Possibles Places

Festival MANCA 96 (French côte-d'azur):

For the festival of MANCA 96, produced by CIRM (International Center of Musical Research) Eric Wenger created the first part of his show with Metasynth and Bryce. The topic of this 18 th. festival, "nature/contre nature" was perfectly fit to allow artistic exploration of new technologies.

Eric presented a visual and a sonic voyage through imaginary worlds,called Possibles Places. The visual parts of theses worlds was made with his own animation version of Bryce. The music was cybernetically generated by components of the Bryce scenes, the whole idea made possible by MetaSynth. MetaSynth used the textures and the forms of 3D terrains objects to create the sounds. Theses sounds were fed back in Bryce for sounds spatialisation and mixing. The final sound result was taking into account cameras and objects movements to provide a realistic effects, giving for the first time sound to fantastic Bryce landscapes.

Place I (Lava Planet)
RealMedia Animation

Place II (Gaz Giant) RealMedia Animation

Place III RealMedia Animation

Project Manca, Eric Part I "Possibles Places" theory:

Considering the huge size of our universe, and the unknown amount of them, there might be a good chance that any virtual landscape could actually be pretty close to an actual place, somewhere in the world. Therefore, the systematic exploration with computers of virtual realities may prove to be our better way, and certainly the cheapest and faster, to visit and discover remote places. The recents advances in computer science and computational power, along with the development of artificial life algorithms allow us to envision the very possibility of creating collectively a "simulacre" of universe, a randomized partial mirror of the un-accessible real one, populated by a large number of creatures grown artificially with genetics algorithms, within possible environments and constraints. KPT Bryce, as a successful commercial software available to anyone on a Macintosh, was one of my contribution to that collective dream. I am still amazed about the quantity of places I have visited just by looking at a tiny portion of all the pictures done with Bryce by hundred thousands of people around the world. I decided to go further for the festival Manca and to give some of theses possible places sound and music, to expand the exploration not only visually but auditively also, populating virtual landscapes with sound creatures. To help me in that task, I have designed a new synthesis software "MetaSynth" able to transform picts into sound and have made a special version of Bryce that can spatialize and synchronize theses sounds with 3D animations in a realistic and accurate way.

For the show tonight I propose to visit 3 places tonight. Each "place" is divided into different zones, numbered arbitrarily. Their exact location within universe is unknown and of no importance. Theses places are inhabited by shapes and sounds. There might be a clear correspondence between the texture, shape and sound but not necessarily. While the main video screen displays 3D computer animation of evolving scenerys, more detailed steady pictures are projected on the sides.

Place I A hot and very volcanic planet where huge rocky structures emerges from lava seas and burning rivers flows deep inside immense canyons.

Place II Probably a gazeous and liquid giant. Some creatures are evolving within that soup at specific altitudes ranges, some floating near the surface using energy provided by nearby star, some swimming deeper using heat energy provided by pressure and gravity, and mecanical energy provided by strong coriolis and convection currents.