Tenori-on musical instrument demo

The newly released Tenori-on, developed by Toshio Iwai for Yamaha, has been mentioned on several blogs. But I particularly liked this short demo from engineer Yu Nishibori. Tenori-on is a 16-channel, 16-layer music sequencer, with a modernized 8-bit-ish sound. I particularly liked the visual feedback that the interface provides — deleting, moving and setting [...]

Interview with Milk and Tales

The British collective Milk and Tales is made of three young women who design interactive environments for cultural venues. I don’t know how they do it but each of their new projects manages to enchant everyone: kids and their grand parents, Londoners and tourists, people for whom interactive environments is a new expression and old grumpy blasés like me who keep on complaining that interaction is getting tired and tiring.

Who is Milk and Tales? How did you get to work on interactive environments?

We are Arlete Castelo, Melissa Mongiat and Kelsey Snook.
We met on the MA Creative Practice for Narrative Environments (CPNE) course at Central Saint Martins, in London, and started working on projects together, in parallel to the course activities.

– We also have a set of rotating collaborators for different projects. We have been working with Dan Harris, Charles Ward, Matthew Olden and Rakhi Rajani on some projects, we are currently working with Chris O’Shea on a new project.

We started to work on interactive installations together as an offshoot from the course where we were fine-tuning our skills in creating narrative environments. A narrative environment is an experience or a place designed to communicate a story, is hopefully engaging and a place for dialogue. Interactive environments are inevitably linked to narrative environments. We’ve got a mix of skills and are very happy designing both.

Hidden Love Song

Your installations seem to manage to get the broad public immediately engaged and entertained. At the same time, your works are very elegantly designed. Is one of you responsible for the “look” of an installation and someone else works more intensely on the sound technicalities or on the experience side of it? How do you work?

Arlete and Melissa have a background in communication / graphic design and Kelsey has one in in product and installation design. In concept phases, our skills blend to work on the experience of the user/visitor/passer-by – that is our focus and what attracted us to the MA CPNE. For design detailing and production though, we may be working separately on different parts depending on our expertise and we usually seek extra help for technological development, but this is always done in a collaborative spirit, so that in the end, we all have a say and all make sure we are working towards a cohesive whole.

How much do you manage to control the way people interact with your work? Which kind of unexpected behaviour have you witnessed with your installations? Any bad or good surprise? What have you learnt from the way people interact with your works?

We like unexpected behaviours, we see our role as providing a medium for people to be creative. However, for the interaction to work, we feel there needs to be a careful study of the context. We carefully plan the first spark, and then let it go from there.

Hidden Love Song

When we study the context, we’re looking at factors such as the environment, the user, and the existing types of behavior in the environment. This enables us to set the foundation for a successful interactive piece, however, we enjoy when people find new ways to use our work and take ownership over what we do. For example, in Gamelan Playtime, we took time to study how people moved in the space and understood that everyone was in a hurry with no time to stop. We made it a priority for people to only have to stroke the wall while passing by for the interaction to work. However, when the installation was up, we realised people were stopping to pull and twist the buffers and were spending a lot of time discovering the different instruments and creating their own piece. They were seeking much more engagement than what we had anticipated. For the following installation of the same ‘Keeping in Touch’ series, Hidden Love Song, we provided a much more flexible and empowering medium, the scratch-off layer. People could scratch the wall to reveal hidden words or sounds, but they could also scratch in their own messages or simply draw. The piece was particularly nice because it wasn’t precious, the whole wall was fair game for manipulation.

Gamelan Playtime

Gamelan Playtime was created for the Royal Festival Hall in London. What was the brief for that project? How easy or difficult is it to get such a prestigious and probably a bit conservative institution to accept your unusual ideas.

