I admittedly had never heard of Swedish audio-visual artists Kent and Wenche Tankred before beginning the Analogue Detour workshop at VIVO with them. They do improvised sound performances that use found electronics (one thing they have said over and over this week is that they almost never buy anything for their music), makeshift contact mics, old motors, AM radios and sheets of metal, among a mess of other household/garbage items, to produce a symphony of deep dark hums and buzzes. I like it a lot. It relaxes me.

Liz and I are now about halfway through the seven-day workshop. One thing we've learned that is the most relevant to our (and maybe your!) work—along with getting over our we-can't-do-that attitudes and finally delving into some sound experimentation—is the use of audio mixers as the intermediary for a video signal. It's a simple idea, but one that neither of us has come up with before. Genius. There are two ways to go about it. The first is to send a video signal through the mixer to a tv or projector. The image is rendered out of focus, with variable undulations. The second way to is to use audio signals. One of the best things I have seen at this workshop thus far is that way sound 'looks' on a tv. Single notes create bold horizontal lines; with chords these lines split and multiply, and the vibrations get stronger.

The one downside to this is that the video comes out as black and white. Audio signals obviously contain no chrominance, and I'm guessing that audio mixers are therefore not equipped to handle that when running video. If you have an Edirol V-4 or another type of analogue video mixer, you can throw a chroma filter on your signal and play with that.

The workshop is culminating with a performance this Sunday, June 8 at VIVO. If you're interested in seeing what this technique looks like in person, drop by for 8pm.