The Audiovisual Environment Suite is five interactive systems which let people create and perform abstract animation and synthetic sound in real time. Each environment is an attempt to design an interface which is easy to learn, it can also yield infinitely variable and personally expressive performances in the visual and aural domains. These systems permit their interactants to engage in a flow state of pure experience.

The AVES systems are built around the metaphor of an inexhaustible and dynamic audiovisual “substance,” which is freely deposited and controlled by the user’s gestures. Each instrument in a context whose free-form structure inherits from the visual language of abstract painting and animation. The use of low-level synthesis techniques permits the sound and image to be tightly linked, commensurately malleable, and deeply plastic.

The AVES systems has a bunch of junctures of art, design, and the engineering of tools and instruments. As artworks, they extend an established Twentieth century tradition in which artworks are themselves generative systems for other media. As a set of tools, the AVES work represents a vision on the computer, in which uniquely ephemeral dynamic media blossom from a close collaboration between a system’s user.

Scribble, a color-music performance which uses the AVES instruments. In this concert, composed and developed in collaboration with Scott Gibbons and Greg Shakar, sounds and dynamic visuals which were at times carefully scored, and at other times loosely improvised. Scribble has since appeared, or will appear, at Opera Totale 6 (Venice, 1/01), the Berlin Transmediale (2/01), and Interaction01 (Gifu, 10/01).

The AVES instruments are available (for Windows2000) from the Ars Electronica Center Store, as part of a DVD-ROM compilation disc, Active Score Music, which documents the premiere performance of Scribble. More information about the DVD is available here.