DVD Program Notes
Part One: Butch Rovan, Curator
Curator’s Note
The eight works brought together
for this DVD represent very different
approaches to creating and perform-
ing with interactive video. In each
performance the visual image is mal-
leable material, sculpted in response
to the gestures of an individual per-
former or other participants. Through
the intervention of custom software
and/or hardware, human movement
is translated into sound and image in
unique and surprising ways.
In MindBox, a collaboration among
Humatic, Roberto Zappal `a, and the
Institut de Recherche et Coordina-
tion Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM),
the metaphor of the slot machine
provides the interface for individual
players to create instant mash-ups of
Zappal `a’s movement. Both a game and
a performance instrument, MindBox
invites viewers to become partici-
pants in a virtual choreography, re-
combining Zappal `a’s movement and
sound into infinitely new patterns.
Pattern from process is the im-
petus for Louise Harris’s interven-
tion:coation. Seeking to create a
“cohesive whole,” Harris maps subtle
processes onto her sounds and images,
creating a nuanced performance en-
vironment in which what is seen and
what is heard bear equal weight. Her
symbiotic system reveals the fragile
interdependencies of perception and
performance.
The ongoing collaboration be-
tween vade (image) and Aerostatic
(sound) is captured to stark effect in
Transmissions from a Dying Planet.
An excerpt from a longer narra-
tive, this dystopian work probes the
man-nature-technology divide and
its myriad failed solutions. Here the
“transmissions” are detritus casting
doi:10.1162/COMJ e 00198
about a post-apocalyptic landscape,
hypothetical data fragments reassem-
bled into an old/new media artifact.
A similar fascination with the
artifact informs Alex Dupuis’s All
Hail the Dawn. In performance,
Dupuis guides the behavior of a
sensitive feedback network that
comprises a light-sensitive analog
oscillator, audio processing, and
audio visualization. By projecting the
generated image back onto the light
sensors, he cajoles his system into
ever-changing states of resonance and
chaos—visual and sonic artifacts of
his physical presence in the system.
In Alchimia the duo Noisefold
(David Stout and Cory Metcalf) po-
sition themselves as hypothetical
zookeepers of a menagerie of “syn-
thetic organisms” that inhabit—as
well as create—the visual and sonic
field. The performers negotiate an
intricate system of infrared sen-
sors, microphones, and controllers to
nudge data feedback and algorithmic
processes in real time. The emergent
behavior of Alchimia interestingly
suggests both the dystopia of Trans-
missions from a Dying Planet and the
contained chaos of All Hail the Dawn.
At the center of Butch Rovan’s of
the survival of images is the capti-
vating onscreen presence of dancer
Ami Shulman. Through still images
and high-speed video that reveal the
intricate details of her movement,
the dancer controls the unfolding
scene while also being controlled by
the performer. Rovan’s custom-made
GLOBE controller directs the vir-
tual choreography of the dance, his
physical gestures determining the
real-time synthesis of both sound and
image. The movement gives way at
points to a breathless chain of still
images, like surviving fragments of a
gesture yet to come.
A female presence—in this case,
the voice of Lesley Flanigan—
also dominates Bioluminescence, a
collaboration between Flanigan and
Luke Dubois. Dubois is her virtual
interlocutor, capturing Flanigan’s
vocal improvisations during perfor-
mance and translating them into
an evocative audiovisual landscape
through extensive computer process-
ing. Sitting face to face across a table,
Flanigan and Dubois’s understated
performance weaves a compelling
visual and sonic atmosphere in what
they describe as an “intimate conver-
sation between two people.”
Kyle Evans and James Connolly
create an intricate audiovisual con-
versation in Cracked Ray Tube. Their
project subverts television technology
with the help of hacked CRT com-
puter monitors, feedback networks,
and exposed circuitry that begs to be
touched. Voiding all warranties, they
reanimate the carcasses of discarded
tech to give voice to a new sonic
and visual beast. From the seemingly
simple resources of RGB signals, their
exploration of the inner workings of
the TV exposes the both complexity
and expressivity of analog circuitry.
1. MindBox—Humatic
(Christian Graupner,
inventor, media artist,
director, composer; Nils
Peters, system developer/
software artist); Roberto
Zappal `a, performer/
choreographer; Norbert
Schnell, interactive
music/sound design
MindBox is an audience reactive
video-and-music triptych and can be
operated with the lever and buttons
of a modified one-armed bandit.
Originally created as a stand-alone
media installation singing songs from
the swamps of “Casino Capitalism &
Total Body Control,” MindBox in its
final development phase turned out
to be an intuitive audiovisual musical
instrument.
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Figure 1. MindBox in performance,
featuring Roberto Zappal `a.
Based on the Humatic Re-
Performing Musical Characters con-
cepts (H.RPMC), the media slot
machine allows for musical reinter-
pretation of sounds and images giving
access to expressive parameters while
preserving the character of the pre-
recorded performance material. The
player can let the instrument au-
tonomously generate variations but
take over the audiovisual and musical
control at any time while stay-
ing in a consistent and continuous
flow.
Through a series of working ses-
sions Graupner and Zappal `a have
created a vocabulary of beatboxing-
like movements and sounds that now
fuel the re-performance machine.
MindBox’s design is dominated by
a “pimped” classical fruit (slot) ma-
chine. With an easy-to-learn tangible
interface including the lever, multi-
ple push buttons, blinking lights, and
giant displays, the MindBox appears
as a headstrong sculpture offering var-
ious interpretation levels—complex
but not complicated. The direct
“body contact” with the “Man in
the Box” seems to break barriers
between players, performers, and
audience.
