GenComp Collective Berlin: Chaotic, cybernetic, and hybrid systems — Neurological and cybernetic research techniques have been adopted by many experimental music protagonists, such as Louis and Bebe Barron, Alvin Lucier, David Tudor and others. The GenComp Collective Berlin (Alberto de Campo, Hannes Hoelzl, and students, alumni and associates of the class Generative Art / Computational Art at UdK Berlin) explores the use of such systems for experimental performance. They use current developments like Rob Hordijk’s chaotic synthesizers (the Benjolin and the Blippoo box), Peter Blasser’s hybrid designs Fourses and the Rollz family of modules; they design, build and program their own performance systems based on a variety of sensors, analog electronics, and software synthesis.

The book to-be-launched: Critical Neuroscience. A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience, Choudhury, Suparna / Slaby, Jan (eds.): Critical Neuroscience brings together leading scholars in a collective effort to understand the impact of the intellectual, economic and political conditions on current views of the brain and how these models may in turn impact society. With illuminating insights and deep scholarly rigour, Critical Neuroscience offers a comprehensive interdisciplinary perspective that aims to enrich our understanding of the brain as situated in the body and world, and neuroscience as embedded in a complex cultural context.

The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in partnership with UNC Asheville and the John Cage Trust is pleased to announce ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 3 to be held October 7 – 9, 2011, a weekend gathering of scholars, performers and artists coming to Asheville to present ideas and perform works related to avant-garde composer John Cage. The program for the weekend will include music, performances, installations, exhibitions, films and scholarly presentations, all touching on some aspect of Cage’s life, work and genius…his Circle of Influence.

The keynote address will be given on Saturday, Oct. 8, 2011 from 5:00 - 6:00 p.m by Laura Kuhn, the Executive Director of the John Cage Trust. Ms. Kuhn worked directly with John Cage from 1986-1992 on a variety of large-scale projects, including his Europeras 1 & 2 for the Frankfurt Opera. Projects under her direction include a CD-ROM of sampled piano preparations from Cage’s Sonatas & Interludes (1946–48) and The John Cage Book of Days, a yearly pocket calendar filled with historically important dates, pithy quotations, and unique images drawn from the archives of the John Cage Trust. She created and directed James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet, a theatrical realization of Cage’s radio play (2001). Kuhn is the John Cage Professor of Performance Arts at Bard College, where the John Cage Trust is headquartered.

John Cage (1912-1992) was a man of many interests: music, mushrooms, Zen Buddhism and Eastern Philosophy, visual art and dance. He pioneered the practice of ‘preparing’ the piano by inserting objects into the strings, thereby altering the sound of the instrument in radical ways. He worked collaboratively for many years with choreographer/dancer Merce Cunningham and with fellow musician David Tudor (both of whom were also at Black Mountain College). Cage’s most famous (and infamous) composition is 4′33′, first performed by David Tudor in August of 1952. The piece lasts for precisely 4 minutes and 33 seconds during which time the pianist sits at the piano, consults a stopwatch and turns the pages of a score, but never strikes a note on the piano. This courageously conceptual work confused and outraged audiences and established Cage as an iconoclast and radical thinker. Cage taught at BMC in the summers of 1948 and 1952 and was in residence the summer of 1953. While there in 1952, he staged the first ‘Happening’ in the United States, a multi-layered performative event that changed modern theater.

John Cage’s influence in multiple fields is a reason for his enduring legacy and contemporary relevance. As a musician, composer, philosopher and visual artist Cage’s work continues to inspire others. ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 3 will celebrate this enormously far-reaching influence through a mix of performances and presentations that address the many aspects of this visionary artist and thinker.

The schedule includes presentations by an impressive roster of participants, including some who worked with John Cage on visual art or music-related projects such as Ray Kass (worked with Cage at the Mountain Lake Workshop), Janos Négyesy (premiered Cage’s Freeman Etudes in 1981), (Beverly Plummer who made ‘edible paper’ with Cage)and others who are scholars or musicologists and have published books about Cage (David Patterson, editor of John Cage Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933-1950).

