6:45-7:15pm: Thomas Zimmerman, IBM Almaden Research Center, on Music as the Mother of Invention: Many of my inventions started as input devices for musical instruments. The DataGlove was a means to play air guitar. The Personal Area Network was a means to play air drums. I shall discuss the development of input devices for electronic musical instruments and how they contributed to inventions.

7:15-7:45pm: William Hsu and Matt Heckert of the Multimedia & Visualization Lab at SFSU on Sound Machines and Computer Control: An overview of several mechanical sound installations and performances they have collaborated on over a 5 year period: the Rotifiers/Centripetal Sound, the Fencers, and the Chainboxes.

7:45-8:00pm: Break

8:00-8:20pm: Sharon Siskin, of WEAD: Over the past 20 years my studio art has had clear and sometimes subtle overlaps with science. Some recent projects make visual the detritus our family produces in the process of raising twin daughters. I will be showing documentation of a variety of recent and past gallery projects; from work that resulted in the creation of a garden at an AIDS hospice, to installations that combined reused, altered X-rays and scientific paraphernalia to address issues related to food and my ethnic identity, loss, memory and healing.

8:20-8:40pm: Deborah Munk, of the San Francisco Dump: An overview of the Artist in Residence Program at SF Recycling & Disposal and will focus on a few of the 70 artists who have had residencies. I will also discuss recycling, the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch and sustainability.

8:40pm: Piero Scaruffi on the next Leonardo Art/Science evening

8:45-9:45pm: Discussions, more socializing.

LASER is a bimonthly series of lectures and presentations organized by Piero Scaruffi on behalf of Leonardo / The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST).

The once aimless material waste becomes the nexus of a unique art project that celebrates waste and the odd notion of an enjoyable wasteland through a complex means of processing and image making. The Appearance Machine’s permanent residence is in New York City, the unofficial center of the detritus crisis as home of the largest landfill in the world. The machine itself is housed in a warehouse space that doubles as a factory or lab for audiovisual ‘performances’ set to an orchestra of digitally produced sound.

The Appearance Machine is a production mill of sorts, a system that generates non-narrative audiovisual by-products, relying on a steady stream of incoming refuge to sustain itself. Trash enters a conveyer belt-like system where objects are photographed in a manner not unlike the way a photographer might capture the image of a fashion model. Artificial wind, mechanical impulses, and vibration work in concert to animate the objects to provide them with context, dimension and, to some degree, personality. Multiple camera angles ensure the same quality of perspective and dimension to produce audiovisual works of art in increments that last for about ten or fifteen minutes…” Continue reading Trash Talk: A Review of The Appearance Machine by Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig by Natasha Chuk, Furtherfield.org.

Creative innovation has always relied, to some extent, on the logic of call-and-response, a phrase that Breitz borrows from musicologists, who use it to describe the interactive quality that is key to musical experience in various oral cultures. Mudam warmly invites you to share your ideas with a group of artists and thinkers as they explore the logic of call-and-response and reflect on strategies of artistic appropriation and creative recycling during a three-day line-up of performances, panels and discussions.

With invited guests Cory Arcangel, Martin Arnold, Pierre Bismuth, Claude Closky, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Iain Forsyth + Jane Pollard, Surasi Kusolwong, Matthieu Laurette, Lawrence Lessig, Gabriel Lester, Bjørn Melhus, Momus, Jonathan Monk, Kaz Oshiro, Guillaume Paris, Paul Pfeiffer and James Webb.

Friday, 25 April 2008 Evening
OPENING EVENTS
Forsyth + Pollard

London-based artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard met and began working collaboratively in 1993. An interdisciplinary approach to art, music, mediation and ‘liveness’ has led to their continued engagement with the soundtrack underpinning contemporary life. Their universal yet highly personal strategies play out ideas of memory, performance and the mediated image in a challenging but highly accessible body of work.

