Telepresence | Doug Van Nort

A series of two pieces combining text/graphic scores and a custom gestural language, for large-scale ensemble in the telematic medium, created to mark my 20 year anniversary of telematic musicking.

The Original Program Notes for Dispersionology #1:
In the world of physics, dispersion describes a phenomenon in which the rate of propagation of a wave in a medium, its phase velocity, is dependent on its frequency. This can be seen in light, sound, gravity waves, etc. Its a property of telecommunications signals, including the pulses of light in optical fibre cables, describing how the signal broadens and spreads out as it moves across the channel. Dispersion therefore is inherent in the medium that more-and-more binds us these days, in the movements of light pulses that transports our attention, and our listening, around the globe. A beautiful consequence of dispersion is a change in the angle of refraction of different frequencies, leading to a prismatic opening up of a full colour spectrum from incoming light. This ability to broaden out as signals propagate through the network reflects a much wider expansion of distributed listening and sounding that is made possible in the context of telematic musicking. It occurred to me recently that, as of early 2023 I’ve engaged this medium now for 20 years, with an ear towards exploring the myriad ways that the shared real/virtual and nowhere/everywhere site of performance can act as both a point of convergence towards a singular locus of performative attention — yet also a dispersive prism, reflecting individual voices and the preservation of creative agencies of every performer.

I call this current exploration of this phenomenom, at this current milestone moment, “Dispersionology”…. I’ve invited a wide array of past telematic collaborators (spanning this entire 20 years) to explore this and other related tales with me on May 10th. I hope you can join us!

-Doug Van Nort

The concert for piece #1 took place on May 10th as Dispersionology and Other Tales with the following program:

Tuning Meditation
Composer: Pauline Oliveros
Performers: All Sites

Dispersionology
Composer: Doug Van Nort
Performers: All Sites

Other Tales: Algorithmic-chance-structured improvisation
Composer: Doug Van Nort
Performers: All Sites

Performers:

Dispersed/Various Locations:

Chris Anderson-Lundy, Saxophone, Toronto, ON
Tom Bickley, EWI + Max processing, Berkeley, CA
Anne Bourne, cello, Toronto, ON
Cássia Carrascoza Bomfim, flute, Brazil
Chris Chafe, celletto, CCRMA/Palo Alto, CA
Viv Corringham, voice, electronics, New York, NY
Bjorn Eriksson, analog electronics (feedback boxes), Solleftjea, Sweden
Colin James Gibson, guitar, Toronto, ON
Bill Gilliam, piano + electronics, Toronto, ON
Scot Gresham-Lancaster, electronics, Maine
Theodore Haber, violin, Montreal, QC
Glen Hall, Soprano saxophone, contrabass clarinet, Brampton, ON
Holland Hopson, banjo, Tuscaloosa, AL
Rory Hoy, bass + electronics, Brampton, ON
Kai Kubota-Enright, piano (+/- preparation), electronics, Montreal, QC
Al Margolis, violin/contact mic(s)/objects, Chester, NY
Scott L. Miller, Kyma, Minneapolis, MN
Emma Pope, piano, Montreal, QC
Ambrose Pottie, percussion and electronics, Castleton, ON
Dana Reason, piano/inside piano, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon
Omar Shabbar, guitar + electronics, Toronto, ON
Kathy Kennedy, voice + electronics, Montreal, QC
Doug Van Nort, soundpainting, greis/electronics, voice, Toronto, ON
Sarah Weaver, conducting, New York, NY
Zovi, Theremin, Albany, NY

Bogotá (Universidad de Los Andes):

Ricardo Arias, balloons
Leonel Vásquez
(featuring U de Los Andes students)

Chicago (School of the Art Institute of Chicago):

Eric Leonardson, springboard + electronics
Garrett Johnson, electronics
Gordon Fung, electronics

Oslo (Universitetet i Oslo):

Krisin Norderval, voice
Fabian Stordalen, Bass guitar, Guitar, No-input mixing
Kristian Eicke, Guitar (percussive) on lap
Nino Jakeli, Vocals, Guitar, Keyboard
Aysima Baba, Accordion
Alexander Wastnidge, Guitars, Live Electronics
Emin Memis, Ney Flute, Drums

The immersive multi-channel performance – placing the performers at distinct points in the Dispersion Lab space – was recorded with a Zylia 6DOF ambisonic microphone array and is being prepared for future release as a virtual/immersive realization of the piece.

