BEDROOMLAB: Why numbers make sound?

We had our bedroomlab session at the Carlos Celdran's living room. Celdran who is Manila's most famous tour guide was kind enough to host our geek out sessions at his pad. The apartment, North Syquia is a pre-WWII apartment (hence the wooden floor bed) and we've had a couple of sessions here before. Carlos hosts foreign artists and professionals in one of the rooms and the place has been hosting parties, meetings, and such for years. The Living Room has also hosted five of our artists during SABAW's new media art symposium, ASEUM last year, July 2009.

Initial discussions

Beckett shaking the hands of the incoming visitors

For the first presentation, we had Tad Ermitano and Jing Garcia, original members of the seminal sound art band, The Children of Cathode Ray, talk about their experiences throughout the years since their early formation back in the late 1980s. It was quite interesting to see and hear so much untold history in the media art scene in Manila during the 90s. 
Un Escargot Vide? is a multifaceted project of Sebastien Szczyrk, a sound and visual artist, and traveler. He showed his stop animation video and played music on top of it. His music, very much drawn from field recordings evoke a kind of experimental performance that vaguely resemble a fragmented audio narrative. Sounds are absorbed by our earlaps as image-like frames to audience’s cerbral cortex -- truly worthy of the term "Cinema for the Ear.

(L-R) Jing Garcia and Tad Ermitano

Un Escargot Vide? [FR] stop animation

Electronic musicians Kijjaz and Benz (Space360) are both from Thailand. Their complex yet informative presentation puredata for electronic music was inviting enough for some of the audience who weren't exposed to realtime audio processing, let alone software programming. Kijjaz at times acted and spoke as if having qualities of a Buddhist monk instructing the complex secrets of life: very Zen. Benz, an active electronic music organizer and producer talked about the condition of the electronic music scene in Bangkok and Changmai, which was as fertile as the electronic music scene here in Manila. 

Kijjasak Triyanond talks about the PureData (Pd) practice in Bangkok

Game designers and media artists, Luis Hernandez Galvan from Mexico and Anne Marie Schleiner talked about their quirky yet complex video games they made out of boredom. After showing us various projects, Anne Marie let the audience try out her game which was a quirky take on hiphop and rap, was a bit reminiscent of Masaya Matsuura's Parappa The Rapper (PS1) but more hilarious and actually fun to play with. The point of the game was to cue in the right words on beat and as you go on, lsd-inducing graphic cubes and shapes would swirl all over the screen, making it a bit challenging. (The game is not recommended for people with drug addiction). http://www.opensorcery.net/

Luis' crazy take on the 3D Tron game was also mind-boggling. You can download the games and check out his other work here: http://ungravity.org/ 

Luis Galvan from Mexico showing his computer games and interactive motion graphics projects

Anne Marie Schleiner

AV OPEN JAM! 

Electrojam between Malek Lopez (PH), Luis Galvan (MX) / 1escV? (FR), Space360 (TH), Kijjaz (TH)

Kijjaz and Luis having their favorite beer always close to them

BEDROOMLAB family shot. Back Row: (Tengal, Malek, Beckett the dog, Kijjaz, Luis, Tad, Jing, Benz, Terence) Front Row: Sebastien (1escV?), Carlos Celdran, Chesca, and Bianca -- the two angels of WSK!

Video post will be up soon!

Photo credits by Advocacy Photographers (Cherry Madriaga and Shale Albao)

We'd like to thank BIGTOP Media for the video documentation and Carlos and Tesa Celdran for their kind hospitality!