Justin Stephenson:  is laughing and thinking while trying to come up with some descriptions of what his project is: “It’s almost like surfing!”
Stephenson, an award-winning filmmaker, is talking about the Faceless Forces of Bigness (FFoB). It all started as a collaboration between the video/art designer and a few longtime friends: Michael Philip Wojewoda, John D.S. Adams, Chris Stringer and Kurt Swinghammer – all venerable, well-respected artist-musicians in their own right.
“We use analog modular synthesizers and feedback loops to create generative music – it’s all random and we’re all out there in the ocean just trying to shepherd it,” explains Stephenson, who has been in demand in Canada for his skills as a director and motion design specialist. His previous credits include The Complete Works (Director), The Secret Path (animated documentary) and Robert Lepage’s Ewartung and Bluebeard’s Castle with The Canadian Opera Company.

The group has been together for almost 20 years. Over that time, Stephenson has been trying to get the video to respond to the audio.
“The computers were so slow back then, and the software just wasn’t up to the task, I ended up performing the video as opposed to allowing the sound to drive it” he explains. “Then, I recently switched to Isadora and found it to be the perfect tool for this improvised audio-visual experience and helped me get my bearings – I was able to create tools to respond to the audio performance. As Isadora user dusX put it in the Isadora forum, ‘there is something in creating a tool, that helps you find the meaning in the content.‘ When we were setting up and I started to see the picture responding to the audio, I felt like this was the thing I had been trying to achieve for all these years with FFoB“
Stephenson says he was particularly pleased with the software’s lack of latency, the ability to have up to eight discreet audio inputs, the ability to used FFGL plugins and Shader Toy shaders and how simple it is to bring in serial inputs from Arduino: “It’s so easy, it’s crazy! Because you define the environment and workflow in Isadora, you can work through complex ideas very quickly”

The group performed at the leading experimental music festival Sound Symposium in Newfoundland in August 2018. FFoB did a one-hour set for a sold-out, enthusiastic audience. FFoB also led a workshop at the symposium.
“We all show up with our respective ideas and there is very little talking,” Stephenson says when asked about the kind of preparation FFoB does. “As it is improvised, the performances are more akin to conversations as opposed to being designed as shows. Before the show, we do talk about arc – such as, we should start out soft, go loud, then quiet and then go musical and end on a bang.”
Click to watch the FFoB Video

However, he reveals they do get together to “rehearse,” which can last up to six hours: “It’s an opportunity for these guys – who are at the top of their game – to create an environment where things can evolve and devolve. They’re looking to extend the boundaries of what music and performance are.”
For his part, Stephenson blends nature imagery, text, and sequences depicting acts of reading and writing using digital glitching effects, overlays, scaling, color treatments and blurs.
“My concern in all my work explores the relationships between language and The Real, the discrete and the continuous,” he describes.“I’m modulating all of my clip and effects parameters with the audio coming from each of the guys. When the picture is tightly linked to the audio, you don’t need a lot of fancy effects to create visual interest. One of the most exciting things about FFoB is that it is improvised, we don’t know what the end result will be! Mostly it’s beautiful, though sometimes it’s awful. We just perform and then suddenly, it’s done.”
Stephenson finds pleasure in responding to the moment: “It’s liberating to work in real time.”

In his professional work, which involves animation and post-production utilizing a lot of animation and editing software, he’s usually sitting in a suite constantly refining and cutting: “In my day-to-day work, I’m working frame-by-frame, pixel-by-pixel.”
Stephenson’s Isadora experience reaches far back. He’s used it for stage performances including a piece by Canadian choreographer Denise Fujiwara, Euonia, based on a book of poetry: “The ability to go from scene to scene, and create snapshots was ideal for quickly iterating a show”
He hadn’t been thinking of utilizing Isadora for FFoB. Up until this show, he had been using a range of VJ packages: “While I love VJ software, I found that it leads you into performing rather than developing concepts around audio reactivity. I wanted to get to that point where the sound was really driving the picture. I thought to try Isadora for our show in Newfoundland”
Then, everything changed.
“With Isadora, the ability to make and modify your own tools was ideal. For fast prototyping, it’s optimal. Just before the show, I thought I’d love to have a controllable multiplier for the audio inputs and just five minutes before we started, I had that tool for the show.”