The premiere for piece #2 in this series took place in November 2023 as part of the 2023 NowNet Arts Conference/Festival.

Credits:

Composition and Direction:
Doug Van Nort

Performers – Dispersed/Various Locations:

Performers – Performance Nodes:

Chicago (School of the Art Institute of Chicago):

Eric Leonardson, springboard + electronics
Garrett Johnson, electronics
Gordon Fung, electronics

Oslo (Universitetet i Oslo):

Also Broadcasting from Chicago on Free Radio SAIC
In-person audience at Universitetet i Oslo (IMV Salen)

thee Doug Van Nort Electro-Acoustic Orchestra is an ensemble comprised of a mixture of acoustic and electronic performers. It is an emergent sonic organism that evolves through collective attention to all facets of sound, software instruments and text/graphic pieces created by Van Nort, and gesture-based real-time composition in combination with a growing repertoire of these pre-composed structures that are fluidly traversed and integrated spontaneously during performance. The gestural-compositional conducting language used with the group draws upon Van Nort’s experience in electroacoustic improvisation and its unique approach to sound sculpting, shared signal manipulation, the distinct relationships to time/memory/causality that electronics afford, and works that integrate improvisation with pre-composed structures or generative systems. The language is built upon Soundpainting, with many modifications and additions for this project.

This ensemble builds upon the larger Electro-Acoustic Orchestra project, as a more professional and established group which has now had a fixed membership over a longer time scale. This ensemble emerged from the pandemic, integrating select long-term members coming out of the course-based version of the EAO ensemble, with members of the international community of electro/acoustic improvisers (and notably, collaborators from the international Deep Listening community), via telematic connections. The ensemble meets regularly to work through new materials, gestures-concepts and pieces.

The course-based EAO often acts as a pathway to join the professional ensemble for students and professional performer alike. The professional DVN-EAO ensemble has converged to a much higher degree of refinement and specificity, with Van Nort able to compose more involved sonic structures (both electronics as well as text/graphic scores) that are rehearsed and can be called upon and nonlinearly combined in performance, as well as much more “two-way mind reading” that happens in the moment.

thee DVN-EAO regularly performs online and in-person (typically with mixed in-person/telematic performers), and invites proposals for venues and festival performances.

Upcoming and select recent performances include:

November 2023: Ongaku no tomo hall, Tokyo, Japan

December 2022: online/streaming performance for the Winter Solstice

October 2022: keynote performance for the exhibition/symposium Sensoria: The Arts and Science of Our Senses with audiences in Gdansk, Poland and at the Dispersion Lab, featuring immersive haptic/light piece by Van Nort.

May 2022: Elka Bong (Walter Wright and Al Margolis) and thee Doug Van Nort Electro-Acoustic Orchestra in first in-person concert at the Dispersion Lab since the pandemic.

December 2021: Works for the Winter Soltice – online/streaming concert.

June 2021: nO(t)pera Summer Soltice Selections – online/streaming concert.

December 2020: Quarantine: A Telematic nO(t)pera, large scale piece online/streaming concert with audience participation.

Credits:

Composition and Direction:
Doug Van Nort

thee Doug Van Nort Electro-Acoustic Orchestra:
Chris Anderson-Lundy (saxophone), Tom Bickley (EWI+electronics), Viv Corringham (voice+electronics ), Björn Eriksson (feedback boxes), Rory Hoy (bass+electronics), Kathy Kennedy (voice+electronics), Omar Shabbar (guitar+electronics), Danny Sheahan (violin+electronics), Doug Van Nort (soundpainting/composing/electronics).

