This lecture is divided into two parts. The first part of the lecture is dedicated to gaining an understanding of ultra minimalism in order to learn what the elements of operation are in music compositions are so reduced that the experience of listening to them becomes one of listing to near silence. Using this as a background, the elements of the work GongPong.SAT will be presented and the concept of distributed ensemble will be introduced, in order to demonstrate what role mobility plays in the work and how connectivity between players is accomplished by using GPS satellites as a ubiquitous sensor system. The lecture concludes with a line by line look at the code in the GongPong.SAT app that is used for the performance, so that the connection between what is in the sky and what takes place on the ground is revealed and so that issues of a more technical nature can be addressed to come to an understanding of how just a few lines of code can create a plethora of nuance in performance.

Bios

ART CLAY lives in Basel Switzerland. He has appeared at international festivals, on radio and television, and diverse art venues from top museums to artist run spaces. He has received support from a multitude of arts councils from around the world for diverse projects including those for performance, installation, theatre, and design. Prizes have been awarded to him for music composition, performance, theatre, new media art, curation, as well as software development. For the last ten years, he has taught media and interactive arts at various Art Schools and Universities in Europe, North America, and Asia including the University of the Arts in Zurich. He was a Guest Professor at Sogang University in Seoul from 2014 to 2017 for sound design and music composition.

JÜRG GUTKNECHT was professor for computer science and head of the Computer Systems Institute at the ETH Zürich until his retirement in 2014. He has a passion for new hybrid art forms. He has actively participated in culturally-oriented "wearable computing" projects, including "Instant Gain in Grace" (motion tracking of a Butoh dancer), "Going Publik" (distributed orchestra based on mobile electronic scoring), and "On the Sixth Day" (multi-channel video system for interactive storytelling). Together with Sound Artist, Art Clay, he organised the Digital Art Weeks from 2005 to 2015, offering opportunities  for both artists and scientists in the areas of computer-aided art and music.

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and kind support from: