Aside from a brief post announcing our performance at SOUNDkitchen a few months back I’ve failed to actually talk about the Birmingham Laptop Ensemble (BiLE).
BiLE (Birmingham Laptop Ensemble) are a collaborative group of composers and performers of instrumental and electroacoustic music. Six artists were brought together through their shared interest in live performance and desire to perform and improvise together in an interactive ensemble.
BiLE’s core team of performers are: Julien Guillamat, Charles Céleste Hutchins, Shelly Knotts, Norah Lorway, Jorge Garcia Moncada and Chris Tarren.
BiLE regularly perform with glitch artist Antonio Roberts.
My role in the group (the supersecrit seventh member) is, where necessary, to provide visuals for their performances. Up until now I’ve been using various versions of a video mixer built in Pure Data to do my visuals. This has worked and I’ve used it to create this video for Electroacousitc Sonata No.1 for Cello by Julien Guillamat:
For future performances I want to compose visuals in the same way that they do with audio. For example, for some pieces each member is able to control certain parts of the software being used by another member by sending messages via OSC over a wireless network. I’ve recently figured out how to join this network so now I’ll be using their data to affect the visuals. I also want to use a Wiimote and Kinect in some way, but I’ll have to work on that.
BiLE will be performing next at NIME in Oslo, Norway (without me) on 31st May 2011. After that we have an easer-to-get-to gig in Wolverhampton. More on that soon…