At the workshop in Newfoundland, he was able to highlight the finer points of using Isadora and how to customize it to individual needs.
“One of the most useful things is the way you can create your own reusable modules with various logic, effects and clips. It makes it possible to easily explore relationships and develop ideas in a way that makes sense to how you are thinking about the work…it’s instantly responsive and engaging.”
Stephenson intends on continuing to “noodle” with the software and to keep experimenting. “The patches can always be tinkered with, optimized and improved – it becomes a bit of an obsession”
Meanwhile, FFoB is looking to expand its concerts to more venues outside of Canada and to more festivals.
“When we’re performing, we hit a groove at a certain point. If you’ve ever done VR – it’s like that. Because we’re combining improvised video and audio, you’re stepping into another world and there is nothing marking time. It’s such a feeling of freedom and elation. Our work at Sound Symposium really galvanized us all to want to do this more.”

Text by June Chua | Images by Justin Stephenson + Michael Phillip Wojewoda
[Interview conducted in October 2018]

“My job as an artist is to see, so I’m going to look deeply at things that concern me and not look away,” Fernanda D’Agostino http://www.fernandadagostino.com/
states emphatically. The Portland, Oregon-based multimedia artist is explaining the origins of her project Borderline. “I’m exploring mass migration, climate change and surveillance culture…all these things began to weigh more heavily on my mind when Donald Trump was elected.”
D’Agostino adds that the other trigger was a Facebook post by a cousin in Italy, a “conservative”: “He was using the same prejudiced language about Mediterranean migrants that was used against my grandparents 100 years ago when they immigrated to the U.S.”
The cousin told D’Agostino she understood nothing about the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, and that’s when she put on her artist’s searchlights.
“I started checking Italian coastguard footage of migrants in the Mediterranean, as well as government surveillance video of the U.S border and EU footage of their land borders. I also did parallel research investigating U.S. forest fire footage and climate monitoring footage from the NOAA [National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration]. I collected it all, not knowing what it meant or if there were any connections,” says D’Agostino.

Around the fall of 2017, the puzzle pieces started to come together after D’Agostino met two dancers, Jaleesa Johnston and Sophia Wright Emigh. All three were part of an artists’ study group at Open Signal Media Center, in Portland, OR.
“Both were deeply committed to investigating embodied trauma and generational memory – Jaleesa is an African American and Sophia is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors,” said D’Agostino. “I had similar concerns so we decided to collaborate on a performance project.”
At the same time as the trio got together, D’Agostino became a visiting member of Collective Action Studio in San Francisco. She was helping the collective create some videos for a mapping project at the Palace of Fine Arts and met Tra Bouscaren who was working with Isadora. He offered to do a couple of tutorials to get her up and running in Isadora.
“I had never seen a program that powerful! I was blown away by what you could do. So, I went home and did every online tutorial,” exclaims D’Agostino. “I have to give kudos to [Isadora creator Mark Coniglio]. I’ve tried to learn coding and I’m 69…I couldn’t. Isadora was a revelation.”

In creating the installation for the Portland Art Museum (The Map is not the Territory, Feb. 8 to May 9, 2019), D’Agostino seeks to place the viewer inside the action: “I’ve used a video camera input to place viewers in scenes of surveillance at borders around the world, as a way of making them remember we are all implicated and effected by these scenes of catastrophe or dystopia.”
The work at the museum is the culmination of an ongoing series all titled Borderline. At PAM, the installation uses two five-meter scrims and a floor projection in the atrium of the museum. The scenes appear randomly on the scrims and floor yielding infinite combinations and implied meanings. For D’Agostino, Mark’s tutorials were so effective that some of the scenes she created using the online tutorials are now appearing in the project itself.
“Isadora has changed my artistic life,” she reveals. “I have the power to change and make anything. It’s so much user-friendly than anything else out there.”

