Dionysium

I went with raaga123 to the Dionysium this evening. It's hard to explain what this is, so you may as well just check out their web site.

There was a short lecture on the history of spam. There was a debate on gun control. There was a short lecture on Darwin. There was a short film, Muto, by Blu--very cool. It's a stop-motion animation made completely out of grafitti.

The lectures and debate were teases--you could tell that they could have been really good if the "performers" had had the time to prepare them as proper performances. Since they have one of these each month, I'm guessing that the performances/lectures are often thrown together at the last minute. But that's part of the fun.

The reason we went was to see Bill Meadows's "Loose Atoms". This was definitely a proper performance and one that Bill had carefully prepared and has performed before. He uses a Wacom tablet connected to his Macbook to turn a sketchbook into a synthesizer. It looks like he's writing, but he's doing much more--using the many degrees of freedom of the stylus (position, angle, pressure, etc.) to control the audio so that you hear words of a poem or music or percussion. Very hard to describe (without staying up past my bedtime)--you'll just have to hope to get the chance to see it for yourself. And you're in luck. He'll be performing as part of Fuse Box '09. In addition to "Loose Atoms", he is working up something that uses Wii controllers.

Another place you can witness Bill's wizardry is at Blue Lapis Light performances.