Saturday, 26 April 2008 10am-6pm
Mondo Youtube

This day-long session brings together several artists who have explored the participatory potential of mainstream media such as advertising, the Internet, reality television, video games, MySpace and YouTube. Given the increasingly profit-driven nature of most of these formats, is it possible for a challenging culture of call-and-response to exist within these nascent public spheres, or inevitable that all criticism and innovative thought introduced into these new formats will immediately be instrumentalized towards commercial ends? Invited artists will supplement discussions of their own work with examples of mainstream media that have interested them, influenced them, or into which they have actively intervened. With:

Cory Arcangel, New York
Matthieu Laurette, Paris
Bjørn Melhus, Berlin
Guillaume Paris, Paris
Gabriel Lester, Amsterdam/Brussels

Sunday, 27 April 2008 10am-6pm
After Images

This day-long session brings together several artists who have engaged in explicit call-and-response relationships with other artists or works of art, addressing the crucial exchange and dialogue that motivates artistic practice. Each artist will talk about their own work in relation to those artists or works of art that they respond to or dialogue with in their work. With:

Surasi Kusolwong, Bangkok
Jonathan Monk, Berlin
Claude Closky, Paris
Kaz Oshiro, Los Angeles
James Webb, Cape Town
Keynote Speaker: Lawrence Lessig, San Francisco

Monday, 28 April 2008 9am-8pm
Art Goes To The Movies

Martin Arnold has written that, “The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.” This premise can be seen to inform the work of many contemporary artists who work in video today. This day-long session brings together several artists who have responded to and cannibalized mainstream cinema in their work, addressing the complex call-and-response relationship that exists between commercial cinema and contemporary art. Each artist will have the opportunity to talk about their use of found footage and their relationship to the cinematic images that they recycle in their work. With:

Paul Pfeiffer, New York
Pierre Bismuth, Brussels
Martin Arnold, Vienna
Candice Breitz, Berlin
Keynote Speaker: Diedrich Diederichsen, Berlin

Evening
Momus Live

“Ultraconformist, voyager, timelord, tennis and ping pong champion, tender pervert, poison boyfriend, hippopotamus, philosopher, folk singer, star forever.” Nick Currie, more popularly known under the artist name Momus (after the Greek god of mockery), is a songwriter, blogger and a journalist for Wired. Most of his songs are self-referential or postmodern.

Mudam can provide assistance with accommodation, food, local transport and other details for students. Call+Response will take place in the Mudam auditorium and will be open only to registered participants. All talks will be held in English. Program subject to modification.

Live: Blevin Blectum, David Toop, Sean O’hagan (High Llamas/Microdisney), Aleks Kolkowski (Recording Angels), Simon Bookish :: DJs: Laetitia Sadier (Stereolab / Monade), Janek Schaefer (Rummages The Oxfam Box as DJ Dedication), Iris Garrelfs :: Demos / Installations: Aleks Kolkowski - live CD recycling demo Dithernoise; Simon Storey - pedal-powered installation. Bring your old CDs to be recycled into vinyl records or for the Oxfam box. - Think: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle

Sonic Recycler 4 is the fourth in an annual series; an event showcasing the many different strands of eclectic ideas in music, based on the idea of recycling. With performers, DJ’s, films, stalls and interactive presentations, it’s a packed evening of radical sounds in a lovely Thameside venue.

Air Detritus is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with the funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Miya Masaoka is a classically trained musician, composer and sound/ installation artist. She has created works for solo koto, laser interfaces, laptop and video. She has also made works for sculpture installations and written scores for ensembles, chamber orchestra and mixed choirs. In her pieces, she often works with the sonification of data, and maps the behavior of brain activity, plants and insect movement to sound. Read an interview with Miya on Networked Music Review.

Auto Confessional 1 (video below) or Automatic Confessional Machine “…was designed and built in 1997 in Swindon UK and exhibited in specific public spaces around the East End of London, and various rural locations in Wiltshire between 1997-1998.

The ACM is made from recycled electronic hardware and custom built electronics. A CCTV Camera, A printer, A Computer, DC Halogen and UV Lighting, An LED Relaxation Device, and scrolling banner, Two mini Lasers, LCD Display, and a Photocopier. It has been placed in nightclubs, bars, and Techno Dance Parties.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3CPWoFamZc

Auto Confessional 2 (video below) is a secular computerized networked icon employing an Apple Power Macintosh G3, CCTV camera and image analysis software.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoQjQx13BtA

Auto Confessional 3 (video below):

“is a network of 10 Apple Mac computers that search the internet for online confessions, and sings them as a canon using the Apple text-to-speech software MacInTalk 3.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vpHLAmb1Pc
[blogged by Garrett Lynch on Network Research]

Originally proposed by Vonn New the three concerts are the proof of concept result of musicians forming new ensembles, improvising, planning and rehearsing via the INTERNET using SKYPE in audio conferences with up to ten players at a time.