The work is deeply affecting, provoking emotion. Borderline is as concerned about the psychological borders that separate people as the geographic ones. Borderline also investigates the tipping point, or the line between things working and things falling apart. In addition, the artist is sensitive to the fact that very little of her own daily life has changed despite ominous and terrible things around the world and in her own country. The question for D’Agostino creatively was — how to bring those worlds together?
“In the 60s, this used to manifest as giant protests but now, I think the response is online.”
In Borderline, utilizing technological advances to link up all the dots has been critical.
“I hope people have an emotional reaction to Borderline,” she says. “Real change happens most often as a result of emotional connection.”

Text by June Chua | Images by Brian Foulkes
[Interview conducted in December 2018]

Excavating the past to learn for the present — an idea that has, so far, sparked a six-part series project by Moritz Majce and Sandra Man. Visiting Greece, the Berlin-based artists hit upon the idea of choros – Greek for “dancing place.” It denotes both the locale and the people who are dancing there.

“While they are dancing, they are connecting to the space, out in nature,” explains Majce. “It’s more like a ritual because you are part of what’s going on.”

In ancient Greek theatre there was often a circular space between the stage and audience, the orchestra. It’s where the chorus is placed.

“We looked at the very beginnings of art and thought about what framework was set there that is still active now” said Majce. “Art has to be in contact with what’s going on in the present. So, we did something that is inspired by the past but included themes of nature and technology.”

Choros was borne of that concept — utilizing the circle, environment and melding performers with audience at times. The project is what they call a ‘space choreography,’ a moving installation in which the audience is a participant. The works are also examining what it means to be a spectator. Majce and Man seek to have the audience follow their own paths rather than have the performers guide them.

It’s been a leap for Majce, who comes from fine art world and spent only a year with Isadora to learn how to use live video and sound for exhibits and performances. He found it easy to work with and is pleased with the results.

Choros has expanded into six parts, which Majce describes here.

CHOROS I: Ufer Studios, Berlin. We worked with a group of 6 to 8 people using circular moving patterns and texts provided by Sandra. We had the old Greek meter of rhyming with the choir moving and also turning around – we worked on the relationship between movement and the lyrics of the rhymes blending breathing and the movement of the body and text. Sandra and I explored an old way of dealing with language and relationships within a group. We also experimented with mini round stages.

CHOROS II: Kunstfabrik am Flutgraben, Berlin. A followup to the first Choros. We still used rhymes, this time we blended in singing and the focus was the chorus as the agent creating a space for the audience. It’s like a moving installation made of dancers in which the spectators can walk in to and the installation reacts to them. Think of a group of wild animals where they are aware of you without doing any extra “performing” for you, and you can just be with them.

CHOROS III: The mountains of Austria. We took one dancer and made videos of the dancer in the landscape. It’s about how the landscape makes the body move. If you’re there for some time, you generate movement out of the location — you’re receiving from the environment. At one point, the dancer was stamping a small circle for hours in the grass. This was a two-month project and we made a multi-video and multi-audio-channel installation in a gallery, Kunstraum Lakeside, where it was a chorus of videos, not a chorus of people.

CHOROS IV: Hungarian Culture Institute, Berlin. We did a show for their Montag Modus performance series that included a four-screen installation with two performers speaking live, one in German and one in English. We re-arranged video material from the previous Choros chapters. The idea was to have different languages on stage speaking at the same time as the videos were running. The live performers were choreographed by the movement of the images. Sometimes, they would talk one after the other and at times, simultaneously.

CHOROS V: WUK performing arts, Vienna. We were in a theatre space and we had six trampolines, a circular tower made from wood, four huge projection screens and a hexagon made of real grass where the performers would do a round dance and the grass would decay and smell as it was dying over the duration of the performance. The performers were on all the sites. The videos were produced with the dancers in one of the biggest former coal mining areas in Germany called Lausitz. It’s a devastated space and has giant construction equipment still sitting there. It’s one of the biggest terraforming sites now. There are trees re-planted there and artificial lakes. Metaphorically, it’s an in-between place – it’s nature that’s been built by human technology.

