Audiovisual Collaboration: Building & Performing with Konx-Om-Pax And Hamill Industries

CAMP is a residential arts facility in the French Pyrenees. It's a place where great art is made, new movements are formed, new ideas are explored and groundbreaking people are nurtured. CAMP is located in Aulus les Bains, the last village before the France/Spain Pyrenean frontier chain. The location is spectacular - we are nestled at 750m above sea level, surrounded by snowcapped peaks over 3000m high, ancient forests and cascading waterfalls. There are eagles, lammergeiers, vultures, ibex and bears. Walk out of the residency, and within ten minutes you are completely alone in one of the most beautiful mountain landscapes in Europe. Aulus les Bains is also a spa village - there are hot water springs, and a thermal spa in the village to take advantage of the healing and relaxing properties of the water.
    
Workshop dates: 21/06/2023 - 2023-06-26
    
In 2022, we carried out our first AV workshops - sessions aimed at musicians interested in adding visual dimensions to their work, visual/installation artists interested in delving into sonic elements, and anyone with an interest in exploring the space where audio and visual arts meet, whether in a live performance, installation or studio/workshop environment.

We're developing this program in 2023 with another groundbreaking AV workshop, this time led by rave futurist Tom Scholefield aka Konx Om Pax, and mix-media artists Pablo Barquin and Anna Diaz, aka Hamill Industries.

For Tom (aka Konx Om Pax), the language of design and music production crosses over. As a producer, he’s released two LPs on Planet Mu, the first of which was a resolutely melancholy and grainy take on pastoral IDM, shaped by living alone in Glasgow. The result of a move to Berlin and subsequent embrace of more rave-tinged signatures, his later releases (Caramel and Refresher) present a fresh take on advanced dance music that is hard to tame. Saturated neon colours, classic ’80s sci-fi and early modernist cues are recurrent themes in a vivid aesthetic that's instantly recognisable and helps shape the looks of Oneohtrix Point Never, Hudson Mohawke and Kuedo.

Hamill Industries is a creative studio partnership composed of skilled film directors, inventors, and mix-media artists Pablo Barquin and Anna Diaz. Their body of work focuses on marrying computerized, robotic, and video techniques to explore concepts from nature, the cosmos, and the laws of physics. They work across multiple mediums including TV advertising, music videos, art installations and live performance. Their work has been recognized internationally in specialized publications (such as DJ MAG, It's Nice That, RA, Deezen, and The Creators Project) and awards such as the GRAND LAUS 2019, LAUS d'OR 2015 and special mentions in the STARTS PRIZE AWARD 2016. Since 2015, they've been touring with Floating Points creating visual performances, and have presented their work at festivals and institutions such as SÓNAR Festival, ARS Electronica, Semipermanent, and the Barbican in London. They've worked for brands such as Converse, Diesel, MTV, Barcelona Football Club and the Contemporary Arts Museum of Barcelona (MACBA).

Anna & Pablo's section of the workshop is deeply intertwined with the landscape - during their days, you'll learn how to create your own automated timelapse rigs. Anna & Pablo will teach you how to build and program a rig that can move a DSLR camera with Arduino, and adjust the settings to capture (in a very Hamill way) the nature that surrounds us. They'll encourage participants to create rigged still-life setups and observe and capture the beauty of plans through the camera lens by exploring different illumination techniques (use of multipass photo, UV light or Infrared) to enhance the visual properties. This section of the workshop will provide you with the tools and knowledge you need to build your own automated timelapse rig and capture the beauty of nature through a creative perspective.

Tom's section of the workshop will introduce Touchdesigner, and how to implement Ableton Live into the workflow to create real-time audio-visual content. The first morning will be an overview of the user interface within Touchdesigner before we move on to take a look at the AbletonTD package within Touchdesigner, its various components, and how to interface with Ableton (including using midi, audio and clip data from Ableton to influence parameters within Touchdesigner). Finally, we'll focus on building a simple audio-visual work that mixes generative patterns and movie clips powered by musical data from Ableton.