Schematic as Score features an eclectic range of young, contemporary artists who have revisited and expanded upon the philosophies and works of this earlier generation. Operating at the extreme edges of the DIY electronics scene, builder-composers such as Peter Blasser, Jason R. Butcher, Moritz Ellerich, Lesley Flanigan, Martin Howse, the Loud Objects (Kunal Gupta, Tristan Perich and Katie Shima), Jessica Rylan and Synchronator (Bas van Koolwijk & Geert-Jan Prins) all represent some of the most radical and idiosyncratic artistic approaches to creative circuitry of the moment. Their compositions take the form of systems which provide a map of what is possible, but lack a prescribed route on how to get there. The discovery — and the risk — is left to the moment of the performance.

Quartet With Pyramid Scheme is a streaming online sound installation whose audio content is collected through a sixteen-week pyramid scheme structure. Every two weeks, a new set of participants (recruited by prior participants) submits sound samples that the quartet will selectively work into the stream. The samples are played continuously in unpredictable variations through a Max/MSP patch. By the end of the process, 512 participants will have been asked to contribute.

Quartet With Pyramid Scheme is a 2011 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHIES

JORDAN TOPIEL PAUL is a musician, artist and elementary educator based out of Queens, NY. Originally an improvising percussionist, he continues to explore improvisation in his current work with sound installation and electronic media. His recent pieces have involved collaborative planning and production, field recordings, site-specificity, FM and Internet transmission, Max/MSP programming and indeterminate processes.

ERIC LASKA is a New York-based musician. Examples from recent work focus on the proliferation of sounds from localized material processes, the arrangement of improvised music for extended periods of time, and composing for electro-acoustic music based on “back-end” principles such as power consumption. In addition he is part of the Internet surf club “Double Happiness.”

RICHARD KAMERMAN’S artistic interest is aimed foremost on the task of magnification. Small sounds, small gestures — made large. Inconsequential events — made important. The vast difference made to a narrative by a small change in focus. Room acoustics, microphone/pickup placement, and amplification are often very important to his live construction of sound, where he places great weight on the embracing of unintended consequences - e.g. errors in translation/format conversion, bursts of feedback, power supply failures.

REED EVAN ROSENBERG is an American multidisciplinary artist working primarily in sound. He programs various digital instruments for each specific project on which he embarks, encompassing the areas of improvised electronic music, extreme computer music, and installation art. Recent projects include an in depth study of chaotic synthesis using Boris Chirikov’s “Standard Map,” systems that hack and trouble auto-tune and phase vocoding, and a musical system using the boids algorithm which simulates the flocking patterns of birds and was most famously implemented in the CG of Jurassic Park.

“Like” us on Facebook:
http://facebook.com/nrpa.org
http://facebook.com/turbulence.org

Follow us on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/turbulenceorg

Please support the Turbulence Commissions Program. See http://turbulence.org for details.

Since the earliest civilizations, a complex relationship has existed between human society and the weather systems that define the world around us. We make sense of seasonal cycles through rituals and folklore, passing down ways of harnessing the natural elements whilst constructing defenses against those which threaten our existence.

Variable 4 transforms these weather patterns into a living musical composition with the same unpredictability as the elements themselves. Using meteorological sensors connected to a custom software environment developed by the artists, the wild weather conditions of the Kent coastland act as composer, navigating through a map of 24 specifically written movements. Every aspect of the piece, from broad harmonic progressions down to individual notes and timbres, is influenced by changes in the environment: wind speed, rainfall, solar radiation, humidity, tropospheric variance, temperature, and more.

Linking together the sensor data and scored motifs is an array of algorithmic processes drawn from the natural world, modelling phenomena such as tree growth, swarm theory and evolutionary development. The resultant composition is performed over a 24 hour duration through a field of 8 speakers integrated into the landscape.

The piece will take place from midday May 22nd to midday May 23rd 2010 on the headland of Dungeness, a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) due to its unique and diverse wildlife.

James Bulley is a composer, producer and sonic artist, whose work spans a range of mediums and genres. Most recent artwork includes a series of collaborations with the artists Charlesworth, Lewandowski and Mann, a 9-channel 29 piano field recording installation in the Queen Elizabeth Hall entitled Equal Temperance, and work for the theatre companies Athletes Of The Heart, and Connection Failed [winner of Attic Arts 2009]. As a producer, James is currently working with Fred Deakin, with previously production credits including Pete Greenwood [Heavenly Records], Among the Bones [Clan Destine Records] and Trojan Sound System. He is also founder and co- director of OOXXOO, a South London based artist platform curating and producing exhibitions, documentary films, events and publications.

