Disparate Bodies 29th November

SARC (Sonic Arts Research Centre)Disparate BodiesSARC presents a programme of new music performed simultaneously in Belfast, Hamburg and Graz. This unique event showcases strategies for performance over the network including instrumental, audio-visual and laptop work. Point your browser to www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/pages/db to collaborate in the making of the performance!The Belfast Legion for Improvised Sights and Sounds is at it again.As part of the FIX 07 – 7th International Performance Festival, BLISS will be re-appropriating the Disparate Bodies concert recording input fordestruction and post-mixing!Drop by to Catalyst next thursday Nov. 29 @ 10pm and listen to SARC’s very own Laptop ensemble.The Legion does not prescribe its sights or sounds; they are the product of digital and contra-digital networks of gates, tables, switches, speaker objects, cabling and data… The Legion is not a band, we don’t play at weddings, BUT we like playing in hotel lounges.

Interactive beat machine that yearns for the human touch

Between radio stations, algorithmic beats formed out of snippets of sound captured from the airwaves form the basis for a musical piece that is played out through human interaction. As you rotate and twiddle the set’s dials the system gains energy and becomes frenetic, when you pause it slowly cools off.

At the heart of the set is a database of sounds that is added to whenever the radio is tuned, each represented by a rotating square. These samples are sorted along the length of the bar by acoustic properties (spectral centroid, loudness, noisiness) and selected by you for use as you rotate the frequency dial. Changing the mode from FM to MW or LW changes the sorting mode. As samples are played more often their square slowly becomes more opaque, the bluest square corresponding to the most popular sound. If the radio set is left tuned to a particular station then slowly it will degrade the signal through boredom while it grabs percussive, strong attack sounds. When this happens the set’s data visualisation degrades too and if a new sound is found a correspondinglittle square floats out from the centre.

The piece is seeking to answer the question: ‘Can electro-acoustic, noise based, art music be made more accessible by allowing the listener to erect parameters of its realisation?‘. The music is composed in the sense that certain rules have been expressed rigidly, for instance the complex fashion in which each dial affects the sound engine, but how they are applied is left to the listener to be expressed by their own choice of knob twiddling.

None of this really matters, and if you’ve read this far then you’re probably missing the point. The most fun can be had by grabbing a knob (gently as all breakages must be paid for) and twiddling until you think you’ve figured out what is happening or you just don’t care anymore. Glitch factor ten can only be achieved by really going for it and twiddling like crazy.You’ll know when you’re there, the visuals will go mental.

Robin Price, November 2007

Nov 26th to 30th at FIX07

Monday 26th November
Old Museum Arts Centre
1pm – 3pm

Legitimate Bodies Dance Company:

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

This 2-hour workshop is a great opportunity to experience the work of the newly formed contemporary dance company “Legitimate Bodies”. The session starts with a release-based warm up that focuses on alignment, spine and floor work and culminates in a dynamically challenging sequence that emphasize the use of the body in the space. This is followed by a choreographic session in which the participants are encouraged to look at the space with its restrictions, whether imposed or chosen, as a primary source of movement. The whole workshop builds towards a structured improvisation derived from these ideas of spatial relationships. Relationships arise between two bodies and between the body and the surrounding architectural space.

Price: £7 regular fee / £5 concession

Monday 26th November
Old Museum Arts Centre
8pm

PERFORMANCE DESCRIPTION
Title: History is Still a Game
A solo in which a young girl considers what it means to dress in a wedding dress.

Title: Lingering on a Diagonal
To live commentary an audience interactive danced romance for the 21st Century. Nick and Cristina are the Italian woman and the Irishman at home trying to work out their troubled relationship. By a touch on your mobile you can decide on their fate!

Special Guest Appearance from Milan via New York: Marta Ciappina performs a choreography by John Jasperse
Title: Breathing Space
“A solo created about the urge of breathing, the breath which fills the space, giving resonant sounding form to the swinging body, from public to private states of beings, very simple activities that come one after the other in a day-like timing, scanned by syncopated rhythm of the movement so that an irregularity between silence and acceleration is unavoidable.”

Price: £7 regular fee / £5 concession

Tickets and Bookings for both workshop and performances: Old Museum and Arts Centre (OMAC) on 028 90 23 3332

Tuesday 27th November
Catalyst Arts Gallery
7pm

Daniel Vais – The Love Spotters


The Love Spotters is a collective group of performers with apparently special needs.
At the core of its work, The Love Spotters focuses on dance, movement and live art, experimenting with different styles and forms.

