Steve Gibson
Steve Gibson is Associate Professor in Innovative Digital Media at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He is primarily interested in transdisciplinary collaborations between art, design, and computing, and has concentrated his research work on tactile and physical interfaces and applications that enable a healthier relationship with technology. He works as lead-beta tester of the Gesture and Media System motion-tracking system and has produced a number of significant body-based pieces using this technology. His current research and practice also explore the formal, theoretical and practical implications of Live and Real-time Visuals. Steve has also had immediately publicly facing roles as Curator and Director for the Media Art event Interactive Futures (2002-07), and as Co-owner and Creative Director of a media company Limbic Media Corporation (2007-14).
Over the course of his 25-year career he has presented at many world-leading venues including Ars Electronica, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Banff Centre for the Arts, Digital Art Weeks, the European Media Arts Festival, ISEA, the National Museum of Scotland and Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich. His publishing career is also very active, with papers appearing in high profile books, journals and volumes including Leonardo, Springer, St. Martin’s Press, MIT Press, New World Perspectives, Urra Apogeo, and Passagen Verlag. His co-authored book Live Visuals: History, Theory, Practice was published by Routledge in July 2022. He is currently working with Northern Dance in Newcastle on a large-scale movement-based audio-visual project, Ephemera.
Personal Website: http://www.telebody.ws
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/room101studio
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/steve-gibson-101
Live Visuals Book: https://routledge.pub/Live-Visuals
Over the course of his 25-year career he has presented at many world-leading venues including Ars Electronica, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Banff Centre for the Arts, Digital Art Weeks, the European Media Arts Festival, ISEA, the National Museum of Scotland and Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich. His publishing career is also very active, with papers appearing in high profile books, journals and volumes including Leonardo, Springer, St. Martin’s Press, MIT Press, New World Perspectives, Urra Apogeo, and Passagen Verlag. His co-authored book Live Visuals: History, Theory, Practice was published by Routledge in July 2022. He is currently working with Northern Dance in Newcastle on a large-scale movement-based audio-visual project, Ephemera.
Personal Website: http://www.telebody.ws
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/room101studio
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/steve-gibson-101
Live Visuals Book: https://routledge.pub/Live-Visuals
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Videos by Steve Gibson
In short this video was assembled by me moving in 3D space. Music, lights, video and fog were played live by moving in 3D space.
More information is available at www.telebody.ws/OPK/OPK.html
Full video showcase: https://vimeo.com/showcase/5176262
Books by Steve Gibson
Covering a wide historical period from Pythagoras’s mathematics of music and colour in ancient Greece, to Castel’s ocular harpsichord in the 18th century, to the visual music of the mid-20th century, to the liquid light shows of the 1960s and finally to the virtual reality and projection mapping of the present moment, Live Visuals is both an overarching history of real-time visuals and audio-visual art and a crucial source for understanding the various theories about audio-visual synchronization. With the inclusion of an overview of various forms of contemporary practice in Live Visuals culture – from VJing to immersive environments, architecture to design – Live Visuals also presents the key ideas of practitioners who work with the visual in a live context.
https://www.routledge.com/Live-Visuals-History-Theory-Practice/Gibson-Arisona-
These new contexts also provided live visualists new opportunities to present contemporary socio-political subject matter to their audiences; themes such as Thatcherism, Reaganomics, mass consumption and environmental degradation were commonly addressed within the audio-visual content of this period. Interestingly, while mass media was a site for their criticism, for some artists, it also became a channel through which they found a more mainstream voice – the prime example being through the creation of music videos that were then seen on MTV (as outlined in Chapter 3).
Developments in technology played an important role in driving these changes. The emergent media technologies of the VHS video, the Panasonic MX10 Digital Video Mixer and rudimentary computer-based video editing greatly facilitated new forms of creation and production. As is argued in Chapter 8, such experimental use of technology helped shape the visual aesthetic that emerged during this era. By reappropriating broadcast content on VHS tapes, irony and juxtaposition came to underpin the aesthetic; these approaches are also reminiscent of the ‘montage’ technique used by Sergei Eisenstein (as discussed in Chapter 2). By combining broadcast content with computer-generated graphics and text, visual artists could elect to be more narratively ambitious. Later hardware developments afforded better real-time computer processing, which when harnessed, allowed for the generation of ‘audio-responsive’ visuals. For Live Visual performers, the development of better interactive interfaces made it possible to utilise all the new advantages of desktop computers and software into their stage productions.