First we have to mention that we have been working with the Learning and Participation team at the Royal Festival Hall, who is one of our very innovative and most forward thinking clients. Their way of doing and thinking has been an inspiration for our work, and was really a true collaboration. We met Shân Maclennan, head of L&P through the MA CPNE network and she asked us to come up with an interesting experience using the RFH hoardings while the building was closed for refurbishment. The initial thought was that we could start with communicating Gamelan workshops held with primary school children in Lambeth. They wanted to bring back the life that usually inhabited the area when the building was open. Typical marketing posters campaign didn’t seem to do that.

Gamelan Playtime

We came up with a broader program that we called ‘Keeping In Touch’ which would aim to communicate ongoing activities to the general public via an interactive system on the RFH hoardings for the entire duration of the refurbishment period. This system was made up of a tactile surface, sensors and a sound system which would enable a series of hoarding to go up every 2-3 months. This would keep a momentum with the audience until the re-opening of the hall, and maximise the use of the interactive system. Even though Shân could not commit to the program at the start, we ended up having 3 cycles on the hoardings, up until they took the hoardings down. Then followed PLAY.orchestra on the Riverside Terrace. Now the RFH is open, and we are still working with them on various interactive systems.

Where does the idea of PLAY.orchestra come from?

The brief came from the Royal Festival Hall (RFH) in collaboration with the Philharmonia Orchestra (PO). The PO wanted to communicate their Sound Exchange website, which enables the general public to download sounds from the orchestra and upload their own.

This installation was to take place on the Riverside Terrace which was not very busy, though a lot of people would pass by. Some people were using the seating in the area to take breaks. We needed to make it a destination point, for all audiences.

The Philharmonia initially thought of having their website on the hoardings for people to take part in the sound exchange. We thought it was all a bit too abstract for people to come by and want to ‘exchange sounds’ through a website interface on a hoarding. So we thought through what a sound exchange meant to begin with: it was about taking part in the Orchestra, learning about the sounds and sending your own for a composition to take place. We noticed on the website there was a page of the orchestra scheme with all the instruments laid out in their particular spot and the sound they each make. So there, we decided to recreate the orchestra scheme on a stage with only seats. Each seat was labeled with its instrument. When people would sit, they would activate the sound of the instrument. All together, they would hear an entire piece, either classical or specially commissioned pieces. Once comfortably sitting and engaged, people could further take part in the orchestra by sending their own sounds via their mobile phones. A composition was made with all the sounds received and took place on the PLAY.orchestra installation in the last two weeks of its showing.

It turned out to be a huge success that the Royal Festival Hall directors could witness from their office windows not very far away. We also have had quite a lot of demand for it from around the world. We are now in discussion with the RFH and the Philharmonia to make a touring version.

In general, how much do you have to battle to get your vision of a work accepted? Do you get carte blanche?

It is very rare to get carte blanche, we feel the biggest trick is to be resourceful! Our process is pretty rational and directly responds to a client’s need, so it’s does not feel like a battle to have our ideas accepted. The biggest challenge is always to fully understand the context, the client’s desires and apprehensions, and then of course to make the idea work within budget…

Which kind of advice would you give to young designers who would like to work on similar projects? What are the pitfalls? What worked well for you?

We feel we’ve been pretty lucky with our opportunities, but our advice to new designers in the field— to see the opportunity to do something great in every brief, to think ahead and make the opportunity exciting even when the brief might not be. Gamelan Playtime’s initial brief was just a hoarding design that could have seemed somewhat boring, and made with a very small budget. But where there’s a will… Our first design had a great response and so the idea was allowed to grow. We also were careful to plan a basic interactive system that could be changed in a series of different installations, and luckily we were able to produce a series!

Is there any spot in London where you´d love to install a work?

Many spots… of course the Tate would be nice. An installation for the Olympics as part of a celebration, that would be great. The New York City Subway has a great art installation and tile art programme, which has really changed the experience of using their transport system. We would love a chance to do something similar for Transport for London. Tube journeys are just torturous, the NYC subway isn’t a whole lot better, but when you are navigating the subway maze or arrive at stations where there is some kind of installation, you feel at least that your journey hasn’t been all that bad. It’s an opportune ‘dead’ time and space where people have the time to engage, if you can pique their interest.

