Month: November 2022

Intro to PdParty

Dan Wilcox

This is an overview workshop PdParty, a free open-source iOS application for running Pure Data patches on Apple mobile devices using libpd. Directly inspired by Chris McCormick’s DroidParty for Android and the original RjDj by Reality Jockey, PdParty takes a step further by supporting OSC (Open Sound Control), MIDI, & MiFi game controller input as well as implementing the native Pd GUI objects for a WYSIWYG patch to mobile device experience. Various scene types are supported including compatibility modes for PdDroidParty & RjDj and both patches and abstraction libraries can be managed via a built-in web server. Unlike the rise of the single-purpose audio application, PdParty is meant to provide a platform for general purpose digital signal processing via Pure Data patches.

Dan Wilcox is an artist, engineer, musician, and performer who combines live musical performance techniques with experimental electronics and software for the exploration of new expression. He grew up in the Rocket City, and has performed in Europe, Asia, and around the US with his one man band cyborg performance project, robotcowboy.

screenBashing

Magno Caliman

screenBashing is a live coding piece, where audio and visual materials are programmed in real time during its performance using SuperCollider for it’s sound components, and C for it’s visual elements.
Visuals are created by printing characters such as backslashes and underlines in rapid succession, while at the same time freezing the whole system several times per second, creating the illusion of animated motion.

Audio is generated via an “oneliner”, and there are no refined performance controls to it, making it impossible later on in the performance to tweak parameters of something that was already generated and is being heard. Any modification on the code will create new versions of the audio, where the only possible option is to sound in superposition to previous layers, creating an accumulation which drives the narrative forward. Layers can not be paused or removed after their creation. Mistakes are impossible to be undone, and all decisions are final.

One consequence of this setup is that it is extremely resource-heavy on the computer, as it purposely freezes the whole system several times per second in order to create an animation.
This unavoidable consequence – saturation of the machine processing power – is embraced as a principle/composition guideline, and is deeply explored throughout the performance, with the computer becoming gradually more unresponsive as new animations are spawned. After a certain threshold, the system becomes erratic, up to a point where it is no longer possible to gain control of it.

Magno Caliman

Sound artist, educator and creative coder, both his artistic and academic research activities are heavily rooted in the embracing of programming languages as places for poetical speculation, as well as the construction, modification and manipulation of electronic circuits. Has a degree in Music Composition and a master’s diploma in Education, where he developed and researched learning and teaching methodologies for programming languages in the context of the arts. Former teacher of Multimedia Arts at Maia University in Porto – Portugal, and was part of the team running, managing and curating SOMAR, a venue in Lisbon dedicated to sound, art and technology.

Currently teaches at the “Artistic Research in Music” master’s programme at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome – Italy. As a doctoral researcher working with the “Music, Thought and Technology” research cluster at the Orpheus Institute – Ghent, he investigates how technical objects can operate as active, non-transparent agents in technologically mediated experimental sound practices.

robotcowboy

Dan Wilcox

robotcowboy is a wearable computing platform to explore new types of man-machine music & artistic performance. Embedded computing, custom open-source software, and audio electronics are utilized to build portable, self contained systems which both embed and embody the computation on the performer. This cyborg approach is both empowering and compromising as new sonic capability & movement are offset by the need for electrical energy: elements of tension between human and system. robotcowboy shows are always live and contain aspects of improvisation, feedback with the audience, and an inherent capability of failure.

robotcowboy’s first 2006-2007 incarnation melded rock with realtime algorithmic composition tools into a dynamic live show. The second incarnation followed the story of the first human on Mars with spacesuit as portable music machine in 2013. The ongoing third incarnation explores themes of trajectories, radiation, and space travel. The future is bright, do you have room to wiggle?

Dan Wilcox is an artist, engineer, musician, and performer who combines live musical performance techniques with experimental electronics and software for the exploration of new expression. He grew up in the Rocket City, and has performed in Europe, Asia, and around the US with his one man band cyborg performance project, robotcowboy.

Techno-chiptune-jazz

Live coding party music by Servando Barreiro and Per-Olov Jernberg
Per & Servando are Audiovisual artists based in Stockholm where they often meet and collaborate in the local artist collectives.