Booking:

dispersion[dot]relation[at]gmail[dot]com

Quarantine: A Telematic nO(t)pera is a piece by Doug Van Nort, created for the Electro-Acoustic Orchestra (EAO), for the virtual space of connected isolation, for Casper the cat, and for self-sanity. It is not an Opera, but it is not not an Opera. It is a composition for musical, visual and virtual engagement. The music consists of six movements that span disparate sonic landscapes. It is organized by pre-composed palettes that integrate text, graphics, Soundpainting and software instruments, and are augmented with additional real-time composition via EAO’s unique Soundpainting conducting. This content is a crystallization of ideas that have emerged from months of regular online rehearsals that date back to the beginning of the pandemic, bringing together performers from three continents and numerous time zones. As a meditation on (and a product of) our network-mediated present, the nO(t)pera also introduces diverse networks of improvised collaboration: cross performer-machine collaboration, performer-animal collaboration and audience-machine-performer collaboration.

In one movement of the piece, the audience is invited to improvise drawing input that are interpreted by machine learning algorithms, and in turn will determine the overall structure and sonic content of the music.

Credits:

Composition and Direction:
Doug Van Nort

Electro-Acoustic Orchestra:
Tom Bickley (EWI+electronics), Lo Bil (voice), Viv Corringham (voice+electronics ), Björn Eriksson (feedback boxes), Faadhi Fauzi (synths), Colin James Gibson (guitar), Yuanfen Gu (notpera granular patch), Rory Hoy (bass+electronics), Melanie Jagmohan (guitar+legos), Kathy Kennedy (voice+electronics), Aida Khorsandi (notpera FM patch), Nicholas Lina (bass), Kieran Maraj (kin/electronics), Diane Roblin (inside piano/synths), Omar Shabbar (guitar+electronics), Danny Sheahan (violin+electronics), Peter Vukosavljevic (percussion), Doug Van Nort (conducting/composing).

Live action-or-lack-thereof:
Casper, the cat
Cat-herding and video work:
Stacy Denton
Virtual Staging and visuals:
Rory Hoy
Deep Machine Learning (conducting and drawing recognition):
Kieran Maraj

This project integrates two MYO muscle-sensing armbands, shared-signal sound processing of an electro-acoustic ensemble and gestural recognition of Soundpainting-style conducting. In the project, the Soundpainter shifts modes between guiding performers, collaborating through movement/sound improvisation, and explicitly processing the sonic output of performers through their movements. These shifting modes of interaction require all performers to become attentive to the tensions between acoustic and electronic sources, between their origination point (instrumentalist vs. Soundpainter) and between bottom-up structured improvisation and top-down guiding via conducting. These continuums are amplified and explored through another layer of shared articulation, as machine learning is applied to recognition of the composer/conductors gestures, with symbolic recognition opening up channels of electronic processing and discrete states of potential sound transformation, . The underlying machine learning system is also trained on continuous mappings between conducted motion and sonic transformations, allowing the Soundpainter to perform these transformations through their (now free and unconstrained) movements, continuously co-shaping the output with a given performer. The presence of these two distinct modes of machine-mediation create a tension between the symbology of conducted instruction and that of continuously co-constructed sound, with the Soundpainter and performer sharing signals and intentional resonance in performance. I diagrammed and mapped out this larger human/machine system of listening and co-creation, as can be seen in the below image gallery.

Intersubjective Soundings narrows in on this collective experience as a compositional parameter, allowing for moments of getting “lost” in one another’s sound world and gestural intentions, while needing to pull back to the symbology of soundpainting-based conducting. The work therefore traverses the spectrum of embodied listening-in-the-moment at one extreme, and a reflexive consideration of musical meaning at the other, with both of these modes being mirrored in the movement of the conducting language. This project has been developed in the context of the Electro-Acoustic Orchestra and was premiered at the 2017 International Conference on Movement and Computing (MOCO), with myself at Deptford Town Hall at Goldsmiths University in London, and the EAO at the DisPerSion Lab in Toronto. In this piece, the sense of “listening across” that occurs between instrumental performer and conductor/performer was further heightened through the introduction of a telematic connection between sites.