Daniel Jones is an artist, composer and software engineer who creates generative audio-visual works based on biological phenomena. Part of a body of research towards a PhD in complex systems dynamic, his interdisciplinary work with simulation and visualisation bridges the gap between the domains of art and science, serving to illuminate each in a new light. Previous works include AtomSwarm (2006), a musical performance system using swarm dynamics; Map of a Micro-Community (2007), which depicts the growth and fluctuations of an online community; and Subtext (2008), a site-specific installation which translates the underlying signals of network traffic into a set of human-readable hieroglyphics, commissioned by SoundNetwork for Futuresonic08. He co-ordinated and developed the technical infrastructure for The Fragmented Orchestra, winner of the prestigious PRS Foundation New Music.

Variable 4 is made possible thanks to generous funding from the PRS for Music Foundation, and support from a number of independent sponsors including Campbell Scientific, Max For Live, KEF and the Dungeness RNLI.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at London’s Barbican from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.

John Cage (1912-1992) defined a radical practice of “experimental” composition that not only changed the course of modern music and dance but defined a new conceptual horizon for artistic practice in the late-20th century. Illuminating the relevance of Cage’s contribution to contemporary art, Henie Onstad Art Centre presents the most extensive exhibition to be devoted to the artist since his death, and the first to focus on the historicization of the composer’s oeuvre and its impact.

The Anarchy of Silence - John Cage tracks systematically the critical developments in Cage’s career: from his work with percussion (1930s), to the prepared piano (1940s), to chance and indeterminacy (1950s), to new media (1960s onward), through to the political focus that ever more explicitly informed the work in the last decades of his life. Cage ushered in formal, structural, temporal, and media innovations that now form cornerstones of contemporary consciousness. In this exhibition, his changing approaches materialize as the powerful series of conceptual catalysts through which the composer altered the terms of creative practice at large. Sound recordings, films, scores, and documentary materials provide an insight into the extraordinary scope of Cage’s project.

Because of its special position of exploring the work of a composer from the perspective of a museum of contemporary art, the exhibition considers Cage’s encounters with artists as a key part of his practice. As artists were rejecting expression Cage developed indeterminate composition, and his scores became a crucial model for mediating the creative act. The show thus features 200 works by the composer and other artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Henry Flynt and Nam June Paik.

John Cage visited Høvikodden in 1983 and held several concerts here, so a number of Norwegian artists and musicians were in close contact with him. The Henie Onstad Art Centre’s exhibition pays tribute to this by presenting four days of music devoted to John Cage, when Cage compositions will be performed, along with concerts by musicians and sound artists who were inspired by Cage. In addition, as many as three newly commissioned works will be performed.

The exhibition is curated by Julia Robinson and is the result of a collaboration between MACBA, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona and The Henie Onstad Art Centre. The exhibition opened at MACBA, is now on display at Henie Onstad Art Centre, and will then travel to SCHUNCK in the Netherlands.

Catalogue: The exhibition is accompanied by a significant publication of new scholarship on Cage. Authors: Yve-Alain Bois, Branden Joseph, Liz Kotz, James Pritchett, Julia Robinson; with an extensive chronology by Rebecca Y. Kim.

Cage on CD: A comprehensive CD and book entitled John Cage in Norway, documents Cage’s visit to Norway in 1983, when he spent a week at The Henie Onstad Art Centre and a group of Norwegian musicians including Christian Eggen, Magne Hegdal, Kjell Samkopf and Rob Waring performed his works. John Cage in Norway comprises a 64-page booklet of new articles about Cage, a transcription of a conversation that Cage held at the State Academy of Art, a newly written article written by musicians who worked with him here in Norway and a number of hitherto unpublished pictures.

MUSIC PROGRAMME:
28. February:
Jim O’Rourke: “Aunt Esther” commissioned tape work
Else Olsen S: Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48)
Håvard Volden and Toshimaru Nakamura: Sculptures Musicales (1989)
Kjell Samkopf: Child of Tree (1975)
In collaboration with Ny Musikk
21. March:
Robin Fox (commissioned work)
Low Frequency in Stereo
11. April:
Cage for Kids!
Workshop and concert in collaboration with The Norwegian Academy of Music
25. April:
Lemur and Tom Løberg: Four6
Deathprod: performance in the Studio (commissioned work)
Andrea Neumann: Water Walk and extracts from Song Books
In collaboration with Ny Musikk

The individual scores are created using software that reads the RGB pixel information across the X axis of the image and assigns a unique tone to each colored pixel. Two 20 minute movements of MUSICfor.one [byTEN] will be performed live on the Chatroulette network March 20, 2010 at 10:00 pm EST [-5GMT]. Click through and see if you can find the performance. Documentation of MUSICfor.one [byTEN] will be made available.

