On a recent Sunday, we stopped by bitforms gallery’s new location on the Lower East Side to drink a Modelo and talk models with artist R. Luke DuBois—though not the type of models you might guess. DuBois, a self-taught programmer, is the focal point of 131 Allen’s inaugural exhibit—literally, one could argue. The standout of the exhibit, Self-portrait, 1993-2014, is a data visualization masterpiece: a web of nodes that DuBois created using data from his different e-mail accounts. Each e-mail address he’s contacted in the last five years is a major node; Dubois painstakingly hand-wrote the name of each contact, scanned it, and used an algorithm to place every name on the web. In this piece, each one of DuBois’s personas is a mathematical foci of the print.
There’s something awesome about the way DuBois makes the scary deluge of emails we all receive intimate and personal. In (Pop) Icon: Britney, the artist uses data to get up close and personal with the woman herself. Amassing a collection of all of her videos (41, per wikipedia!), DuBois creates a breathtaking moving portrait in which Brit’s eyes are the focal point, a style that recalls traditional Byzantine iconography. Surrounded by a gold, baroque frame, the singer’s eyes always remain in one place even as she morphs from teenager to MILF and back again. The viewer can never escape her purvey, and surely this is how some Baby Boomers feel about her, too—infinitely trapped by her voice at intervals throughout their lives, perhaps while shopping at Target or chaperoning a child’s first middle school dance. The piece plays a mashup of her “a cappella” songs, which she makes available for fan-art, run through a machine of DuBois’s design that layers multiple tracks simultaneously and runs them through a convolution reverb algorithm.
A programmer by trade, this writer was extremely curious about how DuBois managed to code these works into existence. The artist was kind enough to answer some of our questions via (what else?) e-mail. Be sure to stop by bitforms next time you’re on the LES—trust us, it’s worth taking a vacation from looking at your own digital screens to spend some time looking at DuBois’s.
KATIE BARNWELL: Can you explain in greater depth how you generated the sounds effect in (Pop) Icon: Britney?
R. LUKE DUBOIS: The reverb I used for Britney comes from the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, which is one of the most important remaining sites of Byzantine iconography. The piece itself is a play in this kind of visual iconography. The impulse response of the space was sampled by acousticians at the University of Bologna, Italy, in 2008 while doing research on the unique character of the space. They provided me with the impulse response files.
Convolution reverb is where, rather than computationally modeling a space, you use the impulse response of a real acoustic space (a church, the trunk of a car, whatever) as your reverb. You do this by going into the space you want captured and firing an "impulse" through it... ideally an infinitely short burst of white noise, or a sine wave sweep of every frequency you can hear. This captures how the space interacts with all the frequencies, and you record the result. You then do a frequency-domain multiplication of the sound you want reverberated and the recording of the reverberation itself... that way, it crea
There’s something awesome about the way DuBois makes the scary deluge of emails we all receive intimate and personal. In (Pop) Icon: Britney, the artist uses data to get up close and personal with the woman herself. Amassing a collection of all of her videos (41, per wikipedia!), DuBois creates a breathtaking moving portrait in which Brit’s eyes are the focal point, a style that recalls traditional Byzantine iconography. Surrounded by a gold, baroque frame, the singer’s eyes always remain in one place even as she morphs from teenager to MILF and back again. The viewer can never escape her purvey, and surely this is how some Baby Boomers feel about her, too—infinitely trapped by her voice at intervals throughout their lives, perhaps while shopping at Target or chaperoning a child’s first middle school dance. The piece plays a mashup of her “a cappella” songs, which she makes available for fan-art, run through a machine of DuBois’s design that layers multiple tracks simultaneously and runs them through a convolution reverb algorithm.
A programmer by trade, this writer was extremely curious about how DuBois managed to code these works into existence. The artist was kind enough to answer some of our questions via (what else?) e-mail. Be sure to stop by bitforms next time you’re on the LES—trust us, it’s worth taking a vacation from looking at your own digital screens to spend some time looking at DuBois’s.
KATIE BARNWELL: Can you explain in greater depth how you generated the sounds effect in (Pop) Icon: Britney?
R. LUKE DUBOIS: The reverb I used for Britney comes from the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, which is one of the most important remaining sites of Byzantine iconography. The piece itself is a play in this kind of visual iconography. The impulse response of the space was sampled by acousticians at the University of Bologna, Italy, in 2008 while doing research on the unique character of the space. They provided me with the impulse response files.
Convolution reverb is where, rather than computationally modeling a space, you use the impulse response of a real acoustic space (a church, the trunk of a car, whatever) as your reverb. You do this by going into the space you want captured and firing an "impulse" through it... ideally an infinitely short burst of white noise, or a sine wave sweep of every frequency you can hear. This captures how the space interacts with all the frequencies, and you record the result. You then do a frequency-domain multiplication of the sound you want reverberated and the recording of the reverberation itself... that way, it crea
Wu Tsang and boychild perform Moved by the Motion. Photos by Stryder Bartow
Comedian Kate Berlant
Malcolm Stuart and Bec Stupak
Wu Tsang and boychild kicked off the evening with a bang heard all across the Internet. Their performance featured boychild’s signature movement and striking full-body makeup over Wu Tsang’s spoken word piece.
Niko Wenner from Oxbow
Comedian Derrick Beckles
Marina Rosenfeld
When in France... eat well. The freshest of sea bass with colorful zucchinis. Photos by Alice Tate
Turns out Picasso's asylum was damn pretty.
On repeat: Caribou "Can't Do Without You"
So French! (Yes, a lot of wine was consumed on this trip)
Photos by Christina Paik
Shrimps 
Hartono 
Rachel Comey 
Moschino 
Gosha Rubchinsky 
Christopher Kane 
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