waves

Jeremy Hinsdale

The consciousness generator is an online generative multimedia artwork. Neurons are generated into an open mindscape. Electrical pulses begin to produce brainwaves across a spectrum of frequencies. A binaural rhythm synchronizes, and entrainment gives rise to nascent mind states. Environments are introduced into the neural network to prime visualization, memory and precognition. Thoughts soon begin to ebb and flow in a now emergent consciousness.
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Still from "Consciousness Generator"

experience "consciousness generator" here

Still from "Consciousness Generator"

Jeremy Hinsdale is a writer, technologist and artist in New York City. His work has appeared on the websites for PBS, Newsweek, the American Museum of Natural History, State of the Planet and other publications. 

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Nathier Fernández

"Genetically Generated Texts" is a research project following a series of experimental artifacts that speculate the act of renaming genetics as a form of literature by implementing linguistic rules and computational arts to living organisms. These set of in vitro and in silico inspired fictions focus on the ‘otherness’ of the microbiome that constitutes us, the alienation of the human body through biopolitics, and the influence of tech in our relationship with artificial and biological non-human entities and environments.

At the moment there are three well-defined threads that interconnect with each other: The first implements linguistic rules based on the central dogma of microbiology; this dogma creates ‘gene expressions’, where information inside a gene is read to build proteins. Parts of speech in English grammar were mapped by a trained NLP mode that followed the biological protocol and read the gene expressions. The machine learning model creates a  linguistic interpretation of the bio ‘instructions’ inside the gene and a dada text is built instead. The second creates visual statements of these machine interpretations as if they were to behave like living organisms. The third takes these interpretations to be translated into DNA code, synthesized in a lab [in collaboration with Dr Leslie Mitchell], and embedded inside the organism [E. Coli] that provided the first DNA input; creating, at last, a living text-based ‘virus’, a new genre.

Texts [Letters addressed to Royal Society] from microbiology’s father Anton Van Leeuwenhoek were used as the original text corpus of the synthetic ML protocol,  as they were one of the first documented human observations made on microorganisms; especially bacteria (Escherichia Coli) observations. The original corpus texts were cut up by the algorithm and then rearranged, following the gene sequence of each promoter using Python 3.

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"Fission" poem. Image courtesy of the artist.

"Strain" poem. Image courtesy of the artist.

Nathier Fernández is a Colombian designer and research-based artist. Her current work focuses on the relationship between human and non-human interactions and what arises when emerging technologies are involved. She has a special interest around living materials, exploring possible intersections between biological and computational systems. ​

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Pavel Korbicka

"Dance Calligraphy No. E1" is a three-part luminous linear sculpture, which documents the transformation of a single dance act through the natural imperfectness of the human body. The five points (head, palms, insteps) set into motion on the dancer’s body are the farthest points of the body gravity center and with them it is possible to delineate the boundaries of physical space. They were recorded as a linear image with a 3D scanner. This record was transformed in life scale into final shapes of glass neon tubes. The repeated enactment of a single dance event and the mode of installation of the final objects have become the source of subtle visual differences, which were inspired by the natural ambiguities of the human body. The process results in the overlap of immaterial luminous drawing and corporality, which is the ultimate key towards understanding the artwork.
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Dance Calligraphy No. E1 - 00:03:00 min + 00:03:17 min + 00:02:00 min, 2017, three performances of a single dance set, installation, neon glass tubes, 194 x 120 x 135 cm + 197 x 125 x 128 cm + 196, 124 x 118 cm, Moravian Gallery in Brno, dance: Petra Hauerová, photo: Jan Vermouzek.

"Dance Calligraphy No. F1" is a spatial linear record of dance carried out on a line 5 m long. The five points (head, hands, feet) set into motion on the dancer’s body were recorded as a linear image with a 3D scanner. This record of a dance was transformed in life scale into final shapes of glass neon tubes. The process results in the overlap of immaterial luminous drawing and corporality, a dance and its notation.
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Dance Calligraphy No. F1 – 00:03:00 min, 2019, installation, neon glass tubes, 165 × 545 × 127 cm, The Brno House of Arts, dance: Petra Hauerová, photo: Jan Vermouzek.

Pavel Korbicka is a visual artist based in the Czech Republic. He has been awarded grants and scholarships from the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, and held a residency at SCOPE Light Art in Berlin. Having earned his degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, he has exhibited widely in Europe in cities including Brno, Prague, Katowice, Milano, Venice, and Büdelsdorf.

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Emily Erekson

“Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me … I too am part of that ocean, my love, we are not so much separated, Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect!” 
- Walt Whitman, Out of the rolling ocean the crowd

​I gave 22 women a set of parameters: 

• Use your voice, no other instrument
• Record for 1-3 minutes
• Start and end by humming a D
• Listen to a D continuously on headphones while you record
• You get one take--once you start, just keep going

Some were more comfortable with this exercise than others. Many felt their voices were inadequate and were hesitant to participate, while those who identified themselves as “singers” confidently volunteered. A few wished they had more rules and an example to make sure they did it “correctly,” while others thrived in the flexibility and freedom. Some meticulously planned. Some spontaneously vocalized. One woman hummed a single pitch the entire time. Another beatboxed. The result was a beautifully diverse sound-bank of voices, each with its own unique timbre, rhythm, intonation and harmony. 

