Devils, Elleves, Firadrakes and Occult Geographies

Earlier this week I presented at the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers International Conference, participating in a session called Occult Geographies: (im)Material Agents and the Geographical Imagination. I’ll reflect on the other papers in my next post – until then you may like to take a look at my paper Devils, Elleves or Firadrakes: Genius Loci, Magical Technologies and the Occult Philosophy of Landscape. Full text and slides can be found over at academia.edu.

Entity relationship diagram depicting the digital artist as magician.

The paper as presented is actually a synopsis of a far more detailed, 10,000-word article, which I hope to prepare for publication shortly. It’s perhaps a peculiar collision of ideas: occult, creative and technological, but I think it’s a fairly good reflection of my multiphrenic identity! One thing it was a shame I couldn’t deal with fully in the conference paper was the further implications of John French’s translation of Agrippa’s Classical terms into folkloric parallels: however, this is discussed in detail in the full paper, tracing the roots of the Agrippa’s calling of the ‘good spirits’ to medieval folkloric practices, which came full-circle in the work of 17th century magical compiler Dr. Rudd.

Saltaire Arts Trail

The Saltiare Arts Trail 2013 app is live! I’ve been working on this over the last few weeks, alongside the inevitable end-of-semester crunch, and I’m rather pleased with how things have turned out. The app was commissioned with funds from Saltaire Inspired and the Arts Council Grants for the Arts scheme, and is part of what I hope will be a two-year project for Tonality Systems Press. This year implemented a basic framework and suggests a workflow for future use of the app. Next year will, I hope, be more ambitious: collaborating with Saltaire residents and artists, along with composer Nigel Morgan, on a locative soundscape composition to accompany the festival.

Meanwhile, you can get the app for iPhone and Android via the Saltaire Arts Trail website.

There are some fantastic artists involved in the festival, which runs from the 25 to 27th of this month – my favourites being Nicola Taylor‘s folklore-influence photography, the paintings of artist and archaeometallurgist David Starley and the prints of Joy Godfrey and James Bywood (including his screenprint of one of my favourite haunts: Almscliffe Crag!)

Crunch!

Hectic times are upon me this month, with three conference sessions on the horizon in the next few weeks… So, part four of The New Speculative Music  is going to have to wait until mid-March, unless the Muses suddenly take hold of my keyboard.

Angelystor at Hartshead.

What’s coming up? I’ll be at the Six Eight Kafé on the 24th of February talking as part of Birmingham’s Network Music Festival. I’ll be doing two sessions: one with Nigel Morgan on Active Notation, and one on my own about locative media.

The week after I’ll be at the opening of the Uncanny Landscapes conference at Royal Holloway University, doing an artists talk called Music, Magic and Metaxy.

To save a bit of space here, you can read abstracts on my presentations page.

The Angelystor application is coming along nicely in advance of these dates. It needs a bit of polishing up, but writing it has been a very useful exercise. Last week, Layla and I went out to test it at St. Peter’s Church in Hartshead, which itself shares a very similar legend to that of Angelystor.

St. Peter’s Church, Hartshead.

Auditioning Angelystor

Testing the Angelystor app.

Earlier this week I continued developing the prototype LOAM software by writing the basic code for the Angelystor application. Angelystor is a piece of music based around the folklore of the St. Digain’s church, where on Hallowe’en the voice of the spirit Angelystor may be heard pronouncing the names of those in the parish who will die in the coming year… Angelystor imagines a night, from dusk to dawn, in the Llangernyw churchyard.

The app allows you to relocate a multi-track version of the Angelystor to any location (ideally a churchyard) and to use your environment as a virtual mixer. It should be available to download by the end of the month.

The music itself grew out of couple of rough and ready field-recordings made by Layla, as detailed here. It was produced by myself with some help from Briony Yorke and Layla. You can have a listen to a rough mix of the ‘fixed’, non-locative version below! [Edit: now HERE]

Roaming in the LOAMing

So, with the holiday over, work on LOAM can resume. Or rather, be slotted in around marking, preparing for the next semester, writing documentation for a new-and-terribly-exciting-piece-of-composition-software (more on this later, non-disclosure agreements permitting!) and all the usual stuff that goes on here.

Two public prototypes using small areas of the LOAM function set are currently available. These are geolocative audio applications for Android mobiles:

Almias – An experimental soundscape situated on Almscliffe Crag, North Yorkshire.

Holbeck Audio Walk – A locative rendition of Simon Bradley’s MA on the oral history of Holbeck, Leeds.

