I can’t describe in prose how important Max Mathews is to my life and to those of everyone that has ever listened to or caused a computer to make sound. He started it all. The advent of our information technology catalyzing our music was a harnessing of metaphor every bit as important to our collective history as the splitting of the atom, and this is a rare opportunity to hear Max discuss these nascent breaths of digital song.

It is also fortuitous that we currently have in our Gray Area exhibition hall Aaron Koblin, who with Daniel Massey (himself a part of the last round of our Resident Artists), has created Bicycle Built For Two Thousand – a crowdsourced version of the original work. Comprised of over 2,000 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service, this work creates an eerily similar sound to the original but sang by people all over the world.

The parallels and juxtapositions between these two renditions of the same song, Daisy Bell, are myriad. First we embodied the machine with our song, and then the machine brought us together from no matter how far apart. Two of the most important cultural metaphors in the last century, the information processor and the network, are manifest in these works.

Don’t miss this unique night if you’re anywhere in the area.

Friday, March 19, 2010
7-9 PM
Gray Area
55 Taylor St. San Francisco
Suggested Donation $5-10 – No one turned away for lack of funds.

+dialog symposia series
presented by RML SF, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, and Phasor~

Friday, March 19, 2010
7-9 PM
Gray Area
55 Taylor St. San Francisco
Suggested Donation $5-10 – No one turned away for lack of funds.

The RML SF +dialog symposia series fosters discussion and interaction between audiences and artists, authors, theorists, educators, and producers of cutting-edge work.

This first edition traces the history of the most important song in computer music through two groundbreaking renditions. Max Mathews, the father of computer music, and new media artists Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey, will give presentations about their interpretations of the classic song followed by a open discussion moderated by digital arts technologist Barry Threw.

Computer performance of music was born in 1957 when Max Mathews made an IBM 704 at Bell Labs play a 17 second composition on the Music I program.

In 1962 Mathews synthesized the music for the song “Daisy Bell”, originally written by Harry Dacre in 1892, as an accompaniment for a vocoder speech synthesizer created by John L. Kelly. Arthur C. Clarke, then visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility, saw this remarkable demonstration and later used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey” as the swan song of the dying computer, HAL9000.

In 2009, the online work Bicycle Built For Two Thousand by artists Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey took this first recording and created a crowd-sourced rendition using a custom tool made in Processing. Comprised of over 2,000 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service, participants were asked to listen to a short sound clip and record themselves imitating what they heard. The result was a reconstructed version of the song as rendered by a distributed system of human voices. Instead of programming a computer, they used a computer program to stitch together a cross section of humanity.

Max Mathews
Max V. Mathews worked in acoustic research at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1955 to 1987 where he directed the Behavioral and Acoustic Research Center. This laboratory carried out research in speech communication, visual communication, human memory and learning, programmed instruction, analysis of subjective opinions, physical acoustics, and industrial robotics.

From 1974 to 1980 he was the Scientific Advisor to the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), Paris, France. In 1987 Mathews joined the Stanford University Music Department in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) as Professor of Music (Research) where he developed a new pickup for electronic violins and a real-time computer system for music performance called the Conductor and Improv Programs and a 3D MIDI Controller called the Radio Baton.

At Bell Labs in 1957, Mathews demonstrated synthesis of music on a digital computer with his Music I program. Music I was followed by Music II through Music V and GROOVE, all were involved in the composition and performance of music on and with computers. These programs have been influential in the development of computer music. For this pioneering work he has been called the “father of computer music,” and most recently, “the great grandfather of techno!”

Max Mathews has conducted research on computer methods for speech processing, human speech production and auditory masking, and developed techniques for computer drawing of typography. The developer of “Music V” synthesis software and “Groove,” the first computer system for live performance, he is also the inventor of the Radio Baton, a computer-driven device that allows the user to conduct their own orchestral performances from MIDI files stored in the computer. Many multimedia patching languages such as Max/FTS, pd, jMax, and Cycling 74’s MaxMSP was based on Mathews’ ideas for a flexible, user-patchable sound generating system.

Mathews is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Acoustical Society of America, the IEEE, and the Audio Engineering Society.

Aaron Koblin
Aaron Koblin is an an artist specializing in data visualization. His work takes social and infrastructural data and uses it to depict cultural trends and emergent patterns. Aaron’s work has been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and TED. He received the National Science foundation’s first place award for science visualization and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Currently, Aaron is Technology Lead of Google’s Creative Lab where he helped to launch Chrome Experiments, a website showcasing JavaScript work by designers from around the world.