Schedule:

Activities will commence on Thursday night, Oct. 6th when the Mobile Art Lab Easel Rider projects imagery onto the BB&T building. Then, from noon to 1:30 on Friday, Oct. 7th a 90-minute MusiCircus will take place all over town. This random and unscripted series of musical performances will spontaneously ebb and flow in an unpredictable way. At 3:00 p.m. author and independent scholar Mary Emma Harris will give a talk entitled Eden Re-imagined: John Cage & Black Mountain College, 1948-54 followed by Beverly Plummer’s presentation Choice, Chance and Anarchy: Making Edible Paper with John Cage. Friday evening from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. activities will shift over to the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center for the opening reception for the exhibition John Cage: A Circle of Influences and then over to the Grey Eagle for Roedelius w/XAMBUCA. Hans-JoachimRoedelius is one of the pioneers of electronic music, synthesis and sound exploration.

Saturday morning’s presentations and performances will begin at 9:00 a.m. and continue until midnight, all at UNC Asheville. The keynote address, delivered by Laura Kuhn, Executive director of the John Cage Trust will take place from 5:00 - 6:00 p.m. Saturday afternoon, followed by a reception. Saturday evening at 8:00 p.m. a set of three performances is scheduled to take place in Lipinsky Auditorium. This promises to be a highlight of ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 3 as the three performers are extremely accomplished. Louis Goldstein, Professor of Music at Wake Forest University and co-founder of the California New Music Ensemble will perform ASLSP INTERPENETRATED. Then, celebrated German pianist Jens Barnieck will perform The Age of Cage, a set of compositions by Cage, Yvar Mikashoff and Tui St. George Tucker. Saturday evening will close with Hungarian violinist Janos Négyesy performing one of Cage’s most difficult compositions, The Freeman Etudes.

Sunday morning’s activiites will commence at 9:00 a.m. with another round of presentations and performances including Matthew Burtner’s presentation Agents Against Agency: Environmental Activist Music and the Legacy of John Cage, film by Robbie Land and poetry by Joseph Bathanti. After lunch, a tour of the Lake Eden campus of Black Mountain College will be offered along with a Mushroom Walk.

In conjunction with ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 3, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center will present an exhibition of Cage’s artwork called John Cage: A Circle of Influences. This exhibition explores multiple aspects of Cage’s work from his important time at Black Mountain College to his later collaborative projects including the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia. The exhibition will open on Sept 30th with an opening reception planned for Friday, Oct. 7, 6:00-8:00 p.m.

The Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center preserves and continues the unique legacy of educational and artistic innovation of Black Mountain College for public study and enjoyment. We achieve our mission through collection, conservation, and educational activities including exhibitions, publications, and public programs.

Why would anyone want to merely bang out music, when you could have euphoria? Why be satisfied with an ordinary spinet when you could have The Emotion Organ? Developed over a rigorous three-year period in a small studio in Norway, Amanda Steggell’s The Emotion Organ is a synaesthetic, simulacrum machine that takes its public on a phenomenological journey through the physical senses. With the organ, you can hear colors and smell sounds. The Emotion Organ is also a time machine. It connects obsolete technology with the new, combining a 19th century organ with contemporary gadgetry to create a hybrid form that is part performance object and part scientific instrument for studying phenomenon. When playing the organ, various combinations of chords and foot pedals trigger cross-sensory events, such as the projection of visual patterns, vibrations, and/or emission of compelling aromas. Each viewer is invited to play the organ and come up with his or her own set of discoveries. As a sculptural object used to explore processual practices, Steggell’s The Emotion Organ is an exciting contribution to a contemporary artistic practice and redefinition of artistic roles from makers to facilitators that enable the exploration of complex relational, networked and social experiences.

The Emotion Organ will be installed within the Women’s Art Resource Centre (WARC) and be offered to the public to explore and perform with. You are allowed and encouraged to touch the art! The exhibition will open with an introduction to the organ by the artist followed by a special evening of performances by both established and up-and-coming Toronto musicians who will create live improvisations using The Emotion Organ.