Improvised Audiovisual collaboration
Tools used: Hydra, puredata, Nanoloop FM

https://possan.codes/
http://servando.teks.no
https://www.rumtiden.com/
https://www.blivande.com/
https://www.instagram.com/svartljus/

Servando Barreiro

Has a background is in Electronics, Sound and Audiovisual communication. He started his artistic career early on by showing a video performance in the Reina Sofía contemporary art museum in Madrid. From that point on, he continued self-educating about the subjects of Art+ science+ technology. He considers himself lucky to have been around Medialab Madrid, precisely when they started teaching and organizing lectures about media / technology / electronic art. A couple of years later, he moves to Berlin where he does various Artist in residencies. He has lived in Perú, Stockholm, México and California.
www.servando.teks.no

Possam

Polyglot programmer living in Stockholm, Sweden. Spending most of my time experimenting with new technology.

Pleasure Force

dr. Nexus / Kris Kuldkepp

PLEASURE FORCE is a duo between Hamburg based bass guitar player and feminist performer Kris Kuldkepp and Berlin based sound artist and voice improviser Dr. Nexus.
Their performances are exploring the intersections of noise and experimental music, silence and loudness, visuality and materiality with a hint of pleasure.

https://www.kristinkuldkepp.net
https://drnexus.bandcamp.com

All My Piksels: A Momentary Archive, John Bowers Solo

We saw all the colours at The Flip-Flop Flop-Film Film-Club and learned our alphabet with Xerxes who Must Die, And So Must You And I (2011). Wearing god helmets, we made Experimental Communications, wrapping copper wire around our bodies and haunted rocks, and we transmitted to broken televisions (2012). We touched the bare pins of circuitry and microcontrollers to display The Peacock’s Tail (2013). We walked to where the witches were burned, the warship sunk, and followed the steps of the Isdal Woman as Bergen Invocation (2015). We used salt water to reprogram a Turing Machine which we saw and heard execute its algorithms in Turing Tape Music: The Sea Is Ground (2016). We prototyped The Universal Transformation Machine (2018). We walked there and back, there and back, there and back, there and back, while live streaming in LOOPS (2020) and The Rose Walks (2021). All My Piksels is a performance which revisits all the past works I have been involved with at Piksel, remixing and refashioning their ideas, devices, sounds and images, into a momentary archive.

John Bowers is an artist-researcher with an academic background in the social and computing sciences, design, music and critical theory. As an improvising musician, he works with modular synthesisers, home-brew electronics, reconstructions of antique image and sound-making devices, self-made software, field recordings, esoteric sensor systems, experimental film, and spoken text. He often combines performance with walking and the investigation of selected sites to research an imagined discipline he calls ‘mythogeosonics’. He has performed at festivals including the collateral programme of the Venice Biennale, Experimental Intermedia New York, Transmediale/CTM Vorspiel Berlin, Piksel Bergen, Electropixel Nantes, BEAM London, Aldeburgh Festival and Spill Ipswich, and toured with the Rambert Dance Company performing David Tudor’s music to Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest. He contributed to the design of The Prayer Companion – a piece exhibited twice at the Museum Of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and acquired for their permanent collection. Amongst many musical collaborations, he works with Sten-Olof Hellström, Tim Shaw, Kerry Hagan, with Paul Stapleton and Adam Pultz Melbye in the telematic improvising trio 3BP, and in the noise drone band Tonesucker. He helps coordinate the label Onoma Research, is a director of Allenheads Contemporary Arts, a trustee of Monkfish Productions, and a Visiting Scholar at SARC, Queen’s University Belfast. https://www.instagram.com/johnthemodulator/

Meta Music Machines [Fluorescent Markov Beat]

Oskoff

MMM [Flourescent Markov Beat] is the first brunch of the MMM series. In a installation/concert format, MMM_FMB with a minimalist and reductionist approach, addresses the rhythmic question and the synesthesia between light and sound.