Daniel Massey
Daniel Massey (b. 1982, Mexico) is an artist, designer, and programmer based out of San Francisco, CA. Daniel’s recent work seeks to instigate new modes of collaboration, creation, and transformation by approaching technology as inherently malleable. His projects take on varied forms, from immersive installations and web-based work, to live visuals and music. Daniel earned his MFA in Digital Arts & New media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was part of the Yahoo! Design Innovation Team and is now a resident artist at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.

Also presenting a new installation at the Gray Area Gallery on One Button Objects, is Peter Kirn, curator in conjunction with game art collective Kokoromi; just in time for the Game Developers Conference this week.

LOCATION:
Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
55 Taylor Street
Thursday, March 11th
7PM – 9:30PM

The presenters are:
* VISDA GOUDARZI (Stanford CCRMA), will present Fosotomo/Gestonic/Neuroklang a video-based interface for the sonification of hand gesture for real-time timbre control. The goal of the system is to survey the space of musical possibilities and generating computer music using human movements. The system is build up on top of chuck and processing and uses simple frame difference as the metric.

* Composer CHERYL E. LEONARD will discuss how she creates music with natural objects, materials and sounds. She will demonstrate several of her unique natural-object instruments, including ones constructed with materials, such as penguin bones and limpet shells, that she collected in Antarctica last year.

* SURABHI SARAF will present her recent audio/visual works. She is interested in the dense, layered structure of sound with a focus on creating dynamic physical experiences. Her short performance will involve live singing and digital manipulation of the sound.

* JULIA OGRYDZIAK will present on working with the K-Bow, a new technology from Keith McMillen Instruments, which provides expressive live controls through a specially designed blue-tooth bow, transforming the possibilities of string performance. She will show how the bow works and give a live performance.

In addition, we will have awesome short LIGHTNING TALKS:
* SARAH GRANT says “i will be discussing my latest work using conductive felt as an interface for sound. i am interested in drawing connections between the similar properties of sound and fabric — specifically texture and the malleability and layering of form.”

* PETER KIRN (representing the Kokoromi collective of women and men) on the GAFFTA exhibit of ONE BUTTON OBJECTS: What can you do with one button? In an age of ever-more-complex touch interfaces, we’d like to imagine what a single, tangible, hardware button can mean for a design. To celebrate the arrival of their Gamma game event in San Francisco, art game collective Kokoromi is teaming up with Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion to launch a one night show of objects that respond to this question. The work extends from games to interactive art and musical instruments.

BIOS

VISDA GOUDARZI is a computer musician interested in research in software for computer music, human-computer interaction, gesture-based interfaces, computer graphics, sonification, sound synthesis, and the application of new media in art. She is currently a researcher at Stanford working on an audio-visual feedback device in the Department of Oncology. She received her MA in Music, Science, and Technology at CCRMA in 2009. She also holds an MS in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology in Vienna, Austria, which she earned in 2008. Visda began her studies at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran before relocating to Vienna in 1998.

JULIA OGRYDZIAK started the playing the violin at the age of 3 and made her solo debut at age 6. She has performed throughout Europe and North America, including the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, the Tanglewood Festival, and at Lincoln Center. She studied at the SF Conservatory of Music, receiving their Distinguished Alumni Award, the New England Conservatory of Music, and in Paris. Julia has a Masters with Distinction from Harvard Design School and dual degrees in Music and Physics from MIT, where she received the AMITA award for most outstanding woman graduate and worked in the Hyperinstruments Group at the MIT Media Lab. A vocal proponent of modern music, she is involved as both artist and composer. Her recent projects include BELLA piano trio, collaborations with Capacitor Dance, and shows combining live performance and immersive visuals, such as Dark Blue Sky Dream which premiered at the Chabot Planetarium. Julia is also an award-winning visual artist, Creative Director, and serial entrepreneur. She is the founder of Blacksquare, a digital media studio; she has received multiple Webby Awards and the Vera List Prize, and her work has garnered national media attention and exhibited at MOMA. She is currently working on a new startup: IMHO, a new model for media distribution online, and is thrilled to also represent Keith McMillen Instruments as a K-Bow Artist and Evangelist.

