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Sebastian Oschatz 

is a German media artist with a background in Computer Science and one of the founders of the Frankfurt-based media company Meso, established in 1997 to work with experimental media interfaces and interactive installations.

At one point Sebastian Oschatz was a third of the experimental music ensemble Oval, famous for their uncompromising systems-based approach to the creation of sound. Oval did away with instruments and musical structures, pioneering the use of "glitch" sounds and microsamples. In 1995 Oschatz created a series of generative music videos for Oval, using custom software running on a SGI Onyx supercomputer. The group later split up.

Oschatz is one of the founders of the Frankfurt-based media company Meso, established in 1997 to work with experimental media interfaces and interactive installations. Meso works with big name clients like Lufthansa, FIFA and Volkswagen, creating computational exhibition designs.

Meso is also the developer of the visual programming tool VVVV, created originally to run Meso's own projects. VVVV has since snowballed into a freely available programming environment with a growing fan base. VVVV is well-suited for realtime video synthesis, and gives easy access to a range of control protocols like MIDI, OSC and DMX-512. In general it is an excellent tool for sound-responsive visual performance. See the previous blog entry on VVVV for more details.

 

In addition to Meso, Oschatz co-founded Involving Systems, a label for interactive audio works. The concept behind Involving Systems is to involve the visitor in the music-making process, exposing it to manipulation through lo-fi interaction devices. A good example is inv.sys.3.1, an "interactive breakbeat entertainment system". A leitmotif in Oschatz’ work is an interest in a system-based approach to creation and the use of physical interfaces to open the work up to interaction. For some of his own thoughts on the subject, read this interview with frequency magazine.

Source: Generator.x

 

 

Sebastian Oschatz, vvvv, software

Reading

META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (2007) by pioneering digital artist Mark Amerika mixes (and remixes) personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art. META/DATA is a playful, improvisatory, multitrack digital sampling of Amerika's writing from 1993 to 2005 that tells the early history of a net art world gone wild while simultaneously constructing a parallel poetics of net art that complements Amerika's own artistic practice. (The MIT Press)

Audio.Visual - On Visual Music and Related Media (2009) by Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund (Eds.) is divided into two sections: the first deals with the academic discussion on the subject of visual music; the second introduces contemporary paradigms of audio-visual praxis in brief presentations and contextualises them. Apart from being a guide in the historical sense, this new volume provides theoretical approaches to understanding and making visual music. (Fluctuating Images)

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SEE ALSO

Visual Sound Design (2010) by Reza Ali is a little app he made to help him understand microsounds, oscillators, timing, frequency, low frequency oscillators, polymorphism, sequencing, filtering, time domain effects, such as reverb, chorusing, etc, and distortion effects, such as clipping and more... in real-time in a visual manner, which is how he learns best. (Reza Ali on Vimeo)

‘vE-”jA: Art + Technology of Live Audio-Video (2006) by Xarene Eskander is a global snapshot of an exploding genre of tech-art performance: VJing and live audio-video. The book covers 40 international artists with 400+ colour images and 50+ movies and clips on an accompanying DVD and web downloads. (VJ Book)

Audiovisuology: See this sound (2010) - An Interdisciplinary Compendium of Audiovisual Culture. This all-embracing compendium brings together texts on various art forms in which the relationship between sound and image plays a significant role and the techniques used in linking the two. The entire spectrum of audiovisual art and phenomena is presented in 35 dictionary entries. (Cornerhouse)

Golan Levin (*1972) is an American new media artist, composer, performer and engineer interested in developing artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression. Golan Levin's work focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into the formal language of interactivity, and of nonverbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems. (Golan Levin)

Lamp Shade (2007) by David Muth visually explores rhythmic patterns and their underlying harmonic shifts through abstract minimalism. Specially written software generated the imagery. Music by Alvin Lucier. (David Muth)