pure-data.ca ~

PERFORMANCES

The performances presented on the 21st, 22nd and 24th of august as well as Transduction, Télé Punch and Blind Date presented during the MixSessions evening on august 23rd have been selected by curator Marc Fournel in collaboration with the artistic committee of the convention.

Robotcowboy - TUESDAY 21st – SAT café, 9pm

by Dan Wilcox
http://www.robotcowboy.com

Robotcowboy is a performance project consisting of a wearable computer system and various peripheral devices which enable a single performer to become a mobile, technological "one-man band" free to roam the stage, the street, and the world. It is both an hommage to the "one-man band" tradition and an exploration into a post-digital renewal of embodiement and physical instrumentality in electronic musical instruments. The system is built with low-cost in mind and utilizes readily-available hardware and free, Open Source software in order to make the concept feasible to the everyday computer performer who wishes to step out from behind his screen. It is hoped that the concept of "wearable music computer" can one day become as ubiquitous as that of "laptop musician" in a return to the fragility and excitement of live music. Let's bump!

The Electronic Unicorn - TUESDAY 21st – SAT café, 9pm

by Georg Holzmann
http://grh.mur.at/projects/e-unicorn.html

The interface consists of 3 main parts: a glove with contacts on the fingertips, a board with 4 contact plates and a potentiometer on the forehead, the unicorn. The aim of the interface is, to be able to control various parameters at the same time. When touching one of the four contact plates, specific parameters can be controlled with the unicorn, relative to it's current value. Touching the plate with different fingers affects the sound because each finger corresponds to one (musical) voice.

Extended-guitar improvisations - TUESDAY 21st – SAT café, 21h

by Tim Vets
http://www.timvets.net/music/egi/noblurnoverb.html

A series of live performances around the idea of 'extended-guitar improvisations'. This piece is performed on guitar, Pure Data and some periferal devices. Free-jazz-ish and post-tonal improvisations form the basis of sonic explorations. A modified guitarsynthesizer enables the software to capture the sound of the six guitar strings separately. These signals are then modified in realtime and parametrized via a pedalboard built out of 32 doorbell-buttons. Treating the guitar strings this way opens up an alternative conception of the guitar as an instrument. Variable alternative tunings, computer-aided melodic structuring, and independancy of physical limitations of the guitar-neck and the physically playable. It's also a comment on the 'persuit of virtuosity' characteristic of many ambitious instrumentalists. The 'extension' process is sometimes also mapped onto physical percussive instruments, such as a ding-dong mechanism driven snaredrum...

0xA - TUESDAY 21st – SAT café, 9pm

by Aymeric Mansoux + Chun Lee
http://320x200.goto10.org/?id=0xa#

Chased by the operators, we started to live in the empty ghosts left by the machines. As we were growing in communities, they started to claim the ownership of our seeds. Today we defend our territories and create our own tools. What is left when the ether is gone? Will you meet me at the intersection of rows and columns? The cells are fed by tasks and processes, the vesicles carry the bits, and you just can't help to see patterns in this dataflow. And now let's dance.

Convo. Bro's Guide to Live Performance - WEDNESDAY 22nd – SAT café, 9pm

by Convolution Brothers (Zack Settel, Cort Lippe, Miller Puckette)
http://www.zeep.com/zack/cbros/gallery1/

The piece is a performance piece that deconstructs and explores the process of live performance, rendering visible the internal processes which govern the Creative Source and linkage to the external world where creative collaboration and the experience of expression occur. Long, by no means, this work invites the audience to join the Brothers in a collective effort to expand notions.

LiveImprovS - WEDNESDAY 22nd – SAT café, 9pm

by Koray Tahiroglu
http://mlab.uiah.fi/~korayt/liveimprovs/

The LiveImprovS performance is a musical improvisation process that brings together different approaches to experimental music with an emphasis on real-time sounds. It creates a fusion interaction between sound structures. The performance combines improvisation with algorithms that generate a changing set of sonic relations over time. Computer generated improvisation gives an unexpected richness to the sound processing in this live performance. The performance brings together the ever-changing musical identity of a free improvisation and the work of computer in the generative process.