In 2019 I was invited to present work for a CBC sponsored festival called CRAM. In this context I applied this project to a new piece with another instantiation of EAO, in this case co-located in an acoustically-interesting silo space on York University’s campus known as Vari Hall. We played it twice that evening, and someone was kind enough to post a phone-recorded video of one of the sets.

Credits

Piece Creation/Direction: Doug Van Nort

EAO for the London performance was:

London: Doug Van Nort (composing/conducting, MYO-based transformations)
DisPerSion Lab: Dave Bandi (guitar), Chris Cerpnjak (cymbals, glockenspiel) , Glen Hall (saxophone), Ian Jarvis (catRT+supercollider) , Ian Macchiusi (Moog mother), Mackenzie Perrault (guitar), Danny Sheahan (keys, samples), Fae Sirois (violin), Lauren Wilson (flute)

EAO for the CRAM performance was:

Doug Van Nort (composing/conducting, MYO-based transformations)
Chris Anderson-Lundy (saxophone), Dave Bandi (guitar), Chris Cerpnjak (cymbals, glockenspiel) , Erin Corbett (analog synth), Glen Hall (saxophone), Rory Hoy (bass), Ian Jarvis (catRT+supercollider) , Kieran Maraj (electronics), Ian Macchiusi (Moog mother), Mackenzie Perrault (guitar), Danny Sheahan (violin+electronics), Fae Sirois (violin), Lauren Wilson (flute)

Additional Reference:

Doug Van Nort, Conducting the In-Between: Improvisation and Intersubjective Engagement in Soundpainted Electro/Acoustic Ensemble Performance, Digital Creativity, 29(1), 68-81, 2018.

This project was in collaboration with Thomas Gerwin, connecting the DisPerSion Lab to
Germany. It explored varying modes of attention, including cross-continent gestural interaction between the ensembles. The event connected the lab with the Brandenburg New Music Festival in Potsdam, with performances by the EAO in collaboration with the Stream ensemble. Pieces for this group were created by Doug Van Nort (Canada) and Thomas Gerwin, John Rausek, and Sabine Vogel (Germany), and also included cross-site Soundpainting gestures involving Vogel and Van Nort.

Credits:

Direction: Doug Van Nort and Thomas Gerwin

Performers:
DisPerSion Lab: Electro-Acoustic Orchestra (dir. Doug Van Nort)
Potsdam: Ivo Berg (recorder), Jenny Döll (dance), Reinhard Gagel (accordion, Moog synthesizer),
Thomas Gerwin (banjo, objects, live electronics), Dietrich Petzold (violin,, viola), Sabine Vogel
(Soundpainting)
Composition: Thomas Gerwin, John Rausek, Doug Van Nort, Sabine Vogel

This piece was commissioned by New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) for their 2017 Deep Wireless Festival. It was written for the Electro-Acoustic Orchestra with featured violinist Mia Zabelka, and centres around processes and concepts of tuning, fission and fusion.

The concert event, co-produced by Dispersion Lab, NAISA, and Thomas Gerwin at the Exploratorium in Berlin under the theme of “tele-conduction”.

