The Venetian Hotel Gets A New Look

It has been some months since I have posted.
Whilst I have been busy behind the scenes, it's not always possible to give advance warning of some public projects.

The "Light Of Venice" project at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas has been in progress for some time and as of June, it is now live, up and running so I thought I would share a little information with you about it.

As a collaborative project with the Projection Studio, I was invited to create sound pieces to accompany a series of 4D/3D projection mapped son et lumieres for the forecourt of the Venetian Hotel for a permanent installation. These pieces are free to the public and visitors to Las Vegas.

The Venetian Hotel is a very interesting design. Detailed studies have been made of numerous buildings, structures and artworks that have made Venice an historical, architectural and artistic wonder and these have been replicated in an incredible amount of careful detail at this particular resort.

The project focusses on the Torre dell'Orologio as the centrepiece. I plan to update my blog with some images to show you in due course!


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Finally...Illuminata at Caerphilly Castle

'Illuminata' is a son et lumiere created specifically for Caerphilly Castle to tell its history. It is returning for a second time to the Castle in December 2011.
I was commissioned to provide the sound piece for it and to also program the media server system for the video content.

After examining site plans and geography, I decided on a layout which is somewhat unconventional but worked well in the space. As a heritage site, there were a number of restrictions on what could and couldn't be physically achieved for a temporary system and I allowed for both variation in position and height in speakers in a way which would normally be considered slightly unbalanced but was taken into consideration with the content to create interesting textures. This resulted in six output channels plus additional bass.
The major creative decision was that the sound would contain no narrative. I incorporated a lot of soundscaping with the use of space and also music. As much of the history focusses on the medieval era, I was very happy to be working with recordings from different medieval manuscripts of music from that era. I chose all this very carefully and added in additional music of my own to provide links which were deliberately flavoured in a cinematic score style to juxtapose and add weight to the cartoon animations forming part of the medieval section of the story. This additional music to the period instrumentation was based on the medieval melodies or Welsh melodies. Once again, I explored the sounds of my lyre, as the forerunner of the harp, to create extra instrumental timbres alongside the medieval instruments.
The journey through from natural 'music' sounds to early music sounds and onwards through formal music of the 17th century, romantic harp playing of the 19th century into the radio and cinema footage of the twentieth, it has a lot of breadth and the combination of visuals and sound speak a great deal about the texture of history without a single word being spoken!
It also gave me the opportunity to express within a sound piece my knowledge of music and instrument history.

Contours at Illuminating York 2011

I was very pleased to be given the opportunity to re-exhibit 'Contours' at such a rich historic site. Many thanks to everybody who came to experience 'Contours' in the Dean's Park. I am told by worthy statisticians that Contours welcomed 50,000 people into its circle of light over the four days of the Festival and those of you who were kind enough to offer your thoughts at the onsite surveys said how much you enjoyed engaging with it.

I would like to thank everybody who came, including those who I spoke with during the artist one-on-one sessions at the Park. This Festival has always been a pleasure to be involved with and the level of organiser support to facilitate what I have needed to do has always been impressive and efficient, so thank you also to everybody who worked with me on re-shaping Contours for York. Special thanks has to go to Nev Milson, the lighting designer who worked to make the Contours circle structure a reality and to the production manager Ben Pugh for all the onsite technical arrangements and negotiations for the work.
I really enjoyed the one-on-ones with the people who came. It was really rewarding to show you images of the original texts, the reproduction lyre I played for it, show you the scripts and translations we worked with and wrote. Highlights must be letting people have a go on my flutes made of sheep and deer bone!

You can retweet all Contours posts and information from the button below, or hear it if you click here.


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