Participating Artist

www.bugbrand.co.uk

Tom Bugs inhabits the fertile border between arts and science. Driven by a strong DIY ethic, the world of bugs flourishes in diverse directions, taking in hand-built electronic audio devices, ever-mutating musical progressions and the creative decorations of photographic and etched artwork.

Coming from a background of music, Tom has been working with electronics for the last few years, beginning with circuit bending and simple guitar stomp boxes and gradually sinking deep into the circuitry for work on handmade noise systems and large scale modular synths. Tom’s work tries to mix the worlds of art and science by opening up technological ideas to new controls and areas of chance or controlled chaos. His recent work is almost entirely with analogue electronics, with his ideas often taking existing designs, twisting them a bit and then combining and presenting them in new ways. Alongside his solo music and design projects, Tom builds devices for musicians, setting installations and collaborating in technical arts and musical projects.

What Tom would like to achieve from NIP

There are two areas that I envisage focusing on during NIP.

Analogue Control
Understanding the workings of sensors and how to effectively harness their response in creative ways is key to analogue control (for example in a modular synthesis system), but also forms the front-end of many digital control solutions. I really believe that interface is a key part of turning an electronic box into a responsive and inspiring instrument. I have worked with a range of ideas before for example, lo-fi touch control on the Weevil devices with further developments used on my previous project, Touch-to-MIDI Sonic Post (2006). I am also working with sensor and controls on a currently dance collaboration. My main work for this has been the design of sound generating and processing circuitry that can be mounted on the dancer and played together with movement. During NIP I would be interested in exploring this is more depth.

Atmel Microprocessors
While my work is predominantly analogue, interfacing and control with digital microprocessors is an area I would like to investigate further, with particular emphasis on generating MIDI control messages. MIDI is still the most widely used means of control in both musical and visual fields. There exist a number of off-the-shelf solutions for generating MIDI but greater understanding and potential would be realised through custom micro-control. I have had some past experience with PIC microcontrollers. Microprocessors would also have great potential to open up new avenues in the control of audio devices.

These two areas of investigation would feed together into the creation of custom MIDI control devices potentially for collaborative use with other participants in NIP. The NIP framework would provide an inspiring schedule and drive such work. In my locality there are few people working in these ways and it can sometimes be hard to really share ideas with other practitioners it would, therefore, be really inspiring to work and share time with artists such as Michel Waisvisz, in particular, as his history and projects, seems to cross over with my own work.

Technologies that Tom has used

Hardware: Analogue Electronics such as PCB fabrication using Eagle PCB & Press'n'peel + chemicals - for making custom pcbs (also copper images - etching); Microprocesser; various Midi and controller; Diverse sound engineer experience (mixing desks / microphones / monitoring).
Software: Reaktor Software (like MAX MSP), Cubase SX, Wavelab, Photoshop and fireworks, little bit of Avid (video), Dreamweaver.