Wednesday 28th and Thursday 29th November
Ormeau Rd. and embankment
3pm – 7pm

The Master Art in Public will be performing a series of interventions and actions. The MA has evolved from current complex concerns for the role of art / artists in a changing society.
It engages in the interrogation of the territories of art in civil society and the modes of practice to inhabit and develop them. The programme seeks to develop testing modes of working that are dialogic, participatory, interventionist and collaborative in intention and structure. These practices are interconnected with social movements of globalised, networked societies.

Thursday 29th November
Sonic Lab at Queens (Malone Rd.)
8pm

SARC (Sonic Arts Research Centre)

SARC presents a programme of new music performed simultaneously in Belfast, Hamburg and Graz. This unique event showcases strategies for performance over the network including instrumental, audio-visual and laptop work. Point your browser to www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/pages/db to collaborate in the making of the performance!

Friday 30th November
Catalyst Arts Gallery
6pm

The Ma Art in Public will host a public round table discussion on art in the public realm, drawing in part on their experience of working in FIX.

Today at FIX

Peter Richards – Top Twenty Of Performance Art

15 November
13.00-20.00h
PS2 Donegall Street

More!

Bbeyond group performance – (Christine Cadman, Stephen Dorothy, Brian Patterson, Rainer Pagel, Hugh O’Donnell, Sinead Bhreathnach-Cashell, Brian Connolly)
7 PEOPLE AND A TABLE

15 November
15.00-19.00h
Catalyst Arts Gallery

More!

SARC – Open Jack with Dialogic Instruments

15 November
21.00-23.00h
Catalyst Arts Gallery

More!

Disparate Bodies 29th November

Disparate Bodies: A three-way Network Performance

Within the context of EU Culture 2007 project COMEDIA, the Sonic Arts Research Centre, the Hochschule für Musik und Theatre Hamburg and the Insitut für Elektronische Musik and Akustik (KUG Graz) present a concert which showcases four unique strategies for music performance over networks. This event presents instrumental, audio-visual and laptop work and features music by John Cage, a network piece by Pedro Rebelo and structured improvisations with a distributed piano trio and a laptop trio.

29th November 2007

Belfast (Sonic Arts Research Centre): 8PM UK TIME [ADMISSION FREE]
Hamburg (Hochschule für Musik und Theatre): 9PM CET
Graz (Insitut für Elektronische Musik and Akustik): 9PM CET

The performance can be experienced in three different ways:

1. Physically on one of the sites
2. Second Life
3. Three independent audio streams on this site

Programme

Five (John Cage)

Cage’s work is performed with a distributed quintet, making use of Georg Hajdu’s Quintet.net software for network performance.

Piano Trio

A pianist in each site forms a distributed trio performing a free improvisation work. The performance utilises remote avatars developed at SARC which abstract and display gestures from remote performers.

Frequencyliator Laptop Trio

Developed at SARC by Alain Renaud, the Frequencyliator acts as a hub for laptop improvisation providing cues, distributing bandwidth and facilitating negotiation between performers through a voting system.

Disparate Bodies 2.0 (Pedro Rebelo)

First performed as version 1.0 in Belfast, NY and Stanford as part of NIME 2007, this work relies on the development of performative and improvisational strategies which take advantage of network performance scenarios through graphic notation and temporal structuring. The work itself is a clash of disparate approaches which form the basis of an investigation into relationships with musical potential (between performers, performers and audiences, composition and improvisation etc…). Help shape the performance by distributing scores over space and time using the online db_editor
The db_editor invites to public to shape the performance of Disparate Bodies by manipulating various graphic score sources. The changing position of each symbol is reflected in the order and duration of each score element during the performance. By dragging the symbols over the map you are editing two aspects of how the final performance score will be put together and displayed to audiences and performers on the three sites. The time of edit (shown on the right column) determines the relative duration and order (most recent first) of score elements.
The position relates to how prominent score element for each site (e.g. a score element positioned over Belfast suggests that only performers in Belfast will play that element).
This editor will be open till the 28th November 12:00 CET, when the final score sequence will be assembled. Thank you for your contribution!

You can contribute! Just click on this link.