- Exploration of Sound/Gender/Technology intersections where:
- Expanding on work by:
- Looking/listening; male/female; technological/natural are all false binaries.
- How can we resist false binaries and reimagine what gender could sound like with the use of technology?
- Improviser (hornist with sf nowave, sludge bands after conservatory)
- horn study with David Jolley from Orpheus
- embodiment
- resist commodification
- Came to technology through dual interests in information accessibility (adult literacy tutor, public, and corrections librarian) and independence!
- had alot to do with my experience of gender, and then technology & gender
- mind blown by early PLORK, late The HUB concerts
- <3 for Network Music: its anti-hierarchical structures and DIY ethos
- Went to Mills College (RIP) to study with Pauline Oliveros and The Hub
- Started SuperColliding in 2011, making noise to improvise against on my horn
- <3 for the SuperCollider message boards where I could be a curious, anonymous avatar (again, technology & gender)
- Moved Paris in 2015 without my horn, Laptop became my primary instrument
- Joined UK-based offal orchestra for femmes and laptops in 2016
- <3 for online communities as migrant support systems
- baby & pandemic = fully online
- drone flight / birder's delight over the uncanny valley
- Pregnant in the winter of 2019 with the fetus who would become my daughter, I made hydrophone recordings from my cervix periodically between viability and birth. radiant drift accounts for the relative motion of my daughter and me in spacialized audio as we individuated in gestation. The literal hydrophone recordings are set in counterpoint against a poetic rendering in analog electronics.
- Art makes us human. When a machine makes art, it challenges that axiom. With certain advents in art-making technology, the relationship between art and humanity has been called into question. Today in the West the music technology that raises the debate is machine-learning algorithms; a generation ago it was MIDI; a century ago it was mechanical instruments; five centuries ago it was instruments other than voice. psalter ex machina is a site-specific work for Orgelpark in Amsterdam which resignifies sounds from these advents using SuperCollider, Python, and OSC. Gestures generated from the Magenta Performance Recurrent Neural Network machine-learning algorithm trained on Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’s organ settings of the Genevan Psalm 116 are heard in the Sauer organ alongside sampled and processed recordings of the Solina String Ensemble Synthesizer and instruments from the Museum Spleelklok.
- An approach to creative practice
- Improviser makes art by re-writing rules (mostly computer programs, but sometimes other code) in real-time
- Audio - Visual Digital media (mostly)
- Dance, Poetry, Lighting design (more and more)
- When we re-write the rules, we change their fundamental character, not just their behavoir
- Like adapting a recipe with different ingredients vs adjusting serving size
- Chaos reigns, not control!
- Luthier/developer/backend, performer/musician/frontend roles blurred/blended = Distributed Agency
- Anti-hierarchical
- Relatively low barriers to access (FOSS technologies)
- Economically accessible ("The Laptop is the Guitar of the 21st Century" - Fred Frith)
- Pedagogically accessible (with many, many caveats)
- Affords criticality in our relationships to digital capitalism
- TOPLAP (virtual gatheringplace for livecoders) MANIFESTO (the Rachel edit):
- Give us access to the performer’s mind, to the whole human instrument.
- Obscurantism is dangerous. Show us your screens…
- Embrace error, risk is the way to go. Live coding embraces worst practices.
- Code is an interface to oneself, and the self is an interface to culture. To code is to decode.
- Programming and programmer are both part of the runtime environment.
- We weave expression through algorithms that thrive in uncertainty.
- To hack is to play seriously. Rules are good because they can be changed.
- feminized machines/machinized femmes.
- resignified signal from: Fedha Sinon; Imane Anys; Cher; Pete Namlook and Uwe Schmidt; R.B. Braves; Roberto Cacciapaglia; and Jan Jelinek.
- Algorithm/Avatar is my improvisational interlocutor whom I'm attempting to reassemble as I go
- Generative Models: