Acrpost: A Project of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres

Event Description

Featuring Stefan Smulovitz’s Mad Scientist Machine, visuals by Sammy Chien and performances by MASOM and the NOW ensemble, madMethod is layers of memory and experience combining light, images and sound, remembered, manipulated and instantly created. Audience members look down from above and see images and lights on the floor and hear sounds responding to and inspiring imagery.

Lisa Cay Miller’s work Aventures I and III, originally performed in 2014 by the NOW ensemble, will be rearranged and performed by a little big band, which in parts be joined by MaSOM, the software agent trained to react with the original live recording. Sammy Chien will provide live video responding to the ensemble on December 2. On December 3, the NOW ensemble and guests will respond to the recorded imagery of the previous evening. And the Mad Scientist Machine will use color and intensity to cue the ensembles and visuals, Miller and Smulovitz conducting instant compositions.

Mad Scientist Machine – Stefan Smulovitz

The Mad Scientist Machine is a software/hardware system created by Stefan Smulovitz allowing a user (conductor/composer) to organize a group of players in a structured improvised composition system. A local or remote user can use the software to control an LED light that is placed in front of each performer.

Sammy Chien

Sammy Chien is a Taipei-born, Vancouver-based interdisciplinary media artist, director, performer, researcher and mentor who works with film, sound art, new media and dance/theatre performance. After learning real-time performance softwares from Troika Ranch (NYC/Berlin) he continues his deep interest in interdisciplinary collaborations and forges deep connections between image, sound, and movement.

MASOM - Kıvanç Tatar and Philippe Pasquier

Musical Agent based on Self-Organized Maps (MASOM) is a musical software agent for live performance. MASOM plays experimental music and free improvisation. It learns by listening to audio files such as recordings of performances or compositions. MASOM extracts higher level features such as eventfulness, pleasantness, and timbre to understand the musical form of what it hears. MASOM is limited to the style of what is has listened to and reacts in real-time to what he is hearing.

the NOW Society ensemble: Lisa Cay Miller (piano), Jon Bentley (saxophone), JP Carter (trumpet), James Meger (bass) and Skye Brooks (drums).

The NOW ensemble is a five to ten-member ensemble with flexible instrumentation drawn from Vancouver's finest improvising musicians. The music of the NOW is closely associated with Musique Actuelle and Creative Music, fusing improvisation and composition, the predetermined with the undefined. Events planned and unplanned are linked, craft and skill navigates the endless possibilities of the unknown.