Golan Levin
golan@flong.com
http://www.flong.com
Golan Levin is an artist and composer interested in developing artifacts and experiences which explore supple new modes of audiovisual expression. His work has focused on the design of systems for the creation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general examination of communications protocols for individual engagement and social dialogue. Levin is the recipient of an Award of Distinction in the Prix Ars Electronica 2000 for his AVES interactive software and its accompanying audiovisual performance, Scribble. Levin received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the MIT Media Laboratory, where he studied with John Maeda in the Aesthetics and Computation Group. Prior to this, he worked as a research scientist and interaction designer at Interval Research Corporation for four years. He currently resides in New York City.
Audiovisual Environment Suite
The Audiovisual Environment Suite (AVES) is a set of five interactive systems which allow people to create and perform abstract animation and synthetic sound in real time. Each environment is an experimental attempt to design an interface which is supple and easy to learn, yet can also yield interesting, infinitely variable and personally expressive performances in both the visual and aural domains. Ideally, these systems permit their interactants to engage in a flow state of pure experience.
The AVES systems are built around the metaphor of an inexhaustible and dynamic audiovisual "substance," which is freely deposited and controlled by the user's gestures. Each instrument situates this substance in a context whose free-form structure inherits from the visual language of abstract painting and animation. The use of low-level synthesis techniques permits the sound and image to be tightly linked, commensurately malleable, and deeply plastic.
The AVES systems inhabit a domain at the juncture of art, design, and the engineering of tools and instruments. As artworks, they extend an established Twentieth century tradition in which artworks are themselves generative systems for other media. As a set of tools, the AVES work represents a vision for creative endeavor on the computer, in which uniquely ephemeral dynamic media blossom from a close collaboration between a system's user and designer.