Will we need neither pop stars nor concert halls in the future? New socio-technical practices will enable amateurs to make the music they like themselves. Ubiquitous Music: an exciting journey through a new world of music making!
D. Keller (BR), lecture (en), “Ubiquitous Music”.
G. Kramann (D), performance, “Tangoschach” **
Lufo (AR), installation, “[IN]Musicality”.
The visitors will have the opportunity to play chess or dance Tango Argentino and participate in the creation of Tango Chess.
Registration is requested: kontakt@clb-berlin.de
Current artistic practices within the ubiquitous music movement (ubimus) explore the expanded possibilities of music making and computing that arise from the use of networked computers, as well as embedded and mobile platforms. Ubimus systems form an ecology of people and devices that is very different from earlier acoustic-instrumental music practices and their technological cousins. Damián Keller, one of the founders of the Ubimus movement, will talk about some of the recent artistic initiatives in this rapidly expanding field.
From the multitude of examples of novel musical practices that have emerged from the Ubimus movement, Lucas Olivero (aka Lufo) will present his installation [IN]Musicality, which explores innovative aspects of the visual transformation of imagined musical pieces.
A second contribution is a live musical performance developed by Guido Kramann. Two chess players control the sounds through their moves. The threatening situations resulting from the game positions trigger musical events in a constantly changing dialogue between chess rules, game strategies and emerging musical aesthetics.
Damián Keller is an associate professor of music technology at the Federal Universities of Acre and Paraiba, Brazil. He is a member and co-founder of the Ubiquitous Music Group (g-ubimus). His research focuses on everyday creativity, ecologically grounded creative practice, and ubiquitous music.
Lufo is an artist, architect, and civil engineer, and holds a PhD in design. He is currently pursuing a second PhD in Digital Media Arts. His ongoing research focuses on digital artifacts and artistic applications for handmade immersive drawings. He has exhibited and lectured in Europe and Latin America.
Guido Kramann is a professor of mechatronics at the Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences. He has also been teaching artistic research for engineers for several years. Composing music has always been an important part of his life. Especially the last 15 years were characterized by the desire to combine musical and technical interests, which led to several publications in the field of computer music as well as to a large number of compositional works.
Artworks
Deserted Mirrors (2022). (Damián Keller, Luzilei Aliel, Valeska Alvim).
Deserted Mirrors, a collaborative installation and video dance artwork, proposes an open dialogue between movement, image and sound triggered by the ongoing conflicts and aggressions imposed on the social dynamics in the Brazilian Amazon. The acoustic content is based exclusively on the improvised utterances of a female singer and on news footage of femicides that occurred in the state of Acre in 2019. A voice-activated percussive synthesis technique was used to generate all musical sources. The video-edited choreography reflects the terrible fate of many girls abused and abandoned by an increasingly deaf and blind society.
Contracapas for removed double bass and effects (Marcello Messina & Carlos Mario Gómez Mejía).
Contracapas (Spanish for “counter-layers”) is the product of various layers of interventions in different materials, especially textual references from performance notes in contemporary music scores. The work takes verbal cues and textual material as a starting point to set in motion a process that goes beyond notation and re-dimensions the discursive hegemony of the “score” as the ultimate and non-negotiable source of musical “truth”-this is done by insisting on utterances that are contiguous and complementary to the score itself, and that constitute a series of quasi-clichéd additions to the gesture presented by the notation. Performed by a necessarily “remote” double bassist (with “live” effects), the piece includes pre- and post-pandemic reflections on ubiquitous music in situations of physical distance, including but not limited to domestic ubimus.
[IN]Musicality (Lufo)
[IN]Musicality is an artistic installation that explores, exhibits, and plays with spherical perspectives. The artifact uses a machine learning library for body tracking to interact with the spherical perspectives through the movements of the hands. The concept of the artifact is “The Musicality of Drawing,” which means “How do we see music?” and “What music do you hear when you look at a particular spherical drawing?” [IN]musicality deepens this concept by using the so-called Hybrid Immersive Models or, in other words, by the interaction between a spherical perspective, a VR environment, physical objects and live music.
Thanks
Our special thanks go to Dr. Anthony Brooks from Aalborg University, Denmark, who provided us with advice and support.