Gatwick.
I missed my train from London.
He left at 4am and got there early.
This tells a lot about who we are.
(He was, I must say, not surprised)

Reflecting on these past few months, I realize that what has moved me most – because of its unexpectedness, is the nature of collaboration itself. Beyond authorship and choreography, performance and technology. Beyond what we had set ourselves up to discover…

But this is not (really) about that.

Onwards with Budapest.
—————————

Tuesday

We arrive at an uncharacteristically calm KIBU, where we were given the tour and handed the keys to our (amazing) flat. And although courtyards seem to be a banal architectural affection to locals, we feel like royals. We both have rooms with doors.

Wednesday

Patiently awaiting our turn to speak at the weekly team meeting, we are pleased to hear a familiar ‘hey guys!’ amongst the Hungarian chatter. A few (20) minutes to describe the project later, we find a desk, a wifi passcode and reboot the piece.

KIBU is alive, filled with dismembered robots and knowing makers. Absolutely welcoming.

We had left Amsterdam with We Are Forests running on an Asterisk phone system and the desire to move things along the open source hardware route. Objects soon to be part of the internet of things.

We had also been meaning to revise our working schedule, as 10-18 – we found out the hard way, is more depressing then useful. Myself being mostly grumpy until 12.

Happy beginnings.

Thursday

KIBU is hosting a noise workshop. This is driving us completely mad, but we remain focused and enjoy the happening. Noise is good.

Yet an escape to the great market hall allows for food and illuminations.
And we fall in love.
For…

‘high above your head, iron struts hold up the arching orange roof.
light floods in from the hundreds of square glass panes,
illuminating the infinite pattern of pale and darker tiles lining the alleyways.’
- We Are Forests (rethink_v03)

This piece had found its public space. A market.

Friday

Duncan is ill.

The weekend…

is spent battling illnesses and writing new structures on post-its.

We (mostly) talk about the market, and the adjacent bridge, about the reverence of cathedrals and feeling like a guest in a space.

We devise choreographies, and imagine stories beyond walls.

We think about crowds and lost intimacies, about the sited and the specific.

We remember the busker in the Amsterdam square, who played out of tune (with the piece in our ears).
In the end we had given him money to listen to our mp3 and play accordingly.
And it was beautiful. An unperfected bleed between We Are Forests and, well… this is your (real) life.

And Sunday night…

we meet Lawrence.

Lawrence is a friend of a friend, a brilliant musician and british expat living in Pest. He takes us to a local jazz bar, where the ‘chef’s favourite soup’ is followed by Pàlinka.

We tell Lawrence about the busker, and ask him if he knows a singer with the balls to perform the audience contributions in the market, a cappella, at a key moment in the piece.

He says: sure!

And that singer is now Lawrence.

As of Monday…

We geek out on Gumstix.

Duncan fires up the engines (with Tim, live from Dublin), writing up PD patches and lines of Linux to make sense of it all.

And I ponder.
‘What would you whisper in a stranger’s ear?’…
What if this piece was ever really meant to connect only two people within a crowd?

Our phone system was built with the gall to connect as many participants as possible, creating a choir-like narrative layered onto public spaces in real-time.

But what of this second piece? The object-based – more intimate piece… Could we actually change all the rules?

I travel the city and find a tin music box that László happily takes apart to find room for the Gumstix. The top tier sounds like the creepy ‘eye wide shut’ score, and I make scary faces while winding the handle. And leave it at that.

Lawrence visits with Dori to rehearse the a cappella moment. We hand them mp3 players and imagined bits of narrative. And as they sing of lost sisters and broken windows, we finally hear the piece. Whole. And everyone applauds.

Meanwhile, Arjan (the great) is still hacking away at the Asterisk phone system and connected web interface, as we’ve sent him weird structure diagrams he must now make sense of. And all the way from Amsterdam, we receive pings and urls with progress updates and eventually, a final product.

With the Gumstix alive, the phone system kicking and our three producers flying into town, we are ready for our first market test.

Friday (today)

We test.

Duncan meets Lawrence and Dori at the market while I explain the rules to our willing participants.

Phones in hand, we make our way through the busy streets, and into the even busier market. It’s almost 12 and locals are stuffing themselves with cabbage as tourists fill their shopping bags with souvenirs.

And as our system now allows for calling out instead of in, we hit play, and mobiles start to ring.

‘Welcome to We Are Forests. Press 1 to start’

In the Panorama bar, on the top tier of the building, Lawrence and Dori are scribbling down participants’ contributions as they are being recorded in real-time on the lower level.

‘Strawberries. Sausages. A giant lamp.’

Duncan pushes the narrative and instructions sound files as I walk along, recording wild sound with my ‘chic white’ project phone.

