L-R: Alex DL, Ben GR, Dawn DX
Hi Ben, thanks for taking the time to chat today. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?
I am Ben Randall. I am a projection designer, multimedia artist, and creative coder. I like to work in live music, events and specialty gatherings, I will say.
Let’s talk about the coding aspect of your work. What are some of your first experiences with tech, and why coding specifically?
When I was a kid, maybe sixth grade, I discovered ROM hacking. ROM hacking is a practice where coders take the original files of a video game - in my case, games like Super Mario World, or Super Metroid - and modify the art, music and level design, to do whatever they want with it.
I got into rom hacking at 13 years old, and I started making rom hacks of this indie game, Cave Story (Doukutsu Monogatari). I was making my own music and graphics. I coded in the very basic scripting language that the hacked together program used. That’s really where I got my start coding.
Years later in high school, I started to take classes in coding, with the idea that maybe one day I'll be able to make interactive experiences like a video game with that knowledge. And here I am, years later! I did not start to make video games, although I have made a couple of games. That's really how I got into coding, an interest in interactive graphics.
In the present day, with your background of coding and set design and music combined, it's become a reality with your immersive project Rite of Passage.
This project itself feels like a game you can step into. Can you tell us about what the project entails and how you began?
There’s a lot to talk about with that.
I would start by saying that I've always been interested in alternate reality games (ARGs). Those are world building games where there's not much mechanically going on. However there's a lot of lore and backstory that has been built up by developers. The games themselves are much like assembling pieces of the puzzle of whatever this world is. I always liked that.
I started some projects where I made ARGs. The problem I found when making ARGs for myself included a lot of effort for not a lot of reward. The reward for me is interacting with my audience. I pivoted toward live events, I went to graduate school for live event design, and it was more rewarding to sit in community with my audience, get an idea of what their wants and needs are from a live event.
So the interactive experience is more rewarding than anything else, like a physical object. Is the fleeting nature the most important thing?
Yeah - it's a little bit selfish for me, because I want to experience hanging out with my audience and meeting them. I think the most impactful events for me as an audience member involved sharing the experience with others.
Can you tell us about the tools that you use to generate graphics for live events? What’s in your tech stack?
Unfortunately, I rely a lot on Adobe, despite being anti-subscription. I got into it and it's hard to get out. I use Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator. I also use a lot of plugins and tools collected over the years. My bread and butter is TouchDesigner, which is for real time graphics processing, with inputs and outputs. I plug in audio inputs from musicians and artists, and transform them into video and lighting and even lasers.
Essentially, you can grab someone's audio input from what is created in real time and communicate back with your visual output?
Yeah, exactly. I've always been a fan of nice lighting and video design. Specifically, what's interested my own research is lighting and video that is closely tied to the audio, akin to traditional programmed light shows seen in a big arena for rock bands. There's no reason why we can't have that kind of high production value in underground music scenes as well.
Speaking of underground music scenes… beyond creative coding, you're a DJ and take gigs whenever you can. How do you progress as a DJ with different mediums running parallel or intersecting?
As a DJ, I've always been into music that sounds new and fresh to me.
I’m naturally someone who digs for new music. I didn't know what DJing was for years. I began producing my own music in high school, all kinds of different genres. When I was producing my own music, I almost couldn't keep up with my own desire to hear new sounds by producing them.
So eventually, I found DJing to kind of scratch that itch of not only hearing new sounds, but also performing them for other people. So as a DJ, I enjoy exposing audiences to sounds that I think they might not have heard before, and also blend them into other songs that I think are unexpected but satisfying at the same time.
When you DJ on Shared Frequencies, you’ve designed reactive visuals for DJ sets.
Are there challenges to mapping out visuals for a show that has a plot or start to finish as opposed to DJ sets? One seems more cut and dry - the other, off the cuff and unpredictable. I’m curious about which direction you take creatively for DJ sets versus other forms of live programming.
I see. It is very different. Less stressful for me when I'm DJing rather than producing a show.
I know I'm never going to match every single second to the visuals. What I typically do is create a bunch of content with 3D engines like Unreal Engine or Blender. I'll create a ton of content in TouchDesigner and I'll gather some clips. I will put those into a custom application that I've built in TouchDesigner to VJ.
From there, I take live inputs from the audio - low end, mid range and the high end. I plug those into different clips and effects that I have to get an audio reactive feel. However, I don’t have to program everything in itself. I spend a lot of time on my VJ sets. I don't take a lot of gigs because I don't want to burn out on one style or set of clips. It’s a lot of work to create a custom application for every time I VJ. But I wouldn't do it any other way because that’s what makes it special.