Tvestroy - WEDNESDAY 22nd – SAT café, 9pm

by Thomas Ouellet Fredericks + Danny Perreault
http://tvestroy.danslchamp.org

Tvestroy is a live audiovisual performance played on regular television sets. Generated from a single source, the sounds and images are not simply synchronized to each other, but emerge as one: the sound is the image. Tvestroy is the third installment of ongoing electrovideoacoustic research and will be presented for the first time in color!

Takeover - WEDNESDAY 22nd - MCGILL UNIVERSITY - Tanna Hall, 1pm

by Tristan John Evans
Pianist: Pamela Reimer
http://www.tjevs.com/convention07.html

Takeover is a work for solo piano and PureData. Essentially it is a work for piano and tape, but PureData, using a piano sample as its output, generates the tape part live. The work gets its name because the two elements are constantly trying to conquer each other, striving to be the dominant force. The pianist interacts with PD via a unique cue system constructed of lights, which coincides with various instructions given to the pianist in the score. The work starts off with PureData generating random material in the low register of its sample, based on a pre-programmed tone row. The material eventually builds until the piano enters with contrasting slow, melodic material. After an exciting climax the piano has fast, fragmented solo material before returning to the previous melodic passages. The piano then interacts with PD, imitating the material generated with some interesting delay effects. The two forces start to build, with chromatic passages weaving up and down in the piano, while PD dances around in the background, poking fun at the piano.

ShareMTL : Open JAM - THURSDAY 23rd – 8pm - PLACE DE LA PAIX (park beside SAT)

www.sharemtl.com
Share is an open jam, not just for digirati, but for all new culture lovers. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others' signal and perform live audio and video. We furnish the amplification and projection. All are welcome!

Blind date - SAT (MixSessions) - THURSDAY 23rd – SAT café, 11pm

by pd~graz collective: Florian Hollerweger, Georg Holzmann, Peter Plessas, IOhannes m zmölnig
http://pd-graz.mur.at/blind_date_description
blind date is an audiovisual performance which aims at an artistic extension of common patterns in computer programming. Rather than featuring isolated programmers, two people work simultaneously on a single Pd patch, operating the same logical interfaces though each using their own physical keyboard, mouse and monitor. Since the performers have to share access to the machine, it is necessary for them to coordinate their work in order to produce a functioning patch. No longer merely a technical tool, the patch also becomes the primary means of communication between the programmers. This performance features two computers – one for audio, one for video – with four players programming at a time. The performance starts with a blank canvas (i.e. an empty patch), and participants change at regular time intervals, so that different combinations of programmers continue to build on the patches left by their predecessors. In combination with the resulting audio and video works, the patches themselves are also projected into the performance environment. As opposed to usual objectives of audiovisual programming, this provides the audience with a deep insight into the processes of programming and communication among the players.

Télé punch - SAT (MixSessions) - THURSDAY 23rd – SAT café, 11pm

by Jérôme Abel
http://impala.utopia.free.fr/index.php?page=travaux&id=49

In this performance, the artist uses the television as a simple percussion object in order to put this object into perspective, to demystify it and to create an artistic reappropriation of it's meaning within society. At first view, this performance scenario appears comical: on stage a performer sits on a television set and hits it aimlessly. Violence against an inanimate object has the tendency to produce a certain form of humour but the performance also presents the darker sentiments associated with mass media's effects on society. The performer provides concrete opposition to these concerns.This mocking gesture is significant of an era in which our relationship with the media is conflicted. Paradoxally, television is a popular media and contemporary culture is embodied within it. Television give rhythm to our lives, the 10pm news has become the most emblematic ritual.
    As a spectator, at the end of the chain of information, the possibility to maintain control over the mediated information is quite small. One can simply turn on or off the television set or change the channel and volume. In this performance the artist harnesses these control devices and to create a veritable musical instrument with one major change to the televisions usual functioning: the sound and image are produced live and so the audio and visual results are completely unpredictable. This randomness makes the performance more amusing and allows viewers to pay attention to the choices made by the performer and his complicity with the software. The performance releases the viewer from a passive, individual and hypnotic position by including them in the act of reappropriating the typically calculated and established media. The artistic recompositions allow the viewer to watch the news as if it is a theatre play or piece of music complete with drama, tensions, patterns, etc.