Parallel to these developments, the acid house movement began in Chicago in the mid-1980s and moved quickly to the UK, culminating with the “Second Summer of Love” in 1987.1 Acid house was a simple form of dance music, with a pulse that was driven by the iconic Roland TB-303 synth. Acid house fed directly into the establishment of rave culture, which was christened by former Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV singer Genesis P-Orridge in 1989.2 Rave usually consisted of illegal events in huge venues, where drugs were consumed and hedonistic dancing took place to electronic music. Though initially driven by acid house, other forms of electronic music such as drum and bass and techno became common at raves in the 1990s. The rave, while not always employing Live Visuals, often did have psychedelic qualities achieved through lighting that brought to mind the equally psychedelic events of the 1960s (see Chapter 3 for more on psychedelic events such as The Joshua Light Show’s performances and Chapter 11 for more on the hedonism of rave culture).
This chapter will select and discuss some of the most pioneering live-visual performers of the 1980s and 1990s as examples to illustrate what happened when culture was mediated through emerging technology. The chapter will begin in the UK with scratch video, stay in the UK to discuss rave culture, move to the United States to discuss Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN) and then return to the UK to consider Coldcut.
Using the Gesture and Media System 3.0 motion-tracking system, the performer can dynamically manipulate an immersive environment using two small infrared trackers. The project employs a multipart interface design based on a formal model of increasing complexity in visual-sound-body mapping, and is therefore best performed by an expert performer with strong spatial memory and advanced musical ability. OPK utilizes the “body as experience, instrument and interface” [1] for control of a large-scale environment.
1. ACM. TEI Arts Track website. 2018. Retrieved October 10, 2017 from https://tei.acm.org/2018/arts-track/
Papers by Steve Gibson
More specifically the paper will look at the particular Dadaist-inspired absurdities in Grand Theft Bicycle (GTB), such as the use of an aerobic-style bicycle to engage in a political battle with world leaders within a vacuous game environment.
GTB is part of a sub-genre I am describing as ‘Dadaist game art.’ In short, Dadaist game art uses the forms of commercial gaming, but inverts normally uncritical game content to include ironic reflections on the culture of gaming. Dadaist game art borrows from game culture, but provides a new take on gaming that is contradictory, provocative and absurd in the Dadaist sense.
The paper considers the connection between drawing technique and media control both generally and specifically, postulating that dynamic drawing in a live context creates a performance mode not dissimilar to performing on a musical instrument or conducting with a baton. The use of a dynamic and physical real-time media interface re-inserts body actions into live media performance in a compelling manner. Performers can learn to “draw/play” the graphics tablet as a musical and visual “instrument”, creating a new and uniquely idiomatic form of electronic drawing. The paper also discusses how to practically program the application and presents examples of its use as a media manipulation tool.
across the mediums: the artist, the engineer, the musician and the dancer may collaborate with each other but in much interdisciplinary work there is a sense that they are separate entities performing their own expert functions without more thorough knowledge of the other’s technical or artistic processes.
Transdisciplinarity implies a level of direct connection and cross-over betweenmediums: the artist also becomes the engineer, the engineer becomes the artist, and when they collaborate they actually have enough expertise in the other’s field to be able to address concerns across the mediums and even across disciplines. This is not to say that there are not varying levels of expertise within transdisciplinary work, but rather that transdisciplinary art in its best sense makes the effort to understand the medium of the other in more than superficial terms. Here science is no less important than art, art no less than science. The elitism of the isolated discipline is broken down to a degree.
In short this video was assembled by me moving in 3D space. Music, lights, video and fog were played live by moving in 3D space.
More information is available at www.telebody.ws/OPK/OPK.html
Full video showcase: https://vimeo.com/showcase/5176262
Covering a wide historical period from Pythagoras’s mathematics of music and colour in ancient Greece, to Castel’s ocular harpsichord in the 18th century, to the visual music of the mid-20th century, to the liquid light shows of the 1960s and finally to the virtual reality and projection mapping of the present moment, Live Visuals is both an overarching history of real-time visuals and audio-visual art and a crucial source for understanding the various theories about audio-visual synchronization. With the inclusion of an overview of various forms of contemporary practice in Live Visuals culture – from VJing to immersive environments, architecture to design – Live Visuals also presents the key ideas of practitioners who work with the visual in a live context.
https://www.routledge.com/Live-Visuals-History-Theory-Practice/Gibson-Arisona-
These new contexts also provided live visualists new opportunities to present contemporary socio-political subject matter to their audiences; themes such as Thatcherism, Reaganomics, mass consumption and environmental degradation were commonly addressed within the audio-visual content of this period. Interestingly, while mass media was a site for their criticism, for some artists, it also became a channel through which they found a more mainstream voice – the prime example being through the creation of music videos that were then seen on MTV (as outlined in Chapter 3).