I'm sure you have had this conversation so many times and might be exhausted about it, but I wanted to ask you about misconceptions around creativity, AI and music technology.
I can't speak much for AI in music, but I can definitely talk about AI and visual art.
I think that has gone a little further than AI and music. Although I started making AI music yesterday and it blew my mind on account of how good it was. For AI and visual art. I'm definitely an optimist.
I don't think that it will change the world for bad. There’s dangers outside of the realm of art, but contained within art. I'm excited for what AI has let people do. I’ll put it this way. It reduces the friction between the brain and products, which I think is almost always a good thing.
There is something to be said about discovering what your tool offers your art. Painters have different traditions of painting because of the medium, as photographers follow different traditions within photography because they might use film or digital. Personally, I use AI to fast forward my process, to get behind paywalls, or generate images that I need but cannot take a photo of. I'll use AI if I need the texture of a specific piece of paper if I can’t find the exact texture I want on some stock image site.
I use AI as a compositional assistant, I feed it prompts to see what compositions it comes up with. I don't, I don't know how important it is that someone can go type in something and come up with an image and then post it somewhere. I don't really think that that is a danger to artists, or an apocalyptic event. I think it's a really interesting tool. It is another step beyond having Photoshop when people didn't have Photoshop, or having cameras before people had cameras.
I'm excited about AI in general. It’s pretty scary and we need to do something about it as a human race. But in visual art, I, I'm only excited for what it means. It almost gives a little bit more power to the average person to create what they want to create.
The painting analogy is spot on. Canvases always start blank, but depending on the painting, you might use a certain shade of ochre to underpaint a canvas. This highlights certain colors and their warmth or luminance. It’s a primitive analogy, but like any sort of tool or technology, there is always a primer for what is to come.
Right. The important part for me is that humans are central to the equation, and there's no removing that. It's a good debate, but in my opinion - If there's no audience, people may debate “is it art? Or is it not art?’
If AI starts generating art for itself, that'd be very fascinating. I don't see the harm in that. If humans are making art with AI, there's still a human behind it. There's still a human at the receiving end of it. Humans are still at the beginning and end of the process no matter what.
L-R: Nick McDonnough, Vonne
Back to your project Rite of Passage. This latest iteration will include guest DJs Nick McDonnough and Vonne, and returning collaborators Alex DL and Dawn DX. Can you tell the uninitiated about it? I hate to say “you have to be there” You can look it up online. You can listen to Alex DL’s accompanying album for the project and the music of Dawn DX as well. You can watch recordings. However, you do have to be there to get the full experience. For those who wouldn't be able to attend past or future iterations - what would they be getting into?
Rite of Passage started as a celebration of community, specific to the Austin underground electronic music community.
We had an opportunity to do a live event in a space that was closing. A space ran by Freq System. I've thrown a lot of events in my time. As much fun as I have going to live events where the focus is raving and dancing and partying. I grew tired of doing that myself. I wanted to challenge myself to put together an event that was intriguing, but almost completely ambient.
I have a lot of opinions on ambient music. I wanted my audience to hear and experience something that they had never experienced before, but I suspect that they had always wanted. So in its core Rite of Passage is a ambient music event. I've pulled in artists that I really think are both extremely talented and under-appreciated in Austin, in Texas. I create audio visual performances, as a way of telling the story of the rite of passage universe I’ve created.
The common themes that you might pick up on at a rite of passage event are: community, spirituality, virtuality. I was investigating pointillism for a while. Meditation. wonder and awe as well. Besides that, I think you do have to just see it for yourself.
If you’re anywhere near Austin, you should make your way there to see it!
Last question: do you have any advice to creators merging art and technology together?
If you're interested in doing it full time, you can find a lot of people who will pay you for the technology, but not a lot of people that will pay you for the art.
It happens very fast, where you can slip into only doing the technology or only doing the art and disconnecting the two. What helps me be successful is knowing when to push the art and when to push the technology, who to push it to, but overall selling myself as both a creative and a technician. Never let the art that you make take a backseat to your technical side.
Ultimately, that's what connects the most to other people.
There's a lot of people out there that will pay you for your technical skills. But if you're as interested in art as I am, what I'm really interested in is talking to other people about art. I push that part of myself to the front. Make good connections. Technology makes things a much easier sell at the end. That's coming from a working perspective, because that's what I've been working through in the past couple of years - learning how to be a working artist and creative.
Get tickets for Rite of Passage on Resident Advisor
Watch Rite of Passage
Listen to Rite of Passage by Alex DL on Bandcamp
Listen to My Device by Dawn DX on Bandcamp