Credits:

Composition:
Doug Van Nort

Performers:
DisPerSion Lab: Dave Bandi, Chris Cerpnjak, Erin Corbett, Ian Jarvis, Ian Macchiusi, Mackenzie Perrault, Fae Sirois, Doug Van Nort, Lauren Wilson

Other Concert Participants:
Berlin: Ivo Berg (recorder), Jenny Doell (dance), Reinhard Gagel (accordion, piano, Mini-Moog),
Thomas Gerwin (banjo, objects, electronics.), Dietrich Petzold (violin, viola)
Compositions: Doug Van Nort, Thomas Gerwin, Sarah Weaver and Glen Hall
Audio Broadcast: NAISA radio

This piece engaged the performance space as a “total work” that included visuals and a sense of dramaturgy driven by the composition of time and interactivity – and thus it is a “nO(t)pera”, i.e. it is not an Opera but it is not-not an Opera. It is a semi-structured, semi-improvised performance linking five performers and their audience across one virtual and five real sites of performance. The musicians utilize their deep listening skills as they listen across networks, across N. America, and across radically different acoustic spaces and instrumentations, in order to find convergence through musical dialogue. Performers from Stanford (California), RPI (New York) and York Special Projects Gallery were projected onto materials within the DisPerSion Lab, forming an uncanny trace of their bodily presence, embedded on a blended “stage” with a live electronics performer. Public activity from the hallway of the neighbouring building on York’s campus, leading up to the Special Projects gallery where Bourne was performing, was mapped into visual and sonic art and projected within DisPerSion Lab, creating a texturized “double” of the activity just outside the Gallery site of performance. The Dispersion Lab website provided another realization of the performance, allowing audience to chat, interact via twitter, listen to individual streams or the entire mix, and alter the outcome by conducting the musicians using a web-based interface during one section of the piece. The York-based audience was invited to wander between the differing performative realities of the public spaces, the virtual online platform, the live performance within the gallery, and the live performance within DisPerSion lab. The overarching composition and design vision for the piece was an uncanny sense of being/not-being “there”, as one moved between local sites while hearing the sounds of other neighbouring performance locations in the distance. Students from Van Nort’s “Performing Telepresence” course contributed visual design work for the staging, theatre lights and projection, as well as programming and administrative work

Conception/Composition/Direction:

Doug Van Nort

Performers:

Anne Bourne (cello) – York Special Projects Gallery, York University Toronto, ON
Chris Chafe (celletto) – CCRMA, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California
Pauline Oliveros (V-Accordion), Jonas Braasch (Soprano Saxophone) – CRAIVE Lab, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

Doug Van Nort (greis/electronics) – DisPerSion Lab, York University, Toronto, ON

Press:

Yfile online magazine

Scenography/Visual and Lights/Technical Production/Promotions

Gale Cabiles – promotional video and graphics
Kevin Feliciano – audio networking and DisPerSion Lab sound engineering
Akeem Glasgow – public, interactive sonic instrument
Radi Hilaneh – video processing and in-York networking
Justin Hsieh – Gallery design and layout
Raechel Kula – DisPerSion Lab projection surfaces and visual design
Rory Hoy – network mapping design
Candy Hua – DisPerSion Lab
Tony Liu – remote conducting of performance sites
Sam Noto – visual streaming to virtual performance site
Sarah Siddiqui – website audio remixing/streaming
Keren Xu – promotional video and graphics
Yirui Fu – network lighting control, sound-to-light mapping DisPerSion Lab
Mingxin Zhang – lighting effects, DisPerSion Lab
Cary Zheng – video networking between sites, documentation
Keke Zhou – public, interactive visual instrument

This was a collaboration with York University Associate Librarian William Denton and the students of my “Performing Telepresence” course. Denton created a real-time sonification of the library’s reference desk activity, called STAPLR (Sounds in Time Actively Performing Library Reference). Equal parts installation, sonification, and performance, the STAPLR Dispersion piece created a performative conversation with the library space, influencing the data streams and drawing attention to the practices and rituals of the library. We created sound and light instruments to receive the library data, which defined an immersive space within the DisPerSion Lab that spatialized the sound and light based on the library branch that the data was coming from. Twitter was scraped for hashtags and keywords, which modified the results and were displayed as part of the piece. Laptop stations showing the stream from the lab, the sonification stream and the Twitter comments were placed at five different library branches and students embedded themselves (quietly!) with headphones at each station. Library patrons were made aware of the ongoing activity and encouraged to join in and influence the piece either by tweeting or by engaging the reference desk, thereby altering the sonified data and engaging the public in a performative interaction with the library space. Various students and librarians moved between libraries and the immersive lab space, creating a meditative engagement with public space, data, archives and performative practices in everyday life.

