The Lappetites - April 2001 - present
................. is an ongoing laptop group exploring ways of connecting players and sounds via digital and sonic linking games within a multispeaker playground.
The Lappetites is a forum, a meeting place, a concept within which to make new musics via these kinds of possibilities.

Now, its members are Antye Greie, Ryoko Kuwajima, Eliane Radique and Kaffe, who made their 1st performance at the Capital Sonores festival, Paris, Jan 2004. Currently working on an OPERA. For completion December 2004. Developments...
Established by Kaffe in April 2001, the Lappetites has worked so far with, o-blaat, Ikue Mori, Marina Rosenfeld, and Zeena Parkins. It has made 2 residencies at Steim, Amsterdam, 1 at CCMIX, Paris and performed in New York (the Kitchen+Tonic), as well as in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Switzerland, Paris and London.

Initially the content of the work was fed by Matthews/McIntosh research at NASA, Houston,(2002)..... meetings with astronauts, mission controllers, rocket scientists and local noise musicians, beer at the astronauts’ local bar, the Outpost Tavern, and samplings of the jukebox. Parkins later processed these songs into souped-up go-go dancer selection. Have you checked http://www.weightlessanimals.com yet?
Wake-up call interactions between the Columbia crew and mission control were downloaded to make a sonic landscape which reflected the atmosphere gathered from the seven astronauts, who died tragically in the accident which forced the whole agenda of human space travel back into the public eye. Musical selections of other astronauts were processed to make launch and descent sequences and an astronaut’s dream was constructed to convey how extreme ambient noise endured by sleeping space travellers might affect their subconscious.

All sounds and images in the work were recorded in Houston, downloaded from public access NASA archives or made through improvisations @annette works,London. Glasgow based McIntosh created pictorial elements by using traditional animation techniques eg. rotoscoping to investigate and generate new space patinas as well as manipulating code to create visual robots. Specific space related palettes, sterile creams and whites, saturated orange flying suits and super hero comic book colours, were all sampled directly from 1960s archives to present day, including Mir and the former space station. One of the main visual influences was how space travel was stylistically rendered by educational publishers such as Ladybird.

Electrical space activity was also explored by London based Matthews who processed realtime electrical space activity via radio transfer from the net to make digital fragmentsfor composition, e.g. in the molecular hair filaments for visitors to play on.

Material and ideas also further shared and explored in a weeks creative workshop in Glasgow, July 2003.

Overall the project seeks to investigate the current significance of space travel as a human endeavour. Astronauts remain privileged, revered human beings who are trained to work in the most extreme environments humans are capable of being in.
Have you checked http://www.weightlessanimals.com yet?