The choreography seems to be working. People are navigating the space as planned.

‘we’d like you to be part of the crowd again,
because this moment was never just for you

make your way back downstairs to the central walkway of the market.’
- We Are Forests (rethink_v05)

The singers are now facing each other in the centre of the market. From the top floor, we hear the lower chords of Lawrence’s song. But the space is giant and to notes are lost.

And as the piece finishes, and participants make their way to find us. We hope for the best. The tech system worked flawlessly, but what of the stories? of the intentions?

The feedback is good, helpful. Our newest canvas is understood, and people are moved.
…

Now what?

This last leg comes with a deadline.

We are pleased to finish the residency in Bristol, as it feels like the project will be returning from a long journey abroad. Yet the timetables are tight, and we’ll only have a few days to re-write the script for the space, and show and tell. And then there is Future Everything…

But we are here. And here is great.

‘let us take this moment and remember it
so that we can see change
and know if we are moving forward
let us build a document of now
for the sake of comparison’
- We Are Forests (rethink_v05)

Dear Emilie,

It’s good to be back on the project and exciting to be in a new city. Kibu is such an active space, a big shift from the meditative calm of the NiMK artlab. Once again we’re resettling in a new world and just like the last two venues it’s amazing how welcome we’ve been made to feel. Have you noticed how the drive of the institution affects our workflow and interests.

The fact I’ve thrown myself at programming and microcomputers is definitely inspired by the fact we’re surrounded by wires, robots and geeks. We said that we’d make an effort to change our working patterns for this leg of the residency, and in this second week it’s definitely happened. How are you finding the late start very late finish? I enjoy the fact that during the day there’s a lot of people and discussion but then it becomes easy to focus once it calms down in the evening.

I’m glad we’re still exploring two systems (phone + gumstix) and I especially like the suggestion you made to turn the gumstix branch into a two person experience. It makes sense to me to explore the intimacy/public space question as a one-to-one experience, it’s a good counterpoint to the multiple participant space of the phone system. I like where you’re going with the idea of the music box as an object to contain the technology, do you think there’s a risk it has too many nostalgic connotations? The music box itself looks good, if somewhat overly scary . . .

It’s been interesting to rework the script for the phone piece too, delving into the details of intonation and suggestion, trying to keep it poetic while still remaining pragmatic about how to shape the contributions and choreography of the audience.

I’m looking forward to today’s first proper test of the phone system. I’ll write more afterwards.

regards

duncan

here’s the new web interface Arjan has concocted for the phone version of We Are Forests

I’m unclear as to where to start.
I was meant to go home, but I lingered instead.
We parted on a cold morning, near the invisible recycling bins.
This was 13 days ago.
………………………………………………………

Since we’ve decided to take some distance from the project, I feel almost every sentence and every thought spill out of the place in my body were We Are Forests lives.

This is what you’ve missed.

In Amsterdam…

I became obsessed with the archived voice, even though most of it broke my heart. {http://bit.ly/hsn4Bq}

We broke up with cloud API start-ups (you know who you are) to build our own open source wonder. {http://bit.ly/eSAcHp}

We traveled to Belgium to be led around a museum in headphones and blindfolds. {http://bit.ly/ieCbo4}

We adopted a square, with a courtyard beyond and a name we (still) can’t pronounce. {http://bit.ly/fxrzL3}

We asked you to leave us voicemails, which you didn’t do and we got slightly upset. {http://bit.ly/hYCkMj}

I read about the Fukushima reactor collapse whilst sat in the Trans-Natural symposium (and was suddenly thankful to work with melancholic sound and not creepy futuristic bacteria). {http://bit.ly/bqsK2o}

I listened to the Sounds of Montréal and felt a sudden gash to the heart. (‘Lonely lonely that was you’) {http://bit.ly/epzts7}

We devised a new scheme in which we remove an audience from their home town for two months, play them police radio and make them weep. {http://bit.ly/CbKLY}

Instead, we curated a structure and gently extorted stories from an audience. And as he fought with writing music for phone lines, he later payed a busker to play our track live during the final show. And it was beautiful.

Then he found the kill switch and I raised the flag.

………………………………………………………

I’m unclear as to where to start.
I was meant to go home, but I lingered instead.
We are meeting on the Gatwick Express platform, heading for Budapest.
This is two days from now.

PS. We also came up with a safe word to ensure we would remain friends, and remember to laugh. {http://bit.ly/cXkvIg}

so we head into our last week with renewed vigour and a pick-up of the pace . . .