Credits

Conception and Direction:

Doug Van Nort

Library Data Sonification:

William Denton

Sound, Light and Text Instrument Design:

Doug Van Nort and students from the “Performing Telepresence” course: Gale Cabiles, Kevin Feliciano, Floria Fu, Akeem Glasgow, Radi Hilaneh, Rory Hoy, Justin Hsieh, Candy Hua, Raechel Kula, Sam Noto, Sarah Siddiqui, Keren Xu, Carey Zheng, Mingxin Zhang, Keke Zhou, Tongliang Liu)

Triple Point Was:

Pauline Oliveros – accordion/v-accordion

Doug Van Nort – greis/electronics, voice

Jonas Braasch – soprano saxophone

Credits:

Curation and Performance:
Doug Van Nort

Performers/Presenters:

Various – see above.

Event Promotion, Flyers, Web pages:
Nina Bouchard, Lauren Osmond

Inspirator, Lab Context:

Sha Xin Wei and the Topological Media Lab

More info – historical links:

Topological Improvisations

and

Topological Re-Mediations

This is a piece for networked laptop ensemble, and was commissioned for the festival Zerospace: an interdisciplinary initiative on distance and interaction at the University of Virginia, organized by Matthew Burtner.

It was created for the M.I.C.E. laptop ensemble at UVA. For the performance, I “conducted” the piece telematically from the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY, with performers from the MICE ensemble (and the audience) located at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

The piece is built around a granular synthesis software instrument that includes a genetic algorithm to evolve sound forms, a set of specific samples, and a score to guide our performance. My conducting includes remote control of higher level granular qualities for the group, as well as text/colour instructions for full ensemble or sub-group, sent via OSC. Each performer had control over mixing up to six different granular voice, as well as control over the GA evolution of their own sonic “gene pool” of sounds.

Below are snippets from the pdf score, my conducting window, the performer instruments, and a reaction from one of the ensemble members, from our rehearsals leading up to the performance.

Credits:

Composition:
Doug Van Nort

Performers:
M.I.C.E. Ensemble 2013 (dir. Matthew Burtner)

Festival Organization:
Matthew Burtner, Sarah O’Halloran

It is with great pleasure that I have curated Computer Music Journal’s 2014 Sound and Video Anthology. I decided upon a theme of distributed agency in digitally mediated performance. In particular, my interest here is to showcase a multiplicity of ways in which shared agency manifests between human performers, as well as between human and machine performers. The collection begins with “Part A: Distributed Composition”; this section presents audio/video documents that highlight five unique approaches to distributing and sharing expressive voices between composer- performers. In these works, the resulting compositional voice does not reside in one central location, but rather is a product of collective co-creation, at varying levels of spa- tial and temporal remove. This set includes a work by Chris Chafe and colleagues, wherein large-scale com- positional qualities are influenced by global sea levels as well as by a live audience, resulting in a piece that

is not only artful but consciousness- raising at the same time. In contrast to this “outsourcing” of the details of compositional form, the works by Pedro Rebelo and The Hub both present two very different takes on “net- work music”: Rebelo’s work defines a global feedback network whose sonic character and overall shape are the product of a large-scale interconnection of disparate acoustic spaces and performers, whereas The Hub— the fathers of “computer network music”—present us with a canonical example of their ever-groundbreaking approach to composing for shared, living network structures. The piece by CLOrk (the Concordia Laptop Orchestra) eschews the classically calculated and precise world of the laptop orchestra in favor of the messy and risky world of interdisciplinary improvisation. The result is a work whose shared agency is a product of listening for gestural engagement across forms (kinetic, sonic). Finally, Bill Hsu and Chris Burns present a piece that intersects this world of cross-media improvisation with shared control at the level of their interactive performance systems, resulting in a document that demon- strates the possible richness discov- ered when sharing gestures across media, between human performers, and with the system itself.