The MindBox project has been
created by Humatic through col-
laboration with IRCAM and the
Compagnia Zappal `a Danza. MindBox
is produced by Humatic Berlin in co-
operation with TMA Hellerau , BEK
(Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts,
Norway) and Compagnia Zappal `a
Danza. The MindBox technology is
based on HUMAsystem and the FTM
and related libraries for Max/MSP.
Roberto Zappal `a is the artistic di-
rector and main choreographer of
Compagnia Zappal `a Danza, which
he founded in 1989. The company
is today one of the most important
Italian dance companies. In 22 years
of activity of the company,
Teatro alla Scala of Milano, the
Swedish company Norrdans, the
Stichting Theaterwerkplaats Gen-
erale Oost (Netherlands), the
Goteborg Ballet in Sweden, and
more. For more information,
consult the company Web site
(www.compagniazappala.it/en/
compagnia zappala danza/roberto
zappala).
In his latest work the Berlin-
based artist Christian Graupner has
been exploring the practices and
myths around popular and contem-
porary music, combining multi-
channel video and sound with partly
machine–partly user-controlled “hu-
matic” interfaces and mechanisms.
His recent sculptural/media work in-
cludes gambling machines and Asian
mojo figures, feedback guitars, and
beatbox-like vocal and dance per-
formances. In processing visual and
audio material, he not only uses and
adapts available computer programs
but also uses the developments coded
by his project collaborators. Graupner
is a composer, visual artist, and pro-
ducer. His wide-ranging earlier works
were made up of drawings, paintings,
and experimental electronic music,
mostly published on LPs and CDs, as
well as in films and radio plays under
the pseudonym VOOV (Violation of
Ordinary Values). With his works
such as 2Lives Left and his newest
projects MindBox and Don’t Dance,
he is keeping alive his conceptual
platform “Automatic Clubbing.” In
2000, he formed the independent
artist group and production company
Humatic Ltd. together with Nils
Peters who develops software tools
for artists working in a variety of
media forms. Graupner has been a
guest artist at Zentrum f ¨ur Kunst
und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Karl-
sruhe. His work has been shown and
performed worldwide. For more in-
formation, consult the Humatic Web
site (www.humatic.de/cv/cg.html).
Roberto Zappal `a has created more
than 30 choreographies, presented
all over Europe and in Central and
South America, the Middle East,
and South Africa. For his creations,
the choreographer often deals with
articulated projects, including: Corpi
incompiuti (2002–2007); Instruments
(2007–2009); and re-mapping sicily.
Among his creations for the com-
pany, Pasolini nell’era di Internet
was selected for BIG Torino 2000,
and A.semu tutti devoti tutti? was
awarded the Danza & Danza Prize
2010 for best Italian production.
Compagnia Zappal `a Danza has dis-
tinguished itself for the availability
of a wide and articulated repertory, a
result of the synergistic and prolific
work of Roberto Zappal `a and the dra-
maturge Nello Calabr `o, who, over the
past ten years, have traced together
a project-based path in continuous
expansion, allowing the realization
of productions of different typologies,
most of them with live music.
Zappal `a has collaborated with
companies such as Balletto di
Toscana, the Scuola di Ballo of the
DVD Program Notes
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Figure 2. Louise Harris.
Born in 1966, Nils Peters is a free-
lance programmer and artist living
in Berlin. Starting off in music in
the 1980s, his work as taken him to
fields such as installations, theatre,
and performance, mostly involving
explorative use of (media) technology.
He has been working with a number
of machinery art ensembles (a.o. Dead
Chickens, BBM), combining music
and robot sequencing, and has, as a
founding member of Humatic, devel-
oped a patented real-time multimedia
sequencing environment and several
software libraries and programs used
in various fields from art to medical
technology to sound recording.
Peters has received several grants
for media, theatre, and installa-
tion projects, and has received
prizes for catalogues accompany-
ing those projects. His musical work
has recently been published by the
Academy of Arts, Berlin. For more
information, consult the following
Web sites: www.deadchickens.de or
www.humatic.de.
Norbert Schnell is a researcher and
developer on the Real-Time Musical
Interactions team at IRCAM, focusing
on real-time digital audio processing
techniques for interactive music
applications. He studied Telecommu-
nications and Music in Graz, Austria,
and worked as programmer and sound
designer with the Musiklabor Wien.
At IRCAM, he initiated and partic-
ipated in numerous international
research and development projects
as well as artistic works in the field
of interactive audiovisual installa-
tions, music pedagogy, and sound
simulation. From 2002 to 2007, he co-
ordinated the Real-Time Applications
and Real-Time Musical Interactions
team at IRCAM. He chaired the 6th
International Conference on New
Interfaces for Musical Expression
(NIME) in 2006 and held the DAAD
Edgard Var `ese Guest Professorship for
Electronic Music at the Technische
Universit ¨at Berlin in 2007. In 2013
he was invited as keynote speaker
to the International Conference on
Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied
Interaction (TEI).
2.
intervention:coaction—
Louise Harris
This work is part of an ongoing in-
vestigation in bringing the processes I
have evolved through my fixed media
audiovisual compositions into a live
performance context.
intervention:coaction is a live au-
diovisual performance work (utilizing
processing in PureData communi-
cating through OSC). The intention
is to create a symbiotic system, in
which live decision-making by the
performer impacts on both the audio
and visual components of the work,
but also in which both the audio and
visual components can interact with
one another, causing behaviors that
are not directly controlled by the
performer.
