Space exploration has had a deep impact on the way a lot of us see the world and think about our art. So I can’t wait for this Saturday’s Yuri’s Night Bay Area, which will bring a convergence of bleeding-edge music, art, technology, science, and visualism to a 12 hour-long party on NASA’s airfield outside San Francisco. We’ll be bringing some of the best of this event to you all around the world. Read or subscribe to RSS for our special minisite to make sure you don’t miss a thing, wherever you are on the planet; updates will continue live through the event and in the couple of weeks afterward:

yuricdm.com: Yuri + CDM + music + motion
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If you’re near the Bay Area, let us know if you’re coming to the event. We’d love help with photos, video, and coverage. And if you’re involved in a Yuri’s Night somewhere else in the world, let us know about that, too.

Here’s just a sample of the visualist angle at Yuri’s Bay Area:

Fixate from Aaron Sjogren on Vimeo.

Aaron Sjogren shares this VJ test set from an installation last week. It raises an important point — even as we’ve talked about the importance of getting “out of the box,” rectangles can be cool, too. (Notice: combining multiple 4:3 rectangles already means you escape the bland aspect ratio.) And it illustrates the importance of good documentation, ideally in an actual environment. (Previously reliant on pricey cameras, cheap HD can give you great results if you know how to use it!)

I love the idea that communities like Vimeo will help raise the bar for visualists sharing their work.

Full HD version available on this video’s Vimeo page, along with more from Aaron.

And since Aaron wasn’t sharing, anyone care to ID the visual app in use on his Mac? (I also think people are warming to dudes standing behind computers, much as eventually we got used to people manning synths and mixers.)

New York City, despite its reputation, is actually a pretty peaceful place to live in a lot of ways. Most visitors here never make it out of Times Square, though even that experience to me is more Vegas than Blade Runner. But even here, the days of electronic synesthesia as something alien are over. It’s a far cry from the 1960s, when, even if they were only slightly drugged up, audiences would actually begin to believe light shows and synths were an alien invasion. Today, even people on an acid trip are jaded.

So I found this quote interesting, from Rhizome, in regards to Hong Kong’s decade-old new media bash, the Microwave International Arts Festival:

In inspecting our flashing city that is Hong Kong, sound, light, and images are constantly coming at us from all directions, collectively attacking our senses…

[the festival will resurrect] the pleasure elicited by the audio-visual interactions will help visitors recover the fascinations in our daily lives that have so been overwhelmed and numbed.

It’s an interesting thought, and I think says a lot about where performance may be headed. I got to see Simian Mobile Disco last month, and they were able to run a near-blinding light show, synced to the beat. People loved it, mostly, but even there, the effect was wearing off, and I actually heard some complaints. (Not from me. I never get tired of overstimulation.)

What I came away with, though, was that there’s a real opportunity to make the sensory in digital art something very different. I think the initial birthing of digital art and media art may finally be concluding, and we can begin to aim for something approaching maturity. (The fact that various entities are now preoccupied with writing histories is a good sign: the artists can get on with doing something new.)

If you are in Hong Kong (and if you aren’t, schedule that layover between LA and Singapore), the festival looks great. A nice mix of electronic music and digital motion. Hmmm… digital music and digital motion? But will it work?

Rhizome News: Resensitizng to Light, Image, and Sound