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February 19, 2008
Björk’s Reactable: A Reaction
I just returned from Björk’s live show, and I don’t mean to dodge the whole issue of the actual performance (it was quite good) but one thing that really stood out to me was that they used this technology that looked very familiar to me as a MIT Media Lab project that I remember seeing a few years ago. Throughout the show, this instrument was featured on screens as one of the musicians played with it, and I could swear I had seen it before, though I had remembered it as a prototype, not commercially available or otherwise attainable in any way except to these two MIT students who had developed it. I marveled at the fact that Björk–or whoever tipped her off to it–had found this thing, gone through the trouble of contacting the developers about using their invention, perhaps even convinced them to develop it further, and that this whole complicated transaction must have happened so I could ultimately see it used in this performance today.
But going home and researching, to my surprise, I was completely wrong! I did find the piece that I had remembered, its called Audiopad, was developed by James Patten and Ben Recht, and can be seen here as well as in the video above. What she is using is this other thing called the Reactable, made mostly by a team of four from Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University.
What’s really strange to me is that although the Reactable is literally almost the exact same thing as the Audiopad, there is very little mention of said device from the Reactable team. No real debt to it is given, although listed on top of the related page of Reactable’s website, and there is no indication of any transaction ever going on between the two teams behind the devices–although conspicuously, Audiopad was exhibited at Sonar festival in Barcelona in 2003. Same for James Patten’s page. No mention of Reactable whatsover.
Is Reactable just a rip-off of Audiopad? If so, do the two Audiopad creators care? After all, news about their invention seems to have died out. On YouTube, the Audiopad video with the most hits has around 7000. Reactable on the other hand got picked up by Björk, has cracked well over a million hits in YouTube, and is apparently being made into an actual product in the near future.
Björk seems to always be incorporating some kind of bleeding edge technology into her performances. Previous to Reactable, she was using Lemur before anyone else, and it still features in the show as well. My next question however is, does this explicit gizmo-flaunting actually add to the performance? This is a little tricky and could be compellingly argued either way, but ultimately I would say it does. I could start to say that it doesn’t, that they’re not doing anything in that live show that they couldn't accomplish without traditional synths and sequencers (which is true), but this is beyond the point, and smacks of hard-headed, narrow-minded music snobbery.
The point is that Björk is smart. If she hadn’t jumped on this thing before anyone else, I wouldn’t be writing this, would I? I could just be saying, hey she played these songs from these albums, had a nice harpsichord player and a brass section, danced around a bit, and was out. ¥9000 later I had a good time. But its not that simple. These machines look amazing, and everyone knows it. That’s why there is no VJ or prerecorded video in these shows–just a camera on the machines. They’re the goddamn interface from the bridge of the NCC-1701-D come to life, and just to control sounds, for fuck’s sake. And once that prototype becomes a real device and people start to talk about it, buy it, or use it, Björk’s name is going to come up in every one of those conversations as being the pioneer. Even if the devices aren’t adding a lot to the sound, they are in fact superseding that purpose with the role of providing atmosphere and the intangible value of creating an overall lasting experience. I guess what I mean to say is, if you ever find yourself questioning the sexificiation of technology, especially in relation to Björk, you need look no further than that gem from 1999.
Posted by shane at February 19, 2008 11:09 PM