The Conflux is an emergent art practice of collaborative
tele-production of art. When participating, one enters a social space
that fosters forward-thinking approaches to expression and co-creation.
Conflux is derived from the “con-” prefix of converge, consensus, connect and the Fluxus art movement. Confluxes are a radical remote collaboration process, that at their core emphasize process over product. While originally incubated entirely virtually, we now use the art form to push the boundaries of how we collaborate in a more hybrid realm. It is an art praxis that uses (primarily) virtual tools to act as a vehicle for artists to teach each other new skills in real time.
Though it began with the co-production of music, it has since been
adapted to other art forms such as visuals and writing, further proving
its ability and aim to use emerging technologies to enable artists in
different physical locations to create with each other.
The Conflux uses a wide range of virtual tools beginning with:
– Gather.Town: a web-conferencing platform that allows a number of people to operate together or split into smaller rooms. Very useful in the connection of multiple spaces.
– DAW’s: BandLab, Ableton, Studio One, Pro Tools, or any other major DAW. This provides the highest quality audio and control from the source, and gives a lot of room for experimentation and programming
– Sonobus as a low-latency media transfer, that sends audio and MIDI over a private network. This is what allows multiple spaces to work togeher simultaneously at low-latency, which is vital for Confluxes that spread across various time-zones.
– ZeroTier as a private network tool to connect all devices directly, and further lower latency that would be encountered over normal networking. This also gives us the freedom to have whatever network configuration we desire.
– Figma as an interactive design tool to map the Conflux plan and interactions. While any design tool works, we prefer to use Figma as part of our design process.
“A unique virtual and local collaboration between artists in various countries, making music simultaneously and creatively…”
The musical Conflux has also evolved into many shapes and forms all, revolving around a creative round-robin. The primary forms are the:
– Conflux QP (Quick Play): A session in which artists simultaneously work on creating a total of 4-5 tracks together per session, with each artist working on every single track
– Conflux Jam: A session in which artists collectively collaborate to create one jam in a one-off live session, designed for maximum education in which each artist narrates their process as they create; and
– Confluxtape: a long-form process of co-producing songs in which artists are freed from the time constraints of the QP and Jam sessions. We’ve also experimented with Visual Conflux: where different visual artists collaborate on and ‘remix’ each others’ design work, and Lyrical Conflux: where artists work together to write lyrics.
