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Biographies

See Hear Now premiered in upstate New York in 1999 and over the following year performed around the eastern US, including the Knitting Factory and Roulette in New York City. In a series of loft installations, the Gampers explored alternative ways of immersing both audience and performers. Performances have included guest artists such as Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveros, Stephen Vitiello, Fritz Hauser, Chris Gamper, Straylight’s Geoff Gersh and Jason Finkelman, the Juilliard Electric Ensemble, Monique Buzzarté and Zanana. RouletteTV produced a performance which was first broadcast in 2003. The duo was featured in Brooklyn College’s Electroacoustic Music Festival in 2003, the 2004 SOUNDPlay festival in Toronto and in Juilliard’s 2005 Beyond the Machine festival in New York City. They released their DVD See Hear Now: Visible Music in 2005. Recent installations and performances include the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Roulette’s Festival of Mixology, Optisonic Tea at Diapason Gallery in NYC. and ISSUE: Project Room’s Sensorium festival in a Brooklyn silo.

David Gamper moves freely among the worlds of music performance, improvisation, and electronic instrument design. These passions merge in the performer controlled sound processing environments he has created for acoustic improvising musicians. He is a member of Deep Listening Band (with Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster) since 1990, and has performed frequently as a duo with Oliveros. The recording of their concert at the IJsbreker in Amsterdam has been described as “the pinnacle of the Oliveros-Gamper collaborations, music that through its depth, reveals ever more profound expression.” Gamper’s solo piece Conch was in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s BitStreams exhibition and is on the CD of sound art from that show. He appears on many recordings with Deep Listening Band and others.

Gisela Gamper, prior to her video work with See Hear Now, has been photographing and exhibiting for over 35 years. For See Hear Now she expanded her fascination with textures and collage into the realms of movement and color. The video she creates for live mixing in improvised performance captures the rhythms and colors observed in our world. Gamper exhibited widely and among her grants and numerous awards are two fellowship grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts and the Hasselblad Cover Award in 1991. Gamper’s photographs are in the collection of the Albany Institute of History & Art in Albany, NY and in many private collection

Technical Information

David plays piano and various acoustic instruments. The sound is picked up by microphones, digitized and fed into his laptop computer which runs the sound processing and user interface software he programmed with Max/MSP (Cycling74). He controls the roughly 100 variables in his program through two high resolution custom foot pedals with side pressure sensors. These pedals keep his hands free to play his instruments. The primary sound processing is based on modulated digital delays with control over delay time, modulation algorithm, feedback, sustain, and extensive signal routing. The output of each delay is also spatialised with control over position, distance, and reverberation characteristics. The user interface lets David keep track of all these parameters and provides for smooth transitions from previous settings to new values. The spatialised multi-channel sound is converted to analog and sent to 4 to 8 channels of surround sound configured speakers. The natural acoustic sounds of David’s instruments blend with the processed sound from the speakers. This maintains a connection between the sound source and its delayed and changed reappearance.

Gisela performs her video imagery with 3 laptop computers running a patch programmed with Isadora (Troikatronix) that allows her to select, scrub, loop and vary the speed of the clips on the computers. The laptops feed scan converters that then send analog video into a video mixer that combines and processes the images. This method preserves the full resolution and frame rate of the video imagery, and maintains the smoothness of the video material, such as the movement of wind, flowing water or handheld camera. Natural movement is an essential part of this work’s aesthetic. The mixed video output from the mixer feeds one or more digital video projectors. In addition, direct outputs from one or more laptops feed additional projectors. Each projector beam is directed at a board with an arrangement of front surface mirrors. The mirrors deconstruct the images and direct them onto the surface that creates the ‘surround image’ environment. For each projector we add a servomotor shutter that Gisela controls from one of her laptops. Real time ontrol over the projection light streams expands the dimensionality of the imagery.

To create our immersing environment, we may enclose a space with stretched white material (backed by black material if the venue is not black). The video imagery projected on this surface in the darkened space appears to be moving and floating. The material is also moderately transparent acoustically so that most of the speakers for the surround sound installation can be hidden behind it, if they cannot be flown high enough so that they will not interfere with the imagery. The actual boundaries disappear, and the audience is immersed in an ever changing environment of sound and image. We inhabit the same environment as the audience with our instruments and technology. We collaborate in the moment to merge the sonic and the visible into an immersing environment that transcends each medium.