Loveburn Miami was simultaneously a rerun of Burning Man, and a new iteration in many ways. Where at Burning man we had only had the occasional live performance, and those were not fully taking advantage of the possibilities of our instrument, at Loverburn we fully embraced Sonic sphere as an open stage, available to be plugged into by anyone who wanted to have a play. Structurally KA10 was much the same as KA9, but the interior was significantly upgraded. We added a centre circular truss which was secured with 4 vertical trusses from ground level, and we built a number of semi-continuous hard floor sections around the inner perimeter of the structure. We now finally had a net with walk-able tension, and a proper dancefloor, or really, dance area.
This had been a long time coming, and a proper full dancefloor is still an urgent requirement, but the timing of this partial dance floor for Loveburn was perfect, as our open stage approach brought in a number of amazing DJs keen to explore cutting tracks in 3D.
Software wise, we had made the jump to a dedicated renderer, allowing in principle the use of any DAW, in the hope that this would open up our instrument to more producers, artists and composers.
And finally, we at last had devised a way of integrating sound-to-light spatially via a software tool called Touch Designer. It was only a first test, and the learnings from there were mostly about why things didn’t work, but it felt like a real milestone for that critical missing part, proper sound and light in space synchronization.
So, the learnings from KA10 were myriad. The open stage was an incredible success, it pushed the envelope of artistic expression in a fully spherical 3D audio-visual environment; it solidified and exponentially grew our collective of people who get it, are keen to explore the edges of experience and have the expressive talent to do so. The structural upgrades were a direct function of our experience at burning Man, and just worked, the hybrid dancefloor/ chill space combo was a real breakthrough and made the interior a proper multi-modal inter-active space.
The software upgrades and first forays into touch designer were both important milestones, and both are there to stay and developed for future iterations.