It consists of an a square array of LED light tubes that turn on and off following a sequence of states generated by a “markov chain model”. This stochastic and “bastard” model is created from the analysis of heterogeneous and diverse folk music rhythms sources. The sound also follows the sequences and it is generated by transduction and amplification of the light and accompanied by digital synthesis.

more info >>
https://noconventions.mobi/noish/hotglue/?MMM_FMB_eng

meta music machines, general
https://noconventions.mobi/noish/hotglue/?MMM_description_en/

Oskoff

Independent artist, researcher and programmer working in the field of algorithmic poetics and the study of generative and complex systems applied to the artistic context in different formats: sound art, installations and performance always under the premises of DIY and DIWO. His artistic practice could be
understood as a “polyhedral” device of knowledge where art, science and technology converge and hybridize from a unorthodox, critical and experimental approach.

His works have been seen and / or heard in different spaces for contemporary art and
international festivals: La Batie Festival in Geneva (Switzerland), International Image Festival
Manizales (Colombia) , Festival Piksel in Bergen (Norway), Radio Museo Reina Sofia in
Madrid, NK-project in Berlin (Germany), Electropiksel in Nantes (France), among others..

Ventriloquist Ontology

Afroditi Psarra

The continuous implementation of AI and ML systems in all areas of technological artifacts, including art, is challenging the ways in which we understand the world around us and urge us to consider other-than-human entities and ‘objects’ as equally important as human beings. In an exploration of such philosophical ideas that stem from the realms of Posthumanism, Actor Network Theory and Object-Oriented Ontology, ‘Ventriloquist Ontology’ encompasses the creation of a modular wearable, trained using Natural Language Processing to create its own personality that manifests in the form of speech and movement actuation. It explores the limits of control and points of hybridization between the human and the machine through the relationship of a performer and a wearable entity. This ventriloquist modular soft entity speaks through text generated using a GPT-2 language model, trained on a dataset of texts around biopolitics, algo-governance, the surveillanced body, and queer theory. Inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s dystopian theatrical play The School of Ventriloquists, this project manifests the idea of ‘soft control’ through the creation of a wearable that takes over the wearer’s body and converts them into a puppet whose movement is dictated by what they wear.

The softness aspect of this control refers to the plasticity of the interface, the malleability of its hardware connections (mainly soft silicones wires), the suggestive nature that the GPT-2 generated text pertains to, and the indicative nature of the movement of the actuators (some of them rather than radically moving the body, offer a suggestion as to how the body can follow their rhythm of actuation). Sequentially, it brings forth the soft data of the body inextricably linked to ideas of care and intimacy, as well as to the pliability of the different levels of interpretation between the human and the machine. The aspect of control is tied to the cybernetic idea of steering the body to its optimal movement through a feedback loop between machinic language, and human assimilation. It also deals with the hardness of the linear actuators and the microcontrollers that manipulate them, to the domination of these mechanical components over the softness and vulnerability of the human flesh. It asserts the supervision of the artist over the system, on the curation of the content of both the generated text, and its performative aspect. Ultimately, the idea of ventriloquism is used to give agency to an ontological entity comprised of subtle suggestive wearable modules, human flesh and cognitive motor abilities, born-digital, able to produce novel language, but also conditioned to reproduce the biases of its algorithmic parts.

Afroditi Psarra is a transdisciplinary artist and an Associate Professor of Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington. She holds a PhD in Image, Technology, and Design from the Complutense University of Madrid. Her research focuses on the art and science interaction with a critical discourse in the creation of artifacts. Her practice builds on and extends the work of Cyber and Techno-Feminism(s) and the idea of female (and feminized) bodies as matrices of information. Her work has been presented at international media art festivals such as Ars Electronica, Transmediale and CTM, Eyeo, Piksel, and WRO Biennale between others, venues like Bozar, Onassis Stegi, EMST (Greek Museum of Contemporary Art), Walker Art Center, and published at conferences like Siggraph, ISWC (International Symposium of Wearable Computers), DIS (Designing Interactive Systems), C&C (Creativity and Cognition), and EVA (Electronic Visualization and the Arts).

Biofeedback symphony – Solar Return

Jenny Pickett, Julien Ottavi

Using bio-electrode module synth inputs and DIY electronic bio-sensors we will interpret the soil, weeds, moss and fungus of Bergen. The sounds produced will be decomposed by an artificial intelligence for a quadraphonic audio experience. 

