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Machines Speak At CalArts CEIAT Festival

Denise Guerra |
February 10, 2013 | 11:08 p.m. PST

Staff Reporter

(Audience members look at Whitman's Modular Synthesizer/Photo by Denise Guerra)
(Audience members look at Whitman's Modular Synthesizer/Photo by Denise Guerra)
Ever watch Star Wars and wonder how anyone could understand R2-D2’s rambling?

(Of course, for those who know the famous sci-fi adventure film, we know that another robot, C-3PO, was R2-D2’s direct partner in dialogue.)

One robot uses English. The other, a mix-and-match of high-pitch synthesized sounds.

To these androids, the communication makes sense. To the human audience, it’s a method of communication that's both confounding and amusing.

This was how it felt when watching artists Keith Fullerton Whitman and Joonyong Choi perform on Friday their dizzying and provocative pieces for the 2013 CalArts’ Center for Experimentation in Arts, Information and Technology at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Whitman, who studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, deconstructed the idea of sound as asynchronistic pulses, which quite figuratively, felt like bouncing balls of sound circling throughout the theater.

Whitman created these sounds by connecting different cords to several modular synthesizers. If you’ve never seen this instrument, think about the “Mad Men” days when phone operators would connect callers by switching and connecting different cables on a motherboard.

But when it came to Whitman’s motherboard-like instrument, the sheer number of cords and connections overflowed like a massive bowl of spaghetti.

Whitman's sounds appeared to have been mere experiments in frequency, but this changed when Whitman took the electronic pulses from his synthesizers and connected them to a special camera that projected an array of psychedelic colors onto a large screen. The colors then changed their brightness based on the electronic pulses sent through the synthesizer.

Computer music has always influenced Whitman, which differs from Choi’s performance of sound made through simpler machinery.

Choi quietly (and rather awkwardly) attached three Post-It tabs to a CD that was connected to a CD player with its top taken off. As the CD player rotated, Choi placed the contraption underneath foil and wax paper to create a very subtle beat.

It became rather nerve-wracking to watch each of the discs slowly come to a halt, but then Choi starts to distort the sound of bigger objects.

These include a mylar blanket attached to an electrical fan, and a large amp blaring what sounds like static in and outside of the theatre.

(Choi's Materials/Photo by Denise Guerra)
(Choi's Materials/Photo by Denise Guerra)
The improvisation left you feeling rather disoriented, but it also served the purpose of Choi’s body of work, which was to take apart playback devices such as CD players and explore the sounds that came with the manipulation and destruction of the machinery.

The night ended with both Whitman and Choi onstage, each facilitating their separate forms of sound creation. However this time, Choi’s instruments were connected to Whitman’s synthesizer, and the cacophony that ensued felt as if you had walked into a Tower of Babel populated by machines.

It was a collaboration born of experimentation, as neither artist had met the other until that day.

Both artists’ perspectives, created from sophisticated synthesizers or from a ceiling fan, examined the philosophical side of communication and technology.

In fact, a cellphone from the audience bellowed a loud and distinct sound during Choi’s piece.

“Droid,” the cell phone yelled robotically, as if wanting to be a part of the performance.

Reach Staff Reporter Denise Guerra here. Follow her on Twitter.



 

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