I used this sound-bank as raw material to dissect, re-structure and shape into five contrasting movements: four precomposed and one continuously evolving. These movements are connected by a series of algorithmically paired duets that are drawn from recordings by the initial twenty-two women and the voices of each new participant. As I composed, I enjoyed exploring the dynamic relationship between the individual and the community. How does this relationship impact the choices we make as individuals? How do these choices interweave to create our social framework? How do we connect with others? How do we separate? 
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Emily Erekson is a NYC-based collaborative artist who enjoys engaging with music as if she were in a giant laboratory. As a college student, she acquired a dilapidated grand piano and founded The Dead Piano Society, where she and her friends would gather around the soundboard and experiment with extended techniques and new sonic textures. This was just the beginning of what would become a pattern in her career of creating collaborative musical communities that come together, experiment and improvise. Her compositions are natural outgrowths from her desire to explore and have recently been showcased at Carnegie Hall and Columbia University. A passionately eclectic pianist, she has performed classical music, jazz or art-rock at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Utah Governor’s Mansion, the Utah State Capitol and various venues throughout Europe. She has opened for several major acts, including Neon Trees, and is Co-founder and Director of Experimental Workshops of Glassbox Collective.

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Bob Sturm

For the past five years, I have been learning from and collaborating with machine learning algorithms trained on transcriptions of traditional music. One particular system, named folk-rnn (v2), has been trained on a collection of over 23,000 transcriptions of Irish traditional music. This collection comes from a large online crowd-sourcing campaign, where enthusiasts of Irish music contribute transcriptions of tunes they play. The aims of these contributors are to share music, to build repertoires, and to interact with other enthusiasts. None of them anticipated that their collection would be used as training data for lifeless algorithms that have the potential to generate millions of new tunes – a fact that displeases some:

"Can we not technologically tamper with everything that is good and pure in this world? A computer farting out generated tunes in some academic lab somewhere is the beginning of the end. … The sooner this experiment is confined to an anonymous university archive the better. This Sturm guy would be well advised to spend his time practicing his large accordion and then he may have an idea what it takes to come up with a traditional sounding tune and then play it with some degree of style." (anonymous)

Past “technological tampering” of Irish traditional music includes making wax cylinder recordings of Irish musicians in Chicago in the late 19th century, digitizing archives, and of course building and hosting websites on the World Wide Web. Why should applications of machine learning portend doom? A computer algorithm "farting" out tunes mimicking Irish traditional music, and a fellow bringing them to life on his large accordion (also mimicking an Irish traditional musician), are not threats to a strong, living tradition. But discomfort seems to be inevitable from the idea that an algorithm can create moving pieces of music.
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Bob L. T. Sturm is an American engineer and composer living in Europe since 2009. He is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), in Stockholm, Sweden. From 2014-2018, he was a Lecturer in Digital Media at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London. He received a BA in physics from University of Colorado, Boulder in 1998, an MA in Music, Science, and Technology, at Stanford University, in 1999, and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2009.

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Yoav Lifshitz

Alice and Bob are fictional characters commonly used as placeholder names in cryptology, as well as science and engineering literature. In cryptography and computer security, Alice and Bob are used extensively as participants in discussions about cryptographic protocols or systems. 

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a protocol used to send messages confidentially. The message is encrypted with the receiver's public key, and decrypted with a private key. 
 
I have used PGP for over a decade and been fascinated by the aesthetics of this incoherent digital Rorschach. Over time, I realized all messages sent using PGP are basically “love poems”. These days, intimacy is possible only by encryption.

Alice to Bob (a love poem) is the first work from my PGPoetry (pretty good poetry) project.
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Image courtesy of the artist.

Yoav Lifshitz is a media theoretician, a non-disciplinary artist and curator, and teaches new-media arts. In his work, he combines activism, culture jamming, critical engineering, and journalism. Lifshitz is the co-founder of the Captive Portal platform at the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv, and the Israeli Pirate Party collective. 

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Shawn Lawson & Jeremy Stewart

"Cibo V2" is a machine learning agent that performs live-coded music.

​Begin play at 2:00hrs.

​Shawn Lawson is an artist researching the computational sublime. He performs under the pseudonym Obi-Wan Codenobi where he live-codes real-time computer graphics with his open source software. He has performed or exhibited in England, Scotland, Spain, Denmark, Russia, Italy, Korea, Portugal, Brazil, Turkey, Malaysia, Iran, Canada, and the USA. He is a Professor in and Head of the Department of Art at RPI.