Thanks Arlete, Melissa,and Kelsey!

All images courtesy of Milk and Tales.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Oct 13, 2007, 3:53AM

Baby Love [Sydney]

Baby Love by Shu Lea Cheang :: October 1 - November 2, 2007 | Mon - Sat | 10am - 12pm & 2pm - 5pm :: Free :: Carriageworks, Sydney.

Baby Love is art that moves you and your imagination…. Climb aboard a giant teacup and glide into a futuristic fantasy with a dummy-sucking baby doll clone to your favourite love song at Sydney’s new home for contemporary arts, CarriageWorks. Its cathedral-scale foyer will play home to 6 giant teacups, each with a larger-than-life baby doll clone. Baby Love is a wi-fi mobile installation by New York based Taiwanese artist, Shu Lea Cheang, who calls cyber-space ‘home’. Shu Lea is a multi-media artist working in the field of net-based installation, social interface and film production.

Baby Love is an embracing interactive, kinetic and sonic experience, alluding to both past and future as the teacups evoke the nostalgia of amusement park rides and clash with the futuristic vision of cloned babies. The public can contribute to the joyride soundtrack by uploading songs via the web which go directly to the installation. The songs are transmitted wirelessly via Memory-Emotion data to the babies. When the rider selects their love song of choice to begin their teacup ride, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashes.

The cloned babies of Baby Love are an updated version of the central figures in Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies. In the novel, twins born from lockers at a Yokohama Station spend their lives haunted by the sound of their mother’s heartbeat. Cheang’s clones were inspired by scientific research into the development of biobots and artificial life forms. It is an installation which fuses nostalgia for a seemingly simpler age without boggling interactive technology and our contemporary obsessive immersion in the virtual life of the internet. Cheang seems to be asking where will the ever new frontiers of the web take us?

Presented by CarriageWorks, Experimenta and Awesome Arts Baby Love is an umbrella event of Art and About 2007, presented by City of Sydney.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 8:11AM

“Homeland” by Laurie Anderson [Melbourne]

Homeland by Laurie Anderson @ Melbourne International Arts Festival: Laurie Anderson’s latest work Homeland is her next major production, following in the footsteps of United States, The Nerve Bible and Songs and Stories for Moby Dick. Somewhere between epic poem and music concert, this Festival co-commission looks at 21st-century American obsessions with security, distance, information, the relationship of fear and freedom, the increasing acceptance of violence and the persistent new language of war. Using the synthetic language of technology and the sensuous language of song writing and poetry, Homeland explores American-style totalitarianism, shifting images of empire and reality shows through a powerful combination of visual design and experimental music.

The music of Homeland, performed live, is built on the foundation of groove electronics, and features many new melodic forms with which Anderson has been experimenting. This brand new work from one of today’s premier performance artists promises to be a highlight of this year’s Festival program. [Videos] To listen to ABC’s DIG, digital radio’s interview with Laurie Anderson click here.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 11:05AM

Ars Virtua Presents: We are the Strange

Ars Virtua is proud to present the Second Life premier of We are the Strange :: June 29 at 6:00 pm SLT [SLURL].

M dot Strange takes us into the new realm of video game structured and inspired storytelling with his character’s harrowing quest for ice cream. The variety of animation styles, game and cultural references and distopian beauty of this work make it important to modern filmmaking. Add to this that m dot strange created this virtually single handedly and had it selected for Sundance based on his YouTube audience and you end up with a very powerful piece of contemporary media.

