Cupis & Live Fieldwork #114
Doors: 19:30
Start time: 20:00
CUPIS (Gianni Gebbia and Giovanni Verga) - Avoiding the Sun
With the multimedia work "Avoiding The Sun", CUPIS explores the boundaries between organic sounds and repetitive structures represented by the visuals that build up undiscovered and mysterious ways to reveal the obscure sides of what nature hides. A dimension where the sound sources are blended and merged with the images in a Fata Morgana or cosmic mirage.
Live Fieldwork (Tomomi Adachi, Emilio Gordoa and Ritwik Banerji)
Maxine and Bob are artificial improvisers. They are interactive systems which behave like improvisers as much as possible, listening and responding to human musicians as another semi-autonomous (machine) improviser. The question for this evening, as always, is: do they sound like human beings? And really, what would that even mean, since free improvisers seem to value sounding like no one else? In this event, Emilio Gordoa and Tomomi Adachi are invited to participate in “Live Fieldwork”. Each performer is invited to perform a duet with Maxine and Bob. After the piece, each gives their commentary on how these artificial performers behave, and how, or whether, they fail to be human (and whether this is really such a major offense.) The audience is also given a chance to comment on how these systems behave.
CUPIS is a duo formed 2010 by the Gianni Gebbia and Giovanni Verga . In some of their performances it becomes also a trio adding the live video manipulations of Sara Picco.
Tomomi Adachi was born in Kanazawa, Japan in 1972, is performer, composer, sound poet, installation artist, occasional theater director. Performing with voice, live electronics, he has performed works by Cage, Cardew, Wolff, Yuji Takahashi, with Nicolas Collins, Jerome Noetinger, Annette Krebs, Jennifer Walshe, Jon Rose, Butch Morris, Otomo Yoshihide, and at the Tate Modern, IRCAM/Centre Pompidou, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Roulette, Tonic, ZKM, STEIM, Experimental Intermedia and Merkin Hall. In 2009-10, he was a fellow of the Asian Cultural Council in New York, and most recently, in 2012 was a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstler program.
Emilio Gordoa is a Mexican composer and improviser based in Berlin since 2012. He studied composition with Vincent Carver and Mario Lavista and has performed with German Bringas, John Russel, Tristan Honsinger, John Butcher, John Edwards, Misha Marks, Axel Dörner, Tony Buck, Tobias Delius, Jack Wright, Ute Wasserman, Klaus Kürvers and many others. He is a frequent performer with the BerIO and Circuit Training, an electro-acoustic octet. He has performed in several festivals around Europe including the Klangkunstprojekt of Leipzig, Art-Sound Festival in Berlin, and the Contemporary Art Museum of Warsaw.
Ritwik Banerji is an anthropologist of music and interactive media artist. His work focuses on the development of virtual free improvisers, interactive systems designed o listen and respond to human players in the manner of a fellow performer of collective improvisation. This work is the center of his doctoral research as an ethnomusicologist at the University of California, Berkeley, constituting an ethnographic representation of modes of social interaction (through sound) typical in free improvisation. As a fellow of the Fulbright Journalism Program and the Berlin Program for Advanced German Studies, Banerji has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on musical interaction in Berlin’s Echtzeitmusik scene since 2014.