Transduction - SAT (MixSessions) - THURSDAY 23rd – SAT café, 11pm

by Alejandra Maria Perez Nunez + Yves Degoyon
http://www.elpueblodechina.org
http://ydegoyon.free.fr

This performance returns noise to its source of origin, the information that circulates online and the propagation of global domination networks. The performance makes use of a bot that receives live feeds and wikipedia retrievals (wikinibot (Perl bot)). Speech synthesis connected to the set up allows for modulation and processing using custom instruments. The artists use DIY instruments including radio transmitters, receptors, oscillators and a theremin sensor to improve the gestural possibilities of their sound performance. Through this performance the artists seek to develop a discourse related to the openness and encryption of circuits. The openness of the instruments they use highly constrast with the structural rigidity of domination networks. In order to create tactics for opening circuits, they explore the ways in which the circuits function and their intended uses. Keeping with study traditions put forward by the "bureau d'etudes" the artists work to map global power relations.

Ménagerie Imaginaire - SAT (MixSessions) - THURSDAY 23rd – SAT café, 11pm

by Zack Settel + Jean-Michel Dumas + Mike Wosnienski + Sylvain [Sly] Cormier
http://tot.sat.qc.ca/logiciels_audiotwist.html

Ménagerie Imaginaire is a musical jam performed in a surreal virtual environment. Real instruments & performers are physically on stage, yet they are also modelled in an abstract 3-D world. The audience sees a rendered visualization of that world on several screens and hears sound spatialized on a multi-channel audio system, giving the impression that they too are immersed within the scene.
    The performers navigate throughout the landscape, finding loops and audio processing objects to interact and jam with. Microphones capture sound from their instruments, and sensors are used to control the direction of audio propagation. This gives the performers the ability to steer their sound towards objects of interest, and precisely control what the audience hears.

Images/visuals - SAT (MixSessions) - THURSDAY 23rd – SAT café, 11pm

Visuals : Patrick Valiquet http://fragm.net
Son: David McCallum http://sintheta.org

Patrick Valiquet is a musician, artist and programmer born in Ottawa and living in Montreal. He studied as a classical pianist at McGill University and has recently completed graduate research in computation arts at Concordia University. Since 2001 his live and generative audio and video work has been presented at galleries and concerts across Canada and heard on radio and Internet broadcasts around the world. He has worked as a programmer for numerous artists' projects and taught multi-media programming in Vancouver and Montreal. In 2006 he was awarded a CIAM research grant for the immersive audio/video environment "Skyline."
    David McCallum is the Editor of Musicworks (www.musicworks.ca), a musician and sound artist. His work has focused on improvised music, DIY electronics, and locative media. Groups and projects have included the Warbike, a mobile sonification of WiFi networks; Interaccess' I/O Media; the Live Electroacoustic Research Kitchen improv groups; and You Say Potatoe, I Say Potato: a study in the sonic properties of genetically modified potatoes.

sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! - FRIDAY 24th – SAT café, 8pm

by Sven König
http://www.popmodernism.org/scrambledhackz/

sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is a Realtime-Mind-Music-Video-Re-De-Construction-Machine. It is a conceptual software which makes it possible to work with samples in a completely new way by making them available in a manner that does justice to their nature as concrete musical memories.

Faltig - FRIDAY 24th – SAT café, 8pm

by Frank Barknecht
http://footils.goto10.org/faltig/play.html

Faltig is developed using Pure Data and consists of sound and visuals, that are produced simultaneously by evaluating an underlying physical model which is invisible and inaudible. While performing, just the model is influenced directly, while the visual and auditory aspects mainly provide feedback to guide the performer's improvisations. It is hoped, that in this setup the model creates an intimate link between sound and video, so that both become more than the sum of their parts.

