KEYNOTES
Kristina Andersen: Making Things Stranger
The mainstream technological object is losing its established physical form, and the feasibility of new functionality increasingly relies on our willingness to believe in and accept yet another paradigm or interface. As a result the technology object has become a magical unknown. In a world that already feels overwhelmingly unfamiliar, making things stranger somehow allows me to inhabit that strangeness, as if it was mine. My work is centered on the building of new objects based entirely on imagined technologies. They are built from candy and cardboard, and other increasingly ridiculous materials, and they do not really matter in themselves. Instead, for the purpose of the investigation, they embody a fear or a desire in a form that allows me to try it out, live with its potentiality and rehearse living in this hypothetical future. They facilitate a kind of risk taking, they provide a temporary space in which I can be changed and change.Biography
Kristina Andersen is an artist and researcher based at STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam. She works with electronics and reclaimed materials to create unusual devices and experience, but her work is primarily concerned with how we can allow each other to imagine our possible (technological) futures through the making of exploratory objects. She is principal researcher on GiantSteps - a collaboration between Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Johannes Kepler Universität, Native Instruments, Reactable and Red Bull Music Academy funded by the European Union. She is mentor and senior researcher at the Patchingzone and teaches the combined MA between STEIM and Sonology in Den Haag as well as maintaining her own practice.
Stuart Nolan: Mindreading Interface Design
A great deal of human communication is subconscious yet existing interfaces are designed for conscious communication. The emerging combination of Thought Identification Technologies, Robotics, and Cold Data Reading will change this, opening up new ways of working, learning, performing, and mucking about. Mindreading Interfaces will make interaction more responsive and playful but also more mysterious, illusory, opaque, and potentially insecure. What will Mindreading Designers need to consider? We will need to consciously design for deception and illusion or we risk building it accidentally. To do this we need to understand Illusion Design as a discipline that extends far beyond the subtle tricks and sparkly boxes of the stage magician.Biography
Stuart Nolan is a performer and research magician working with Illusion Design and The Mindreading Web. His Mindreading Robotics, IdeoBird and OuijaBird, developed as Magician in Residence at Pervasive Media Studio and The University of Bristol, were featured in the BBC Click Christmas Special, The Guardian, and US Wired’s Connectivity 2.0. He later developed Robomancy (Fortune Telling Robotics) as part of the Being There project (being-there.org). A former NESTA Fellow in Applied Magic with a background in cell biology, interactive media, and experience design, he combines traditional disciplines of deception - conjuring, psychological and physiological illusion, memory feats, hypnosis, sideshow tradition - with bespoke technology and original research into how we are deceived by language, physical gesture, and technology. Stuart performs internationally and is currently touring his latest work, Season of Sleeps, which premiered at the 2015 Venice Biennale. He once deceived over 700 organisations just to prove a point.
Roman Paska: Fear of Puppetry
A discussion of the trajectory of the puppet in art and society from the anti-puppet prejudice of the European Humanist tradition to the emergence of puppetry art as the defining performance mode of the 21st century. Will consider prevailing methods and techniques of performance with objects, and performance that is labeled "puppet theatre," with an emphasis on late 20th-century traffic between the puppet and related forms, including animation, digital theatre, performance art and filmmaking. Will address some key modalities of performance with objects and puppets: from performing the uncanny, performing in Plato’s cave, performing against nature, performing the gods, performing identity, performing the body (in parts), performing the (exquisite) corpse, performing the agon of objects and performing in tongues to performing annihilation. Will investigate the nature of the puppet and puppet identity, the problems of puppet space and the place of the body. Will interrogate existing notions and definitions of puppetry and consider how contemporary theories have evolved through new approaches to performance. Will examine current challenges facing the puppet-as-object in order to ask, “Is the future puppet theater?”Biography
Roman Paska is a writer, director, filmmaker and puppeteer. His original theater productions, under two successive company names, Theater for the Birds and Dead Puppet, include The End of the World, God Mother Radio, Dead Puppet Talk, Echo in Camera and Schoolboy Play, commissioned and presented by Linz '09 European Capital of Culture and the National Theatre of Portugal. He directed August Strindberg's Dreamplay with puppets for its centennial at the Stockholm Stadsteater, and was for several years director of the Institut International de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières, France. His magical-realist documentary, Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy, with John Turturro, premiered at the Venice Film Festival and Lincoln Center, New York. His writings have been published in Zone, Puck, Alternatives Théâtrales (for whom he guest-edited two issues), the ITI World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, and The Language of the Puppet. He has taught at Columbia, NYU, Cornell, the Yale School of Drama, and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
WORKSHOPS
There are seven amazing workshops at ICLI this year. We have two workshops on resonating instruments where we invited the instrument makers Halldor Ulfarsson and Andrew McPherson to lead workshops on their new instruments. These workshops are open to people not registered for the conference. Both workshops will finish with a performance of the pieces made over the period of these two days.
There are also five exciting half- and one-day workshops which are organised by conference attendees and require conference registration or a day-pass to participate.
