Ant Dickinson

Today we had a workshop with North Wales based musician, sound designer and technologist Ant Dickinson who works with unconventionally applied instrumentation and computer processes integrating elements of improvisation, indeterminism and destruction. After studying Popular music at Salford Uni he then went into teaching technology for 9 years. He was also massively into jazz and electronic music and begun to write his own music. In 2010 Ant decided that he wanted to leave the teaching aspect and instead begin to work on creative projects. He started to work with his friend to produce the music within feature films such as "Dark Waters" and showed us ways in which he recorded the water sounds and the technologies he used to do so. Such as Impulse Response recording, contact microphone and scanning electronic microscope. with his wife also being a visual artist they both collaborated to project at a festival at Conwy castle. (see video below) Many of their collaborations were involved with 3D Projection Mapping which I am really interested in using within my work so this definitely did appeal to me. In the afternoon we begun to use Audacity which is a multi-track audio editor and recorder. After collecting some fairground related sound clippings from sounddogs.com I then played around with the effects such as pitch, reverb,fading in and out and playing the sound in reverse. I really enjoyed Audacity and would be great if I was able to use this within my final piece.




Some other software we touched up on within the afternoon workshop was Adobe After Effects, this is what Ant has used many of times within his video footage, and is a good way to manipulate photographs or video stills to make them look like they are moving. I am now going to take this process forward and try and include some of the techniques within the video that i will produce. I am also going to download Mad Mapper and try and get to grips with projection mapping, even though I doubt I will have time to produce this for the exhibition.

The last software we touched up on in the workshop was Pure Data. Which is a visual programming language similar to Max MSP. This can be used for synthesis, sound design, audio processing as well and manipulation and triggering of programmed visuals, video and still images. External hardware such as Arduino can also be programmed for interactivity. I also begun to write my own simple code in Pure Data.

Overall I found Ant Dickinson's workshop highly influential and will definitely be taking many of the techniques I learnt forward within my Textiles Practice. however, I feel like it is a shame that this workshop wasn't at the beginning of the course as I would have really liked to include some of the processes within my final exhibition piece but is now unlikely I will have enough time to do so.