	Robotcowboy - TUESDAY 21st – SAT café, 9pm by Dan Wilcox http://www.robotcowboy.com Robotcowboy is a performance project consisting of a wearable computer system and various peripheral devices which enable a single performer to become a mobile, technological "one-man band" free to roam the stage, the street, and the world. It is both an hommage to the "one-man band" tradition and an exploration into a post-digital renewal of embodiement and physical instrumentality in electronic musical instruments. The system is built with low-cost in mind and utilizes readily-available hardware and free, Open Source software in order to make the concept feasible to the everyday computer performer who wishes to step out from behind his screen. It is hoped that the concept of "wearable music computer" can one day become as ubiquitous as that of "laptop musician" in a return to the fragility and excitement of live music. Let's bump!

	The Electronic Unicorn - TUESDAY 21st – SAT café, 9pm by Georg Holzmann http://grh.mur.at/projects/e-unicorn.html The interface consists of 3 main parts: a glove with contacts on the fingertips, a board with 4 contact plates and a potentiometer on the forehead, the unicorn. The aim of the interface is, to be able to control various parameters at the same time. When touching one of the four contact plates, specific parameters can be controlled with the unicorn, relative to it's current value. Touching the plate with different fingers affects the sound because each finger corresponds to one (musical) voice.

	Extended-guitar improvisations - TUESDAY 21st – SAT café, 21h by Tim Vets http://www.timvets.net/music/egi/noblurnoverb.html A series of live performances around the idea of 'extended-guitar improvisations'. This piece is performed on guitar, Pure Data and some periferal devices. Free-jazz-ish and post-tonal improvisations form the basis of sonic explorations. A modified guitarsynthesizer enables the software to capture the sound of the six guitar strings separately. These signals are then modified in realtime and parametrized via a pedalboard built out of 32 doorbell-buttons. Treating the guitar strings this way opens up an alternative conception of the guitar as an instrument. Variable alternative tunings, computer-aided melodic structuring, and independancy of physical limitations of the guitar-neck and the physically playable. It's also a comment on the 'persuit of virtuosity' characteristic of many ambitious instrumentalists. The 'extension' process is sometimes also mapped onto physical percussive instruments, such as a ding-dong mechanism driven snaredrum...

	0xA - TUESDAY 21st – SAT café, 9pm by Aymeric Mansoux + Chun Lee http://320x200.goto10.org/?id=0xa# Chased by the operators, we started to live in the empty ghosts left by the machines. As we were growing in communities, they started to claim the ownership of our seeds. Today we defend our territories and create our own tools. What is left when the ether is gone? Will you meet me at the intersection of rows and columns? The cells are fed by tasks and processes, the vesicles carry the bits, and you just can't help to see patterns in this dataflow. And now let's dance.

	Convo. Bro's Guide to Live Performance - WEDNESDAY 22nd – SAT café, 9pm by Convolution Brothers (Zack Settel, Cort Lippe, Miller Puckette) http://www.zeep.com/zack/cbros/gallery1/ The piece is a performance piece that deconstructs and explores the process of live performance, rendering visible the internal processes which govern the Creative Source and linkage to the external world where creative collaboration and the experience of expression occur. Long, by no means, this work invites the audience to join the Brothers in a collective effort to expand notions.

	LiveImprovS - WEDNESDAY 22nd – SAT café, 9pm by Koray Tahiroglu http://mlab.uiah.fi/~korayt/liveimprovs/ The LiveImprovS performance is a musical improvisation process that brings together different approaches to experimental music with an emphasis on real-time sounds. It creates a fusion interaction between sound structures. The performance combines improvisation with algorithms that generate a changing set of sonic relations over time. Computer generated improvisation gives an unexpected richness to the sound processing in this live performance. The performance brings together the ever-changing musical identity of a free improvisation and the work of computer in the generative process.

