Fish Population Tracking & Sound Art all swim together at 'Sound 2 Light'.

The music and art event 'Sound 2 Light' was held at the Long Gallery Salamanca Arts Centre on September 20, 2011, it was the second iteration of an evening of cross media collaborations which transformed Salamanca Arts Centre into a hive of performance and installation. Curated by Jason James & Christopher Norman 'Sound 2 Light' was an exploration in collaboration and process through the combination of sonic and temporal practice. Artists involved in the fields sound and light were matched together and given two months to create creative projects and partnerships. 'Sound 2 Light' pairs local sound artists and musicians with visual art practitioners who create a one off work for a one night only event in Tasmania. 'Sound 2 Light' 2011 is a part of the Amplified Festival, for the second year running, it combines an eclectic mix of contemporary artists involved in experimentation with emergent technologies and live performance tools.

To the right we can see an install shot of a particpant interacting with the work 'Jelly Fish Soup' that was featured at Sound 2 Light 2011 by Nick Smithies & Adam Walker. 'Jelly Fish Soup' was an interactive installation, combining audio and animation, that was a part of the 5 different installations and performances for the event.

Nick Smithies and Adam Walker collaborated on 'Jelly Fish Soup' a sound and visual installation, which included a custom built interface where the audience were invited to manipulate the knobs and buttons to influence the animations behaviour and add to the sound scape. The entities who existed within the visual element of the piece were projected in the space as an animation, Nick Smithies the musician side of the work explains that "The sound scape controlled the behaviour of these Jelly Fish entities, in the sense that it changed the way that they interacted with each other and also the way that they existed in terms of the life cycle within the 3D environment we created."

On the night the work was popular with both children and adults, including Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) employees who were interested in the work as it had similarities to the techniques they use in current oceanography research. Nick Smithies explains that "The work had strong computer game elements and a lot of interactive and work experience people from CSIRO were used for tracking fish populations. It was good to see that we made something that could be extended to other uses and had other possibilities".

Nicholas Smithies is a Tasmanian artist and musician who is currently completing a degree in Time Based Multimedia at University of Tasmania. Involved with music from an early age through choirs and school bands, Nick played around Hobart in several smaller rock and pop bands in his teenage years before discovering electronic dance music. Moving to Melbourne in 2007 Nick immersed himself in the music scene there and started to practice DJ mixing and electronic music production. Nick studied Sound Production at SAE College in Melbourne in 2003 and then in 2006 returned to Tasmania to study electronic media. Currently Nicks interests include computer/real world interfacing, reactive installation, aleatoric music constructed from found data sets, electronic performance tools and machine interaction. One of Nick’s proudest achievements to date is learning to play John Cage’s work 4’33” on every major orchestral instrument. Nicks online artwork repository is found at: http://www.nicksmithies.org

Establishing Adam Walker Film in 2001, Adam Walker’s studio delivers animation and production expertise to commercial, corporate and short drama arenas. Operating from Australia’s island state capital Hobart, the studio works with agencies and production companies locally, domestically and globally. In 2006 Adam Walker produced and directed the animated short film Sam and Piccolo. The animated fairytale received widespread praise being official selected for over 65 international film festivals and winning 9 international awards. In 2010 Adam Walker produced the short film 'The Room at the Top of the Stairs', directed by Briony Kidd. The project was embraced, both by key creatives and the state film agency, as a prototype for similarly styled and scaled feature production in Tasmania. With a focus on producing high quality content Adam Walker believes an ongoing incremental establishment of professional production expertise is the most sustainable approach for production in Tasmania.
You can find more about his studio and work at: www.awshub.com and www.adamwalkerfilm.com

Fish Population Tracking & Sound Art all swim together at 'Sound 2 Light'.