One of my primary concerns in
constructing audiovisual composi-
tions to date has been to create work
which exhibits no sense of media
hierarchy, i.e., in which the viewer
is not thinking about what the audio
is doing to the video, or vice versa,
but rather perceiving the work as a
cohesive audiovisual whole. Through
bringing my work out into a live
performance environment, involving
myself as a direct physical presence
in the work, I am forced to negotiate
these ideas in different ways. How
can I become a part of this cohesive
audiovisual whole? Should I be visible
at all? If I am not visible, why would
I want to perform this work live as
opposed to exhibiting a fixed piece?
. . . and so on. These questions are
proving challenging (and interesting!)
to negotiate as this work progresses.
Louise Harris is an electronic and
audiovisual composer. She is cur-
rently a lecturer in music at Kingston
University, London, but in September
2013 took up the post of Lecturer in
Sonic and Audiovisual Practices at
the University of Glasgow.
Harris specializes in the creation
of audiovisual relationships utilizing
electronic music and computer-
generated visual environments. Her
audiovisual work has been performed
and exhibited nationally and inter-
nationally, including: Sound and
Music Expo, Leeds, UK (2009); BBC
Big Screen, AV Festival, Newcastle,
UK (2010); Musica Viva Festival,
Lisbon, Portugal (2011), where her
work, sys m1, was the recipient of
the World Prize in the Electroacoustic
Composition Competition, Musica
Viva 2011; International Computer
Music Conference (ICMC), Hudder-
sfield, UK (2011); New Adventures
in Sound Art (NAISA) SOUNDplay
Festival, Toronto, Canada (2011);
MANTIS Festival, Manchester, UK
(2012); Strasbourg Museum of Modern
Art, Strasbourg, France (2012); Pik-
sel Festival, Bergen, Norway (2012);
Sonica Festival, Glasgow (2013); and
the International Motion Festival,
Cyprus (2013).
Harris is a strong advocate of open
source technology. Her particular
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Figure 3. Aerostatic and vade.
technology since 2004. Utilizing arti-
facts of sound generated by digital and
analog processing in conjunction with
a variety of interactive technologies,
they compose a hybrid style of elec-
tronic music for films, installations,
and music performance.
Aerostatic’s music has been fea-
tured in venues, museums, festivals,
and performances in the United
States, Argentina, England, Austria,
Italy, and Australia. Aerostatic’s Mu-
sic and Sound Design clients include
Sesame Street (Sesame Workshop),
Moshi Monsters, HBO, The Learning
Channel, Four Kids Entertainment,
and the Criterion Collection.
4. All Hail the Dawn—
Alexander Dupuis
All Hail the Dawn uses simple graphi-
cal and spatial gestures to construct
an audiovisual composition within a
cross-modal feedback environment.
The instrument, a custom-built
light-sensitive analog oscillator, is
run through real-time audio pro-
cessing and visualization software.
The graphics are then projected back
onto the instrument and performer,
creating an evolving audiovisual
feedback environment sensitive to
slight changes in the instrument’s
spatial orientation, the state of the
visualizations, and the performer’s
manipulation of the instrument’s
controls. Through the tight temporal
linking of the sound and image, the
performer manipulates and guides
audiovisual behaviors and patterns,
moving through nodes of resonance
and chaos.
Alexander Dupuis is a composer,
animator, media artist, and per-
former. His work aims to develop
and explore applications of graphics
in musical contexts: as interactive
scores, as audiovisual instruments,
research interests are the nature
of the audio/video relationship in
abstract audiovisual composition and
the creation of self-sustaining and
symbiotic audiovisual systems.
of transmissions bouncing around the
ionosphere. These transmissions are
sifted and parsed by an intelligence,
in an attempt to make sense of the
past and understand the present.
3. Transmissions from a Dying
Planet—vade (video),
aerostatic (sound)
Exploring the relationship of man–
nature–technology and the problem-
solving paradigms that are evolving
continuously in the modern world,
it is a grim realization that most
solutions, in their relationship to
the existing natural ecosystem, are
negligent at best. Transmissions from
a Dying Planet embodies the results
of this fatal paradigm.
Transmissions from a Dying
Planet is an excerpt from a larger
narrative that is rooted in a distant
possible future, where all that remains
of the tools and the toolmakers are the
free-floating detritus, the fragments
Anton Marini (vade) is a video per-
formance artist, programmer, and
video engineer. His artwork focuses
on improvisation and real-time ma-
nipulation of video. He plays, bends,
rips, tears, shreds, morphs, molds,
glitches, and synthesizes pixels to
form new visual experiences.
A former researcher-in-residence
at New York University’s Brooklyn
Experimental Media Center, he has
taught at Parsons/New School Design
and Technology Department and
performed at many new media and
video festivals around the world. He
also designs open source tools to
help facilitate the video performance
medium.
Based in Brooklyn, New York,
composers/performers Terry Golob
and Michele Darling (aerostatic)
have been working with music and
DVD Program Notes
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Figure 4. Alexander Dupuis.
Figure 5. NoiseFold in performance.
and as musical elements in their own
rights. Through the use of real-time
animations, visualizations, and pro-
jections, he develops visual methods
for structuring and informing musical
composition, experience, and perfor-
mance. He performs as a guitarist, as
well as with instruments of his own
design, and has performed with his
custom audiovisual systems in Eu-
rope, Canada, and the United States.