CHOROS VI: District, Berlin. This is more like an installation where everything is going on at the same time. You can go to the video installation or the tower or have a look at the looping performances. There are displays on the tower and the choir performs throughout. It’s a continuum with no beginning or end. It’s not dependent on the audience to watch them. You can just watch and leave. Each night, we had a talk on the grass hexagon. We had a philosopher, a curator and a somatic trainer who did spectator training. It’s about the individual spectator and learning how to move their body as a different way of experiencing something in this space. We are exploring the idea of participation and also refraining from guiding the audience through a performance.

Text by June Chua | Images by Moritz Majce + Sandra Man
[Interview conducted in November 2018]

As head of video for three years at the Schaubühne, one of Germany’s preeminent theaters, Jake Witlen’s mantra is, “Workflow. Workflow. Workflow.” The venue premiers about 15 shows per year, on top of 52 existing shows in repertoire, and tours shows approximately 160 days per year visiting about 30 countries. 85% of all productions integrate video and thus Isadora, ten of which are premiers, many of which push the limits of video onstage. A show opening this April called, Borgen, created and directed by Nicolas Stemann, uses Isadora to operate a concept among seven projectors, three cameras, two iPhones, and subtitles. The Schaubühne is well-equipped, but given the scale and number of shows it produces, resources are limited. A lot of logistics go into preparing a show; simply knowing what piece of equipment is available and when can be a puzzle. If a show is going to China for example, Jake can lose gear for three to five months. But he enjoys the challenge: “The fun part is figuring out your game.”

Jake’s responsible for coming up with a plan to ensure that every show runs smoothly and is reproducible. Reproducible means being able to load in, calibrate, and fine tune in a new space in just under two days before opening. He directs a small team of three to program Isadora and execute designs, a team that is typically split between two shows at a time. To be clear, Jake isn’t designing the show himself but instead tackling the trickier and more nuanced challenge of building someone else’s design. Every director who comes through the Schaubühne brings their own designer, and that designer has their own unique vision, communication style, and set of expectations. Jake has chosen Isadora for the Schaubühne because the software can meet the demands of every designer and calibrate quickly. “It’s flexible. For any single problem, Isadora offers 800 solutions. It totally beats the giant servers, which are really just playback machines.”

But sitting down with the director and video designer early in production is essential. Jake negotiates every last detail of the video concept – what is possible based on resources, time, and scale and what the workflow will be. Jake’s team then collaborates in programming the show and builds an Isadora file together. “Anyone could be programming a patch at any given time.” Order is key, but order is easy with Isadora. In fact, it’s so easy, Jake is able to teach the program to the designer’s assistants, so they’re up and running and trying out patches in the space in a matter of hours. Despite Jake’s long history with Isadora, both as director and designer, its myriad solutions never cease to astound him. Because his team is sharing patches, he learns something new from his collaborators almost every show, something that he’s never even thought possible. Isadora can realize “whatever [they] need to do – the blank page is infinite.”

Isadora’s creative potential is attributed to how it’s developed as a piece of software. The program’s creator, Mark Conilgio, is “coming at it from a creative standpoint, asking the question: what do I want out of it? And you can clearly see how he’s influenced by users all over the world.” Jake is active on the TroikaTronix forum and is keenly aware of Isadora’s constant evolution. “You read a question, and four days later you have an update. Mark’s already taken a user’s question and built the answer. When you need something, he’ll be there.”