Biographies:

Amanda Steggell, artist, born in Yokohama, based in Norway, works all over the place. She has a background in dance/choreography and is Associate Professor at Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Her interest is in the allurement and uncanniness of technology and its related devices with which she shares her life. As a collaborative and solo artist, her interdisciplinary work combines and shifts across the scope of the performing, visual, sonic and media arts. She has worked extensively with digital and communications technologies since the mid-1990s when she also co-founded the Motherboard project with Per Platou (www.liveart.org). In 2007 she gained a PhD-alternative qualification for artists in Norway for her artistic research in synaesthesia and contemporary live art practice. Her solo work is currently seeping into science/technology museums in the form of participatory installations as well as in public space as urban interventions.

Born in Canada, Michelle Teran is a media artist currently living in Berlin. In her work she explores the interaction between media and social networks in urban environments. She develops performances via the staging of urban interventions such as guided tours, walks, open-air projections, participatory installations and happenings. She has received numerous grants and awards for her work including the Prix Ars Electronica honorary mention for Interactive Art, the Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life Award and the Transmediale Award for 2010.

Eve Egoyan is a concert pianist who specializes in the performance of new works. Her intense focus, command of the instrument, insightful interpretations, and unique programmes welcome audiences into unknown territory, bridging the gap between them and contemporary composers. Composers have a uniformly high regard for her performances of their works, often considering them definitive.

Gordon Monahan’s works for piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art. As a composer and sound artist, he juxtaposes the quantitative and qualitative aspects of natural acoustical phenomena with elements of media technology, environment, architecture, popular culture, and live performance.

Toronto-based composer and performer Martin Arnold studied in Edmonton, Banff, the Hague, and Victoria, where his teachers were Alfred Fisher, Frederic Rzewski, John Cage, Louis Andriessen, Gilius van Bergeijk, Rudolf Komorous, Douglas Collinge, and Michael Longton. Martin is a founding member of the Drystone Orchestra and from 1995-2000 he was artistic director of The Burdocks. Currently he plays guitar, banjo, melodica and live electronics in Marmots and Cow Paws as well as in bands led by Ryan Driver and Eric Chenaux. Martin works as a gardener and teaches in the Cultural Studies Department of Trent University.

Toddler Body, formed in early 2008, is the double side-project of Randy Gagne (Disguises, Man Made Hill) and Greydyn Gatti (Wolfcow). Originally conceived as a recording project via emailed exchanges of Mp3s, TB explore the murkier side of post-apocalyptic synthesizer pop, Sci-Fi disco, and creeped-out soundtrack music. They are currently devising a method of performing through the transmission of pure psychic vibrations.

Using four speakers placed along the wall, the piece created an enveloping sound environment that varied as listeners walked from one end of the balcony to the other. In combining the unique sonic properties of the space with precisely tuned pitches, timbres, and rhythms, the installation made audible both the dramatic ricocheting echo and the effect of sound taking 135 milliseconds to travel from one end to the other–a perceptible and musically useful delay. The installation’s swells, drones, pops, pitches, and silences transformed the less-visited rear of the hall into a large immersive instrument.

See a slide show of Curve here.

On April 7th, 2010, Peter Traub will premiere a new work performed by flutist Wayla Chambo – Passages and Recesses for solo flute and hybrid space. This is the fourth piece in his dissertation series and is the result of a technical collaboration with Eric Montgomery, a recent graduate in computer science and music from UVA. Eric will also premiere a new piece for solo piano and hybrid space, called Sound Across Grounds, performed by pianist Benjamin Yobp.

Each piece will be performed from a different space – Eric’s from cavernous the Main Lounge of Newcomb Hall, and Traub’s from the resonant upper stairwell of Old Cabell Hall. They will acoustically connect their respective spaces via the network with the Dome Room of the UVA Rotunda – a United Nations World Heritage Site and the architectural heart of the campus. The program will start at 12:50 p.m. in the stairwell. There will be a fifteen minute break in-between pieces to allow listeners to change locations for Eric’s piece.

The event is the culmination of a project funded by a Double Hoo Grant, an award given out annually by the Center for Undergraduate Excellence at UVA to encourage collaborations between graduate and undergraduate students.