He received his MA in Digital Musics
from Dartmouth College in 2012.
5. Alchimia—NoiseFold (David
Stout, Cory Metcalf)
Alchimia is a live cinema work that
draws equally from the visual and
sonic arts. This networked duet ex-
plores the use of infrared sensors,
microphones, and MIDI controller
instruments to animate an evolving
matrix of virtual 3-D forms, which are
imbued with life-like aesthetic prop-
erties. The project is a collaborative
effort created by composer-artist-
performer-programmers David Stout
and Cory Metcalf.
Situated at the nexus between the
modernist tradition of visual-music
and current transdisciplinary explo-
rations fusing media art and science,
Alchimia integrates multiple digi-
tal techniques including real-time
3-D animation, mathematic visu-
alization, recombinant nonlinear
database, artificial life simulation,
image to sound transcoding, complex
data feedback structures, and algorith-
mic video processes used to generate
both sonic and visual surfaces, skins,
and textures. In Alchimia the 3-D
forms are capable of emitting their
own sounds resulting in a surprising
array of sonic expressions induced by
the shape, size, luminance, and move-
ment of the visual object itself. The
kinetic behavior of these “synthetic
organisms” includes morphogenic ex-
pansion and contraction controlled by
the hand gestures of the performers or
automated by a variety of virtual cir-
cuit models including low frequency
oscillators and nonlinear feedback
generators. Alchimia is unique in
that the sound is not an illustration
of visual properties but rather the
direct and simultaneous result of ma-
nipulating the visual field. To further
complicate the often unpredictable
behavioral properties, the organisms
or avatars are programmed to be son-
ically sensitive to each other and to
external acoustic inputs initiated by
the performers to evoke a wide range
of “life-like” recursive audio, visual,
and kinetic phenomena. The result is
a theater of alchemical transforma-
tion and emergence existing within
an intricate cybernetic system. The
generative performance instrument
utilized in Alchimia makes unique
demands on the music-video perform-
ers, who find themselves containing
or reining in chaotic behavior as
often as nudging or stimulating
their independent-minded avatars
to “mutate, dance, and sing.” The
endlessly folding objects, synthetic
life forms, or theoretical geometries
defy easy anthropomorphic catego-
rization. Organic images of cellular
life, nerve networks, serpentine
colonies, collapsing architectures,
plant structures, teeth, bone, and ex-
plosive phallic dystopias may come to
mind.
NoiseFold is the collective identity of
David Stout and Cory Metcalf, who
work at the intersection of digital
music, experimental cinema, and the
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Figure 6. Cory Metcalf.
Figure 7. David Stout.
visual arts. The pair began their sem-
inal work in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
a famed art center and lesser known
as the birthplace of Artificial Life
(A-Life). NoiseFold, in a word, amal-
gamates adjective, noun, and verb.
The name can conjure an immediate
reference to noise music with its loud,
near unbearable volumes, radical ex-
plorations of extreme frequencies,
disjunctive ruptures, glitches, and
wall-of-sound dynamics. Metcalf and
Stout do not discount these memes;
however, their interests are larger.
The project exists as a fold or group
that performs live data – folding pro-
cesses that reference both virtual
origami and the concept of protein
folding. NoiseFold acknowledges
noise as the field of all possibilities.
Noise as prima materia—an alchem-
ical concept sometimes attributed
to Aristotle, prima materia can be
thought of as an elemental formless
state. In this work, noise exists si-
multaneously as both a concept and
a tangible material. Noise is manifest
in various mediums, as a dynamic
visual or sonic field, a data stream,
as collective cultural expression,
as particle bombardment, and as a
chaotic condition of life. NoiseFold
performed its world premiere at the
Festival Internationale d’Art Video in
Casablanca, Morocco (2006). Perfor-
mances, which include the UNESCO
Creative Cities Summit, New York
Electronic Arts Festival, Interactive
Futures in Victoria, BC, REDCAT in
Los Angeles, TEDx at the Denver Art
Museum and “Chinati Weekend” in
Marfa, Texas, have garnered critical
praise and a growing international au-
dience. NoiseFold routinely performs
in wildly different contexts, from con-
cert halls, art museums, and galleries,
to planetariums, rock venues, and
even botanical gardens. This ability
to cross generational, disciplinary,
and cultural boundaries has enabled
the artists to cultivate an expansive
audience eager to experience new
cinematic and musical forms.
Cory Metcalf is a moving-image
and sound artist, programmer, and
performer. Over ten years of ex-
perience with visual programming
have given him the tools to create
complex interactive software en-
vironments. Metcalf’s performance
works, real-time media systems, and
responsive installations question the
primacy of the human perspective,
the anthropocentric Western ratio-
nal mind, and linearity of progress,
arguing for deeper cultural investiga-
tion into new ways of knowing and
the re-evaluation of those forgotten,
dismissed or discarded. His interest
in bridging the old and new is evi-
denced in works such as Signature
Sound (2012), a steampunk divina-
tion machine combining astrology,
projection mapping, and keyboard
input to calculate, distill, and bottle
the participants’ “virtual essence.”
Metcalf’s recent focus is on ethnob-
otany and ethnomusicology in South
America, drawing from the telling of
history in the Andes through Quipu’s,
a pre-Incan data system made up of
knotted cords, to Icaros, the healing
songs of Peru believed to have been
taught to humans by plants. Metcalf
is co-founder with David Stout of the
interactive media performance group,
NoiseFold, which explores the use of
real-time 3-D data visualization and
complex data feedback programs to
model synthetic ecologies based on
genetic and behavioral processes in
living systems.
