Grey Filastine & Nova: Akra Kinari

1. Who are you and what do you do?

Grey Filastine.
I create music, videos, live performances, and public interventions. The music ranges from durty electronic beatscapes to opera compositions. The video work might be documentation, video clips made in tandem with music compositions, or the visuals for live performances. Those live performances are where sound, visuals and narrative ideas can come together, and it’s probably where my work is at its best. My public interventions include the Sound Swarm, which is a swarm of boomboxes and megaphones orchestrated and fed by FM transmitters, to sonify or disrupt public space. My latest work is Arka Kinari, which leverages all of the above, as it’s an AV performance that happens in public ports.

2. Arka Kinari is such a huge and inspiring undertaking, it seems like more than just an art project, it is a way of life. How did you and Nova come up with the idea and make the decision to follow through?

Yes, I think it’s worthy of the german word “gesamkunstwerk.” We live aboard and within Arka Kinari, it is our stage, tour vehicle, kitchen and life support system. A tiny floating universe.
Our work has always spoken about the disfigurment of nature, which we now call the climate crisis for shorthand, but started long before the concept gained currency. As festival performers we tried to be as efficient as possible with our touring, batching festivals with indie gigs to tour as low-impact as possible, but there was still way too much use of polluting airplanes. Also, we wanted to tour more extensively in Nova’s homeland of Indonesia, an archipelago of 17 thousand islands, but it’s hard to get around, and most islands lack good AV equipment- again we found ourselves flying often, and playing through shitty sound systems and dodgy projectors. The solution became obvious- we needed a ship.

3. Ok, give us an in depth breakdown of all the gear on Arka Kinari, everything from what keeps you moving, the people on it alive, and for the performances when you are docked?

Hold my beer?
It starts with tools to maintain this little world, everything you might need for carpentry, welding, engines, electrical, plumbing and AV gear, plus all the raw materials and parts for anything that might break.

Electricity comes from a dozen solar panels, a wind generator, with a diesel generator used just for top-ups or after a string of cloudy days.
We have a desalinator that can make a steady trickle of freshwater for the sea, and a complex system of provisioning food for months-long voyages. Of course we need all the ropes and steel cables and shackles and bits that make the sailing rig function. The “iron topsail” is a 1980’s Detroit Diesel 2-stroke engine, a model used by the US military for tanks, trains and boats for many years. As an eco project of course we try to use this ship engine as little as possible, but certainly glad that it is there.

As for the audiovisual gear we have to budget electricity carefully. 

The sound system is 5x12” tops, 3x18” subwoofers, all self-powered for simplicity, and all with low-consumption Class-D amps.
For visuals we use two short-throw 5k lumen projectors on big-ass RAM balls designed for military and police use, because in order to get enough throw distance the projectors are hanging outside the rails of the ship, directly over the sea!
Stage lighting is handled by a dozen LED spots and par cans, networked with DMX and connected to the computer with ArtNet. Finally, all of this stage equipment is stowed in a cavity below the wheelhouse in a kind of precision Tetris, sealed boxes with plenty of silica desicant packets inside.
Now, this is where it gets interesting- all of the video AND the lights are controlled via VDMX in combination with Ableton Live. It means that in one ‘song’ there will be one master audio clip, that might have some core audio events, but crucially has 40-60 lines of automation, with video fades, triggers, lighting cues, all baked in to the clip. Communication between Ableton Live and VDMX is by OSC, and has been flawless, never any lag or glitches. The best feature about this system is that I can always override any of those instructions by touching the midi controller, which would then become the master of that parameter. To return to the plan just hit that “return to automation” button in Ableton. In this way Ableton is a sequencer, and VDMX the brain for video, and the conduit for transforming OSC into DMX to control the stage lights. 

4. Aside from learning all the ins and outs of living at sea, surviving during COVID when you couldn't dock at ports, what were some of the more unexpected technical challenges you have run into over the years?

What’s doing my head in right now is that I designed the whole performance for the starboard (right) side of the ship, and it turns out that, due to the steering distortion caused by the directional spin of the ship’s propeller when manouvering, it is far easier to dock on the port (left) side of the ship, so now I’ve got “Flip Horizontal” plug-ins on the master layer, and on the internal layers, which makes the corner mapping extra painful.. Back is forward, left is right, etc.. and I locked in the GUI design in Ableton (a custom Max4L plugin) and VDMX so deeply that I’ve got to keep using these horizontal flip workarounds or spend weeks painfully reprogramming the whole show. Oops. But how could I have known this?

One of the first things you learn is to never touch anything technical before rinsing the salt from your hands. Freshwater is harmless compared to seawater, which is like a deadly snake venom for cables and connectors.

Anyone that has done architectural mapping has probably battled with whoever controls nearby streetlights and business lights. For Arka Kinari we struggle with the port’s dock lights and lights of other ships. The dock lights are often solar and automatic, so we’ve learned how to throw weighted balls with rope tails over the top of the lights, and then pull up a cardboard box to block the beam. For the ships we bribe the crews with packs of cigarettes for them to reduce their external lighting.

The first few years there were plagued by dramas from wet equipment, not from the sea, which we treat as dangerous as if it were lava, but from rain! We’re voyaging near the equator, where tropical downpours come quickly and often. I’m very proud of how far we’ve come with waterproofing, all the gear now has quick-install covers that attach by velcro, the whole AV system can be rain-proofed in under five minutes, then uncovered for the gig with only a few minutes of group effort.