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An Ode to the SAT: Recap of SAT Fest 2024
I had the opportunity to attend SAT Fest this year, held at the Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT) in Montreal from March 21st to 25th. I am used to attending conferences here during the summer months when you can sit outside on the patio and have beers and talk with old and new friends late into the night about domes, sound, art, and life. This year I got to experience a bit of the March climate. Winter was not quite over and while it was cold and snowy outside the warmth of both the space and the people inside was unmistakable.
Defining Immersive: In the Age of Everything Immersive
“How do you define an immersive experience?” This was a question posed as I sat in front of the small but packed room of eager participants at the German Haus at SXSW. I had been spontaneously invited to sit on a panel titled Exploring Immersive Media and Creating New Social Experiences which was a part of the German Haus’ “Creative Technology” series of events. I was accompanied by Nick Meehan, (Chairman and Artistic Director at the Institute for Sound and Music), Gerda Leopold (Director and Writer for VR films at Amiluxfilm), Kevin Bacon (Composer at KBUNLTD), and Michael Cohen (Professor at the University of Aizu). This question was not unfamiliar to any of us, yet it seemed to carry an important weight. The term ‘immersive’ is becoming a 'buzzword' that many companies are beginning to include in their marketing campaigns, so much so that sometimes I find people roll their eyes when I tell them that I work with immersive technology. There are many companies using the term ‘immersive’ in various ways, some of those applications I personally would not consider immersive. So how do we define this elusive term and how do we keep the meaning of the term from getting convoluted?
Special Topic: Audio Production for Fulldome
Seven years ago, I walked into the Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science with the opportunity to experiment with the planetarium’s audio/visual system. I had just graduated with my undergraduate degree in recording arts from the University of Colorado in Denver and suddenly found myself ‘playing’ with a 15.1 channel surround system (15 individual speakers arranged around the perimeter of the dome with one sub channel for the low frequency sounds). At that time, there were no tools available to interface a digital audio workstation to such a system, so we had to build our own. One of my previous audio engineering professors had organized a group of us to be a part of an artist and technology collective we called Signal-to-Noise Labs. This collective had a shared interest in technology, new media, and experimentation and we all had a desire to push the boundaries of what was previously possible. Building on our foundations in audio engineering and with the help of one of our more computer tech savvy members we dove into learning how to use the graphical programming environment Max MSP and within a month we were flying sound around in 3-dimensional space. From then on I was hooked.
The Cube: Virgina Tech High Density Speaker Array
In the small town of Blacksburg, Virginia, the Moss Arts Center, at Virginia Tech hosts one of the worlds few high-density loudspeaker arrays called the Cube. With 139 individually addressable audio-channels positioned around a 50’ x 40’ black box theater, this space takes the concept of immersive audio to the next level. Since its initial construction in 2013 the Cube has hosted numerous artists, researchers, and technologists in a variety of contexts including live performance, scientific research, technological design, and more. By being such a unique space it challenges scientists, technologists, and artists to think outside ‘the cube’ to find new ways of researching, developing, and creating content for such an environment.
Media World
What does it mean to live in a digital culture? As I write this I am sitting in a coffee shop looking at the surrounding people all alone, drinking their coffee, typing away at their computers, just as I am doing. We are all disconnected from the world around us, lost in whatever this magical screen has to offer. If I stare at it long enough I almost feel like I would get sucked into the portal of digital space the computer’s open jaw has created… if only this damned glass wasn’t in the way. And this is our world now. It wasn’t always this way. I remember the days where computers were more of a novelty, but now they are everywhere. They are our companions and our best friends. I probably spend more time with my computer then any one person in my life.