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silvertron

For the past couple of years I’ve had sporadic forays into mixing music and live visuals (sometimes just visuals) for various dance party events. It all started in 2005 when Nick Muellner invited me to dj/vj a dance party for a symposium about 1968 at Ithaca College in April 2005. I also performed 1968 (remix) at the Andy Warhol Museum, in Pittsburgh, in September of 2005. In February 2006 I mixed visuals for DJ Edgar Um at a party in celebration of the Pittsburgh Dance Council during a visit by the Joffrey Ballet. For these early events I just sequenced the music using iTunes (ouch, some messy transitions) and used Modul8, a V4 Mixer, and a couple of DVD players for the visuals (a mix of appropriated clips, homemade animations, and video I shot myself).

April 2007 saw the premiere of silvertron and my I Heart Robots: A Spacedelic Dance Party at Christopher Sperandio’s, YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME: Copyright and Transgression Festival. This is a Sci-Fi/Space Age/Cosmic video dance party. The styles of music getting into the mix include: Space Disco, Kosmische Musik, Motorik, Cosmic Afro Funk, Dub, Electro, nu-Disco, Italo, and a bunch of other terms that mean everything and nothing. Basically music that gets the body moving, the head spinning and the spirit soaring is okay by me. I’ve begun digital djing with Traktor DJ and my live visuals toolbox has expanded to include VDMX5 and Max/MSP/Jitter.

I Heart Robots was reprised twice in 2008. In April at the MFA opening celebration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in May at the opening of the Pittsburgh Biennial at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. I seem to be on hiatus in Arizona this year. However many of the techniques and ideas I was developing/exploring have found their way into my collaborative interactive media performance project with Hilary Harp, Fruit Machine.