A laptop orchestra piece is forming with a score by Doug Van Nort from Montreal. The piece calls for each person to contribute a sound sample of less than one-minute duration. The samples are then rated by each of the performers. Then each player downloads two samples, splits them in half and mutates the sample by joining one half of one sample to one half of another sample. One sample is kept without any further editing. The other sample is processed to change its characteristics. The samples are returned to the pool. Further mutations happen in another generation until finally there is a pool of sounds to play with. The performers then improvise with this sound pool that has been collectively created.

Full List of Artists participating in Convergence:

David Arner, Lisa Barnard, Nancy Beckman, Tom Bickley, Anne Bourne,Monique Buzzarté, Raylene Campbell, Seth Cluett, Viv Corringham, Caterina De Re, Stuart Dempster, Renko Dempster, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Heloise Gold, Susie Ibarra, Ione, Marc Jensen, Kathy Kennedy, Norman Lowery, Al Margolis, Dominique Mazeaud, Kim McCarthy, Brigitte Meyer, Stephan Moore, Ikue Mori, Kenta Nagai, Michelle Nagai, Uta Nagai, Vonn New, Kristin Norderval, Pauline Oliveros, Elizabeth Panzer, Zevin Polzin, Roberto Rodriguez, Margrit Schenker, Skot Smallwood, Bill Stevens, Will Swofford, Phala Tracy, Doug Van Nort, Katharina Von Rütte, Sarah Weaver, Julia White, Gayle Young, and Christine Zehnder-Probst.

DiY in a Field

p-tex will perform GYOML in a field on Heysham Barrows near St. Peters Church on Saturday August 19, 2006 at 7.30 p.m. For live streaming copy and paste this URL into your media player’s url window.

p-tex will be exploring how computer musicians can perform and create music without the need for mains electric, and using low budget or recycled / salvaged equipment and free open source software. He will also be using various sensors that will be manipulated and triggered by the surrounding environment, as well as by visitors to the site. p-tex has created software patches specifically for the piece which enable the sensors to communicate with the computer equipment. To achieve this he has used free software puredata and processing. For directions to Heysham Barrows, go here.

Electronic Improvisational Music Performance with DIY wiring

The Breadboard Band is a performing band that uses breadboards made of freely constructed electronic circuits to play music. We produce audio and visual expression through the most minimal, fundamental elements in the form of showing the electronic components of an instrument while directly touching and forming the electronic circuit by hand. The electric signals released from hand-made electronic circuits releases extremely rough and ferocious wave patterns. This performance is based on improvisational interplay, and we pull powerful music into shape through each member’s operation, while discovering new sounds by hand.

Keywords: Breadboard, Improvisation, Electronic Musical Instruments, On-the-fly Wiring, Bending, Techno-Noise, iPod, Discrete, Musical Performance, Programmable Device

The Breadboard Band is one that uses a breadboard to perform music. A breadboard is a board that is perforated with connector holes into a grid-shape, to which electronic components are inserted in order to build a prototype of an electronic circuit. The electronic components can be inserted or removed with ease, making it simple to change the wiring with jumper cables. Utilizing the features of the breadboard, The Breadboard Band creates audio and visual circuits on the board, and modifies them during performance.

Today, 100 years from the public performance in 1906 of the Telharmonium, the first electronic musical instrument, The Breadboard Band raises objections toward black-box electronic musical instruments and computers. This objection is raised in the form of showing the electronic components of an instrument, directly touching and forming the electric circuit by hand, and producing audio and visual expression through the most minimal, fundamental elements. This can be considered the hardware version of software programming. The circuit change during a performance is called “On-the-fly Wiring”.

The performance of the circuits on the breadboard is less than 0.1% of that of electronic audio and video devices offered commercially. The electric signals released from hand-made electronic circuits releases extremely rough and ferocious wave patterns that might destroy a commercial instrument. However, the primal screams of ecstasy released from the electric circuits surge from the depths of modern society that is surrounded by sophisticated information technology, and stirs us with emotion.

The Breadboard Band’s performances based on improvisational interplay, and we pull powerful music into shape through each member’s operation, while discovering new sounds by hand. Various elements blend together, becoming one from beats made through analog oscillation circuits, riffs made through programmable chips, noises made through magnetic head, scratches made through a hacked iPod, and the videos of changing audio signals. It may be quite humorous to see the serious expressions of the performers as they grapple with small electronic components, but they match any band in vigor and potency.