We ‘ve planned for a couple of live trials so monday is a day of site recces and we finally choose Spui square.
Today’s point of discussion was about research methods and the value of the everyday. Should you always research the history/legacy of a place when creating a work that will be experienced there? Does a deeper understanding of the past let you write better for the present, or should you just observe and react to what you can experience for yourself.
We attempt a mixture of both and begin to sculpt a rough structure for the work, a series of ‘frames’ for the participants contributions to sit within.
We start with the cinematic, a description of the buildings and a wider view of the location. Inspired by an episode of ‘this american life’ where a postman talks about what he knows (and guesses!) about the occupants of the houses he delivers to, we begin to incorporate fictions around the people who may be in the houses. The text then continues a wide circular description, drifting over the places beyond the wallsm the places you can’t see, before returning to the square.
This is followed by a series of framed sections that shiftfrom one mood to another, eventually pushing outwards and reversing back around the original circular description.
Each of our frames sets up a way of ‘thinking’ but we know from past tests that this isn’t quite enough to guide the vocalised contributions of the audiemce, so we plant ‘seeds’, scripted contributions from fictional participants. We also add a section of music, to add a break in the soundspace. On top of all this we try out Arjan’s new software for the first time., allowing us to move away from the conference call mode and have the individual contributions recorded and then played out to the rest of the people taking part, queing them one after the other and removing the layers of noise.
So with all these new things to test . . . . it of course goes completely wrong and we have a serious technical failure! Undeterred we revert to out conference call mode but include the new frame structures.
I don’t really feel we learnt much about how the piece worked, but we definitely reminded ourselves that testing too many things in one go can be difficult!

Some tinkering from Arjan and a dash of re-writing by us leads to our next (and final) test on Thursday.
This one begins much more successfully, people respond well to the seeds, but it’s clear we aren;t shifting the tone enough from one to the other.
We had tried to start incorporating some physical choreography, encouraging them to go to locations that they’d heard described by others, or maybe to find the other contributors. This wasn’t strong enough and didn’t give enough drive to move with purpose. needs a bit of a re-think.
The sense of connection between people is obvious, but we are still working with a group that know each other (or at least were all together at the start of the test), so it’s still hard to guage how people would speak if they didn’t know who they were talking to.

A small addition to the music also created some expected and unexpected results. On the tuesday there had been a busker in the square playing violin beautifully but incrediblly loudly, and rudely he had chosen not to play in the same key as the music we were playing to our audience, causing an uncomfortable soundclash. When I arrived to set up with Arjan on Thursday the busker re-appeared, so I jumped at the opportunity to try something I’d been thinking about for a while. A short conversation in broken english + spanish convinced him to become involved in our piece. I gave him an mp3 player to hide in his pocket, for the majority of our test he just played as usual, a fixture in the environment for the audience, but then when they started hearing our recorded music in their ears the violinist suddenly shifted his playing to duet with it, a beautiful bleed between the unpredictable (real? hmmm) and the choreographed.
This created some strange experiences for the audience, as much as the bleed was slightly magical for them, they also suddenly brought the busker and his audience into the narrative of the piece, building a story around people they now thought were all ‘in on it’.

We had intended to try out an addition to the ‘circular’ structure, where towards the end of the piece we began to playback contributions people had left, but play them in reverse order, tracing their way back to the start of the piece, to see if simple, lightweight early contributions take on more importance once the audience has gone through the experience, and their contribution becomes a memory of that space, and when they hear other peoples whether they reflect on what they were doing/thinking when they first heard it. Sadly it turned out we had a hidden kill switch on the phone, which I accidentally pressed and it shut down the entire system! oh how we laughed!

Once I thought we might be getting somewhere with the phone system and decided that we may draw on the power of music in the piece, I started experimenting with music through IP phonelines. oh joy!We all know phone quality is bad, but through these software systems it gets even worse. The funniest thing is that the compression/filtering systems that they seem to use create the kind of sound processing that electronic musicians spend all their time working with. Sending a bit of Maria Callas through a Tropo conference call leaves it sounding like an Autechre b-side, sadly sending an Autechre b-side through it doesn’t end up operatic.  This is going to create some limitations for us but at the same time we can play with what it offers us, the fragile breaking up of musical strains.
The evening saw a visit to a local exhibition ( of the local Dogtime course )and a chance encounter courtesy of my friend Marieke. A friend of hers happened to be experienced with using Asterisk (the open source phone system we wanted to use), plus he was an artist, worked with the fantastic Mediamatic, and was interested in our project, ladies and gentleman, let me introduce our new project collaborator, the wonderful Arjan Scherpenisse

With Dan away in SXSW I set to work tackling Tropo, after successfully setting up an answering machine service I began to drill into our conference muting/unmuting problem.

Spending a while in IRC chatrooms with their technical and customer support teams we eventually got news that a new development build would be released the following week, so we should sit tight.