Developments in technology played an important role in driving these changes. The emergent media technologies of the VHS video, the Panasonic MX10 Digital Video Mixer and rudimentary computer-based video editing greatly facilitated new forms of creation and production. As is argued in Chapter 8, such experimental use of technology helped shape the visual aesthetic that emerged during this era. By reappropriating broadcast content on VHS tapes, irony and juxtaposition came to underpin the aesthetic; these approaches are also reminiscent of the ‘montage’ technique used by Sergei Eisenstein (as discussed in Chapter 2). By combining broadcast content with computer-generated graphics and text, visual artists could elect to be more narratively ambitious. Later hardware developments afforded better real-time computer processing, which when harnessed, allowed for the generation of ‘audio-responsive’ visuals. For Live Visual performers, the development of better interactive interfaces made it possible to utilise all the new advantages of desktop computers and software into their stage productions.
Parallel to these developments, the acid house movement began in Chicago in the mid-1980s and moved quickly to the UK, culminating with the “Second Summer of Love” in 1987.1 Acid house was a simple form of dance music, with a pulse that was driven by the iconic Roland TB-303 synth. Acid house fed directly into the establishment of rave culture, which was christened by former Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV singer Genesis P-Orridge in 1989.2 Rave usually consisted of illegal events in huge venues, where drugs were consumed and hedonistic dancing took place to electronic music. Though initially driven by acid house, other forms of electronic music such as drum and bass and techno became common at raves in the 1990s. The rave, while not always employing Live Visuals, often did have psychedelic qualities achieved through lighting that brought to mind the equally psychedelic events of the 1960s (see Chapter 3 for more on psychedelic events such as The Joshua Light Show’s performances and Chapter 11 for more on the hedonism of rave culture).
This chapter will select and discuss some of the most pioneering live-visual performers of the 1980s and 1990s as examples to illustrate what happened when culture was mediated through emerging technology. The chapter will begin in the UK with scratch video, stay in the UK to discuss rave culture, move to the United States to discuss Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN) and then return to the UK to consider Coldcut.
Using the Gesture and Media System 3.0 motion-tracking system, the performer can dynamically manipulate an immersive environment using two small infrared trackers. The project employs a multipart interface design based on a formal model of increasing complexity in visual-sound-body mapping, and is therefore best performed by an expert performer with strong spatial memory and advanced musical ability. OPK utilizes the “body as experience, instrument and interface” [1] for control of a large-scale environment.
1. ACM. TEI Arts Track website. 2018. Retrieved October 10, 2017 from https://tei.acm.org/2018/arts-track/
More specifically the paper will look at the particular Dadaist-inspired absurdities in Grand Theft Bicycle (GTB), such as the use of an aerobic-style bicycle to engage in a political battle with world leaders within a vacuous game environment.
GTB is part of a sub-genre I am describing as ‘Dadaist game art.’ In short, Dadaist game art uses the forms of commercial gaming, but inverts normally uncritical game content to include ironic reflections on the culture of gaming. Dadaist game art borrows from game culture, but provides a new take on gaming that is contradictory, provocative and absurd in the Dadaist sense.
The paper considers the connection between drawing technique and media control both generally and specifically, postulating that dynamic drawing in a live context creates a performance mode not dissimilar to performing on a musical instrument or conducting with a baton. The use of a dynamic and physical real-time media interface re-inserts body actions into live media performance in a compelling manner. Performers can learn to “draw/play” the graphics tablet as a musical and visual “instrument”, creating a new and uniquely idiomatic form of electronic drawing. The paper also discusses how to practically program the application and presents examples of its use as a media manipulation tool.
across the mediums: the artist, the engineer, the musician and the dancer may collaborate with each other but in much interdisciplinary work there is a sense that they are separate entities performing their own expert functions without more thorough knowledge of the other’s technical or artistic processes.
Transdisciplinarity implies a level of direct connection and cross-over betweenmediums: the artist also becomes the engineer, the engineer becomes the artist, and when they collaborate they actually have enough expertise in the other’s field to be able to address concerns across the mediums and even across disciplines. This is not to say that there are not varying levels of expertise within transdisciplinary work, but rather that transdisciplinary art in its best sense makes the effort to understand the medium of the other in more than superficial terms. Here science is no less important than art, art no less than science. The elitism of the isolated discipline is broken down to a degree.