We are the Strange is an animated feature film in which two diametrically opposed outcasts fight for survival in a sinister fantasy world. After meeting in the somber Forest of Still Life, an abused young woman (Blue) reluctantly follows a care free dollboy (Emmm) to Stopmo City on his unreasonable quest for ice cream. They’re lives are constantly in jeopardy after they’re caught in the middle of a deadly battle between bizarre monsters on their way to the ice cream shop. A flamboyant ultraviolent hero(Rain) appears and effortlessly dispatches all the horrible monsters in his path. Blue meets Rain before he partakes in an impossible battle against the source of all that is evil in Stopmo City. When it seems as if darkness will have the last laugh a gleaming fist made of aluminum foil bursts through the ground thus starting the final showdown
between mega_good and hyper_evil.

We Are the Strange is its own imaginative and immersive universe. M dot Strange spent three years painstakingly creating this film, using a range of animation techniques: traditional, stop-motion, computer, and his own unique blend of 8-bit graphics and anime, dubbed “Str8nime.” The stunning visuals are complemented by a soundtrack that is both beautiful and harrowing. The end result is a freaky technocarnival ride that climaxes with a momentous battle between innocence and darkness.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Jun 26, 2007, 11:17AM

Lucy and Jorge Orta

Antarctic Village

From February-March 2007, Antarctic Village - No Borders, was installed in Antarctica by the artists. They travelled from Buenos Aires aboard the Hercules KC130 flight on an incredible journey lasting several weeks. Taking place during the Austral summer, the ephemeral installation coincided with the last of the scientific expeditions before the winter months, before the ice mass becomes too thick to traverse. Aided by the logisitical crew and scientists stationed at the Marambio Antarctic Base situated on the Seymour-Marambio Island, (64°14’S 56°37’W), Jorge Orta scouted Antarctica by helicopter, searching for different locations for the temporary encampment of their 50 dome-shaped dwellings.

Antarctic Village is a symbol of the plight of those struggling to transverse borders and to gain the freedom of movement necessary to escape political and social conflict. Dotted along the ice, the tents formed a settlement reminiscent of the images of refugee camps we see so often reported about on our television screens and newspapers (official figures estimate that 141 foreigners have died trying to reach Spain in 2004, Human Rights claim the death toll was 289. 58 Chinese people discovered dead through dehydration by customs officers in the back of an articulated lorry in Dover UK in June 2000, etc., etc.)

Physically the installation Antarctic Village in Antarctica is emblematic of Ortas’ body of work, composed of what could be termed modular architecture and reflecting qualities of nomadic shelters and campsites. The dwellings themselves are hand stitched together by a traditional tent maker with sections of flags from countries around the world, along with extensions of clothes and gloves, symbolising the multiplicity and diversity of people. Here the arm of face-less whitecollar worker’s shirt hangs, there the sleeve of a children’s sweater. Together the flags and dissected clothes emblazened with silkscreen motifs referencing the UN Declartion for Human Rights, make for a physical embodiment of a ‘Global Village’.

Antarctic Village - Metisse Flag: By way of calling the Orta Antarctic expedition to an end, the artists staged the first in a series of symbolic football games, ‘Heads or Tails, Tails or Heads’. Meteorologists, paleontologists and geologists from the Marambio Antarctic Base joined the Orta team to play a symbolic ‘All Nation’ match. The Metisse Flag and the Antarctic football shirts, created by the artists make it difficult to identify the adversary. The front and back of the players’ shirts are stitched together with different countries’ football team colours. The match mirrors human behaviour. Appearances are often deceiving. Someone we think is a friend may actually be playing against us, while a total stranger can surprise us with an act of solidarity. It is not appearances that count, but rather decisive actions in critical moments.

Also see:

Antarctic Village - No Borders, Expedition Tarpaulin
Antarctic Village - Dome Dwelling 5005 and more.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on May 23, 2007, 5:46PM

Pocket Gamelan

Several posters were presented at the Mobile Music Workshop yesterday afternoon, a good opportunity to discover new projects and have a chat with their author.