Stereo visuals, and upclose will catch aspects of live, electronics and organic matter. 

Since 2015 Solar Return have been working on the use of organic organisms such as plants and fungi in the processes of recycling e-waste, new DIY circuit development and how these systems create feedback audio transmission using moisture and decomposition of the circuit boards.

This begins with a few spores settling down on a nutritious surface. When these spores wake up in close proximity to one another they start germinating at approximately the same time and grow outwards as thread-like cells (hyphae) at a similar rate. The electronics feed on both the sun and wet soil, pregnant with (DIY) mycelium growth. As an information superhighway the interactions between a large, diverse population of individuals speeds up. It allows individuals who may be separated to communicate and help each other out. It also allows them to commit new forms of communication.

Solar Return

Nantes based artists Jenny Pickett and Julien Ottavi created Solar Return in 2009. Taking electromagnetic phenomena as a starting point for their audio creations. They have produced various scores for dual audio synths/oscillators/DIY electronics etc…which reflect patterns and electromagnetic events such as solar flares and inner city mobile phone masts, hidden sonic environments as well as the unfathomable audio world of kitchen appliances. Through their performances the duo tunnel deep into the world of frequency, static and sound as a physical experience, where they mix environmental recordings from the cosmos to pylons to Nuclear power plants with Live electronics and various antennas as instruments. Ottavi has been working with radio-art and open recordings since the late 1990’s, from performing with pirate radio transmitters or decentralised internet broadcasting, as well as giving workshops on the construction of electromagnetic antennas, receivers and radio-hacking. Pickett has been performing Live using huge VLF antennas as an instrument since 2013. Solar return plays with the physical space, the audience and the architecture of the venue to reveal and remix the hidden soundscapes present therein. Both defend the community of experimental music and arts, as well as FLOSS / copyleft attitudes through the project APO33, which Ottavi founded in 1997.

http://www.apo33.org

Solar Return has performed internationally at various events and festivals including Piksel Festival, Bergen (NO), Wave Farm, Hudson Valley (US), Main d’Oeuvre, Paris (FR), Transpecos, New York (US), Coaxial, L.A. (US), Harvest works, New York (US), STWST48 @ Ar Electronica in Linz (AT), Experimental Intermedia, New York (US), NeON festival, Dundee (UK), ACUD, Berlin (DE), IKLECTIK, London (UK), SONOSCOPIA Porto (PT), Kontactor in Riga (LV), CYCLE CULTURE CLUB in Crete (GR), Fylkingen (SE), OEIL DE L’ODAACQ FESTIVAL, Rennes, LUFF – Lausanne Underground Film Festival, Lausanne (CH), HTMLL’s Festival, Montreal (CA), LES ATELIERS CLAUSS, Brussels (BE), among many others…

http://solarreturn.bandcamp.com/releases

Mimoidalnaube

Michał Seta

mimoidalnaube is a videogame piece for T-Stick (http://www-new.idmil.org/project/the-t-stick/), a Digital Musical Instrument (DMI). It uses the Sopranino version of the T-Stick, which is the smallest in this instrument family, and houses the following sensors: gyroscope, acceleromenter, magnetometer, piezo, as well as pressure and 12 touch sensors. It is an evolution of a DMI that has been in constant development for over a decade. This composition is a fruit of my participation in the second composers’ workshop for T-Stick, led and supervised by the inventors of the instrument, [[https://josephmalloch.wordpress.com/][Joseph Malloch]] and [[http://dandrewstewart.ca/][D. Andrew Stewart]]. It was an exciting opportunity to incorporate a DMI into my current practice of comprovisation. In recent times, I have been using a video game approach as a vehicle to music comprovisation and performance. Today’s game engines fit well my interest in physical modeling as a mediator in human-computer interaction, visual scores and visualization in the context of live musical performance. I use different techniques of game mechanics and interaction in order to shape the musical material. The visual composition serves both as a form of a score, which invites and guides physical gesture and, at the same time, conveys information about the state of the composition. The public is a witness to the audio-visual feedback between the performer and the work.

teaser video: https://vimeo.com/761318188

Michał Seta is a comproviser and researcher in digital arts. He enjoys juggling the tangible and the intangible, analogue and digital, sound and silence.