Dear CMS friends,
We invite you to join us on Thursday March 25th at 18:00-20:00 for the second event of the Cambridge LASER Talks (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendevouz), called 'The Known World', curated by our own Chrysi Nanou!
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/29706 Registration:
https://www.leonardo.info/civicrm/event/info?id=619&reset=1 The Cambridge LASER talks (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendez-vous) questions the separation and propagation of art and science as distinct categories of knowing and being. We ask, 'What is creativity in science and the arts? What is experimental practice in art, science, or philosophy? Where do scientific and artistic attitudes, inquiries, methods overlap? How do they differ and complement each other? Can such understanding help shape our technological, urban, economic, and environmental futures for an ecologically and socially sustainable life and wellbeing.
The Known World
Chaired by Satinder Gill, Chrysi Nanou and Prerona Prasad
In this Cambridge LASER, we bring together musicians, scientists, and data scientists to discuss the processes of creativity and discovery and analysis of environmental data. It is the first in a series that will address the concept of data: how we collect, perceive, analyse, construct, make sense of and translate data, in various thematic contexts.
This Cambridge LASER responds to a concert curated by musician and music psychologist Chryssie Nanou, entitled 'The Known World'. It features works for piano, celetto and mixed media created using environmental data sets and sounds.
Four composers bring their distinct voices to raise awareness to ongoing environmental changes through sound and music, in particular, of three distinct locations unfolding their ecosystem: underneath the Arctic ice on the Alaskan coast, Svalbard coastline, and San Francisco's Crissy Field. These pieces together create an instantly compelling palette, one that simultaneously combines current technologies with ideas, materials and traditions inspired by the natural world.
Electronic sounds mixed with water, ice crackling, animal cries, hand-made instruments and sonic objects along with a technologically reimagined piano and cello, create a kind of harmony with contrasting lyrical improvisations and the overhead whine, purr and rumble of the nearby urban environment.
Programme
Satinder P. Gill (
https://cms.mus.cam.ac.uk/directory/satinder-gill) - Cambridge LASER Chair
Centre for Music and Science, University of Cambridge, and Managing Editor of AI & Society Journal (
https://www.springer.com/journal/146 ).
Welcome to the Cambridge LASER Series – Why the Art & Science of data?
Prerona Prasad (
https://www.dow.cam.ac.uk/people/dr-prerona-prasad) – Cambridge LASER Co-Chair.
Curator of the Heong Gallery (
https://www.dow.cam.ac.uk/cultural-life/heong-gallery), Downing College Cambridge
Introduction to the Heong Gallery.
Chrysi Nanou (
https://chrysinanou.wordpress.com) – Cambridge LASER Co-Chair.
Centre for Music and Science, University of Cambridge, and Centre for Music Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) Stanford University. Nanou is a Performer, curator, lecturer and teacher of piano performance. Her work gives special emphasis to performance practices for today's acoustic and electro-acoustic contemporary music.
Introducing The New World project and performing Iceprints, composed by Matthew Burtner.
Matthew Burtner (
http://matthewburtner.com) - Eleanor Shea Prof. of Music in Composition and Computer Technologies, University of Virginia. Co-director of Coastal Futures Conservatory, Director of the Alaska-based EcoSono non-profit organization.
Composing Iceprints
The Metered Tide by Chris Chafe for celetto and tidal data
Chris Chafe, (
https://chrischafe.net) – Director of Centre for Music Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Duca Family Professor of Humanities and Science, University of Stanford.
Chafe's works include gallery and museum music installations which are now into their second decade with "musifications" resulting from collaborations with artists, scientists and MD's. Recent work includes the Earth Symphony, the Brain Stethoscope project (Gnosisong), PolarTide for the 2013 Venice Biennale, Tomato Quintet for the transLife:media Festival at the National Art Museum of China.
The Metered Tide
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~cc/dataGG.mp4 frostbYte – music by Daniel Blinkhorn (
https://danielblinkhorn.com)
Aaron O'Connor (
http://thearcticcircle.org/2018/01/12/artists-in-the-arctic/ ) - Director of the Arctic Circle Foundation (established in 2009), an artist and scientist led annual expeditionary residency program.
The Arctic Circle Foundation
Victoria Vesna (
https://www.victoriavesna.com/index.php?p=biography) – Artist and Professor in Design Media Arts, UCLA, Director of the Art|Sci Centre in the School of Arts and California NanoSystems Institute. Vesna's work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nano-scientists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists. With her installations she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation.
Noise Aquarium
http://noiseaquarium.com Richard Wolfson (
https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/people/richard-wolfson) - Benjamin F. Wissler Emeritus Professor of Physics, Middlebury College, where he also taught in the Environmental Studies Program and at the Middlebury Institute in Monterey. Wolfson's research involves the Sun, climate change, and solar energy. Author of numerous books and textbooks including Energy, Environment, and Climate.
A Conversation - Jonathan Impett and Chrysi Nanou reflect on the processes of composing and performing to data.
Jonathan Impett (
https://orpheusinstituut.be/en/orpheus-research-centre/researchers/jonathan-impett)- Director of Research, Orpheus Institute, Gent, and Associate Professor at Middlesex University, London. Impett's professional and research activities cover many aspects of contemporary musical practice, as trumpet player, composer and theorist.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtMctW9Wk-HG0MD9VGDrfGhbnBJgJq-YK 