People can listen to a piece of music and tell you instantly if they like it or not, and they feel confident in saying so.” Award-winning video designer, Dan Shorten, wants his audience to be able do the same. Working under the moniker, Anomic Multimedia, he uses Isadora’s projection mapper for large-scale outdoor events and five-star touring productions, including the five-day Glastonbury Festival of performing arts and most recently, Shakespeare400, a series of public performances around London celebrating the 400-year legacy of The Bard. Running systems that can use up to 19 projectors, he transforms the facades of buildings and spaces into living entities and animated environments. An impressive 150,000 people a week can experience his work – that’s 8,000 pairs of eyes a night. With these kinds of numbers, success comes down to accessibility, as the larger the public, the wider range of responses. Some people might be attracted to the meaning, others the magic, and a few, the mechanics behind the mastery. But it’s this open invitation, one that trusts the audience’s sensibilities, that is part and parcel to Dan’s ethos of good art.

It’s also the reason why Dan has chosen Isadora as his primary control for video design. It’s “fast, logical and has a simple layout.” But it’s not as limited as even more widely known plug and play gadgets. “With Isadora, you have to ask questions: What do I want to do? How do I do it? What’s the outcome? How does this actor affect this actor?” Isadora is an open invitation, one that trusts the designer’s sensibilities. Dan admits to having been a skeptic at first – to having made the mistake of thinking Isadora was too open and therefore too complicated for what he wanted to do – which was to project some video and images on stage. But after sitting in on an Isadora workshop as a teacher, Dan realized the software not only offered cleaner solutions – such as using a mouse to move things around on screen instead of rendering things out in the studio and then fitting them to the space using a projector alone – it offered more solutions, which spurred his creativity.

Alongside his design work, Dan teaches at the prestigious Guildhall School Music and Drama, which recently launched a BA degree focused on video mapping in 2015. Most of Dan’s students land design gigs at high level, West End theaters upon graduation, and he uses Isadora to prime them. Isadora teaches his students how to think about video and how to create without running up against complexities in the design of the software itself. Dan owes this to Isadora being an artist-driven software. In fact, Isadora’s creator, Mark Coniglio worked closely with Dan in developing the software’s projection mapping tool before it was released so that it could meet his and other video mappers’ needs in building content.

Despite the scale of his projects, Dan strives for simplicity in both form and process, falling back on his first love of making music and music’s ability to invite an audience to render its own opinion, confidently. Dan embraces the fact that he can make his audience’s jaw drop with his video designs, but there’s a long road between learning a tool and being an artist with a tool. “If you can do something simple, do something simple.” New technology can dazzle, and who doesn’t want to be dazzled? A little rock and roll can inject a lot of energy into life. But there’s a delicate balance between the rockstar and the artist, the artist and the elitist. The benefit of Isadora is that it teaches you how to be an artist, or at least a better artist, while learning the tool. Isadora is Dan’s toolbox and a completely integrated part of his creative thinking.

Profession: Video Designer // Lecturer at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Location: London, England
Isadora user: 13 years
Lines: Start straight at right angles but end up as spaghetti

Text by Catherine Duquette
[Interview conducted in 2015/16]

In 2001, media artist, David Gumbs, saw Isadora for the first time while a student in interactive multimedia at “Les Ateliers, L’ENSCI” in Paris. His eyes widened: Isadora was showing immediate results and instantly “rendering” its users choices. After years of exercising patience with Flash, After Effects, and other animation and video processing software, seeing Isadora was like peeking behind the magician’s curtain. He wanted to know its secrets – he asked the artist who introduced him to Isadora to teach him the software. The artist said, “no.” David was angry at first, but he soon realized this “no” would come to define his artistic career.

Over the course of 15 years, David figured out how Isadora could work for him, developing a distinct process and voice as a result. He found the program easy to learn, despite loathing coding, as it complemented his more organic disposition to making work, the interactivity between artist and tool being one of Isadora’s most compelling attributes. His process is all about “searching but staying open to what happens, even though [he] might deviate from [his] original idea.” He’s always preferred visual art and more tactile mediums – painting, photography, drawing. But making a living in these disciplines is challenging at best. His original turn to video was merely an attempt to learn skills that would allow him to support himself financially while making art in other mediums. Isadora conveniently bridges two minds and two worlds.

