ICMC/25/d1/1930 Concert n04/02 - For Cixin Liu
You are bugs -- Hommage à Person/Cixin Liu
- trippy video visuals says "you are bugs" with symmetrical flourescent handwaivy gestures
- snarky words and movie clips
- distorted visual scores and smashy pianos.
- oh, he's playing! he's actually playing as though he were doing a soundtrack to a silent movie!
- his hands are sculpting in the air
- his turquoise glasses are so arty
- he's totally silly!
- he has some kind of controller on top ofthe piano - he's not actually playing the piano, he's just pretending to play the piano, and perhaps it's automatically being controlled?
- now he's sitting down ok, he is actually playing now. it always sounds so different when the real piano plays, not so ... architectural the way it sounds when piano plays out of speakers
author and performer Person/Pavlos Antoniadis
- Pavlos Antoniadis is a contemporary music pianist, musicologist and creative technologist, currently Associate Professor of Music Communication and Technology at the University of Ioannina, research collaborator with the team ISMM and the ERC REACH at IRCAM, and PhD supervisor and visiting lecturer at Lund University, Malmö. His artistic programming features complexity, extremes of physicality, live electronics, multimedia, sensors, XR and AI. His research focuses on 4E cognition, on computational applications for technology-enhanced learning and performance, and on music biopolitics. Ηe has performed in Europe, North & South America and Asia with the new music ensembles Work in Progress-Berlin, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, Phorminx, ERGON, Accroche Note, Contemporary Insights. As a soloist, he has worked with composers such as Mark Andre, Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough, Wolfgang Rihm, Tristan Murail, Richard Barrett, Walter Zimmermann, Wieland Hoban, and he has premiered solo piano works by James Erber, Nicolas Tzortzis, Andrew R. Noble, Luis Antunes Pena, Dominik Karski, Lula Romero, Frank Cox, Michael Edward Edgerton among others. He has recorded for Mode (2015 German Recording Critics Award/Deutscheschallplattenkritikspreis), Wergo and Diatribe Records. He is the author of two forthcoming monographs from Wolke Verlag and EUR-ArTeC and a collective volume on the music of Anestis Logothetis. Pavlos studied the piano with Chryssi Partheniade, Ian Pace, Geoffrey Douglas Madge and Aleck Karis. In ensemble performance, he was a Fellow of Ensemble Modern and Klangforum Wien. He holds a prize-winning PhD in musicology from the University of Strasbourg in co-direction with the IRCAM, an MA in piano performance from the University of California, San Diego on a Fulbright Scholarship, and an MA in music studies from the University of Athens. He has conducted post-doctoral research at EUR-ArTeC, Université Paris 8 and at the TU Berlin – Audiokommunikation.
description
- On the occasion of Luigi Nono’s birth centenary, I respond to his classic work for piano and tape, “..sofferte onde serene..” (1976-77), with a new work, which extends Nono’s techniques through live AI tools and interactive multimedia. The work reflects on problems of authorship, authenticity and authority in musical AI, namely the disturbing potential of human inferiority – the fact that we all are potentially “bugs” (with its multiple connotations), and we might have to accept a lower status in a new (or not so new) hierarchy. To do so, the work assumes an AI, as if alien, invasion of sorts, inspired by the “dark forest hypothesis”, term coined by the Chinese sci-fi author Liu Cixin as a response to the Fermi paradox. The musical score consists of a dense interactive video featuring borrowed cinematic materials of authoritative figures conducting, instructing, ordering, insulting and abusing the performer; augmented interactive tablatures; music notation and video synths, projected in real-time, and driving a combination of improvised, comprovised and fixed musical materials. These include the author’s previous recordings of works by Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, Maurice Ravel, which are remixed through a combination of SOMAX2 and GesTCom, and live controlled through inertial sensors and an MPE controllers. Thus, both human and machine are trained and constrained, and sparks of resistance are not missing: More than following, GesTCom here has a function of unfollowing: the learned gestures are intentionally obstructed, or the tolerance of the motion follower algorithm is set extremely low, so that the system cannot follow, thus sabotaging its initial intent. As a result, various drones occur, as the supervp.scrub~ object allows resynthesized audio output to be time-stretched, transposed in pitch and undergo several spectral envelope transformations. The virtuosity involved in controlling the SOMAX2 in live settings is nontrivial, and so is the possibility to enter a dialogue with materials already learned and recorded, but also to surprise the system as well as the human performer with alien materials not featuring in the Nono score or in the recordings. Several degrees of distancing (same, similar and alien material) of the human pianist from the original material used to train SOMAX2 result in a variety of interactions, reflecting the echoes and resonances of Nono’s own political aesthetics.