CHERYL E. LEONARD is a composer, performer and instrument-builder whose music investigates sounds, structures and materials from the natural world. Her recent works cultivate stones, leaves, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers and bones as musical instruments. Leonard uses microphones to explore the intricate worlds of sound hidden within these instruments and develops compositions that highlight the unique voices they contain. Many of her projects involve constructing one-of-a-kind sculptural instruments, which are played live onstage. Cheryl also enjoys creating site-specific works and collaborating across artistic disciplines. She has written numerous soundtracks for film, video, dance and theater, and designed sounds for exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Cheryl holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MA from Mills College. Her music has been performed worldwide and featured on several television programs and in the video documentary Noisy People. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, ASCAP, American Composers Forum and Meet the Composer. Leonard has been awarded residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Villa Montalvo and Engine 27. Recordings of her music are available from NEXMAP, Unusual Animals, Pax, Apraxia, 23 Five, Old Gold, the Lab and Great Hoary Marmot Music. www.allwaysnorth.com www.musicfromtheice.blogspot.com

SURABHI SARAF is a new media artist whose work brings together elements from experimental sound art, classical music, choreography and video art. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 with an MFA in Art and Technology. Prior to that, she obtained her BFA in Painting from MSU Baroda (India) in 2005. Surabhi is the winner of Art vs Design (2009) organized by Artists Wanted, New York and presented her work at the announcement reception at the New Museum, NY. Her work PEEL is the Winner of Celeste Prize (2009), Italy and was exhibited at Alte AEG Fabrik, Berlin. Surabhi’s collaborative work with Nadav Assor, was presented at the NETMAGE 10 International Live Media Festival, Bologna, Italy. Her video Peel was also shown at the 13 International Video Festival, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Vojvodina, Serbia. Surabhi is the recipient of the International Graduate Student Scholarship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her solo and collaborative works have been presented at the Links Hall, Looptopia and Sullivan Galleries in Chicago. She has shown at the Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi and was a part of Peers student residency program at Khoj International Artist Association New Delhi in 2006. Surabhi currently lives and works in San Francisco.

SARAH GRANT is a multimedia artist, developer, and alumni of NYU’s ITP, interested in designing soft instruments and textile-based controllers for sound. Her work brings together sculpture, fiber arts, electronics and experimental sound manipulation and signal processing. Her goals are to connect people to sound through physical means that are more germane to the nature of sound than traditional knobs, sliders and buttons, in order to facilitate more meaningful interactions. She is constantly on the look out for new ways to implement textiles as a means of interacting with sound be it wearable, architectural or sculptural. She often works in collaboration with her sister, Lara Grant. Their work can be found at http://www.fsp.fm….

One-button objects curator PETER KIRN is a composer/musician, media artist, and technologist, as well as writer and editor of createdigitalmusic.com and createdigitalmotion.com. The Handmade Music event series he originated with Etsy.com and Make Magazine is now spreading to other corners of the globe, from Texas to Portugal. He has also written for Computer Music, MAKE, Keyboard, Macworld, and Wax Poetics. He is the author of Real World Digital Audio (Peachpit Press). His own work spans live visuals and computer music, collaborations with modern dance, music for early instruments and voice and ambient techno, working with original software in Processing/Java and other tools. He’s currently teaching visual programming and sound and music design at Parsons The New School for Design and is a PhD candidate in music composition at The City University of New York Graduate Center.

March 8 – 2:00 to 4:00 PM
35 West 4th Street, 6th Floor Conference Room

Since 1987 Jon Rose has pioneered the exploration of interactive electronics at STEIM through a series of violin bow powered MIDI compositions.

In 1998, he became the first violinist to manipulate iconic violin images and live video at the end of his bow.

Now utilising the latest in violin bow technology, surround sound, and interactive media, he puts his virtuosic violin technique to the test in a new series of challenging interactive environments.

BIO:
For over 35 years, Jon Rose has been at the sharp end of experimental, new and improvised music. Central to that practice has been ‘The Relative Violin’ project, a unique output, rich in content, realising almost everything on, with, and about the violin – and string music in general.  Most celebrated is the worldwide Fence project; least known are the relative violins – over 20 home experimental string instruments, created specifically for and in Australia.

In 1977, he started Australia’s first musician run collective for the promotion and recording of improvised music – Fringe Benefit.

In the area of interactive electronics, his work is considered exemplary, having pioneered the use of the MIDI bow in the ‘Hyperstring’ project in the 1980s with the Steim Institute, Amsterdam – and with whom he continues to collaborate often in interactive projects involving sport, games, or the environment.