David’s video work explores a tension between the organic and the digital, which reflects his own tension between his Caribbean identity and forging a career defined by technology. Even while a student in Paris, he missed the nature of the French West Indies, its “trees curved by the ocean wind and broken down walls lacerated by salt from the sea.” The concrete and the vertical trees of Europe simply didn’t inspire him. He uses Isadora to manipulate his drawings and photographs that typically depict natural objects, such as seashells, flowers, and his favorite – anthropomorphic trees, and builds interactive video installations for both audience and dancer.
The video artist’s most innovative application of Isadora however is his light work as part of his “Perception Offscreen” series. He digitally engraves Rorschach-like impressions created in Isadora onto large sheets of acrylic or glass, which are lit by white LED lights. The sculptures challenge the viewer to find the “nature within” and to illuminate “parts of their psychology that they don’t normally see”. In April and May of this year, David plans to push this digital sculpture work even further while in residency in Beijing. He will be molding his creations in Isadora into three-dimensional objects. He wants to generate digital art that people not only experience but also possess.

Theater has been built and budgeted the same way for hundreds of years, so a relatively new piece of technology such as video could jeopardize its integrity. “It can either squelch the existing magic or enhance it.” While theater directors want to experiment with video, they still have a difficult time understanding it. However, Jared believes “Isadora makes video/media accessible to most theatres in the U.S.” He designs video for regional theater, including Woolly Mammoth in D.C., Milwaukee Rep, South Coast Rep, Cleveland Playhouse, and Manhattan Theater Company, while pushing the limits of video design for more experimental companies such as New York City’s 3-Legged Dog, Big Art Group, New Georges and HERE Arts Center. Regional theater requires that Jared generates content in the space and quickly – typically with only a few days of tech. In that short time, Jared finds himself not only designing but also teaching the room about his process, so that the director can come to trust the technology. Isadora helps bring people together, builds trust, and makes the process more human.

If the time constraints of regional theater can inspire creativity, then the flexibility and reliability of Isadora can ensure that this creativity thrives in the space. For the last eight years, Jared has also been directing at Andy’s Summer Playhouse, a summer youth theater in southern New Hampshire or as Jared describes, “a multimedia incubator for kids”. This summer, he has taken over as Producing Artistic Director of the Playhouse, where he works with 25 to 30 kids per production, between 8 and 18 years old, to stage 3-4 brand new multimedia pieces every summer. The kids perform and operate the show with Isadora, which they find easy to learn, in part, because it operates sequentially like the cues in theater. In 2012, they staged The BFG, the play based on Roald Dahl’s beloved novel by the same name. Jared wanted to project several images in glass jars onstage, but it wasn’t working – the images were indecipherable and clearly digital. But when one of the kids accidentally shifted their jar out of position, something better than originally intended happened: the image fell off of the frosted portion of the jar and the interior began to glow with the image passing through the glass and landing within. Because of Isadora’s flexibility, Jared was able to program “the mistake” instantly. If he had needed to leave the space, he wouldn’t have been able to duplicate it.

Jared credits his career to Isadora. The program has given him “the permission to have a voice in his field,” a voice that has earned him the Princess Grace Award in 2012 as well as the prestige of having been the first projection designer to be honored with this national theater award. In addition to his regional theater design, Jared leads the projection design track in the MFA Design program at University of Maryland. He strongly emphasizes his curriculum towards Isadora. “The way that Isadora forces you to think about video design in flexible and organic ways is a great curriculum.” Instead of hiding behind the computer, feeling like they’re simply tinkering with code, Isadora moves designers’ eyes “away from the monitor and onto the stage.” The design can live organically and move fluidly in the space, so everyone in the theater can enjoy a shared experience.

Profession: Multimedia Director and Designer for Regional Theater // Professor at the University of Maryland
Location: Washington, D.C.
Isadora User: 7 years
Lines: Cobweb of lines, despite what he teaches
Patching Style: Cobweb of lines, despite what he teaches
Photos by (c) Michael Portrie, (c) Sibyl Wickersheimer and (c) Stan Barough

Text by Catherine Duquette
[Interview conducted in 2015/16]