Standing in a Field David Stout and Cory Metcalf on Noise Folding www.noisefold.com

iotronik@gmail.com

MELT (2013) – NoiseFold real time generative video and sound installation

Standing in a Field We are standing in a field of potential. An empty screen is a screen nonetheless, in that it is a frame of

expectation. The expectation, that heroic dramas, product launches or maybe even “video art” will fill its void.

A projection-mapped image falling across an urban topology becomes something else. Suggesting that the

entire world is a screen. This is no longer a frame in the conventional 2-D rectilinear sense but a near infinite

field, where the dialectic between surface and projected image hypothetically supersedes the importance of

the image(s) themselves - this idea has been keenly explored by artist, Krzysztof Wodiczko, in a socio-

political context. What does this mean to us as an environmental condition, as an extension of both the built

environment and landscape? DS

A geometric form folded through iterative feedback processes within an oscillating noise field (2008)

Up Load and Stream Down As filmmaking and video production practices have converged. As increasingly miniaturized cameras are

embedded in every conceivable device. As we share ourselves over live chat networks. As streaming video

and quick clip uploads to YouTube-Vimeo-Facebook-Vine are now commonplace - how many among us are

still willing to refer to themselves as video artists? This art world distinction is largely outmoded, as both

expensive professional and inexpensive consumer grade HD (high definition) video is used across every

conceivable discipline and demographic, culminating in ubiquitous distribution opportunities to every

available screen on the network. Video as a medium is no longer technologically or socially distinct from film

to the general public. To suggest that everyone is now a filmmaker is nearly a bland statement. The words,

video and film are used effortlessly and interchangeably without a thought that these mediums were once

distinctly different. Now we simply refer to this as a movie. It does not matter what acquisition medium was

used, if the production budget was big, small or nonexistent, or if it is playing at the cineplex or on your

phone. It is all just a movie. Movies are everywhere and being used effectively to communicate everything

from how to unclog your bathtub drain to sell designer shoes. While porn purveyors were momentarily at the

technological forefront, demonstrating the technical feasibility and commercial effectiveness of HD

streaming, it is now commonplace to sift our social media feeds for salient content, from toddler antics to

bloody street protests, to clever art works or a tour of celebrity dream homes. We are awash in content. The

sheer volume of streams raining down from “the cloud” becomes a kind of virtual extension of the built

environment, both as an added interplay with architecture and a hybrid expansion of the natural ambient

field. DS

Still frame from SignalFire, live cinema noise performance by David Stout (2004)

Another Field We are standing in a field of noise. Filtered noise is noise nonetheless. The capital Storyteller has been torn

asunder, scattered to the populous. With it, our archetypes have become like xeroxes, so like the originals,

but fragmented and faded. We tell each other stories because we can, because we always have, but we are

like children in our fathers shoes; without the storyteller, we are still figuring out how to know what they

mean. Our cell-phone videos, tweets, and mash-ups try to reassemble Osiris, but there are pieces missing.

Perhaps new archetypes and fables are waiting to emerge from the trash heap of zero-view YouTube clips,

viral cat-fails and recorded web-cams. Horus, with a screen for a head. But for now, it all feels like noise. We have the tools and capability to create almost any imaginable images or sounds and to transmit them to

countless people in near realtime. Distance is immaterial. We have redefined the boundaries of space and

time. This would have been magic at any other time in history. But how quickly magic becomes the status

quo. Normal to the point of obvious. Void of mystery. The real question then becomes, what images and

sounds will we create and in what spirit will we transmit them? What is the story of now? CM

NoiseFold performs at REDCAT (Walt Disney Concert Hall Complex) in Los Angeles (2010)

NoiseFold The name can and has been interpreted in different ways. Probably the most common association is noise

music and, by extension, dense walls of piercing industrial sounds, painful volumes, atonality, and rejection

of rhythm, meter, melody. And this is not completely wrong. David and I agree that noise music is an

influence but the deeper investigation is about the nature of noise as a perceptual phenomenon. Noise as

the absence of discernible or meaningful form within a field of stimuli. Noise as the unexpressed potential of

all possibilities. Noise as the primordial soup, the prima materia. When organized, filtered, structured or

folded, the potential becomes expressed. The process of folding the noise can cause meanings to emerge,

be clarified, amplified, or even obfuscated behind another layer. Filtering actively structures the stuff of the

universe, so that oxygen is not clay and so I end before my keyboard begins. We are all and everything just

noise, folded. NoiseFold's work dances at the edges between the familiar and the novel, seeking the spaces between, the

not-this-not-that, but almost. We question the boundaries, we shift the filters, flex the flux. Form crystallizes

out of chaos and just when you feel you can almost name it - architectonic, botanical, topological - it is

subsumed, refiltered, redefined. CM

Quantum Shake, still frame sketch from NoiseFold the performance, “Four Directions Home” (2014)