	Tvestroy - WEDNESDAY 22nd – SAT café, 9pm by Thomas Ouellet Fredericks + Danny Perreault http://tvestroy.danslchamp.org Tvestroy is a live audiovisual performance played on regular television sets. Generated from a single source, the sounds and images are not simply synchronized to each other, but emerge as one: the sound is the image. Tvestroy is the third installment of ongoing electrovideoacoustic research and will be presented for the first time in color!

	Takeover - WEDNESDAY 22nd - MCGILL UNIVERSITY - Tanna Hall, 1pm by Tristan John Evans Pianist: Pamela Reimer http://www.tjevs.com/convention07.html Takeover is a work for solo piano and PureData. Essentially it is a work for piano and tape, but PureData, using a piano sample as its output, generates the tape part live. The work gets its name because the two elements are constantly trying to conquer each other, striving to be the dominant force. The pianist interacts with PD via a unique cue system constructed of lights, which coincides with various instructions given to the pianist in the score. The work starts off with PureData generating random material in the low register of its sample, based on a pre-programmed tone row. The material eventually builds until the piano enters with contrasting slow, melodic material. After an exciting climax the piano has fast, fragmented solo material before returning to the previous melodic passages. The piano then interacts with PD, imitating the material generated with some interesting delay effects. The two forces start to build, with chromatic passages weaving up and down in the piano, while PD dances around in the background, poking fun at the piano.

	ShareMTL : Open JAM - THURSDAY 23rd – 8pm - PLACE DE LA PAIX (park beside SAT) www.sharemtl.com Share is an open jam, not just for digirati, but for all new culture lovers. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others' signal and perform live audio and video. We furnish the amplification and projection. All are welcome!

	Blind date - SAT (MixSessions) - THURSDAY 23rd – SAT café, 11pm by pd~graz collective: Florian Hollerweger, Georg Holzmann, Peter Plessas, IOhannes m zmölnig http://pd-graz.mur.at/blind_date_description blind date is an audiovisual performance which aims at an artistic extension of common patterns in computer programming. Rather than featuring isolated programmers, two people work simultaneously on a single Pd patch, operating the same logical interfaces though each using their own physical keyboard, mouse and monitor. Since the performers have to share access to the machine, it is necessary for them to coordinate their work in order to produce a functioning patch. No longer merely a technical tool, the patch also becomes the primary means of communication between the programmers. This performance features two computers – one for audio, one for video – with four players programming at a time. The performance starts with a blank canvas (i.e. an empty patch), and participants change at regular time intervals, so that different combinations of programmers continue to build on the patches left by their predecessors. In combination with the resulting audio and video works, the patches themselves are also projected into the performance environment. As opposed to usual objectives of audiovisual programming, this provides the audience with a deep insight into the processes of programming and communication among the players.

	Télé punch - SAT (MixSessions) - THURSDAY 23rd – SAT café, 11pm by Jérôme Abel http://impala.utopia.free.fr/index.php?page=travaux&id=49 In this performance, the artist uses the television as a simple percussion object in order to put this object into perspective, to demystify it and to create an artistic reappropriation of it's meaning within society. At first view, this performance scenario appears comical: on stage a performer sits on a television set and hits it aimlessly. Violence against an inanimate object has the tendency to produce a certain form of humour but the performance also presents the darker sentiments associated with mass media's effects on society. The performer provides concrete opposition to these concerns.This mocking gesture is significant of an era in which our relationship with the media is conflicted. Paradoxally, television is a popular media and contemporary culture is embodied within it. Television give rhythm to our lives, the 10pm news has become the most emblematic ritual. As a spectator, at the end of the chain of information, the possibility to maintain control over the mediated information is quite small. One can simply turn on or off the television set or change the channel and volume. In this performance the artist harnesses these control devices and to create a veritable musical instrument with one major change to the televisions usual functioning: the sound and image are produced live and so the audio and visual results are completely unpredictable. This randomness makes the performance more amusing and allows viewers to pay attention to the choices made by the performer and his complicity with the software. The performance releases the viewer from a passive, individual and hypnotic position by including them in the act of reappropriating the typically calculated and established media. The artistic recompositions allow the viewer to watch the news as if it is a theatre play or piece of music complete with drama, tensions, patterns, etc.