David Stout is a visual artist, com-
poser, and performer exploring cross-
media synthesis and interdisciplinary
approaches to new genres bridging the
arts, design, and sciences. He holds
an inter-arts MFA from the California
Institute of the Arts where he studied
with Ed Emshwiller, Jim Pomeroy,
Barry Schrader, Bill Viola, and Gene
Youngblood. His award winning
works include live cinema perfor-
mance, interactive video installation,
electroacoustic music scores, and im-
mersive telematic video events that
emphasize multi-screen projection as
an extension of performer, audience,
and architecture. Since 2002, he has
worked closely with creative partner
Cory Metcalf to examine the aes-
thetic possibilities for evolutionary
generative systems, artificial life net-
works, and simulation environments.
The pair, who began their seminal col-
laboration in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
are renowned as founding members
of the critically acclaimed interactive
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Figure 8. Butch Rovan.
media ensemble, NoiseFold. David’s
ongoing collaborations with instru-
mentalists, computer programmers,
composers, and filmmakers include
recent projects with cellist Frances-
Marie Uitti (Netherlands), guitarist
Janet Feder (USA), and early music
artist Anna Stegmann (Netherlands/
Germany). Stout previously founded
the MOV-iN Gallery and the Instal-
lation, Performance & Interactivity
project (IPI) at the College of Santa Fe.
He is at present the coordinator for
the Initiative for Advanced Research
in Technology and the Arts (iARTA)
at the University of North Texas lo-
cated in the Dallas metropolitan area,
where he holds a joint appointment
in the College of Music, Division of
Composition Studies, and College
of Visual Art and Design, Studio
Art-New Media.
6. of the survival of images—
Butch Rovan (music, video),
Ami Shulman (dance)
We shall never reach the past
unless we place ourselves within
it. Essentially virtual, it cannot
be known as something past
unless we follow and adopt the
movement by which it expands
into a present image, thus
emerging from obscurity into the
light of day.
Henri Bergson,
Matter and Memory
of the survival of images belongs to a
larger ongoing work for music, video,
and the moving body called Studies
in Movement. It draws inspiration
from Henri Bergson, whose medita-
tions on time, matter, and memory
offer a philosophical framework for
the multimedia experience. The piece
features the GLOBE, my custom wire-
less music controller, an instrument
I designed to capture performance
gestures in order to control real-
time synthesis and video. The video
presents the image of my longtime
collaborator, the South African dancer
Ami Shulman. Through still images
and high-speed video that reveal the
intricate details of her movement,
the dancer controls the unfolding
scene while also being controlled
by the live performance. My perfor-
mance onstage and her performance
onscreen form a visual counterpoint
that draws out, in sensory form, the
ideas contained in Bergson’s text.
Butch Rovan is a media artist and
performer on the faculty of the
Department of Music at Brown Uni-
versity, where he co-directs MEME
(Multimedia & Electronic Music Ex-
periments @ Brown) and the PhD
program in Computer Music and
Multimedia. Prior to joining Brown
he directed CEMI, the Center for
Experimental Music and Intermedia,
at the University of North Texas,
and was a compositeur en recherche
with the Real-Time Systems Team
at IRCAM in Paris. Rovan worked at
Opcode Systems before leaving for
Paris, serving as Product Manager for
MAX, OMS, and MIDI hardware.
Rovan has received prizes from the
Bourges International Electroacoustic
Music Competition, first prize in the
Berlin Transmediale International
Media Arts Festival, and his work has
been performed throughout Europe
and the USA. Most recently, his in-
teractive installation Let us imagine
a straight line was featured in the
14th WRO International Media Art
Biennale, Poland.
Rovan’s research includes new
sensor hardware design and wireless
microcontroller systems. His research
into gestural control and interactiv-
ity has been featured in Resonance
(IRCAM), Electronic Musician, Com-
puter Music Journal, SoundArts
(Japan), the CD-ROM Trends in
Gestural Control of Music (IRCAM
2000), and in the book Mapping
Landscapes for Performance as
Research: Scholarly Acts and
Creative Cartographies (Palgrave
Macmillan 2009). For more infor-
mation, consult Rovan’s Web site
(www.soundidea.org).
Performer, educator, artistic advi-
sor, and rehearsal director, Ami Shul-
man trained in the performing arts in
South Africa. She danced with Com-
pagnie Marie Chouinard and Com-
pagnie Flak for several years and has
collaborated with videographer Butch
Rovan, most prominently on the
interactive installation piece, Let us
imagine a straight line. Shulman has
assisted in setting new and existing
choreographic works for Ballet BC and
the Goteborg Operans Danskompani,
and was an assistant choreographer
for the Cirque Du Soleil ’s production
of One. Based in Montreal, Shulman
teaches contemporary technique and
has taught at Juilliard, Rotterdam
Danse Academy, National Theatre
School of Canada, Jacob’s Pillow,
Cirque Du Soleil, Alvin Ailey School,
112
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Figure 9. Ami Shulman.
Figure 10. Bioluminescence in
performance.
L’ ´Ecole de Danse Contemporaine de
Montr ´eal, Ballet Divertimento, and
Springboard Project, among others.
Ami is the touring artistic director for
Compagnie Marie Chouinard and she
is the artistic advisor to Jose Navas.
