Moogfest Announces Art and Architecture Installations

From a press release:

Moogfest Announces Art and Architecture Installations

Moogfest, the innovative music festival in Asheville, NC April 23-27th, in keeping with its standard of what Complex calls “forward-thinking creativity”, is presenting a collection of art and architecture installations in partnership with The Media Arts Project, Aloft Hotels, and Clemson School of Architecture.

Over the last 50 years, Bob Moog and his company Moog Music have created technology that has given artists the ability to create and express themselves in new and limitless ways. Moogfest honors this spirit of innovation through a five day festival that highlights the intersection of art, music, performance and technology.

Moogfest and The Media Arts Project, or MAP, issued a call to artists in October 2013, powered by Aloft Hotels. Design teams were asked to propose a freestanding, rapidly deployable temporary structure or installation that embodies Moog’s interdisciplinary and innovative philosophy. Designs had to enhance the experience of the user by engaging multimedia and multi-sensory experiences of sound, structure, materiality, light and form. The objective was for each entry to emphasize the intersection of art and technology.

Clemson’s senior architecture students collaborated to add a unique placemaking design to the array of Moogfest installations. The project draws from both Asheville’s unique downtown landscape and the temporary nature of a festival. The pop-up architectural installation, created as part of the students’ spring project, is based on the idea of connectivity and pop-up urbanism at Moogfest. The installation creates an environment to relax and recharge, both literally and figuratively. There will be cell phone charging stations, shipping containers converted into office space, custom-made seats within the groundscape, and a pixalated canopy shading the entire area.

These installations will be located in the Moogfest footprint running along Lexington Avenue toward Broadway and the Moog Factory, turning the street into an interactive art playground. They are all free and open to the public Wednesday 4/23 at noon through Sunday 4/27 at 6pm. Lexington Ave. from Hiawassee to the 240 overpass will be closed to car traffic at 6pm on Thursday night.

M A P  I N S T A L L A T I O N S

ChipCodes: Interfacing the Chiptunes Movement by Matthew Scheiner and Michelle Cortese — ChipCodes is two custom-built Chiptunes interfaces that engage the user with new but classically-inspired forms, to bridge the gap between musician and tinkerer. These instruments are surrounded by three vintage television sets, all connected to a visualization program displaying graphics reminiscent of 1980s-90s video games. The audio sensitive visualizer graphically fluctuates via changes in amplitude and playing a 6 note streak of a popular videogame theme song will trigger easter egg-type rewards, invoking the culture of cheat codes.

BamBam by collctv — BamBam is an interactive light-based synthesizer that sonifies ambient lighting through a complex set of panels that encase dozens of simple photocell-based oscillators. Drawing inspiration from a variety of disciplines (engineering, architecture, composition, design) and techniques (analog oscillators, digital fabrication), the piece is both a tribute to early visionaries of electronic music and a demonstration of how powerful simple ideas and circuits can be when they’re multiplied on a larger scale.

Geothermophone by Egg Syntax — Geothermophone is a translucent globe which displays chaaging temperature over a fifty-year period (1960-2010), while the audio accompaniment reflects temperature along with other climate variables. Over the course of thirty minutes you can clearly see and hear our changing climate. The music and lighting are directly derived from scientific data obtained through Asheville’s own National Climatic Data Center, using custom software and micro controllers.

Bang / Whimper by Severn Eaton — This interactive installation consists primarily of a suspended fiberglass orb into which the participant can stand. Roots are pierced through the shell, intertwined in the interior. Mics, speakers, lights and sensors combine to create an immersive audio-visual experience that varies as much as the individuals that approach.

Sand Noise Device by Matt Roads, James Saxon, Jay Van Dyke, and Devin Dominguez — The SND is both a complex generative music system as well as a novel and intuitive interface for influencing and interacting with this system. The interface consists of a table-height box filled with sand, a Microsoft Kinect (which provides an RGB camera and depth sensing capabilities), an overhead projector, and several internally lit tangible objects. The Kinect is used to track object position, object color, and sand topography. The projector is used to provide visual feedback. Sound is provided by a multi-channel loudspeaker system arranged around the box.

Tachyons+ installation — The video pyramid utilizes 6 CRT televisions built into a colorful wooden structure and a control panel with giant knobs for users to test their hand at video art creativity. The Tachyons+ exhibit is for everyone at Moogfest a chance to use their imagination in making analog synthesized video paintings.

The Bass Projector by Nick Zammuto — The Bass Projector uses a flexible mirror attached to a speaker to project images of low frequency sound waves by reflected laser points. A simple two oscillator analog synth, designed by Rosser Douglas, allows the user to dial in any musical interval between 0 and 300 hz, and see the beat patterns inherent in the sound. The project is a good illustration of the scientific principals of cymatics, where sound vibrations are translated through a specifically visual medium. A very simple set of materials produce strangely compelling and unpredictable results, worthy of deep experimentation.

C L E M S O N  I N S T A L L A T I O N

Patch by Clemson School of Architecture — Challenged with the opportunity to create an engaging public installation space for Moogfest 2014, Clemson Architecture Students responded with the concept of Patch: a place for interaction and connection between both festival-goers and Asheville locals. “Patch,” is inspired by the event’s namesake, Bob Moog, who was known for creating innovative ways of “patching” sound waves together with a synthesizer. Thus, within every aspect of their design, Clemson’s students aim to patch individual people, ideas and places together to create a unified, collective entity. This connectivity appears within each of the four layers of the project: groundscape, cloudscape, userscape and mediascape.

Five suspended 20- by 30-foot clouds will appear to be floating over a 16,000-square-foot area. Each cloud will be suspended by 5,000 feet of parachute cord and will anchor to nine mobile mini-storage containers. The clouds themselves are 8,000 square feet of inflated Tyvek breathable fabric canopies and weigh a total of only three pounds. Underneath the clouds will be five fixed-plywood charging stations and an interactive virtual game where visitors can upload images to Instagram to try and win a ticket to an exclusive Moog concert.

Eighteen four- by 10-foot vinyl super graphics will cover the sides of the nine storage containers, which also will be used as place-making objects. Visitors will be able to rest on 125 custom-made plywood pixel stools. It all will situated on 2,500 square feet of grey Astroturf surface treatment to provide a designated space for the gathering.  The pixelation of the clouds, stools, Astroturf and super-graphics is reminiscent of the so-called 8-bit era of the mid-1980s video games and the patch concept of merging many individual, unique pixels together to make an overall image.

The project was created, produced and is being built by a group of 21- to 25-year-old undergraduate and graduate students, utilizing the state-of-the-art technology in the School of Architecture’s Digital Design Shop.