point of no return

With point of no return, Ryoji Ikeda condenses the unknowable chaos of the event horizon of a black hole into a work of order and balance. Composing a delicate assemblage of basic shapes, sounds, light and shadow, the artist eschews the intricacies of data for a more sculptural approach. While gesturing towards the sublime, the infinite expanse of space and the immense, reality-warping gravitational force of a black hole, he focuses in on the beauty of the physical, bringing together a few simple elements to make sense of something unthinkably complex. Through his own artistic process of playing with space, the artist finds purity in basic structures while drawing inspiration from the vast scope of the universal. “point of no return is a very simple, very intense piece,” he says.

Sounding Qubits

FILE 2024 | Quantico
International Electronic Language Festival
Eduardo Reck Miranda – Sounding Qubits – Brazil

Although he has learned classical musical instruments since childhood, Eduardo Miranda’s favorite tool for composing is the computer. The researcher has been delving into artificial intelligence and innovative computing methods for compositing for some time, as they offer fresh insights and ideas beyond his own.

A quantum computer deals with information encoded as qubits. A qubit is to a quantum computer what a bit is to a digital one: a basic unit of information. In hardware, qubits exist in the subatomic world. They are subject to the laws of quantum mechanics.

Quantum computers are like super-powered versions of classical digital computers. While a digital computer processes data in a linear, step-by-step fashion, a quantum computer can explore many possibilities at once.

Operating a quantum computer requires different ways of thinking about encoding and processing information. This is where composers can benefit greatly. This technology is destined to facilitate the development of unprecedented ways of creating music.

Bio

Composer who works at the intersection of music, science and new technologies. His background as an artificial intelligence scientist and classical composer with early involvement in avant-garde pop music informs his distinctive music. He has composed for BBC Radio 3, BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC Singers and Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He is a professor at the University of Plymouth and a research associate at Quantinuum, where he explores music composition with quantum computers.

Skin-awareness
The immersive space morphs and alters with light and becomes solid, its pressure composing and decomposing the self-awareness of skin. The dancer’s body is extended and manipulated as a conscious entity, exceeding the physiological object. The constant feedback between the body’s trajectory and interaction with the environment changes the nature of the object itself.

TREATISE
KYMATIC ensemble
Treatise is a graphic musical score comprising 193 pages of lines, symbols, and various geometric or abstract shapes that largely eschew conventional musical notation. Implicit in the title is a reference to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which was of particular inspiration to Cardew in composing the work.

CYBERDANCE

This net art by Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto offers us a split, fragmented, impossible dance, in a divided, multiplied space. Cyberdance consists of the combination and recombination of elements that represent the different parts of the human body. A mannequin was photographed as a model in different positions. These images were later converted to the animated form, allowing users to combine them in different ways, as well as link them to different dance terms, to the names of postures and positions of classical ballet. On a page divided into frames containing fragments of the mannequin, we can see his head, legs, torso and arms rotating, while allowing us to subdivide each frame by clicking on it, each frame composing an aberrant doll whose fragments dance, silently, independent one from the other. There is no music, no rhythm, no space. It is a digital dance, a dance in which time and space have become a platform.

‘Sisters with Transistors’, a documentary about the pioneers of electronic music

This November, a new documentary dedicated to the pioneers of electronic music will see the light under the name ‘Sisters with Transistors’. The feature centers around the work of figures such as Suzanne Ciani, Delia Derbyshire, Laurie Spiegel, and Clara Rockmore.
The feature aims to reveal a unique struggle for emancipation and restore the central role of women in the history of music and society in general.
‘We, women, were especially attracted to electronic music when the possibility of a woman composing was itself controversial. Electronics allow us to make music that others can listen to without having to be taken seriously by the male-dominated establishment’, says the director of the piece.

Quipu Womb
Although better known as a poet in her adoptive North American home (she has lived in New York since the 1980s), Cecilia Vicuña has stayed true to her youthful calling as a genre-bending visual artist for more than forty years, and her site-specific projects highlight the artist’s talent for composing poems in space, for a visceral lyricism in three dimensions.

Silent Percussion
File Festival
The “Silent Percussion Project” (SPP) consists in building a set of computer musical instruments that use human gestures to control sounds, composing and performing with them in an attempt to re-incorporate the body in music performance practice. The “SPP” is a response to the question: what kinds of musical instruments does live computer music performance need? To answer this question it researches the aesthetic qualities and language of non-live electronic music, action-perception systems and new media theory to experiment new ways of bridging between gesture and sound. In that sense, the “SPP” looks to address the problem of sound control by introducing new sensing techniques that take advantage of our sensorimotor capabilities. The Silent Drum and MANO instruments analyze shapes made by hands and transform them into multiple streams of continuous data. These streams, or variables, are directly applied to sound control, avoiding the key paradigm. Continuous data is analyzed to extract discrete features of the signals. The variables resulting from analysis are interdependent, that is, changes in one result in changes in the others, creating complex systems that the performer learns by experimentation.

Fade out
The project focuses on the progressive burying of a drumset under a gravel flow. Each impact is amplified in contact with the different instrument’s parts. The gravel flow produces a rythm section which turns into a sound and visual chocking. In opposition with the process of traditional music composing, the instrument is taken away from the hands of musician towards a rough experience. The sequence shot proposes an experimentation around the technical state of Fade-out, by materializing the decrease of sound and visual signal, until a complete silence and disappearance.