	Transduction - SAT (MixSessions) - THURSDAY 23rd – SAT café, 11pm by Alejandra Maria Perez Nunez + Yves Degoyon http://www.elpueblodechina.org http://ydegoyon.free.fr This performance returns noise to its source of origin, the information that circulates online and the propagation of global domination networks. The performance makes use of a bot that receives live feeds and wikipedia retrievals (wikinibot (Perl bot)). Speech synthesis connected to the set up allows for modulation and processing using custom instruments. The artists use DIY instruments including radio transmitters, receptors, oscillators and a theremin sensor to improve the gestural possibilities of their sound performance. Through this performance the artists seek to develop a discourse related to the openness and encryption of circuits. The openness of the instruments they use highly constrast with the structural rigidity of domination networks. In order to create tactics for opening circuits, they explore the ways in which the circuits function and their intended uses. Keeping with study traditions put forward by the "bureau d'etudes" the artists work to map global power relations.

	Ménagerie Imaginaire - SAT (MixSessions) - THURSDAY 23rd – SAT café, 11pm by Zack Settel + Jean-Michel Dumas + Mike Wosnienski + Sylvain [Sly] Cormier http://tot.sat.qc.ca/logiciels_audiotwist.html Ménagerie Imaginaire is a musical jam performed in a surreal virtual environment. Real instruments & performers are physically on stage, yet they are also modelled in an abstract 3-D world. The audience sees a rendered visualization of that world on several screens and hears sound spatialized on a multi-channel audio system, giving the impression that they too are immersed within the scene. The performers navigate throughout the landscape, finding loops and audio processing objects to interact and jam with. Microphones capture sound from their instruments, and sensors are used to control the direction of audio propagation. This gives the performers the ability to steer their sound towards objects of interest, and precisely control what the audience hears.

	Images/visuals - SAT (MixSessions) - THURSDAY 23rd – SAT café, 11pm Visuals : Patrick Valiquet http://fragm.net Son: David McCallum http://sintheta.org Patrick Valiquet is a musician, artist and programmer born in Ottawa and living in Montreal. He studied as a classical pianist at McGill University and has recently completed graduate research in computation arts at Concordia University. Since 2001 his live and generative audio and video work has been presented at galleries and concerts across Canada and heard on radio and Internet broadcasts around the world. He has worked as a programmer for numerous artists' projects and taught multi-media programming in Vancouver and Montreal. In 2006 he was awarded a CIAM research grant for the immersive audio/video environment "Skyline." David McCallum is the Editor of Musicworks (www.musicworks.ca), a musician and sound artist. His work has focused on improvised music, DIY electronics, and locative media. Groups and projects have included the Warbike, a mobile sonification of WiFi networks; Interaccess' I/O Media; the Live Electroacoustic Research Kitchen improv groups; and You Say Potatoe, I Say Potato: a study in the sonic properties of genetically modified potatoes.

	sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! - FRIDAY 24th – SAT café, 8pm by Sven König http://www.popmodernism.org/scrambledhackz/ sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is a Realtime-Mind-Music-Video-Re-De-Construction-Machine. It is a conceptual software which makes it possible to work with samples in a completely new way by making them available in a manner that does justice to their nature as concrete musical memories.

	Faltig - FRIDAY 24th – SAT café, 8pm by Frank Barknecht http://footils.goto10.org/faltig/play.html Faltig is developed using Pure Data and consists of sound and visuals, that are produced simultaneously by evaluating an underlying physical model which is invisible and inaudible. While performing, just the model is influenced directly, while the visual and auditory aspects mainly provide feedback to guide the performer's improvisations. It is hoped, that in this setup the model creates an intimate link between sound and video, so that both become more than the sum of their parts.