutely uncreative/uninspired as of late. FISHMAN; EVOLUTION is coming soon...also with some colour hopfully and sound this time, so it will be more experiments, and I'm really out of practice so its been quite challenging, I just hope the motion looks as it does in my head...anyways these rambling intros have become a theme on this blog but I would hope if the few of you that care to read this would find all these shenanigans going on this my head amusing while I continue to procrastinate...Fishman is a blessing and a curse becoming a joke himself, and making me into one...haha

Fabricated Artifact; Archaeopteryx

So I'm posting here now because I have so much on my to do list that I'm struggling to get anything really started at all. Technical difficulties have me in a standstill on one of my projects and general lethargy on everything else. Still trying to stay motivated and productive, but I digress; heres a post which I should have updated weeks ago now. I guess I had high hopes while I did the project. I got pretty caught up in the process so once it was over I was a bit underwhelmed with the results. I had a fractal idea of different things I wanted from the piece so I think I could have used some more planning to get better results. I guess I the piece as a whole as a bit unresolved. Anyways, this is a terrible rant to introduce a post, so here it is.

 So the process involved scanning objects then printing them out in black and white on velum and doing matt medium photo transfers, then cutting them out and arranging them into this composite creature you see here. Then a combination of ink, acrylic, water colour, chalk and charcoal were used to blend them all together. Some of the objects used included twigs, pebbles, feathers, bones, horns, grass clippers, and a raccoon skull (that I boiled and bleached myself). Also its just on raw, unstretched canvas and is roughly 34x39 inches

Ill also offer a brief explanation to contextualize the collage. I've been toying with these kind of biological/diagrammatic images along with some fabricated evolutionary studies. So if your not aware, the Archaeopteryx is generally accepted as the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. And I'm fascinated that some people are still refusing to accept that evolution exists, so this is essentially toying with the idea that someone would go and piece together a creature from parts and pass it as scientific fact. I'm obviously not legitimately doing that here but I think it might be an interesting direction to push this idea in. 

On a side-note, I'm over-analysing this because is not my typical medium, I ended up signing up for a couple drawing and painting courses, so I'm obviously not very confident, but I'm working on getting better. (I typically work in sound/video if you don't already know that-but you probably do if you are reading my blog)

So this is by far the wordiest post on here yet, probably because I'm still in denial over my excessive workload, so posts will probably slow down until december. By then I should hopefully have my final projects documented to post so just for that reason ill put a little bonus collage here too. This one was just for fun from the summer, and I really just like it, nothing serious...just Hippos and Crocs. This ones just tiny 6x12 inches