Jon Rose has appeared on more than 60 albums and collaborated with many of the mavericks of new music including Kronos String Quartet, John Cage, Derek Bailey, Butch Morris, John Zorn, Alvin Curran, Fred Frith, George Lewis, Otomo Yoshihide, Christian Marclay, Eugene Chadbourne, etc. at festivals of New Music, Jazz, and Sound Art world wide such as Ars Elektronica, Festival D’Automne, Maerzmusik, Dokumenta, North Sea Jazz Fest, Leipzig Jazz Fest, European Media, New Music America, the Vienna Festival, the Berlin Jazz Festival, etc.

Recently Jon Rose was commissioned by the Kronos String Quartet to write and build “Music from 4 Fences” for the Sydney Opera House; realised his bicycle powered “Pursuit” project at Carriage Works, Sydney; performed a completely new and improvised solo part for the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; created two major radiophonic works for the BBC on the first Aboriginal string orchestra and the history of the piano in 19th century Australia; toured in Europe with his current improvisation groups ‘Futch’ and ‘Strike’; premiered his interactive huge Ball project at The Melbourne Festival; performed his interactive multi-media composition “Internal Combustion” for violin and orchestra at The Philharmonic, Berlin; and been apprehended by the Israeli Defence Forces at the Separation Fence near Ramallah in the occupied territories.

In 2007 he gave the Peggy Glanville-Hicks address – Listening to history: some proposals for reclaiming the practice of music. It has been published in over six journals, including The Leonardo Music Journal of MIT Press.

Tomorrow night is the next Late Friday’s at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and if you haven’t been to one of these events it’s not something to be missed. The Terry Riley and Ellen Fullman performances there were incredible music and perfectly complement the impressive acoustics and architecture of the space.

On Friday come see a rare Bay Area appearance by computer music pioneer Carl Stone, performing the U.S. premiere of his new evening-length multi-channel piece DARDA, featuring the shomyo vocal chant of Makiko Sakurai. (Shomyo is an ancient form of chant associated with the Tendai sect of Buddhism, dating from the Heian period, 781–1192 CE.) First performed in the intimate setting of the tea house of Kiyosumi Garden in central Tokyo, the piece has been adapted by Stone for the museum’s sweeping contemporary architecture. Listeners are invited to bring blankets and pillows and relax in the gallery space.

Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” and “one of the best composers living in (the USA) today.” He has used computers in live performance since 1986. Stone was born in Los Angeles and now divides his time between San Francisco and Japan. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. In addition to his schedule of performance, composition and touring, he is on the faculty of the Media Department at Chukyo University in Japan.

• Enjoy a meal at Cafe Muse, open for dinner on L@TE Fridays from 5 to 7:30 p.m.
• Wobbly spins in the lobby starting at 6 p.m., when wine and beer are available for purchase.
• Zine Mart offers zines, books, and other multiples, including a collectible series of limited edition prints documenting the wide array of musicians, artists, writers, and performers who have participated in the L@TE program.
• The BAM Galleries are open until 9 p.m.
• Love Letters and Live Wires: Highlights from the GPO Film Unit and Joseph Losey’s M screen at the PFA Theater.

Leonardo ISAST in collaboration with USF invites you to a meeting of
the Leonardo Art/Science community.

Like previous evenings the agenda includes some presentations of
art/science projects, a couple of brief “news”, and time for casual
socializing/networking.

Please RSVP to p@scaruffi.com . Admission is limited.

When: March 8, 2010 at 6:30pm

Where: USF campus, San Francisco
(RSVP for detailed address and directions)

What:
6:30pm-6:45pm: Socializing/networking.
6:45-8:45: Presentations
Helena Carmena (California Academy of Sciences) on “Connecting Art and Science
Thorough Museum Experiences”
Jesse Austin & Charles Lee (BIOS Design Collective) on “The application of
biological patterns to architecture”
Anna Couey on “Communication systems as social sculpture”
Taraneh Hemami (Visual Artist) on “One Day: A Collective Narrative of Tehran”
8:45-9:30: Q/A and discussion. Socializing/networking.

The TV of Tomorrow show, where I installed Daniella Steinsapir’s work Moon Diaries last year, is back this week with another artists’ showcase.

The TV of Tomorrow Show, (http://www.tvot2010.com), the leading global conference for the interactive television (iTV) industry, will be held March 3‐4, 2010 in San Francisco at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Now in its fourth year, the conference, produced by InteractiveTV Today [itvt], will bring the latest in multiplatform technology and content issues to the forefront in dynamic panel discussions, keynotes, debates and a technology showcase.

