more from Toronto

Report from Toronto

I landed on Monday and jumped right into activities at NAISA. Most of the week was dedicated to a hand wound coil workshop. I showed some coils I, explained the basic theory of electro-magnetism and got everyone that wanted to build a simple solinoid, a pick-up and an output device. The end of the workshop included the demo of a super hacked electronic bow playing a one stringed instrument made out of a broken microphone stand. One of the participants made a coil that could pick up electro-magnetic fields radiating from electronic devices like hand drills, electric wiring, cell phones and computers. Very cool sounds.

New Adventures in Sound Art

Amongst all the other things I have been up to are the preparations to participate in a residency in Toronto with the NAISA folks August 4-9. I'll be giving a workshop on how to build electro-magnetic coils for sound art based applications, running the Kite Lab, giving an artist talk on wind coil sound flow at the Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium 2009 , and hopefully giving a performance, Against the Wind. I write hopefully because it's an outdoor event and very dependent on the weather conditions. Never the less , weather permitting, I will be out at Sir Winston Churchill Park almost daily running the Kite Lab , so folks will be able to catch Against the Wind in some form or another.

Report from Jack Pine

The Boreality Project continued with our Summer trip to the forest. We had planned to go to Bloodvein Reserve on the east side of Lake Winnipeg but when we got to the the ferry crossing on the west side of the lake, the ferry couldn' t run due to the super choppy water conditions. We had to re-jig our plan rather than head back to Winnipeg. So we turned back and went in search of the Jack Pine Lodge near Pine Dock. We eventually found it, checked in and figured out what we were doing for the week. There was a lot of rain, grey skies, mosquitos, and windy conditions, but we managed to fill out the week with hikes into the bush, lots of discussion, making fires, wild strawberry picking and eating together. I spent a lot of time trying to find interesting forest sound elements to record. The rain soaked days I spent reviewing and editing the Spring trip recordings and a jam session we had at Sids place. I also worked on some soundscape ideas using some elements from the Spring sessions. A very good week.