Haraldur Karlsson

Contributions


About


Icelandic multimedia artist and researcher, based in Reykjavík.

We are living in a fantastic moment. One person, in a browser, can now build the kind of instrument that used to need an institution — and I get to spend my time doing exactly that.

ImWeb is my highest passion and where everything I have learned and practised comes together. My work has mostly run on instruments built by artists for artists — the software that came out of STEIM in Amsterdam, where I was a resident in 2002, 2005 and 2009. I played Tom Demeyer and Steina Vasulka's Image/ine for years in performance and installation. Around 2002 I performed with Image/ine on one machine and SuperCollider on another, my hands the only link between the two.

I build things that are joyful and playable while I build them. That is the method, not a preference — I play ImWeb every day I work on it, and it only gets features I want to reach for. It is why there is no edit mode to leave: I don't work in one either.

ImWeb is not a remake. It is a new instrument, with a 3D pipeline, live shader editing, a corpus of sound you navigate by touch, and things Image/ine never had. Everything in it is a parameter, and every parameter takes a controller — MIDI, a fader, an LFO, the sound in the room. Nothing to type.

And I love sharing it. That is its own joy, not a sacrifice. Open source, free for every artist on this planet, forever — no installation, no subscription, no professional edition. Everything it does can be done elsewhere by someone with the money, the machine and the month to learn it. ImWeb is for everyone else.
haraldur.net