Gaze is projected video of an eye with live video keyed into the pupil that disconcertingly follows movement and finds faces. Gaze explores new possibilities of the gaze through digital technology: the work is viewing the viewer, suspending the subject/object dichotomy. The effect is a juxtaposition of intimacy and surveillance and evokes a specter of technological consciousness.

The first version of Elastotron is currently on display at the Exploratorium.

sneak preview:

Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 5:55pm – Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 1:00am
SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan St (between 8th and 9th)

100 two minute performances by local and international artists set in a newly renovated mechanics pit in the floor of the SOMArts Main Gallery. This is a tour-de-force of the ephemeral. A video of the entire event, as well as all performance residue and ephemera will be on display until the 20th of March.

Alslo, this exhibition will be broadcast live on cable television, thanks to special help from the Bay Area Video Coalition (BVAC).

Opening: Saturday March 6, 2010, 5:58 PM – 1:00 AM or later
Exhibition: March 6 – March 20, 2010

RSVP here

Galley Hours – Tuesdays – Fridays 12:00 PM – 7:00 PM and Saturdays 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM

TechShop is sort of like a gym for people who make things.

It is full of the things you need to make things, including milling machines and lathes, welding stations and a CNC plasma cutter, sheet metal working equipment, drill presses and band saws, industrial sewing machines, hand tools, plastic and wood working equipment including a 4′ x 8′ ShopBot CNC router, electronics design and fabrication facilities, Epilog laser cutters, tubing and metal bending machines, a Dimension SST 3-D printer, electrical supplies and tools. It open to everyone, regardless of skill level, and they are opening a new San Francisco location.

Everyone is invited to the first TechShop San Francisco Building Preview Party!
Come and see the new building in all its pre-demolition glory, meet other future TechShop members and TechShop staff, and enjoy munchies and drink.

Jim Newton, TechShop’s founder, will be there to answer questions about TechShop and the TechShop San Francisco location.
The address is 926 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA. Please go around the back of the building.

Please RSVP so we can plan for enough pizza and Devil’s Canyon beer for everyone.

The opening is this Friday night at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The Global Lives Project (GLP) is a collective of filmmakers, artists, designers, programmers and everyday people who seek to expand individual global awareness through documenting 24 hours in the lives of people throughout the world. Rather than present narrative film, Global Lives seeks to present life as it unfolds at its natural pace. We hope that this experience will foster empathy, and compel viewers to think about their own lives within the context of a larger whole. Already the footage has been captured, edited, translated, and subtitled for 10 countries; Brazil, China, India, Japan, Malawi, the US, Lebanon, Indonesia, Serbia, and Kazakhstan.

Providing music for this event will be the impeccable Kid Kameleon, Chief Boima and Tinker; we’re incredibly excited to have them on board.

Join us from 7:30pm to 11:30pm
on Friday February 26, 2010
the party is FREE, but do RSVP HERE
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Groove globally and drink locally with the Bay Area’s freshest beatsmiths Kid Kameleon, Chief Boima and Tinker while immersed in the lives unfolding around you on the massive 10 screen video installation created just for this opening in YBCA’s Forum.

We’ll have a cash bar, chocolate tasting from TCHO, food by Onigilly, a La Cocina business, and a special appearance by the Slot Blades, a band of SF Cable Car operators, one of whom is  featured in Global Lives!

You’ll also get to meet many of the Global Lives producers and directors who are in town for this opening.

The 10 screen Global Lives installation will be open over the weekend if you are not able to make the opening night party; admission is free and docents will be on hand.

YBCA’s Forum hours are Saturday February 27 from noon to 8pm

and Sunday February 28 from noon to 6pm

This is the opening party for the world premiere installation of the Global Lives Project presented by YBCA; an innovative video installation capturing 24 hours in the lives of ten people from around the world who represent the diversity of the global population, on exhibit in the Room for Big Ideas through June 20, 2010.

Special thanks to our amazing volunteer collaborators and our sponsors for this exhibit: The Long Now Foundation, the Adobe Foundation, the Burwen Education Foundation, the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco, and the Black Rock Arts Foundation. The work itself was made possible by hundreds of individual donors and sponsors, and our key partners: Temple University Japan Campus,DotSUB, Creative Commons, the Museu da Pessoa, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP, and United Nations University.