Pocket Gamelan (PDF), developed by Greg Schiemer and Mark Havryliv, couldn’t make it to Amsterdam on time (seems to be somewhere in the caring hands of the post) but that won’t prevent me from mentioning it. The interactive musical interface allows non-expert performers to create microtonal music using bluetooth-enabled mobile phones. Players swing the handsets on the end of a cord in a circular trajectory. As the phone is swung it produces audible artefacts such as Doppler shift and chorusing which are generated as a bi-product of movement. The device works like a network of operations in which melodies and the speed at which they’re played can be altered.

Pocket Gamelan, draws on Schiemer’s “Tupperware Gamelan” instruments of the 70s and 80s. The custom-made electronic instruments, housed in plastic kitchenware, were designed for non-expert players and used in dance and performance (via.)

Video 1 and 2.

Image.
Related: the 1999 performance Improvisation for Two Altered Telephones.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on May 6, 2007, 10:35PM

The Last Tag Show - *Pash

“The Last Tag Show, a live “net performance,” took place on Last.FM on April 14, 2007. Last.FM is a social networking site centered around tracking its users’ music listening habits and creating a profile based on that data. As a user listens to music, the track title and artist name are sent to his/her profile and listed publicly, allowing the service to create connections between users and the musicians they listen to. Another notable aspect of the service is its reliance on user participation, through wikis, in the creation of artist profiles.

The Last Tag Show cleverly took advantage of Last.FM’s technical structure to pull off a 24 hour performance. As the allotted time progressed, viewers saw tracks and artists appear in succession on Last.FM user profile lasttagshow’s profile page. These were no ordinary songs however, the artists instead altered the metadata of audio tracks such that when they were uploaded to the Last.FM servers they appeared as a multi-character dialogue. The principal personages in the performance include “Moderator,” “Hannah,” “Voiceover,” “Instructor,” “Marck,” “Zita Vass,” and “Gregg,” with occasional guest stars like Thom Yorke. Since each of these characters take the role of a musician in Last.FM’s data-centric view, each of them have a dedicated user-editable artist page, which The Last Tag Show took full advantage of by developing the identities of their subjects in these spaces. As such, Moderator, for example, existed beyond his archived snippets of speech, complete with a photograph and short biography.” Continue reading The Last Tag Show by Nathan Lovejoy at Furtherfield.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on May 2, 2007, 9:46AM

Robosonic Eclectic: Live Music by Robots and Humans

LEMUR presents Robosonic Eclectic: Live Music by Robots and Humans :: LEMUR’s First Annual Commissioned Works Concert :: May 31-June 2, 2007 :: 3-Legged Dog Art and Technology Center.

Featuring Pop Musicians They Might Be Giants, Punk cum New Music Composer JG Thirlwell (Foetus), Electronic Music Pioneer Morton Subotnick and Jazz Trombonist and MacArthur Fellow George Lewis, Performing Live with LEMUR’s Robots; plus Solo Works for LEMUR Robots by R. Luke DuBois and J. Brendan Adamson.

LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots presents its first concert series consisting entirely of works commissioned for LEMUR’s musical robots. The program, Robosonic Eclectic: Live Music by Robots and Humans, will be performed during a three-night run, from Thursday, May 31 through Saturday, June 2, 2007, at 8 pm each night. The series will take place at the Mainstage Theatre at the new 3-Legged Dog Art and Technology Center. Robosonic Eclectic is presented as part of the New York Electronic Art Festival (NYEAF), a month-long celebration of cutting-edge electronic music performed at various venues from May 12 through June 10, 2007.

Four commissioned works, each with a live performance component, serve as the backbone of the evening, alternating with works that the robots will perform solo. Composer/performers for the live pieces are John Flansburgh and John Linnell (They Might Be Giants), JG Thirlwell (Foetus), Morton Subotnick and George Lewis. These works will feature live performances by the composer(s) of the piece, plus special guests. Pieces for solo robots by R. Luke DuBois and J. Brendan Adamson will also be performed by the robot ensemble.