Music For 16 Futurist Noise Intoners is an evening-length concert of original scores and newly commissioned compositions for the intonarumori, or “noise-intoners.” An incredible group of musicians and composers from the experimental music world — including Einstuerzende Neubauten frontman and Nick Cave collaborator Blixa Bargeld, avant-garde saxophonist John Butcher, Deep Listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros, Faith No More and Mr. Bungle vocalist Mike Patton, sound and text-based performer Anat Pick, avant-garde musician Elliott Sharp, and composer and vocalist Jennifer Walsche collaborating with composer and film/video artist Tony Conrad, among others — have been commissioned by Performa to create and perform brand new compositions for the instruments.

Recreations of historic Futurist scores will also be performed by leading intonarumori expert and scholar Luciano Chessa, who is co-curating the project with Performa’s Esa Nickle as well as overseeing the physical reconstruction of these remarkable machines.

In 1913, the Italian Futurist and sound artist Luigi Russolo constructed a family of special hand-cranked instruments to realize an expanded field of orchestral sound. Called intonarumori (noise intoners), and built out of wooden boxes housing intricate mechanical moving parts with large metal horns attached to the sides, these spectacular machines could produce and modulate complex noises — including explosions, howls, buzzes, and hisses — that celebrated the new urban, industrial sounds that the Futurists so loved. As the first instruments capable of creating and manipulating noises through entirely mechanical processes, the intonarumori can be considered to be the original analog synthesizers, and the ancestors to the latest electronic synthesizers used today.

Although all the original intonarumori were destroyed by bombing during WWII, their noises and features have been widely discussed and speculated upon by members of the experimental music community for decades, which is why bringing these historic emblems of modernity back to life is so exciting to countless contemporary musicians. As Elliott Sharp, a central figure in the New York City avant-garde music world and one of the project participants, says, “The reconstruction of the intonarumori is like bringing mythical creatures to life using synthetic DNA.”

As part of its celebration of the 100th anniversary of Italian Futurism, the Performa 09 biennial, in collaboration with the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) and SFMOMA, has invited Luciano Chessa to direct a reconstruction project to produce accurate replicas of Russolo’s legendary instruments. This project offers the first-ever replica of the set of 16 original intonarumori (8 noise families of 1-3 instruments each, in various registers) that Russolo built in Milan in the summer of 1913. These intonarumori are being physically built by luthier Keith Cary in Winters, California, under Chessa’s direction and scientific supervision.

At the Town Hall concert, Chessa will present the first modern live performances of three pieces—a legendary fragment from Russolo’s spooky Risveglio di una città (1913), La pioggia nel pineto antidannunziana, a newly-discovered 1916 Futurist piece for intonarumori, and Words in Freedom by Futurist playwright and poet Paolo Buzzi, both of these latter diplomatically edited by Chessa—as well as his own L’acoustique ivresse, a piece for intonarumori and voice based on a sound poem also by Buzzi.

Intonarumori scores by the likes of Blixa Bargeld, Jennifer Walsh and Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, John Butcher, James Fei, Ulrich Krieger, Mike Patton, Luciano Chessa, and Elliott Sharp, among others, afford the intonarumori a repertoire Russolo could have never hoped for, and bring together for the first time on a performance stage a formidable group of world-renowned artists working in genres ranging from free jazz to electronic music and from minimalism to indie rock, all energized by a common love for Noise.

Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners was commissioned by Performa and co-produced with the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) and SFMOMA. The concert premiered at SFMOMA on October 16, 2009, before traveling to New York for its Performa 09 presentation at Town Hall.

ABSTRACT: The author explores the vibrant, but often hidden, unorthodox musical culture of Australia, recounting little known movements, events, dates, personalities and Aboriginal traditions. He urges the listener to investigate and value this unique and fecund musical history, and in so doing, find models that are relevant to solving the dilemmas of a declining contemporary music practice. Live music encourages direct interconnectivity among people and with the physical world upon which we rely for our existence; music can be life supporting, and in some situations, as important as life itself. While there is much to learn from the past, digital technology can be utilized as an interface establishing a tactile praxis and enabling musical expression that promotes original content, social connection, environmental context.

Artemis Papageorgiou will discuss Wii/nd Chime’s collaborative development as an instrument of reminiscence. Wii/nd Chime signifies a shift from the physical realm to the virtual and the simulated. The sonic languages of both wind chimes and the 8-bit video-game sounds are combined into a system of interaction, which invites people to discover the potential of this new, hybrid object.

