John Granzow, Hongchan Choi, Michael Granzow, Denton Frederickson, Laura Steenberge.
A Deckle is the wooden frame imposing its rigid geometry on the paper maker's slurry of pulp. We like the word. It sounds percussive, and the object it refers to functions to make from a fibrous soup a square medium of information: the page, the print, the pixel, the quantization of flux. Yes, a stretch, but it evokes the digital side of our work.
We draw on a bugged box! It is an electro-acoustic instrument that interacts with downstream electronics to augment the drawing sounds. In a feedback of visual and acoustic textures.
Making marks gives way to percussion, a transfer of interest from fast periodicity (light) to slow periodicity (sound). We hope to perform where these two preoccupations are equally at play.
The outcome is hand-ear as much as hand-eye. The process foregrounds the sound of an otherwise visual activity. The drawing is now tied more to its temporal process, the way a score might be tied to a remembered performance. Not rare forms of synaesthesia, but ubiquitous ones: The common visual / auditory imagination where we imagine, for example, the sonic past of a silent heap of rubble, or the now vanished sound of heavy rain in the silent specks of flung paint. Visual works, silent and sounding.
We design, build and perform on electroacoustic drawing boards. These surfaces are augmented with various sensors and microprocessors. Piezo microphones are used in conjunction with other sensors to produce sounds that are coupled tightly to mark-making gestures. Position tracking is achieved with infra-red object tracking, conductive fabric as well as magnetometers.
The signals from the sound board become inputs to filtering and sound synthesis. To process the inputs from the sound board, we use the ChucK Audio Programming Language. Pieces are composed by thinking of how both the sound envelope and the visual trace/drawing will unfold in tandem.