One of two authors-performers play rolling a virtual dice over the board of a Parcheesi game, projected on the screen, and moving the counter on the board is activating different behaviours. In some squares there are soundfiles of well-known Radio Art works, in some other the performer receives audio instructions to play, other squares have links with webpages of freeradios or with radio stations belonging to Ars Acustica group, in other squares some colleagues give their personal definition of Ars Acustica. And among other surprises the performer could find concrete sound effects like crashing glasses, cheap imitations of animals, laughter, whisperings, non-sense speaking…

We are revisiting documents of Sound Art and Radio Art which belongs to everyone. They are monuments, but in a sense they have become ready-made: objects of functional use industrially reproduced by different media, including Radio. And of course we do an Ars Acustica tribute to its 20th Anniversary.

Apart from those documents, the second performer is almost permanently mixing some other excerpts of radio art works provided by different people belonging to Ars Acustica and choosen specially as examples of “radio-on-radio” works, in which the message of the artist or composer himself is the message of the media.

With the help of Instituto Cervantes of Vienna.

Variations VII is the most recent installment in the Mobius Artists Group’s exploration of John Cage’s eight compositions, titled Variations. Beginning in 1996 with Variations I, in a version for two voices performed by David Miller and Larry Johnson, MAG members and guest artists have studied and performed this series in chronological order. This multiyear project was initiated and is coordinated by David Miller, but each of the projects is essentially collaborative in nature. Working through these radically open-ended compositions, among the most indeterminate of all Cage’s works, has provided the collaborators with an action-research form of insight into one key aspect of Cage’s development.

More important, however, the Mobius realizations of the Variations are aimed at unearthing the potential that these classic “avant-garde” works of the mid-twentieth century have for audiences and artists of our own time. This is especially true for the later works in the series, as they are rarely performed. The first Mobius Artists Group performance of Variations VII, given in March 2007, was the first realization of this work since its original performances in 1966, when it was presented by Experiments in Art and Technology as part of Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering.

The Mobius collaborators’ experience in preparing the 2007 performance laid the groundwork for the more fully developed version to be presented this April, including the addition of new team members Alisia Waller and Joshua Jade. The final work in the series, Variations VIII, is projected for performance in 2008-09.

BACKGROUND ON JOHN CAGE’S VARIATIONS VII: In 1966, John Cage and a set of prominent collaborators, including Billy Klüver of Bell Laboratories and David Tudor, presented Variations VII, as part of the series 9 Evenings: Art and Engineering. Performed at the immense New York City Armory under the auspices of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), Variations VII was an experiment in making audible the inaudible and transforming the results via live electronic sound processing. By the “inaudible” was meant sounds from the world beyond the Armory space (for example, a restaurant kitchen, the zoo), sounds available in the space itself but generally inaccessible (sounds of the body), and sounds produced by the transformation of non-aural data (particularly via a Geiger counter).

The team of composers working with Cage and Klüver used the metaphor of “fishing” to create a rich and dense soundscape, originating entirely with real-time sources unintended for performance. The Mobius team is developing a 21st-century presentation of Variations VII which, while taking into account what was done in 1966, aims at something different from a reproduction of the original. The sonic “fishing” activities will use a variety of means, from Web-scanning to processes which use no electronic technology. The group will also be fishing in another dimension, with real-time development of projected visual imagery using found material. Finally, the fishing will take place in a set of simultaneous, widening circles, from the performance space itself, to the surrounding neighborhood, remote physical spaces, and the global Web. See Variations VII: FishNet.

About Mobius: Mobius, founded by Marilyn Arsem in 1977, is known for incorporating a wide range of the visual, performing, and media arts into innovative live performance, video, installation and intermedia works. Mobius has produced hundreds of original works that have attained critical acclaim in Boston, nationally and internationally. Works created at Mobius have been presented throughout the North and South America, Europe and Asia.

Mobius has long been committed to creating artist exchange projects bringing artists from different geographic regions to work together. The international exchange projects with artists from Macedonia, Croatia, Poland, and Taiwan have focused on site-specific and publicly-sited work. Mobius has presented work involving thousands of artists over its 30-year history and is recognized as one of the seminal alternative, artist-run organizations in the U.S.

Mobius, Inc is funded by the Tanne Foundation; the Nonsequitur Foundation; the Boston Redevelopment Authority; the LEF Foundation; the Boston Cultural Council, a program of the Mayor’s office on Arts, Tourism, & Special Events; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; the Oedipus Foundation; and generous private support.

Once launched, WITCHin flux plays continuously while randomly accessing and remixing samples from Yoko Ono’s Yes, I’m a Witch. Technical requirements - high-speed connection, flash player installed.