She has been a movement consultant
for various theatre productions in-
cluding the Grand Theatre Junction’s
Lucy Lost Her Heart, Repercussion
Theater’s Macbeth, and Yael Farber’s
The Crucible and Kadmos. Shulman
is a Feldenkrais practitioner and she
continues to tour extensively in the
various aspects of her expertise in
movement and art.
7. Bioluminescence—Luke
DuBois (real-time video and
sound), Lesley Flanigan
(voice)
I have been performing since 2006 in
a duet with vocalist Lesley Flanigan.
The project, dubbed Biolumines-
cence, consists of a performance
between Flanigan and myself. Medi-
tating on the female voice, the project
consists of improvisations between
the live singer and a bank of samples
captured in situ during the perfor-
mance, which can be transposed,
re-arranged, and stretched by myself
at the computer. Real-time visual-
izations of the sound are projected
overhead. Our artist statement, in
part reads:
The voice has a unique role in
our musical culture, bridging the
linguistic and the semiotic in a
way that transcends instrumen-
tality through a highly personal
embodiment of musicianship.
The recorded female voice, in
particular, has been the subject of
academic investigation following
its role in aesthetics (Adorno),
cinema and psychology (Silver-
man), and feminist theory (De
Laurentis). In electroacoustic
music, the voice has a privileged
place in our canon, providing
a boundless source of material
for sonic exploration from the
tape works of Berio, Dodge, and
Lansky through the composer-
performer repertoires of Joan
LaBarbera and Pamela Z. Our
collaboration centers around an
extensive investigation of the
possibilities of the improvised
voice in tandem with electroa-
coustic processing, focusing on
the possibilities of detempor-
alization and memory evoked
through the use of looping, time-
stretching, and spectral process-
ing. The interplay between the
two performers (one singing, one
processing) takes the metaphor
of the voice as impulse and the
computer as filter and creates a
dense palette of evocative sounds
and images derived entirely from
the voice of the singer.
The project runs on custom soft-
ware that I have written that allows
me to use the laptop as a live sam-
pler to capture Flanigan’s voice into
“banks” of four short phrases each,
which can be triggered in any se-
quence at variable speed and pitch,
entirely by typing on the computer
keyboard. In performance, this allows
us to perform entire pieces while
maintaining eye contact, creating the
illusion of an intimate conversation
between two people.
R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist,
and performer exploring the tempo-
ral, verbal, and visual structures of
cultural and personal ephemera. He
holds a doctorate in music compo-
sition from Columbia University,
and has lectured and taught world-
wide on interactive sound and video
DVD Program Notes
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Figure 11. R. Luke DuBois.
Figure 12. Lesley Flanigan.
An active visual and musical col-
laborator, DuBois is the co-author of
Jitter, a software suite for the real-
time manipulation of matrix data
developed by San Francisco–based
software company Cycling’74. He
appears on nearly 25 albums both
individually and as part of the avant-
garde electronic group The Freight
Elevator Quartet. He currently per-
forms as part of Bioluminescence,
a duo with vocalist Lesley Flanigan
that explores the modality of the hu-
man voice, and in Fair Use, a trio with
Zach Layton and Matthew Ostrowski,
that looks at our accelerating culture
through electronic performance and
remixing cinema.
DuBois has lived for the last
twenty years in New York City.
He is the director of the Brooklyn
Experimental Media Center at the
Polytechnic Institute of NYU, and
is on the Board of Directors of the
ISSUE Project Room. His records are
available on Caipirinha/Sire, Liquid
Sky, C74, and Cantaloupe Music. His
artwork is represented by bitforms
gallery in New York City.
Lesley Flanigan is an experimental
electronic musician living in New
York City. Inspired by the tangible
elements of electronic sound, she
builds her own instruments using
minimal electronics, microphones,
and loudspeakers. Performing these
instruments alongside traditional
instrumentation that often includes
her own voice, she creates a kind
of physical electronic music that
embraces both the transparency and
residue of process—sculpting sound
from a pallet of noise and subtle
imperfections.
ArtsCriticATL writes, “Flanigan’s
performance comes loaded with
philosophical ideas, often blurring
the boundaries among music, noise,
sculpture, and performance art.”
Drawing from her background in
sculpture and music, she built her
first loudspeaker feedback instru-
ment, Speaker Synth, in 2007. She
continues to build similar systems
crafted from raw speaker cones, con-
tact microphones, and wood. Playable
by hand, her instruments afford a del-
icate tangibility to electronic sound,
and, like a sculptor working with clay,
she layers tones of speaker feedback
and her own voice with the remnants
of amplification, shaping sound as a
fragile mass.
In addition to her solo work, Lesley
Flanigan performs as a member of
Bioluminescence, a collaboration
with video artist and composer R.
Luke DuBois. Exploring the modality
of human voice, DuBois records and
rearranges Flanigan’s voice and image
in real time to shape an immersive
environment of video and sound. She
has wielded a soldering iron as a guest
performer in the circuit constructing
noise group, the Loud Objects, and
collaborated with Stefanie Wuschitz
of Mz. Baltazar’s Laboratory to teach
interactive art workshops for women
artists. She has been an artist-in-
residence at LEMUR (Brooklyn) and
WORM (Rotterdam).
