Psychodrama: 13 Variations by Melissa Grey - Featuring: Harold Jones / The Antara Ensemble and The Orchestra of Agincourt conducted by Edwin Gonzales :: April 25, 2008; 8:30 pm :: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, New York, NY.

A performance including live chamber ensemble, electroacoustic soundscape and projected video, Psychodrama is a multiple re-scoring of the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Psycho. Continue reading

Common Music Notation in Max/Msp with MaxScore with Nick Didkovsky and Georg Hajdu :: April 16, 6:30 - 9:30 pm :: Class Cost: $50 :: HARVESTWORKS Digital Media Arts Center, 596 Broadway, Suite 602 (at Houston St), New York, NY. For details, or to register go here.

MaxScore currently exports to MusicXML so you can load your scores into Finale and Sibelius. MaxScore also exports to the GNU LilyPond automated engraving system. MaxScore was programmed in Java Music Specification Language by Nick Didkovsky (but requires no Java programming to operate). MaxScore was commissioned by “Bipolar - German-Hungarian Cultural Projects.” Bipolar is an initiative of the Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany. Continue reading

“If relational aesthetics and open source were always commercial, can the musical score provide a way of thinking through different relationships between creativity and code? The return to improvisation in ‘livecoding’ draws parallels with experimental practices developed by maverick musicians, programmers and educators from Sun Ra, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Scratch Orchestra to Seymour Papert. Simon Yuill argues that these ‘distributive practices’ are worth extending today.

In recent years the foregrounding of ‘collaboration’ in artistic practice has acquired an aura of inherent benevolence and emancipation, as though the very act of working with others in itself ensures some form of resistance or alternative to conventions of cultural production, and confers positive moral value. Continue reading

Cellar Door by Loris Greaud :: February 14 - April 27, 2008 :: Opening: February 14, 2008; 8pm - midnight :: Palais De Tokyo, 13 avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris.

Cellar Door is an ambitious artistic enterprise: a colossal organism engendered by an original music score that distends through space and time. This mutant form of exhibition is guided in real time by a studio and an engineer located at the heart of the display; they activate the artworks, produce the assemblage of sounds, and prompt its accelerations and retractions. Continue reading

Moving Forest: Insurgency - presented by AKA the castle @ CONSPIRE, Transmediale08, House of World Cultures, Berlin :: February 1, 2008.

Moving Forest of the PEOPLE’S FRONT is conspiring with KEIN.ORG and INURA (International Network for Urban Research and Action) in a call for an INSURGENCY act. The Russians took Moltke bridge. The prisoners took JVA Moabit. We take the prisoners. We are all 129a. The walls are blasted. The data are mined. The phones are tapped. The lives of others. We listen through walls. The cities of others. We walk through walls.

Moving Forest, conceived by Shu Lea Cheang (Plenum, nodeLondon06) and Martin Howse (xxxxx, nodeLondon06), is a 12 hour 5 act sonic performance operating with public wifi and mobile technology - an expandable citywide operatic manoeuvre / intervention. Continue reading

For the past two nights I’ve been sitting in my studio, obsessively scrutinizing Jonny Greenwood’s magnificently bleak score for There Will be Blood. The first time I heard the shrill syncopation of Prospectors Arrive, the centrepiece of the work, it immediately reminded me of a project I came across last year that I had intended to write about here on Serial Consign.

The above image is the score for two movements of Circalles, a 2007 composition by Martijn Tellinga, a Netherlands based sound artist and electroacoustic musician. Circalles is Tellinga’s second experiment with what he refers to as “Compositional Objects”, a term that resonates with his clinical manipulation of the clusters of modulating tones that populate these works. Continue reading

Video by Brock Monroe Continue reading

The quotes and scores assembled in Keep Walking Intently: Scoring Contemporary Art Actions by Lisa Moren, which have been given graphic form by Margaret Re, are traces of a “movement” in the true sense of the term: Not an art movement with programs and manifestoes, but the sometimes slow and sometimes quick, sometimes precise and sometimes imprecise trajectory of certain ideas or impulses as they have passed from person to person in the course of the last 50 years or so. It is a type of movement that is perhaps best compared to Robert Filliou’s Whispered Art History: Endlessly repetitive and pointless in terms of content but fascinating in terms of method, which is all about person-to-person contact. In this sense, this assembly of quotes and scores evoke not so much the history of Fluxus and its surroundings as the sentiment of the moment of their reception…” From Keep Walking Intently: Scoring Contemporary Art [PDF], Visible Language (Providence: RISD), Introduction by Ina Blom. Edited by Ken Friedman and Owen Smith (in press).

Born in 1944, John Lifton studied architecture at University College London. He was one of the first people to become interested in the impact of information technologies on architecture. In 1968, the year he graduated, Lifton was involved in the creation of the international Computer Arts Society, and he exhibited in the landmark Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. The following year he was a founder of the London New Arts Lab and the Institute for Research in Art and Technology, a base for experimental performance and mixed media work, where he set up the first free computer facility specifically for artists. Continue reading

BliK an interactive installation and networked musical composition method based on collaborative “Web 2.0″ principles. The composer / participant types directives / keywords - referencing one of the LEMUR ModBots - into a blog post to create a musical score. The LEMUR ModBots are a set of single-function percussive bots that work as a percussion ensemble. They reside at LEMURplex in Brooklyn, New York. Some are scrapers, some are shakers, some strike different surfaces. They each have their own name, for instance, “bucket” and “shake.” By typing “bucket shake shake shake,” into a blog post, the user causes both bots to improvise algorithmically, with the shake being 3 times more present in the section than the bucket. The user controls the tempo by typing keywords such as ‘fast’, ’slow’, and ‘medium’. Continue reading