Always Sounding I am taking a pause to listen to the “room-tone” in my studio. I can hear two distinct high frequency pitches,

leaves clattering across the driveway outside and a muted truck rumble in the distance. Our environment is

now filled by hundreds of hums, intermittent noise drones and chattering machine rhythms. One just needs

to pay attention to this to discern a spectrum of close and distant sonic threads that we habitually tune out,

nonetheless this field is woven into our consciousness every minute of the day. We are quite literally

imbedded within an amalgam of noises and sounds emitted from panoply of machine sources, living beings

and natural environmental processes. Taken as a visceral condition, without hierarchical distinction, we are

both living inside of, and expressing outwardly, a conditional sonic state. DS

Noise, It’s Nothing New For years when I would visit NYC I stayed with a friend in Sunset Park near an above ground Metro station.

The call of steel on rails punctuated even the quietest moments of night, which were far from quiet. During

one visit there on my way to the Osa Peninsual in Costa Rica, the downstairs apartment owner was

sledgehammering the walls of his apartment down between the hours of 6 and 9 AM. It was a grand futurist

orchestra that would have made Luigi Russolo proud. Somehow the noise never really bothers me in the

city, but nonetheless, I was looking forward to the imagined quiet of the rainforest.

During my stay in Costa Rica what amazed me the most was not the lizards, blossoms, vines, fig trees,

dolphins, giant insects, scarlet macaws, tree-frogs, howler monkeys, spider monkeys, cane toads, toucans,

sea turtles, snakes or sloths, though these were all new to me in that way that makes you truly aware that

you are alive. What stuck with me was that even in a remote village hours from any paved roads or anything

remotely urban, the soundscape was every bit as dense as that of the city. Birdsongs of every color, buzzing

insects flitting through the open-air houses, the waves washing on the shore, monkeys howling out their

territory; everywhere I went it was the same: dense, saturated, too much to parse and unlike the familiar

sounds of the city, too new to ignore. Every sound demanded attention. When I returned to my desert home in New Mexico, I couldn’t sleep for days. CM

Auto Assembly, still frame sketch from NoiseFold the performance, “Four Directions Home” (2014)

Real Music Have you ever thought about using real music? True Confession: This question is a buzz kill though I

welcome anyone’s sincerity in asking. In fact, this one question raises many more questions. What is the

relationship of noise to music? Noise to sound? Sound to noise? These are historic questions that we can

link to the seminal Italian Futurist, Luigi Russolo and composers such as Edgard Varese and John Cage.

These ideas have been and still are being explored by composers, sound artists and even to some extent,

filmmakers. To be clear, the initial question is often posed as a kind of statement to infer a judgment; “Isn’t

music supposed to be a pleasant uplifting experience, something that you can tap your feet to?” There

should be no doubt that Cory and I entertain these questions, all of which, ask us to expand our definitions of

what music can be and what purposes music can serve. Certainly music can be used as a kind of aural

perfume and many wear their musical preference as a kind of tribal signifier (metal head vs. jazz

connoisseur vs. pop diva fan vs. any number of unfolding sub-genres). Maybe you have used music as an

aphrodisiac or as a means of sonic torture to drive the sanity from an imprisoned enemy? Music has many

different real world intentions and these intentions are never merely benign. In the ears of a critical listener

music is loaded with signifiers, whether it is sonic experimentation, culture jamming or as a reinforcement of

hegemonic cultural ideals. This inquiry gets even more interesting for us when considering the interaction

between visual form and sound. Music can be a foil to add heightened emotional significance to a filmic

narrative but it can also explore complex intellectual constructs that are neither narrative or emotional

amplifiers in the conventional sense. As a live cinema group, NoiseFold puts an equal emphasis on the aural

and the visual. We do not wish to trivialize our images by coaxing them to sing a hummable tune, rather we

are interested in imparting a visceral tangibility to these virtual images by giving them heft, weight and

tactility through sound - something that we can hear or feel with our entire corporeal being and not just filter

through a limited preset of musical pleasure centers. Occasionally our images may sing a pentatonic melody

or align in a major seventh chord, just as likely, the listener may be wound in a spike laden noise blanket that

bends and shatters into a hundred spectral fragments. DS

Rota-Weave Series (2008) - an emulation of analog video feedback processes to fold virtual planes

Noise Sifting At what point does music become noise? At what point does noise become music? It is the last question that

may be the most important to our work. Since we use the sonification of visual data as the basis of our

sound, we are constantly involved with making compositional decisions that are simultaneously auditory and

visual. We use a number of different image generation techniques including the live mixing of two or more

geometric models together and then further rearrange or sculpt them through modulated 3-D feedback

processes. The resulting sound can become quite literally white-pink-blue or jagged noise. We can filter,

tune and layer this noise in such a way that it is not merely a static artifact but instead becomes the material

basis of our explorations of sound mass, noise clouds, tuned harmonic percussion or impulse streams for

physical modeling circuits that may render more traditional harmonic structures. We constantly play with this

ebb and flow between the continuum of sound as an environmental state vs. sound as a foreground gesture.