Her work has been presented at
venues and festivals internation-
ally, including Sonar (Barcelona), the
Guggenheim Museum (New York),
ISSUE Project Room (Brooklyn), The
Stone (New York), TransitioMX (Mex-
ico City), CMKY Festival (Boulder,
Colorado), the Roskilde Museum of
performance. He has collaborated
on interactive performance, instal-
lation, and music production work
with many artists and organizations,
including Toni Dove, Todd Reynolds,
Jamie Jewett, Bora Yoon, Michael
Joaquin Grey, Matthew Ritchie, El-
liott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Maya
Lin, Bang on a Can, Engine 27, Har-
vestworks, and LEMUR, and was
director of the Princeton Laptop
Orchestra for its 2007 season.
Stemming from his investigations
of “time-lapse phonography,” his
work is a sonic and encyclopedic rel-
ative to time-lapse photography. Just
as a long camera exposure fuses mo-
tion into a single image, his projects
reveal the average sonority, visual
language, and vocabulary in music,
film, text, or cultural information.
Exhibitions of his work include: In-
situt Valenci `a d’Art Modern (Spain);
2008 Democratic National Conven-
tion (Denver, Colorado); Weisman Art
Museum (Minneapolis, Minnesota);
San Jose Museum of Art; National
Constitution Center (Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania); Cleveland Museum of
Contemporary Art; Daelim Contem-
porary Art Museum (Seoul, Korea);
2007 Sundance Film Festival; Sydney
Film Festival; Smithsonian Ameri-
can Art Museum; and PROSPECT.2
New Orleans (Louisiana). His work
and writing have appeared in print
and online in the New York Times,
National Geographic, and Esquire.
114
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Figure 13. Cracked Ray Tube in
performance.
Figure 14. Kyle Evans.
Contemporary Art (Denmark), and
.HBC in Berlin. Lesley Flanigan stud-
ied sculpture at the Ringling College
of Art and Design, and received a
Masters in Art Technology from the
Interactive Telecommunications Pro-
gram (ITP) at New York University.
8. Cracked Ray Tube—Kyle
Evans and James Connolly
Cracked Ray Tube is a collaborative
hardware hacking project by artists
Kyle Evans and James Connolly. The
project creates a synchronized au-
dio/video environment self-generated
by the feeding back of communi-
cation networks of two obsolete
technologies↓analog televisions with
their video transmitters, and CRT
computer monitors and their VGA
video signals. The red, green, and blue
video signals of the VGA cable are pro-
cessed and fed back through a sound
mixer simultaneously generating
the audio and video information that
is received, deciphered, and displayed
by multiple computer monitors.
Additionally, transmitted video is
distorted through physical contact
with handmade circuitry utilizing
the capacitance of the human body
as a control interface, and by elec-
tromagnetic flexing and folding of
high-powered electron beams within
modified televisions. The collabo-
rative performance is partially done
while crossing systems, sending VGA
outputs to television inputs and vice
versa (as well as the performers physi-
cally switching instruments mid-way
through), which increases the plu-
rality of audio/video material and
the unpredictability of controls and
results. Influenced by experimental
media artists such as Nam June Paik,
the project exploits the materiality
of analog audio and video signals
pronouncing the technology’s intrin-
sically hidden yet vastly complex
spectrum of sound, image, and color.
Kyle Evans (MFA, The School of
the Art Institute of Chicago) is a
sound designer, computer musician,
electronic instrument creator, and
real-time video performer. Although
his educational background was fo-
cused toward experimental music and
sound art, his collective artistic work
ranges from music technology devel-
opment to multimedia installation.
He has invented many electronic
musical and video instruments rang-
ing from studio-based synthesizers
and performance-based computer in-
terfaces to electronic modifications
and augmentations to acoustic in-
struments. His performances and
installations commonly explore the
relation between modern and ob-
solete technologies, breaking and
repurposing, and the dialogue be-
tween performer and technology. His
recent work has focused on utilizing
the hidden capabilities and potentials
of the now obsolete CRT television
and the process of effectively bringing
new life to a dead technology. He has
performed and presented his work
throughout the United States and
Europe including transmediale2013
in Berlin, the 2010 International
Computer Music Conference (ICMC)
in New York, the 2012 Dallas Video
DVD Program Notes
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Figure 15. James Connolly.
Festival at the Dallas Museum of
Art, Dimanche Rouge #19 in Paris,
the 2012 Vancouver New Music Festi-
val, the 2011 Milwaukee Avenue Arts
Festival in Chicago, and the 2011 and
2012 GLI.TC/H festivals in Chicago.
He won second prize in the Guthman
New Musical Instrument Competi-
tion 2012 at the Georgia Tech Center
for Music Technology for his collab-
orative project Cracked Ray Tube.
His work has been presented in sev-
eral publications including Popular
Science, and Hand Made Electronic
Music by Nic Collins.
James Connolly (BFA with Emphasis
in Art History, Theory, and Criti-
cism, The School of the Art Institute
of Chicago) is a video and new media
artist, writer, curator, and real-time
audio/video performer living and
working in Chicago. His videos have
been screened at the GLI.TC/H fes-
tival in Chicago, the Floating World
Animation Festival in Portland, Ore-
gon, and the Townhouse Gallery in
Cairo, Egypt. He has performed at the
Critical Glitch Artware Category at
Notacon in Cleveland, the GLI.TC/H
festival in Chicago, the 2011 Version
Festival at the Co-Prosperity Sphere
in Chicago, the Guthman Musical
Instrument Competition in Atlanta,
the Vancouver New Music festival,
and the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Chicago. He is currently the
Assistant Curator of the Roger Brown
Study Collection, a special collection
of the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago.
