Tim Cowie
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Super Everything*

In July 2014 we were commissioned by WIRED Magazine to create a new interactive media art installation as part of  Bentley Motors Night Call event in the historic Wind Tunnels at Farnborough Airport. This prestigious event celebrated British design and engineering excellence with the launch of Bentley’s new Continental GT V8 S. This was the building where Bentley had tested its original V8 powered car design back in 1957 and the building had been abandoned for many years and only recently opened up for events. We instantly fell in love with the building and its history, however it was a very quick turnaround for such a large scale project and our ideas had to be achievable in a short time frame.

Our response to this challenge was to explore the relationship between sound, space and energy while referencing the building’s long history of aeronautical design and engineering.The resulting piece was a sound reactive video installation built with custom software in Openframeworks that uses a realtime fluid dynamics engine to distort and manipulate a set of vector fields. We designed and developed this custom software to allow us to visually map this huge space and to create a playful interactive piece that would engage the audience at the event while they walking through the tunnel.

We used a set of six 20k Full HD Christie projectors with very wide angle lenses to cover the walls and ceiling of the tunnel in three separate bands along the lengh of the space. Each of these arches of light contained a pair of Naim Audio speakers and a pair of vocal microphones at their bases. As the software generated different virtual energy forces that slowly moved down the space, the audience were encouraged to interact with these visuals by releasing their own sonic forces into the room. The resulting audio visual emissions and graphic turbulence created in these vector fields drove a multi channel piece of sound design in Ableton Liveusing OSC and Midi messages. The resulting sound scape sampled, effected and distorted the audience’s utterances and triggered additional lighting effects at each end of the space.

 

SUPER EVERYTHING*

Commissioning body: British Council Malaysia
Production company: The Light Surgeons

SuperEverything* is a live cinema performance project by The Light Surgeons which explores the relationship between identity, ritual and place through a unique collaborative performing arts project commissioned by the British Council Malaysia and with the support of Canon Malaysia.

The project explores these universal themes using a combination of observational documentary footage, motion graphics, creative programming and original music production to create a poetic audio visual tapestry that forms a rich, kaleidoscopic view of the cultural landscape of Malaysia. The project was filmed on location across Peninsular Malaysia and brings together a collection of Malaysia’s cutting-edge musical and visual artists. Through this process of cultural and artistic cross-collaboration, The Light Surgeons have evolved the project into a new exploded documentary cinema performance in line with their previous works in this arena.

SuperEverything*challenges us to contemplate our shared human story and to ask the timeless question of who we are as individuals and as a society. Through the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity, the project seeks to uncover who we are as human beings and how our complex identities are connected to our every day environments through a multitude of different rituals. It is a journey through Malaysia’s past to understand its present and to reveal a shared social history that looks to our future.

Project Microsite: http://www.supereverything.net/

Solid Steel Radio Mix: https://soundcloud.com/ninja-tune/solid-steel-radio-show-1-3

Creative Director: Christopher Thomas Allen
Leading Artists: Christopher Thomas Allen | Tim Cowie
Camera: Christopher Thomas Allen | Tim Cowie | Fauzi Yusoff | Fariz Hanapiah
Editing & Post-Production: Christopher Thomas Allen | Tim Cowie | Fauzi Yusoff | Fariz Hanapiah | Jai Rafferty | Helen Omand
Production Assistants: Jake Dowling | Simon Bertheux
Research Assistant: Annie Kwan
Music Direction: Tim Cowie
Collaborating Composers: Tim Cowie | Chor Guan Ng | Eu Seng Seto a.k.a DJ Flica
Musical Contributors: Hands Percussion | Rhythm in Bronze
Sound Engineering: Shugar Studios
Music Producer: Hardesh Singh
Malaysian Producers: Joanna Lee | Adshrie Yap | Didi Ramlan
UK Project Manager: Alice Ceresole
Online Content Manager: Matt Armitage