To achieve this we typically have to perturb the visual image by putting our hands, breath, bodies into the

virtual circuit in some way. DS

Gold Spinner, still frame sketch from NoiseFold the performance, “Four Directions Home” (2014)

Live Cinema? NoiseFold makes live cinema. So is that the same as a movie? Sometimes yes and often no, but certainly

we question and explore what the new moving image art-forms can be. This comes in part from the

converging traditions of experimental film, the parallel tradition of instrumental analog video synthesis and an

art world preference for video as a means to package, display and objectify ephemeral performance art.

Moreover, live cinema provides a convenient reference to media forms that are created and/or performed

live. This might mean that preexisting photographic images or animation segments are mixed and edited

live, or it could quite literally mean that the images are developed immediately in front of an audience

through any number of technological means, from direct “hands on” drawing, painting, and manipulation of

film strips, photos or liquids to complex digital simulation systems that allow artists to generate and

manipulate the media streams through various user interface components. Live Cinema draws from diverse

historical roots, including the rich history of visual music, the development of performance oriented light

organs and elaborate theatrical projection effects, to the later efforts of artist-hacker-engineers who

envisioned and built a wide array of analog video synthesizers in the 60’s and 70’s. Live cinema also

references the larger field of possibility drawn from the broad practice of Expanded Cinema. NoiseFold, by

nature, tends to blend historic approaches and new digital techniques together. Our work utilizes simulation

and references to earlier video processing techniques to explore live cinema within a musical context. We

also reference other narrative, and theatrical influences as expressed through the kinetic, visual and

structural dramaturgy of our performances. We are not particularly interested in the live mix / re-mix

approach of creating cinema from found footage or providing a visual pastiche as an accompaniment to

music. We are, however intrigued by the give and take between autonomous processes and behaviors and

the instrumental interactions of the human performer. We are further taken with a desire to manifest these

performance works as an extension of our own bodies and as an integrated element of the physical

environment. Thus far the laptop as an instrumental interface lacks the kind of physical engagement that can

be so satisfying to the painter, dancer and acoustic instrumentalist. We continue to explore the possibilities

and imagine stepping into the simulation itself to play and touch the resonating visual bodies with a much

greater degree of virtuosity than is currently available. In this sense I see an emergence of a hybrid practice

where music, architecture, dance and cinema provide an equal impetus for creating an immersive audio-

visual form, language and embodied physical experience through the kinetic, visual and structural

dramaturgy of our performances. DS

The nFolder NoiseFold uses a custom software system, the nFolder, for all of our performances and installation works.

Developed in Max/MSP over the last nine years, the nFolder is a real time audio/visual/3D synthesizer

controllable by a wide range of possible inputs, from big data sets to midi controllers, sensor interfaces,

computer vision, and acoustic input. The system visualizes 3D geometries and stores them as 2D matrices,

much like a still image, but instead of RGB pixel values it stores the XYZ location data. The conversion of

the geometric space into standard pixel space allows the user to subject those geometries to a wide variety

of novel processing effects taken from the history of video manipulation, including video feedback,

manipulation of H/V sync, chroma and luminance keys, rotations and skewing, and many more. These

processes result in 3D forms that seem to pulse, vibrate, dance, explode, expand, contract and generally

behave in very organic ways. At the same time we are also transcoding the geometry data into sound.

Again, there are a variety of techniques, but each of them seek to create a direct relationship between the

image and sound with a sense that the forms themselves are actually vocalizing the sonic material as

opposed to simply being accompanied by music. The other layer of the nFolder is a robust networking layer

that allows either performer to send or receive data to or from the other, with the ability to delay, scale, invert

or remap it on the other end. A gesture from one performer might cause both screens to take on the same

visual forms or it might cause entirely different behaviors across screens. This shared control is further

augmented by semi-autonomy within the system itself, so that sometimes as performers we are trying to

coax a behavior out of the forms that will only arise for a moment, and other times we are trying to keep the

system in control, suppressing violent outbursts. The duet becomes a quartet, making every performance

something new, keeping us on our toes.