It was also the time we realised the power of twitter baiting, especially with new competing start-up companies! Mention one complaint/bug about a company on twitter and before you know it the company is replying to you and offering to sort out problems, then the other companies chime in with their own services and offers of even ‘more’ support.

Sometimes they can be a bit over zealous in their monitoring if twitter though. In one case we had been testing things with Twilio (a competitor service to Tropo) and found problems with their international phone support, we emailed their helpline but got no response, but then we mentioned the problem on twitter and got an @reply from them saying, ‘we can help, just send us an email’

- guys, sometimes it’s worth checking your email before you check your twitter mentions!

As we were going to be working with some realtime sound processing (on the gumstix) it felt right to go back into a bit of research, specifically into rjdj, definitely the most known and commercially available realtime sound processing ‘experience’.I’d like to forword these thoughts with my absolute love and respect for rjdj and the people behind it, I love what they/it are offering to composers/artists/musicians/audiences, and there are some great outcome so far, but ….
the constant frustration for me with many of the rjdj experiences is their lack of structure. They have a strong novelty factor but there rarely seems to be any thought about the possibilities of narrative.

One work (‘a tool to experience the city’) suggests so much but in the end falls in to the trap of just being a set of random sound processing (looping, resonating, echo-ing) the sounds around you),  the possibilities for structuring the processing over time woudl give it the drive of a composed experience, rather than a random drift, which although often rewarding, doesn’t ever ‘say’ much.
We tried the ‘Inception’ app,  which has been highly publicised and successful.  For me it’s greatest strength is the use of music and the fact that it’s clear about ‘when’ it shifts into different processing modes and musical shades. The fact you unlock different modes also lends it some form of narrative structure. I have to say I was a bit surprised by the cheesy bubbling melody that accompanies entering the ‘dream state’, i felt more like some cheesy 60′s sci-fi moment rather than Hans Zimmer’s stunning film score. (c’mon Hans, you worked on this application!).

Some of this led to me thinking about the physical narrative of our piece, similar to the way we’d moved the Bristol test group from College Green to inside the Cathedral, I started mapping out spaces and ways we could move our ‘participants’ from one to the other.

When we finish this project I’m definitely going to write a narrative time-based experience using the rjdj system.
Our other research carried on into how simple layering of music and voice can be a powerful tool. (not that we didn’t know this already of course)One wonderful experience available online is the ‘you are listening to …’ series, From cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Montreal you can listen to a live stream of police radio mixed together with ambient music by local composers.

What is essentially mundane material combines to create a melancholy and richly atmospheric experience. I searched around for similar radio streams in the UK and only managed to find some CB radio enthusiasts in a shed somewhere just outside london, I tried mixing it with some of my own compositions, but somehow ‘you are listening to Essex’ didn’t have the same mood as north American emergency service calls.

After the heady days of 5daysoff and our varied workshops we got back to digging through some of the conceptual frameworks and opportunities our project offered.  Here’s some of the questions that drifted around

-What’s the difference between privacy and intimacy?

-What does it mean to work with a phonecall?

- What are the assumptions we make when talking on the phone, the quality of voice lets us know it’s a phone, and background sound lets us know the location of the person on the other end. The other common assumption is that it’s one-to-one communication, whereas the intention of our project is to connect numerous people, how will this change the way you speak/listen.

- What happens when all messages are ‘recorded’ as opposed to live?- As we planned to base our phone system around queued audio (i.e. not a live conference, but a system where your input is recorded and ‘then’ played out to everyone) we decided to start researching phone messages, how do we speak when we know the message will be heard later?
We also took this time to realise that there were two clear routes we wanted to explore (mobile phone based and/or custom electronics), and decided we didn’t have a clear answer so decided to develop in parallel and see which was the most useful output for this residency. Both systems bring their own qualities/potentials and therefore would create two very different works, as opposed to the ‘best’ solution to this project.

We also spent this time with Dan trying to push Tropo into a shape we could use for testing, sadly no luck there as bugs still prevented us being able to have a conference call in whcih participants could mute/unmute themselves (we thought this would be a solution to the huge washes of ambient sound that fill the call if 10 people are connected in an outdoor space)
We also took some time to meet with Rachel Feuchtwang, who reminded us what a leap of faith it was for us to undertake this new collaboration which involved living/working together for almost 3 months. It was a bit of a wake-up call to remember that this was really our first proper collaboration and we were putting our friendship and working relationship on the line.

5daysoff, 1 day later

The adrenaline rush wasn’t lurking behind the Artslab door this morning. It was quiet. It was weird.

(The re-purposed hospital bracelets have been cut off from around our wrists.)

We have talked, engaged, asked and answered questions. We’ve invented sound machines and played street games. We’ve finally found Dam Square – where a Hunter was taking his Princess into the woods.

This is (also) We Are Forests.