The premiere performance of these artificial musicians takes the form of a unique and exciting on-stage meeting between human and machine improvisers on May 26th 2010 at the Blackrock Castle Observatory, Cork. Featuring Park and Godfrey (guitars), Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder (saxophones), and UCC Music doctoral composer Francis Heery (diffusion), the performance will be a playful exploration and a boundary-breaking public demonstration of socio-musical technologies and ironic sci-fi parody.
io 0.0.1 beta++ and iWife are modern-day musical automata. They are not instruments to be played, but non-human artificial musicians that perform alongside their human counterparts. They represent contrasting approaches to the artistic investigation of technology, interaction, improvisation, and musicality. io 0.0.1 beta++ whimsically evokes a 1950s B-movie robot, seemingly jerry-rigged, constructed from components such as plumbing, kitchenware, speakers and missile switches. While io 0.0.1 beta++ celebrates the material and corporeal, iWife, in contrast, is disembodied and delocalized: a diffuse ghost in acoustic space.
The performances will highlight society’s entanglement with technology, demonstrate alternative modes of interaction between the musical and the technological, and illuminate the creative and improvisatory processes in music. Against the simultaneously high-tech and Frankensteinian backdrop of Blackrock Castle Observatory, the event will be a radical yet playful engagement with powerful and problematic dreams (and nightmares) of the artificial; a dream as old as the anthropology of robots.
With human performers from diverse traditions of improvisation (avant jazz, free improvisation, AACM and post-AACM practices, European and Euro-American experimental musics), expect music that fuses, fragments and recombines musical histories, traditions and expectations
Human-Machine Improvisations will begin at 8.00 pm (doors at 7.45 pm) on 26 May 2010 at Blackrock Castle Observatory. Tickets are €16 (€10 concessions) from www.tickets.ie
The event is presented with support from the Music Network Performance and Touring Award, the Arts Council of Ireland, Blackrock Castle Observatory, The Castle Bar and Trattoria and UCC School of Music. Human-Machine Improvisations is part of FUAIM Music at UCC.
Picture: Improviser Han-earl Park
1438MMcS
For further information please contact: Marie McSweeney, Press Officer, University College Cork (T) 021 4902371; (086) 0845182.
May 19th 2010
_2.jpg "UCC Musicians Create Improvising Machine Musicians")