David Gamper – multi-instrument acoustic music with live digital transformation using Max/MSP/Spat and surround sound
Gisela Gamper – live video mixing and multi-stream projection using Isadora on laptops, video mixers, mirrors and servomotor shutters
David and Gisela Gamper’s See Hear Now is a real-time music and video collaboration that seeks to merge the sonic and the visible, and to transport the performers and audience to a transcendent experience. In their individual work, the artists are fascinated by sounds and images from nature and life. To create his live improvisations, David begins with the acoustic sounds he draws from his piano, small instruments and found objects. When he expands this material through live electronic transformations and spatial diffusion, they retain the power of natural sound. With a system David developed, Gisela performs her video with the same immediacy as David performs his music. Using multiple video streams, projectors and mirrors, she creates ever-evolving visual collages of color, movement and rhythm. For their Floating Points performance they design a unique projection installation to complement David’s sound spatialization for ISSUE’s “ceiling of sound.”
See Hear Now premiered in upstate New York in 1999. The duo was featured in Brooklyn College’s Electroacoustic Music Festival in 2003, the 2004 SOUNDPlay festival in Toronto and in Juilliard’s 2005 Beyond the Machine festival in New York City. Other installations, performances and residencies include the Jack Straw Music Gallery in Seattle, the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ISSUE: Project Room’s Sensorium festival, and Roulette’s Festival of Mixology in 2006 and 2008 in NYC. They released their DVD See Hear Now: Visible Music in 2005.
David Gamper moves freely among the worlds of music performance, improvisation, and electronic instrument design. These passions merge in the performer-controlled sound processing environments he has created for himself and other acoustic improvising musicians. He also performs and records as a member of Deep Listening Band (with Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster) since 1990 and appears on many recordings with DLB and others.
Prior to her video work with See Hear Now, Gisela Gamper has been photographing and exhibiting for over 35 years. Gamper exhibited internationally with extensive support including a Vermont Council on the Arts grant and a Hasselblad Cover Award. Gamper’s photographs reside in the collection of the Albany Institute of History & Art in Albany, NY and in many private collections.
