photo by Nicole Aptekar

Industrial art groups and large scale projects are no strangers to the Bay Area, but it’s not often that several of these groups collaborate on something so large they couldn’t do it alone. Syzygryd is a 2.5 ton interactive, collaborative musical instrument that breathes fire. This Burning Man Honorarium project is being created through the combined efforts of Interpretive Arson, False Profit Labs, Grey Area Foundation for the Arts, and Denmark based Illutron.

Syzygryd is an interactive metal sculpture measuring 60 feet in diameter and 13 feet tall at its highest point. It consists of three giant spiraling metal arms that join into a tornado of cubes in the center of the space. At the outer edges of the sculpture are three touchscreen grid sequencers (think of a giant 4 foot wide Tenori-on) which allow people to visually compose music together. The touchscreens are also connected to DMX controllers which sequence 1.5 kilowatts of LEDs and an array of flame effects, including a 20 foot fire tornado in the center. In short, the music composed by three strangers will be translated into fire, light, and sound.

While Syzygryd is a Burning Man Honorarium project and received partial funding from the Burning Man Organization, it’s not quite enough to build the envisioned art piece. The Syzygryd team will be throwing Syzygy, a Gala Benefit for the Syzygryd Project at CELLspace on Friday, June 4th with live musical and aerial performance as well as a silent auction to help raise additional funds. You’ll also get a chance to get a hands-on preview of the controllers

There is a Kickstarter going to help put the fire in Syzygryd. In addition to helping bring more fire into the art world, you’ll also score some great rewards for your pledge. The goodies range from stickers and t-shirts to a handheld flamethrower and even your own personal Dance Dance Immolation run. After paying for all the plumbing and parts for the flame effects, any additional funds raised past the $8224 goal will be put towards more fuel for the fire during Burning Man.

Most of Syzygryd will be open-sourced. There are currently plans to release the collaborative grid sequencer (written in Processing), the plans for the AVR-based DMX to LED controller and flame effect relays, and Creative Commons licensed sets of sounds for Ableton Live. If the Kickstarter is successful, additional information including the fire tornado CAD drawings, the flame effects ignition system plans, and detailed fuel diagrams will be publicly released.

This multi-disciplinary project is currently in full swing in community spaces across the Bay Area, including NIMBY, Noisebridge, and TechShop. Additional volunteers of all skill levels are always welcome. If you have interest in anything from music or electrical design to lighting, software, or metal fabrication and you want to work on one of the biggest projects at Burning Man this year, send an email to volunteers@syzygryd.com. If you’re a musician, familiar with Ableton Live, check out the MDK to get your music added to the sculpture. For more info on the project you can check out www.syzygryd.com and follow @Syzygryd on Twitter.

Corpus Callosum is a California-based music & performance art ensemble that performs regularly around the Bay Area. In addition to their wide variety of instruments (everything from accordions to glockenspiels to home-made instruments), their performances also include stilts, puppets, moving picture boxes, and various other performance art. Their music is best described as “folk-haunted orchestration” or “post-industrial-folk-noir”. You may have seen them performing at a Tweed Ride or over at Noisebridge.

Last October they filmed the above music video for their song “Lullaby #2” at the Wave Organ in San Francisco. Utilizing two DSLR cameras they made a stop motion video of the band playing while Avery Burke, the lead singer, was fitted for a blazer. The budget was less than $200 and all filming was done in a single day.

photo by Audrey Penven

Band member, Dax Tran-Caffee explained that in order to film the video they had to first shoot the band playing the song in real-time. They took that video, dropped down the framerate, and displayed it on location via a big screen with live video overlaid on top. In addition to the overlaid video, there were also karaoke-esque cues such as which beat, chord, word or phoneme the frame should be. Then it was a matter of matching up their live-feed bodies (mouths, instrument placement, strums, etc) with their pre-recorded bodies every 8 seconds before the intervalometer fired off the DSLR still cameras. All of this over a 6 hour shoot on a peninsula extending into the Bay waters, with everything running on gas generators.

They are currently working on raising funds for their first full length in-studio album via Kickstarter.

Everyone knows that a large part of SXSW is the parties. Sure we all go to a couple panels during the day, but the true networking happens late into the night at various venues and taco trucks around Austin. This year was no different, except for one new party: the Revolving Door Party in the Hilton Lobby.

As people returned to the Hilton after last call on Sunday night, they were invited to don a party hat and take a dance around the revolving door of the Austin Hilton. Some people took one quick turn, while others spent quite a bit of time dancing round and round. One of the organizers, @efng spent an astonishing 2 hours in the doors, keeping the party going late into the night. Another organizer was SF Shenaniganist Nelz, who handed out hats and noisemakers. I worked “the door” for awhile checking IDs.

photo by Ed Hunsinger

Foursquare and Gowalla checkins plus multiple tweets drew people to the Revolving Door Party and the after party in the lobby. That’s how Robert Scoble heard about it. He got out of bed to come partake in the fun and ended up springing for pizza for everyone. LA Weekly’s Shannon Cottreell has some photos and Chuck Reynolds takes us on a video tour of the party. I also snapped a few pics and video.