NYC: Computer Music Performance in conjunction with "Wakening Shrouds: Evaporating Installation"

[richard chartier <chartier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> (by way of taylor deupree)]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Saturday, November 18th, 2000
8 pm


Taylor Deupree
Richard Chartier
Dmitry Gelfand
Alexander Kalin


Computer Music Performance
in conjunction with

"Wakening Shrouds: Evaporating Installation"

White Box Gallery
601 w. 26th St. 14th Floor
New York, NY



By carefully displacing the primary elements, one arrives at the vast 
diversity of matter comprising the still evolving Periodic Table. It 
should hence be of no surprise that traces of gold  were recently 
detected in the fabric of the human brain.  What may be surprising 
however, is the fact that the brain is the only place where such 
traces can be found in the human organism.  Analogous to the 
"philosopher's gold" described by the alchemists -- "aurum nostrum 
non est aurum vulgi" (our gold is not the gold of commoners) -- the 
isolated presence of gold on the rooftop of our molecular development 
is very much in accordance with the fundumental hierarchy of Nature. 
The gold in our heads ascended from the gold imbedded in the earth 
which had descended from our golden Sun.  The evolution of matter is 
a condensed reflection of the soul's ascent up the omnidirectional 
ladder of our cosmos.

At a cursory glance, the "Wakening Shrouds" project is a simulation 
of the never-exactly-repeating phenomena of dawn and dusk: light 
passes through water vapour which in turn, reflects, refracts and 
scatters the light.  Upon closer inspection, the installation conveys 
the discrete stages of both the physical and transphysical ascent 
towards the quintessence.

On Saturn day evening, November  18th, 4 computer music composers are 
gathering at the site of the installation to transcode (with the help 
of  'artificial intelligence') electromagnetic waves into isomorphic 
ones. By far the most refined and significant examples of artificial 
intelligence are to be found in the realm of sound wave synthesis and 
processing.  Unlike the protozoan developments in robotics and in 
other fields of self-propelled and or self-analysing software, audio 
programs have reached a level of boundless capacities and subtelties, 
ranging from the sonification of molecular vibrations to the uncanny 
hybridization of disparate waveforms which spontaneously reconfigure 
themselves ad infinitum without exactly repeating any previous 
hybrids.  The performances will involve synergetic interventions on 
the part of the composers so as to extend the interplay between 
compositional indeterminacy and computational indeterminacy.  Like 
the never-exactly-repeating scatterings of light through the 
never-exactly-repeating currents of water vapour, the passage of 
audio signals through multiple distinctly oscillating modules is a 
restratafication of the fluctuating conditions during which the early 
universe (the 'prima materia') spontaneously seperated into the 
celestial ladder of inerlocking essences.

"The Philosopher's Stone is made in the image of the Creation of the 
World.  For one must have its chaos and its prime matter, in which 
the elements float hither and thither, all mixed together, until they 
are seperated by the fiery spirit.  And when this has happened, the 
light is lifted up, while the heavy is brought downwards." (J. 
d'Espagnet, Das Geheime Werk, 1730)