This sharing of system-level gestural and compositional forms is the focus of “Part B: Musical Metacre- ation.” This section highlights cutting-edge machine improvisation systems in performance with two top-level human improvisers: Paul Hession on drums and Finn Peters on flute and saxophone. Hearing these disparate systems at play with the same performer begins to hint at the stylistic differences of their composer-designers, as well as the virtuosic flexibility of the human players. In order to bring focus to- wards listening to these differences, I have decided that this section should be audio-only. Each of these excerpts comes from a single concert of the same name that took place at Cafe OTO in London in July 2014. The curation of this concert was the work of Ollie Bown, and so the excellent selection of the included systems is purely to his credit. Aside from being privileged to take part in the concert, from a curatorial point of view I sim- ply had the good sense to incorporate these works into the in-progress curation of this collection, both because they fit so nicely with my chosen theme and because I could feel the strong improvisational musicianship on the evening of performance. I will leave the description of each system and piece for the program notes; taken

as a whole, I feel that these works create an excellent counterpoint to Part A by virtue of their cohesion
as well as a concentrated focus on both stylistic engagement and sonic gestural forms (as compared with the expansive and organic crossing of media and expressive types found within the first set). As a collection, I hope that you will find the diver- sity and quality of these works as compelling as I have, and that they might provide for a moment to reflect on the creative insights that may be gained when one “loosens the reins” on one’s own artistic control, instead distributing it among a collective of listening and expressing performers, be they present or tele-present, musical beings or meta-musical machines. -Doug Van Nort

Tracklisting:

A1 Chris Chafe – Polartides
A2 Pedro Rebelo – Netrooms: The Long Feedback
A3 The Hub – Multiple Issues
A4 CLOrk – Dancing with Laptops
A5 Bill Hsu, Chris Burns – Xenoglossia/Leishmania
B1 Paul Hession, Isambard Khroustaliov – Anything In Any Order By Anything At Any Time For Any Reason
B2 Paul Hession, Arne Eigenfeldt – The Indifference Engine versus Paul Hession
B3 Paul Hession, Doug Van Nort – Hession (Percussion) / Van Nort (FILTER System)
B4 Finn Peters, Ollie Bown – Zamyatin (software by Oliver Brown) with Finn Peters (sax)
B5 Finn Peters, Nick Collins – Finn Peters—Sax, Nick Collins—FinnSystem
B6 Finn Peters, Shlomo Dubnov – Finn Peters—Sax, Shlomo Dubnov and Greg Surges—Software
B7 Michael Young – piano_prosthesis
B8 Finn Peters, Paul Hession, Matt Yee-King – Finn Peters/Paul Hession/the Matt Yee-King simulator

A laptop ensemble composition written for and performed by Tintinnabulate at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, NY. This piece brings together signal-sharing of group tempo and musical key (similar to Awakenings), circuit-bend electronics and also introduced a “human cyborg” performer who could be instructed by audience in another space within the building to engage (or even interference) in the performance, to dance, etc. Audience members were also allowed to come up to a computer located in the performance space running the software instrument, becoming a member of the ensemble. In this way, the piece played with a hyper-localized sense of expanded presence, with breaking down the “fourth wall” of audience-performer engagement, with shared influence of musical structure, as well as hand gestures and a text and graphic-based score, acting as a centering principle for performance actions.

Credits:

Composition and Conception:
Doug Van Nort

Location:
Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY

Credits:

Performers:

Tintinnabulate (Pauline Oliveros, Doug Van Nort, Jonas Braasch, Evan Gonzalez, Zovi McIntee, Sean)

Audience Participation

Human Robot: Joshua Shinavier

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Booking:

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Additional Reference:

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Conception/Composition/Direction:

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Press:

Scenography/Visual and Lights/Technical Production/Promotions

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Further Reading

Triple Point Was:

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