Almias (Credit: Layla Legard)

There are some final bits of functionality to be implemented before I can think about encapsulating everything for a public launch of the complete LOAM platform. One of these is the ‘dislocator’, which will enable experiences to be ‘retopologised’ from one place to another. A prototype ‘dislocative media’ application will be released in February, although I’m hesitant to say exactly what it will involve – I hope it is a surprise!

If anyone in the area wishes to take Almias or Holbeck Audio Walk for a wander, then I would love to have feedback about your experience and the functionality/stability of the prototype works. Email: phil (at) larkfall (dot) co (dot) uk.

Happy trails!

Holbeck Audio Walk released!

Wow, it’s taken some time! First there were server and streaming issues, then a chronic lack of time as the first semester of teaching kicked in, but it’s here – the Holbeck Audio Walk app for Android! Click here to visit the Google Play store page!

This is the third prototype app using isolated elements of the LOAM plaform which I am currently developing. It uses the text and audio from Simon Bradley’s original 2010 Holbeck Audio Walk. This app only demonstrates what I call the the ‘guidance’ or ‘non-diegetic’ layer of LOAM. Embedded/diegetic layers have already been tested in the Almias app.

Due to continuing chronic time constraints I’ve not had a chance to do any comprehensive testing ‘in the field’. I’d appreciate it if any Leodensians/Loiners who might read this could download it (it’s a tiny 44kb file) and test it by going to the canal bridge on Wharf Approach and giving it a go!

LOAM: Locative Oral/Audio Media Overview

It’s been quiet on the blog, but insanely hectic away from it: it’s that time of the semester when all the marking comes in and has to be turned around in 3 weeks. Some staff illness has meant I’ve taken on a lot more than usual, but fortunately most of it is for a module that I love teaching (Creative Music Skills).

Meanwhile, here’s the overview for the LOAM locative media platform that Simon circulated on my behalf during his recent residency at Concordia University. Development on the platform (and the lingering final bug-trapping and launch of Holbeck Audio Walk) will hopefully be happening in a fortnight!

LOAM Overview & Call for Participation [pdf]

Disembodied Narratives

It’s been fairly busy around here, preparing for the wedding along with research and some fairly demanding teaching has taken up a large portion of time recently.  I am immensely grateful to Layla for taking the lead on the wedding with her brilliant organisational skills when I was often deluged and disorientated by my workload.

However, I’ve found a bit of time to do other things over the last few weeks:

Almias app, credit: Layla Legard

First, I was honoured to be asked to be a guest speaker to students of interaction design at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, where Ben Dalton was leading a course on geolocation and mobile media. This was a great opportunity to talk about my work with Simon Bradley, the development of LOAM (more on that presently), Almias, field recording, philosophies for augmented aurality, psychogeography, audio interaction design, foklore and the challenges of recording music outdoors. A very pleasant and relaxed session that saw me come away with some new ideas and perspectives.

XETB – Three Spirits (preliminary artwork)

Next, the 19th XETB album has finally found a home and will be released early in 2013, primarily on professionally duplicated cassette. More details on this as they appear!

This frees up a bit of mental space to begin thinking about the sequel to Almias! I hope to be able to find a bit of funding so that the Almias trio can also enlist an actor or two to help us discover a spectral, (dis)embodied narrative within the Yorkshire Landscape.

Church Field by Layla Legard

Towards a Platform

The Holbeck Audiowalk app will hopefully be launched next week – just one small piece of field-testing is required. Meanwhile, I’ve been working on the next stage of the LOAM project: developing the stand-alone, open platform. I’ll post more information about the project as a whole presently, but in essence it will allow historians (oral and otherwise) as well as sound artists a straightforward and dedicated platform for creating locative audio experiences. Users will be able to create content in Google Earth as well as reading databases and transcriptions generated by Stories Matter or Transana.

Today I’ve had a successful session working on the Google Earth/KML parsing element. Paths, polygons and placemarkers (comprising sonic resources and transcription data) are all supported. Graphical overlays to follow!

Coding Holbeck

A very productive day working on the new app version of the Holbeck Audiowalk. This app contributes to prototyping work on the more complex LOAM platform by developing the ‘guide’ layer – a series of narrations (sound files) and directions (text files) which will become the uppermost layer of the locative audio-driven experiences we hope to develop in the future. The new app also implements polygons and other overlays, which will also be coupled with the interactive map points that were implemented in Almias.

Here’s a little screenshot (typo correction and textual tightening pending!) – hopefully have the first release in a fortnight and then I can begin some work on LOAM proper!