/* VIU */ 2024 - Algo Experimental - Artists info

Friday April 19th - 19h - Algo Experimental

• Venue: Concert at Sala Aranyo, UPF (Campus del Poblenou Roc Boronat, 138)

FREE ENTRANCE

Featuring a wide range of live coding possibilities reflected on musical practices as contrasting as the technical tools creating them. Ranging from electrical noise to algorithmic pattern melodies this concert will take us to that space when patch programming and high-level abstractions are used for real-time human-machine interaction using code for performing arts.

Line-up

• parkellipsen is Niklas Reppel, a programmer, live coder, sound artist, composer, musician, and committed eclecticist. He has been based in Barcelona since 2017, where he found a home in the local TOPLAP node. He has performed as a live coder nationally and internationally, and has been a regular contributor to the International Conference on Live Coding since its inception in 2015. His favourite discipline is from-scratch live coding. He has created and uses Megra, a programming language designed for live-coding music with stochastic elements. He will present a fairly minimalist piece based on only two percussive, found sounds, plus some pitch shifting, and some accidentially recorded birds in the background, exploring the parameters of Mégra’s learning algorithm and explicitly showing their impact on the musical result. During the performance, he will explore the spatial distribution of the sounds as a fundamental parameter, learned in near real-time from patterns (here a string of characters) and modified through the manipulation of the patterns and other parameters of the algorithm (i.e. the memory length). The dense, polyrhythmic textures are spread out into a wide, open cloud of percussive tones. The Markov chains (a kind of pattern in themselves) are visualized to make the performance more transparent.
   
• Tim Cowlishaw & Mercè Jara Muns Tim Cowlishaw is a researcher and designer, as well as an experimental musician working with guitar, electronics and livecode. Mercè Jara Muns is a transdisciplinary artist who works with ceramics, hybridising ancestral culture with open source concepts and easily accessible technologies. They will present their performance Stones Whisper Secrets, a sonic reflection on the vibrant materiality of computing, where silicon dialogues with clay, and copper with ceramics. Both artists work, in their own way with terrestrial, geological matter: Mercè with the latent resonances of earth and clay, generating sound with blows, touches and caresses of her hand-made ceramic instruments. Tim’s practice with livecode and electronics on the other hand may appear less material, but within the black box of the computer, silicon, copper and rare earth metals are activated by electronic voltages resulting from the code edited on screen. Working together, generating resonances and feedback loops between Mercè’s porcelain bowls and Tim’s Supercollider manipulations, they hope to open a space for meditation on the multiple ways in which computation, and computational music, are at heart deeply material practices.
   
• Dan Gorelick is a musician, creative technologist, and organizer who is based in Brooklyn and has a presence in the Bay Area and Berlin. Dan creates live audiovisual performances, blending his classical cello experience with the practice of live-coding: creating music with code. He explores what is uniquely possible when combining the acoustic and electronic practices to create live expressive and improvisational works. “Resonance Reverie: A Cybernetic Somatic Ritual” is an immersive audio-visual piece that invites the audience to join in for a collective moment of pause to ground, presence, and reflect. The piece incorporates livecoding practices with learnings from playing music in sound healing contexts, such as binaural beats and using the somatic nature of subsonic frequencies. Using the cello, gesture-based granular synthesis, and the acoustics of the space itself, the piece explores how sound can create different somatic sensations.
   
• lixt is Rafael Bresciani’s research on the use of live coding as an artistic expression. In the historical moment in which human experience is massively mediated by digital environments, Bresciani – journalist, musician and master in NetArt and Digital Culture – investigates the crisis of language, contrasting the thinking of Wittgenstein and Flusser with the aesthetics and structure of contemporary society. [sh[i]e[l]d] is an audio visual live coding performance focused on information, noise and video feedback. A way to address the power and misuse of the mass media industry which delivers tons of speculative and click bait information to the public causing an endemic vulnerability of social and political understanding and opening space for the fake news industry to thrive. How to protect ourselves from this standardized medium? How to defend our autonomy, free thinking and diversity of viewpoints if the information we consume from the supposedly trustable sources is biased? This project does not gives answers but tries to raise questions while uses the homepage of well-known newspapers as an arena for debate, creativity and play, neutralizing its imposing aesthetics. The local side live coding manipulation of a newspaper’s front page through the browser console is blended with musical live coding environment (ThrenoScope and Strudel) with the use of Hydra resulting in a noisy performance.
   
• Julia Múgica & Iván Paz Julia Múgica is a mexican scientist currently incurring in the artistic exploration of nature complex processes. With an interdisciplinary background that encompasses biology and computational physics, she is deeply interested in understanding how collectives make decisions that result in a behavioral synchrony. Recently, her curiosity extended to the artistic sphere, where the process of creation magnifies and prioritizes different aspects of the same phenomena. Her work includes animated particles design in processing language, noise design from random walks algorithms for modular synthesizers, and rhythm and collective patterns with interactive robots. Iván Paz likes to investigate how the intersection between science, arts and humanities offers new creative possibilities. He also explores real time machine learning and writes in 3rd person when needed. In this experiment, they will explore the synchronization of oscillators that are initially out-of-phase by adjusting their oscillation frequencies with other oscillators that are connected in a dynamical network. By live coding the parameters of a synchronization model, they will play with the synchronization process in real-time, visualizing the oscillators as we change their parameters and simultaneously sonifying their frequencies in a multichannel setup. This configuration will allow them to experience the periodicity of each oscillator and the transition of the system from asynchronous to various synchronization patterns.