Tickets are $20 and available online now from Brown Paper Tickets.

LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots is a Brooklyn-based group of artists and technologists developing robotic musical instruments. Founded in 2000 by musician and engineer Eric Singer, LEMUR creates exotic, sculptural musical instruments which integrate robotic technology. LEMUR’s philosophy is to build robots that are instruments as opposed to robots that play existing instruments. LEMUR’s growing ensemble includes over 50 robotic instruments. GuitarBot, an electric stringed instrument, is comprised of several independently controllable stringed units which can pick and slide extremely rapidly. ModBots are a large collection of modular percussion robots in a variety of styles and functions, including beaters, singing bells, and shakers. The Ill-Tempered Clangier is a robotic xylophone-like tubular bell instrument which clangs percussive melodies on forty-four tuned metal pipes. ForestBot is comprised of a forest of egg-shaped rattles sprouting from long rods that quiver and sway over onlookers. TibetBot is designed around three Tibetan singing bowls struck by robotic arms to produce a range of timbres.

They Might Be Giants (John Flansburgh and John Linnell) Combining a knack for infectious melodies with a quirky, bizarre sense of humor and a vaguely avant-garde aesthetic borrowed from the New York post-punk underground, They Might Be Giants became one of the most unlikely alternative success stories of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Musically, the duo of John Flansburgh and John Linnell borrowed from everywhere, but their freewheeling eclecticism was enhanced by their arcane, geeky sense of humor. They Might Be Giants released their eponymous debut in 1986, and the album became a college radio hit. Two years later they released Lincoln, which expanded their following considerably. Their third album, Flood, worked its way to gold status. They celebrated their 20th anniversary in summer 2002 with the release of their first children’s album, No! Early in 2005, Here Come the ABCs and its accompanying DVD were the band’s first releases for Disney Sound.

JG Thirlwell: The inscrutable JG Thirlwell was dropped on this planet some time ago to bestow sonic majesty, chaos, violence & beauty and cunning linguistics on an unsuspecting earth. A Brooklyn-based Australian ex-pat, Thirlwell has used many names for his many visions: Foetus (and its many name variations), Steroid Maximus, Clint Ruin, Wiseblood, DJ OTEFSU, Manorexia and Baby Zizanie. His multitude of influential recordings under the name FOETUS and variations thereof, has amassed a rabid world-wide cult following. Over the course of more than a dozen albums he has stretched from yearning orchestral soundscapes, meticulously organized chaos, electronic swathes, blistering big band pastiche, crunching hard rock and even inventing stupefying collisions of genres and forms with a raw emotion and irresistible musicality. More recently JG has also branched out into audio installations (the freq_out project curated by CM Von Hausswolf, with whom he also conducted an audio workshop at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt), DJ-ing (as DJ Otefsu), has appeared in an opera (Der Kastanienball in Munich in 2004, directed by Stefan Winter), has scored a cartoon series for The Cartoon Network in the USA (The Venture Brothers), and recently completed a commission for Bang On A Can. In 2005, he wrote his first commission for Kronos Quartet, which premiered in 2006.

Morton Subotnick: Known as a grandfather of electronic music, Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. Most of his music calls for a computer part, or live electronic processing; his oeuvre utilizes many of the important technological breakthroughs in the history of the genre. In addition to music in the electronic medium, Subotnick has written for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, theater and multimedia productions. Currently, Subotnick holds the Mel Powell Chair in Music at the California Institute of the Arts. He tours extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe as a lecturer and composer/performer.