In an attempt to address the issue of the fake entering the realm of the real, Artemis turned towards the notion of the simulacrum and the process of simulation leading to a reality without reference to real signs (Jean Baudrillard, 1994). In Wii/nd Chime the simulation takes places in the faking of the appearance and the mechanism of the original wind chime. However, the actual medium used (Wii Remote) is being explored in order to reveal its nature and history. In that sense, Wii/nd Chime forms a hybrid object, partly faking the original object, partly underpinning the medium’s history and potential.

Wii/nd Chime was developed in the context of a hybrid Interactivos workshop-exhibition held in Eyebeam (New York 2008), partly funded by the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1duI1lnZQ_8

ARTEMIS PAPAGEORGIOU is an architect who works in the intersection between urban design and computational media and focuses on building spatial installations. Her professional practice includes suburban/ rural residential design in studios in Athens, Greece and collaboration with METALOCUS magazine in Madrid Spain. Her main interest revolves around landscape (infrastructural, hybrid, transitional) as an active, over-time, re/inter-active ingredient of urban life. Artemis is currently an MFA candidate in Computational Studio Arts, at Goldsmiths Department of Computing, University of London (2008-09). Her work has been presented in exhibitions such as the Double Take (Eyebeam 2008), EASA2007 (Elefsina 2007) and AthensVideoArtFestival (Athens 2006).

Ryan Jordan’s Sensory Response Systems is an exploration into audiovisual performance using an array of sensors responsive to physical movements in order to control the audiovisual output in programs such as Pd, SuperCollider, Processing, etc. It also looks at reshaping and replicating the body through the use of fabric, textiles and technology. This work uses DIY hardware to build a new interface for live computer music performance, aiming to turn the performers body and clothes into an instrument allowing them to embody new technologies and computational devices.

RYAN JORDAN is a UK based artist working with home brew interfaces for musical expression and DIY hardware. He is concerned with making computer performance, which incorporates human physical movements as an essential foundation. Ryan also curates several noise, experimental and computer arts events and concerts in the UK, such as hac… and noise=noise. He is an active member of London based open source collective, OpenLab; and has released music on Bad Sekta, Anithematica/CovenH, and AntiGen. Ryan has performed his work in many places such as galleries, squats, pub cellars, theatres, the odd town hall, festivals, academic institutions and an occasional beach. He is currently living in London studying MFA Computational Studio Arts at Goldsmiths.

Reversing the information flow in the opposite direction we find André Gonçalves ongoing Untitled #06 project, which also utilises the turntable, this time with a servomotor attached to the needle cartridge. Sound captured from a microphone is processed, then digitised into data and used by the servo to move the cartridge accordingly. The cartridge, which has an Indian ink pen attached, draws the audio events in real-time. The resultant visualisations have semi uniform spirgraphic geometries, and as André says ‘the drawings can be seen as histograms of the audio activity of a space during a certain period of time. In his biography André describes himself as an ‘empathy programmer with googlian self-education’, something many of us with an autodidactic learning will identify with.

Finally, it would be interesting to hear what one of André’s Untitled #06 disc visualisations, if drawn in graphite, would sound like on Caleb’s Graphic Music Sequencer. [posted by Paul on Dataisnature]

TABLACENTRIC is thrilled to present Ajay Kapur, whose work revolves around one queston: “How do you make a computer improvise with a human?” Using the rules set forth by the north Indian classical tradition, Ajay strives to build new interfaces for musical expression by modifying the tabla, dholak and sitar with added microchips and sensor systems, while building robotic musical instruments which can be programmed to perform along with the human performer.

Ajay Kapur is the Music Technology Coordinator at California Institute of the Arts. He received an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2007 from University of Victoria combining Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Music and Psychology with a focus on Intelligence Music and Media Technology. Ajay graduated with a Bachelor in Science and Engineering Computer Science degree from Princeton University in 2002. He has been educated by music technology leaders including Dr. Perry R. Cook, Dr. George Tzanetakis, and Dr. Andrew Schloss, combined with mentorship from robotic musical instrument sculptors Eric Singer and the world famous Trimpin. A musician at heart, trained on Drumset,Tabla, Sitar and other percussion instruments from around the world, Ajay strives to push the technological barrier in order to make new music.