Two-day Workshops
We invite composers, performers and improvisers to come and explore and create new works for novel electro-acoustic resonating instruments. The workshops are collaborative, focussing on knowledge exchange between instrument builders, composers and performers. The workshops will involve group work, composition and performance. The pieces written in will be performed at ACCA at the end of the second day, after the opening keynote.
Workshop participants will work with either the halldorophone or Magnetic Resonator Piano. The Halldorophone is a cello-like electroacoustic instrument affording controlled feedback; the Magnetic Resonator Piano is an electronically-augmented acoustic piano capable of eliciting new sounds acoustically from the piano strings. Both of these instruments are new and unique, but already have an established repertoire and performance history internationally.
Since both workshops will culminate in a performance, they will focus heavily on consideration of themes involving new instruments, new notation, interpretation of new works, how to adapt embodied playing techniques of familiar interfaces with new functionality etc.
These two-day workshops will be structured such that in the morning of the first day, the inventor will present the instrument, its history and workings. Then participants will be able to explore the instrument. Discussions regarding performance, improvisation and new notation will be chaired by the instrument maker. After lunch, people will work solo or in pairs/groups (e.g., composer-performer duos) on a musical piece which could be notated or of improvisational nature. A regrouping in the evening offers an opportunity to discuss the experiments and successes/failures of the day, leading to a dinner in a restaurant. The next day the workshops will continue in the morning, focussing on practicing and finishing the pieces. In the evening the work will be performed in the Attenborough Centre Auditorium. The pieces will be recorded (audio and video) and published online (subject to approval).
Participating in the workshops will be cellist ( Alice Eldridge) and pianist ( Kate Ryder), both with an experience of performing with these new instruments. Their presence in the workshops will helpful for both composers and other performers.
Workshop 1: The halldorophone
There will be limited spaces on this workshop. Please register your interest here by June 15th: halldorophone workshop registration. We will confirm by June 17th. This application process is to ensure a good balance of participants.
Halldoropohones are electro acoustic string instruments developed by Halldór Úlfarsson. The instrument is cello-like in its configuration but with unique features that define the method of playing and facilitate its unusal timbre. Over the last decade a growing number of composers haved composed by solo and ensemble works for the halldorophone. A seminar on conventions in composing for halldorophone was recently held at the Icelandic Academy of Arts, Music department with a panel of composers who have worked with the instrument in recent years.
Workshop leader: Halldór Úlfarsson:
Halldór Úlfarsson is an artist and designer based in Iceland. His practice primarily involves developing projects and collaborations around his electro acoustic string instrument the halldorophone which he has been developing for about a decade. Halldór has a degree from the Finnish Academy of Fine Art and an MA in design from TAIK (Helsinki). He currently works for the department of design at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts.
A video of the halldorophone in action can be viewed here
Workshop 2: The Magnetic Resonator Piano
There will be limited spaces on this workshop. Please register your interest here by June 15th: Magnetic Resonator Piano workshop registration. We will confirm by June 17th. This application process is to ensure a good balance of participants.
The magnetic resonator piano (MRP) is an electronically augmented acoustic piano. Electromagnets are placed inside a grand piano which induce the strings to vibrate independently of the hammers, allowing the performer to create notes with infinite sustain, crescendos from silence, pitch bends, harmonics and new timbres. It is played from the piano keyboard using a scanner that measures the continuous position of each key. Over 20 pieces have been composed for MRP, including recent projects with People Inside Electronics (Los Angeles), the London Chamber Orchestra and the band These New Puritans.
Workshop leader: Andrew McPherson:
Andrew McPherson is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. A composer and electrical engineer by training, he studied at MIT (M.Eng. 2005) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. 2009) and spent a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Drexel University. His research focuses on augmented instruments, embedded hardware systems, the study of performer-instrument interaction and user appropriation of technology. In addition to the MRP, he is the creator of the TouchKeys, a multi-touch-sensing keyboard which successfully launched on Kickstarter in 2013.
A demonstration video of the Magnetic Resonator Piano can be viewed here and with explanations here. Recent performances here.
Thursday Workshops (half-day / full-day)
The Thursday workshops will take place in the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA), in the Music Department's Recital Room, or in the Sussex Humanities Lab. They are either half-day or full-day workshops.Workshop 3: Sound and Space: Performing Music for Organ and Electronics
(organisers: Lauren Redhead and Alistair Zaldua) [half-day - further info]This workshop will introduce the organ as an interface, and then explore its use in music for organ and live electronics. The workshop will be instructional for composers, introducing them to the instrument and its repertoire, and for those interested in extending the organ through technology. A second part of the workshop will be a ‘lab’ in which two pieces are explored and developed live, with a focus on the organ as a technology and its duet role in music for organ and live electronics by Alistair Zaldua and Thor Magnusson. In the final part of the workshop, Lauren Redhead and Alistair Zaldua will perform a selection of pieces from their repertoire that demonstrate the relationship of organ and live electronics in recent pieces
Workshop 4: A Practical and Theoretical Introduction to Chaotic Musical Systems
(organisers: Tristan Clutterbuck, Tom Mudd and Dario Sanfilippo) [full-day - further info]This one day workshop explores iterative feedback processes in the design of musical tools and the questions these types of processes pose for theorising agency, autonomy, interaction design, sociality, and causality.