Part Two: Video and Sound
Examples
This section of the disc features video
and sound examples to accompany
articles appearing in Volume 36 and
Volume 37 of the Journal. Where
examples contain more than one
2. Video Examples to
Accompany the Article
“Performing the Electric
Violin in a Sonic Space” by
Alexander Refsum Jensenius
and Victoria Johnson
(Volume 36, Number 4)
1. Transformation, 3 September
2010 performance, Norwe-
gian Academy of Music, Oslo.
2. Transformation, 28 March
2011 performance, Norwe-
gian Academy of Music, Oslo.
3. Sound Examples to
Accompany the Article
“‘I’-Tunes: Multiple
Subjectivities and Narrative
Method in Computer Music”
by Elizabeth Hoffman
(Volume 36, Number 4)
Note: All excerpts are included
courtesy of the composers. Examples
2, 4, and 8 are courtesy as well of
empreintes DIGITALes, publisher.
The label INA retains performing
rights for example 5.
1. Lansky, as it grew dark.
Excerpt timing: 5:30–6:40.
2. Dhomont, M ´et ´eores. Excerpt
timing: 4:15–5:05.
3. Suk-Jun Kim, What the Bird
Saw. Excerpt timing: 0–1:30.
4. Normandeau, Jeu. Excerpt
timing: 1:00–2:45.
5. Parmegiani, la roue ferris.
Excerpt timing: 1:42–2:25.
6. Lockwood, A Sound Map of
the Hudson. Excerpt timing:
3:00–4:15.
7. Koonce, Hothouse. Excerpt
timing: 2:44–3:52.
8A. Smalley, Pentes. Excerpt
timing: 1:40–2:57.
element in succession, each individ-
ual element has been encoded as a
separate chapter, so one may navigate
forward and backward through the ex-
amples using the Next and Previous
Chapter buttons on any DVD player
or remote control. Alternatively, the
examples will automatically play in
sequence with a short pause between
each.
1. Audio Examples to Accomp-
any the Article “The Problem
of the Second Performer:
Building a Community
Around an Augmented
Piano” by Andrew P.
McPherson and Youngmoo E.
Kim (Volume 36, Number 4)
1. The Masons of Heidelberg by
Daniel Shapiro, Movement I.
2. The Masons of Heidelberg by
Daniel Shapiro, Movement II.
3. Spectra of Morning by Tony
Solitro.
4. Job by David Carpenter.
5. Intermezzo by Daniel Fox.
6. Play by William Derganc.
7. Fantasy by Jeff Snyder, Ex-
cerpt 1.
8. Fantasy by Jeff Snyder, Ex-
8B. Smalley, Pentes. Excerpt
cerpt 2.
timing: 7:50–9:06.
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9. Klein, The Wolves of Bays
Mountain. Excerpt timing:
3:30–4:15.
10. Appleton, Sheremetyevo
Airport Rock. Excerpt timing:
2:00–3:30.
11. Penrose, Dodohead. Excerpt
timing: 3:30–4:32.
12A. Lyon, Light Rain Laganside.
Excerpt timing: 3:28–4:40.
12B. Lyon, Light Rain Laganside.
Excerpt timing: 7:58 – end.
4. Sound Examples to
Accompany the Article
“Dynamic Convolution
Modeling, a Hybrid Synthesis
Strategy” by David Bessell
(Volume 37, Number 1)
1. Cymbal.
2. Gong.
3. Orchestral Bass Drum
4. Snare Drum.
5. Drumsticks.
6. Tom-tom.
5. Video Examples to
Accompany the Article
“Predicting an Orchestral
Conductor’s Baton
Movements Using Machine
Learning” by Donald G.
Dansereau, Nathan Brock,
and Jeremy R. Cooperstock
(Volume 37, Number 2)
1. The templating process. The
white dot shows the real
input trajectory, the gray
lines and dots show a generic
template tracking this input,
and the red line/purple dot
show the adapted template
being formed.
2. Performance, showing a pre-
diction range of 250 msec
(playback is slowed). The
white dot again represents the
input trajectory, the large pur-
ple dot represents the tracked
position on the template, and
the smaller white/green dot
shows the predicted baton
position.
3. This is a performance show-
ing only the input data (large
white dot) and prediction
(smaller green dot).
4. This is the same performance
as above, shown in real
time, and with accompanying
audio.
Kontogeorgakopoulos
(Volume 37, Number 1)
Open Haptics for Artists. The zip
file contains software and hardware
design files.
2. Data Set Examples to
Accompany the Article “A
Clustering Strategy for the
Key Segmentation of Musical
Audio” by Maximos A.
Kaliakatsos-Papakostas,
Andreas Floros, and Michael
N. Vrahatis (Volume 37,
Number 1)
Artificial Data Sets.
1. Same.
2. Different.
3. Random.
Real Data Sets.
Part Three: Additional Materials
The 2013 DVD includes a DVD-
ROM section. To access the material
contained there, the reader will need
to place the DVD into a suitable disc
drive on a computer.
1. Software and Design
3. Software Example to
Accompany the Article
“Synchronizing Sequencing
Software to a Live Drummer”
by Andrew Robertson and
Mark D. Plumbley
(Volume 37, Number 2)
Examples to Accompany the
Article “The FireFader:
Simple, Open-Source, and
Reconfigurable Haptic Force
Feedback for Musicians” by
Edgar Berdahl and Alexandros
The zip file of the B-Keeper release
contains both the old Max stan-
dalone version and the new Max For
Live version of B-Keeper. Instruc-
tions are included in the ReadMe
file.
DVD Program Notes
117
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