George Lewis: MacArthur Fellow George Lewis is currently Edwin H. Case Professor of Music at Columbia, having previously taught at UC San Diego, Mills College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Simon Fraser University’s Contemporary Arts Summer Institute. He has served as music curator for the Kitchen in New York, and has collaborated in
the “Interarts Inquiry” and “Integrative Studies Roundtable” at the Center for Black Music Research (Chicago). A member of the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. An active composer, improvisor, performer and computer/installation artist, Lewis has explored electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated forms. His artistic work is documented in over 120 recordings and has been awarded by a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, 1999 Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts, and numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

R. Luke DuBois: R. Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, video artist, and programmer living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia’s Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and is the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season. He is a co-author of Jitter, a software suite developed by Cycling’74 for real-time manipulation of matrix data. His music (with or without his band, the Freight Elevator Quartet), is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling’74, and Cantaloupe music, and his artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.

J. Brendan Adamson: Brendan Adamson’s compositions and interactive works are informed by the superhuman performance requirements of works by Conlon Nancarrow and others, but employ recently developed capabilities of such robotic instruments as modern self-playing pianos, recent automated organs, and musical robots created by LEMUR. As an undergraduate student, Brendan presented his “impressive compositions” (The New York Times) at Juilliard’s first ever all-robot-performed concert, RoboRecital. In addition to numerous performances in the United States, his music has been performed by robots at international festivals around the world, including those in Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, Mexico, and Japan. Brendan holds a Bachelor’s degree in music composition from the Juilliard School. A native of West Palm Beach, Florida, past teachers include Nils Vigeland, Christopher Rouse, Mari Kimura, and Milton Babbitt.

Robosonic Eclectic is presented in collaboration with Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center. Works by George Lewis and Morton Subotnick are commissioned by LEMUR and Harvestworks with support from the Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production (MAP) Fund.

LEMUR is supported by generous grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation and Arts International. See http://lemurbots.org for more information.

For more information, contact info@lemurbots.org. For press information, contact Gayle Snible at gayle[at]lemurbots.org.

ALSO DON’T FORGET! TRANZDUCER.004 Friday, April 27th 8-11 pm

This month’s acts
* R. Luke DuBois and friend(s): Local new media celeb + >= 1 special guest(s)
* Marek Choloniewski: Krazy sensor music from Krakow
* Ellis & Aguilar Duo: Bass, percussion and electronics

LEMURplex: 461 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, Between 9th & 10th Sts. $5

TRANZDUCER is LEMUR’s music, art and performance series hosted by Eric Singer, Jamie Allen and Tristan Perich.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Apr 27, 2007, 1:20PM

Karaoke DeathMatch 100 (AKA KDM100)

New Rounds Daily, April 15 - June 4

Artist collaborative M.River & T.Whid Art Associates face off in the most brutal performance art smack down of the new millennium… Karaoke Deathmatch 100! This alcohol-fueled blood feud features 50 rounds of sing-along fury (taped live over an 8-hour period with hardly any pee breaks). No Carpenters hit too cheesy, no heavy metal lyric too trite for these teleprompter warriors to hurl in a battle to the end. Who will emerge victorious? Only YOU can decide.

MTAA’s Karaoke DeathMatch 100 is a video blog performance that takes place over 50 days starting April 15th, 2007 and ending June 4th. Each day, a new round is posted pitting M.River & T.Whid against each other in drunken karaoke competition. Visit the web site daily to view the sets of videos, vote for your favorite and discuss the artists’ performances. At the end of the competition, the votes will decide who is the Karaoke DeathMatch 100 Champion.

The web version of KDM100 is an official selection of Visual 07. 7º Festival De Creación Audiovisual Ciudad De Majadahonda. The gallery version of KDM100 premiered at the Leonart ‘05 art festival in Leonding, Austria.

KDM100 was shot in May 2005 over 8 hours.

credits:

video production:
Bill Hallinan, Andre Sala and George Su

web production:
T.Whid & M.River
Developed using open-source software: Wordpress, X-Poll and embedthevideo.

URLs:
web site: http://www.mteww.com/kdm100/
QuickTime feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kdm100m4v
Windows Media feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kdm100wmv

also available on iTunes…

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Apr 15, 2007, 1:17PM