Participants will be introduced to three approaches to implementing chaotic, nonlinear systems in real-time signal processing environments (Max and Pd), each relating to the artistic practices and research interests of the workshop leaders culminating in an open session where participants are encouraged to adapt these techniques in developing their own implementations. At the heart of this workshop is a double articulation between theoretical and practical concerns, where multiple perspectives are brought into dialogue across the three sessions with an emphasis on the challenges posed by these techniques to the various features of musicality as it relates to digital instrument design. Nonlinear and chaotic systems provide a distinct set of resistances and affordances in performance, cleaving a space for reassessing our categories in thinking human-machine interaction.
Workshop 5: Making High-Performance Embedded Instruments with Bela and Pure Data
(organisers: Giulio Moro, Astrid Bin, Robert Jack, Christian Heinrichs and Andrew McPherson) [half-day - further info]This hands-on workshop introduces participants to Bela, an embedded platform for ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing. We will present the hardware and software features of Bela through a tutorial that gets participants started developing interactive music projects. Bela projects can be developed in C/C++ or Pure Data (Pd), and the platform features an on-board browser-based IDE for getting started quickly.
This workshop will focus specifically on using Pd with Bela to create self-contained instruments. Participation will be free, with the option to buy hardware at the end.
Workshop 6: Distributed Agency in Performance
(organisers: Paul Stapleton, Simon Waters, Owen Green and Nicholas Ward) [half-day - further info]Our workshop is targeted at performers, designers and researchers who have an interest in practically exploring complex emergent behaviors and dynamic relationships in ‘performance ecosystems’ (following Simon Waters). We aim to arrive at a better collective understanding of the following questions:
We will begin the workshop by contextualising these questions through discussion of existing artistic works, before moving swiftly on to collaborative practical exercises. Our aim here is to deepen our knowledge of music making through ‘doing’ and ‘showing’ rather than merely ‘telling’. Following this introductory stage, while working in small groups with the facilitators, you will design and physically sketch a human-scale (partially functioning) prototype of a performance ecosystem. This network will include a range of interrelating agents, possibly including: people, elastic bands, cardboard boxes, computer code, sensors, actuators, step ladders, masks, books, tacit rules, and explicit methods for resisting equilibrium and/or provoking crises. Following this stage, each group will deliver improvised performances while acting out the necessary elements of the physical sketches. These improvisations will provide the basis for critical discussion and subsequent performative iterations.
Our team of artist-researchers will facilitate the workshop and provide expertise in designing musical interactions, physical sketching, rapid prototyping, improvising, and critical reflection. We will provide a range of equipment and materials for aiding the physical sketching process, but you are also encouraged to bring your own objects of interests (e.g. computers, instruments, antiques, beverages). Prospective workshop participants will be asked to provide a short biography and a few sentences on why they are interested in joining the workshop.
Workshop 7: Interfacing the Txalaparta Workshop
(organiser: Enrike Hurtado) [half-day - further info]A workshop exploring the txalaparta - a traditional percussion instrument from the Basque Country and newly developed interactive txalaparta software, written by the authour.
The txalaparta features a variable number of wooden planks placed horizontally and beat vertically with wooden batons. Its is played by at least two players who alternate their beats performing through an improvisatory call-and-response pattern.
Participants in this workshop will explore the txalaparta, learning about the history and the main characteristics of the it and and how to play it. They will be able to practice the txalaparta, playing in pairs. After this introduction they will be able to test the software Interactive txalaparta playing the real txalaparta together with the computer.
ICLI Proceedings
Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Live Interfaces, edited by Thor Magnusson, Chris Kiefer and Sam Duffy
Published by the Experimental Music Technologies (EMuTe) Lab, University of Sussex, in collaboration with REFRAME Books, Falmer, UK.
ISBN: 978-0-9931996-8-4
ICLI 2016 Proceedings - High resolution PDF (205 MB)ICLI 2016 Proceedings - Low resolution PDF (25 MB)
Video documentation of the ICLI conference
The proceedings of the Live Interfaces conference are the outcome of a five-day gathering at the University of Sussex's Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts in June 2016. The biennial ICLI conference is interdisciplinary and practice-based, unique in that it focuses on the role of performance interfaces across all of the performing arts. This year it became clear that ICLI has become an established platform for people operating in diverse sections of the arts to meet and discuss the embodied use of technology in live performance. With a focus on practice, the conference emphasised the role of performances, workshops and installations as well as papers and posters.
With submissions from musicians, dancers, roboticists, brain scientists, visual artists, philosophers, animators, sculpturists, and more, the proceedings illustrate the range of activities encompassed by this lively platform for knowledge exchange and new performance practices. The proceedings were peer reviewed and include long and short papers, doctoral colloquium papers, performance installation and workshop descriptions, as well as some documentation of the event itself. Much of the conference was also filmed and can be found on the YouTube channel linked to above.
See video documentation on the YouTube playlist here below:
The proceedings from the 2014 ICLI conference in Lisbon can be found here.