We are priviledged to be hosting a raft of new work created with the extraordinary Fluid Corpus Manipulation (FluCoMa) toolkit developed by PA Tremblay, Owen Green and Gerard Roma at the University of Huddersfield. Here’s what they have to say about their Liminal Spaces programme.
” Instead of the possibility of repetition, we are faced in life with the unique qualities and characteristics of each occasion. “
(Cage, How the Piano Came to be Prepared)
People, technology, musicking. The usual entanglement, where moments are shared and things happen, like by magic. Musicians, as conjurors, ‘prepare’ their digital and electronic instruments and environments, teaching them to listen, to play, to wander: the unique qualities and characteristics of this occasion are amplified. It may not be clear who controls whom; who listens to whom; or even who learns from whom. All we can do is try and be prepared for it…
Over the Festival, 10 world leading musicians / creative coders are joining us, exploring that space where these boundaries blur and creativity strives.
On Wednesday, Gerard Roma will present a live audio-visual investigation of frying, sizzling, sputtering, broiling and poaching sounds, through the lens of computer-assisted stirring. Then Owen Green will be joined by his regular partners in crime of Raw-Green-Rust for a live trio set where an uncertain number of human improvisers, in uncertain locations, with uncertain connections, negotiate a performance mediated by opinionated machine learning algorithms.
On Thursday, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay will play his noisy post-acousmatic piece, confronting gestural and static saturated states, musing sonically on information addiction whilst (ab)using the FluCoMa tools in many small and large parts of his studio composition process.
On Friday, Sam Pluta will be joined by his old ally Peter Evans for a live improvisation between trumpet and electronics using neural net controlled synths and his Live Modular Instrument. Richard Devine will perform an acousmatic piece, utilizing mixed media which comprises a customized modular system with robotic triggers, mechanical springs, coils, exotic metallic percussion, and waterphone, as a live stream from his studio in Atlanta GA. Mark Knoop will premiere a new immersive piece by Hans Tutschku for the occasion, the next step in his 30 years of investigating the relationship between the piano and live-electronics. Niahm Dell will premiere a new piece for oboe and electronics by Alex Harker, where he explores the oboe through the lens of multiphonics, instability and delicate noise. And finally, Feedback Cell (Alice Eldridge + Chris Kiefer) will improvise with one or more of their self-resonating feedback cellos, modulated by analogue and digital processing mediated by adaptive machine learning algorithms and some humans.
On Saturday, we have two public keynotes as part of our final plenary. Rebbeca Fiebrink and Chris Kiefer will be reflecting on the recent advances of musicianly (ab)uses of the machine listening and machine learning technologies by artists, with an enabling agenda: far from the resource of the tech giants, we explore how enabling musicians in their native environment allows them to challenge our vision of the technologies towards a more poetic and empowered works.