Jeremy Stewart is a multimedia artist and performer researching the affective potential of distributed media systems through the creation of improvisational performances, artificial intelligence (A.I.) software, and wearable hardware. Stewart is currently a PhD candidate (ABD) in the Electronic Arts program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

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Times Waves Collective

Since the dawn of time, man has been obsessed with harmony. Put simply, harmony is any esthetically pleasing arrangement of a multiplicity of forms. Whether confronted with musical notes, visual cues, or words, the human sensory apparatus is highly attuned to relative relationships between inputs, and the brain experiences a sense of pleasure when these relationships meet certain criteria.

Are there objective - and everlasting - criteria for harmony?
How do our culture, history, and society formulate our esthetic ideals?
How our ears and eyes perceive particular combinations of movements?

"Music of the Spheres" explores these questions using observational astronomy, neural processing, and audio-visual interaction. In our research for harmonic criteria that have guided musical composition throughout history, we concluded that the criteria that guide our sense of harmonic pleasure are largely defined by relationships we observe in the natural world. As our knowledge of the universe deepens, our sense of harmony grows ever wider and more accommodating. 

In ancient Greece, Pythagoras discovered the basic harmonic series that is created when objects of proportionate masses are struck, or strings of proportionate lengths are plucked. The importance of this discovery to the fields of art, science, and religion - which in Pythagoras’ time were a single area of inquiry - cannot be overstated. To the Pythagoreans, these harmonic relationships meant the divine was revealing itself to us. Pythagoras and his followers sought to discover further evidence of this harmonic pattern in nature and in the cosmos. In doing so, they posited that the distance between the celestial bodies corresponded to the proportions between notes of the harmonic series they had discovered. This fanciful notion set humanity on a questionable path for millennia in both esthetics and science.

Unlike Pythagoras and other ancient artist-scientists, we are privileged with deeper knowledge about the universe and the nature around us. If for thousands of years we’ve enjoyed music based on the harmonic series derived from vibrating strings, could it be that other relationships in nature reveal a harmony that we might tune ourselves to? Such relationships are created and cemented through cultural and technological advancements, which reinforce our perception of harmonies themselves. What happens if we explore a musical system based on the actual movement of the planets? For Music of the Spheres, we pictured the solar system moving through space on a linear trajectory. If we stay at a fixed position and allow the solar system to pass before us, we would see each planet move on a unique sinusoidal wave that weaves around the sun’s trajectory. Each planet’s frequency corresponds to its orbital period, and its amplitude corresponds to its solar distance. 

The law of octave equivalency is used to bring these extremely low frequencies within the audible range. Not falling into the standard Western tuning system, this off-tuning of the solar system has been used as evidence of the lack of harmony within celestial bodies. But such a view rests on the esthetic assumptions of Western music. We propose tuning our instruments to the cosmos instead of expecting the cosmos to be tuned to our instruments. Western tuning systems all rely to some extent on the partials identified and classified by Pythagoras. But other cultures have no qualms about harmony that defies Pythagorean tuning. 

The musical sensibilities of humans vary wildly across cultures, and across time. Within the western musical tradition, some intervals of the harmonic series - most famously the tritone - were unacceptable for centuries. Henry Cowell theorizes in his book New Musical Resources (1930) that the gradual acceptance of more adventurous intervals is linked to advances in musical instrument technology. What we perceive as harmonious is flexible, although not arbitrary. Our taste in frequency relationships has always been defined by harmonic relationships we perceive in the world around us. From hammers hitting anvils, to fingers plucking strings, to planets orbiting stars, we are surrounded by an infinite quantity of systems of frequency relationships from which we can potentially derive harmony. With our advanced technology, we also benefit from the ability to appreciate frequency relationships both visually and auditorily. 

In this piece, we explore a new direction of harmony based on both the visual and auditory relationships between the frequencies found within our solar system. An oscilloscope compares inputs from the left and right channels, generating complex images from the simple sine waves that we play. We set the stage with a simple binaural relationship between two waveforms to establish a visual and auditory reference for the audience. Then, using our ears and eyes as our guides, we use planetary waveforms to generate a composition that will both satisfy and challenge our established esthetic sensibilities.

"Music of the Spheres" appeal and challenge our senses of harmony. Rooted in physical and neural phenomena, we strive to identify and experiment with novel ways of experimenting with musical systems and generative visual systems. After long exposures, the beating of binaural frequencies develops a certain esthetic, if not a spiritual appeal. Through our aural and visual composition, we are interested in creating a profound connection with the audience and elevating our common sense of harmony.
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Still from "Music of the Spheres"

Still from "Music of the Spheres"

Neo Christopher Chung and George Carter Dyer form an experimental audiovisual duo called Time Waves. Based in Wroclaw, Poland,  Time Waves explores physical and biological phenomena, in search of emergent visual and acoustic aesthetics. In recent works, they employ interactive and generative systems based on Max/MSP and Arduino to produce audiovisual textures and feedback loops directly from data and mathematical formulas.

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