An early version of the nFolder software (GUI page 1 of 7)

NoiseFold performance instrument incorporates infrared sensors, foot pedals and potentiometers

Neither David nor I have any formal training in programming or 3D animation, the nFolder being our first

foray into either. While this certainly lead us to an out of the box approach to both, the earlier iterations of the

nFolder suffered from a number of extremely limiting structural choices. The system started off rather simply

with a lot of fixed relationships, so that process A always had to go through process B before getting to

process C. While this worked for us for years, we constantly added on new elements and capabilities, each

time expanding the utility but further entrenching the fixed relationships. By it’s 6th year we calculated that

we were dealing with a parameter set of almost 15,000 elements. As the platform continued to grow, these

fixed relationships began to define the ways that worked for better and for worse. Four Directions Home is the first solo performance by NoiseFold that uses the recently completed nFolder

3.0, a highly modular version of our system that offers a number of advantages: rapid reconfiguration of the

system; fewer wasted resources; no fixed signal flow limitations; improved interaction with acoustic input;

ease of integration of new modules using the nFolder SDK; vastly improved troubleshooting; modular

foundations, so that major changes to the foundation of the system are recursively applied to all modules;

simpler state saving and cataloguing of works; and much more. What excites both David and I the most about the nFolder 3.0 (and it’s previous incarnations) is the feeling of

the system as an entire platform, not just a utility. It is a novel way of generating images, sounds,

performances, movies, installations and printable objects. The system can be controlled by physical

gestures, MIDI interfaces, traditional instruments and scraped data, or it can be automated internally. It is a

wide field of play with unknown boundaries that is ripe for exploration. Entire worlds are nascent within the

system, waiting to be mapped, unearthed and translated into experience. CM

Tidal Heart (2013), a study leading to the creation of 3-screen interactive installation titled, MELT

Figure Becomes Ground In our earlier work we explored the generation, manipulation and transformation of virtual objects within an

all encompassing infinite black void. It is easy to associate this emptiness with a cosmological significance

as an allusion to “deep space” even though such literalism was not a primary intent. Instead, we were

interested in the hermetic isolation of 3D forms so that we could really focus on their performative

behavior. The empty black frame was an effective way to do this by avoiding a more complex visual field

populated with secondary pictorial elements. This compositional experiment worked well and had the added

benefit of minimizing the sense of a finite frame to provide a locked down “window on the world”. As we

pushed our material and became more familiar with the vocabulary we were creating it was a natural

outgrowth to begin to look at other visual approaches. Originally it would be hard to say just how we viewed

the illusionary scale of what we were up to. Were these microcosms or macrocosms? Had we invested the

still life with a sense of kinetic urgency suggesting that all matter is alive? Were we playing, as I have

suggested elsewhere, with a proto-synthetic life-form? Certainly we could perturb a form and watch and hear

its reaction. When we brought a surface closer to view or chose to actually travel inside of the 3D geometry

the tendency was to revert to a familiar explanation of what we were seeing and interpret this as a kind of

landscape with a sense of gravity, horizon and perspective. In a single gesture we could go from a small

group of interacting cell-like forms to move deep inside a single cell full of rising and falling topologies

suggesting a kind of vast geological time-lapse film. In more recent examples we have nurtured this idea of

visualizing a vibratory landscape, bringing it to a new level of complexity and refinement. As part of this

work we have found ourselves moving between relatively flat pictorial spaces to very pronounced 3D

topologies. The “secret” here is that we are mapping the luminance scale of 2D generative animations to

control and reinterpret the overall shape and surface of the 3D models. It is an interesting process as the 2D

movies essentially become a kind of score for extruding both sound and 3D form, as well as providing the

color pallet and texture for the resulting topological structures. After some time spent in this realm it became

obvious that we were in an interesting speculative domain, where the entire visual history of the landscape

could be referenced through a fluid realtime performative instrumental approach. While we are not interested

in a systematic attempt to quote or emulate renowned landscape painters we are, at the same time, aware

of aesthetic similarities that can spontaneously emerge in the making process. DS

Still frame sketch from NoiseFold the performance, “Four Directions Home” (2014)

Midnight Sun Twenty-four hours of sunlight - vast expanses of craggy rocks and gaping fissures blanketed in electric

green under thick fog. Only a few days into my residency in Iceland and already it began to feel normal. The

unknown, the new, is only so for moments. We are masters of compression and normalization, of fitting the

boundless into tiny boxes, of erasing clicks and pops, smoothing it all over. Selective perception, but who is

selecting?

How can we stay alert, aware, raw? How can we remember the art of truly being where we are, instead of

neither here nor there, but somewhere in between? These questions become all the more pressing when we

can be tele-present with almost anyone, anywhere, anytime. In this always on world, perhaps it should be no

surprise that twenty-four hours of sunlight is so quickly just… normal. This is one of the reasons I love making generative work, work that gives agency to the material. The

machine becomes another performer, free to make decisions of its own. In semi-autonomous systems, each

performance asks the performer to engage in actively being becoming. Like any good improvisation, it

demands that you be completely in the moment. The reward is the coaxing out of nascent behaviors as yet

unseen; the fleeting cracks where what has become familiar reveals itself as something completely new and

you are shocked into an awareness of the long now. CM