ICMC

August 2, 2011 – We performed at the ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) held this year at Huddersfield University. Because our sound check was at 1pm and the concert didn’t begin until 10:30pm we had a lot of time to kill. This was a good place to kill it. We attend the Unconference where the use of gesture and visuals were discussed with some interesting people who said some insightful things because of reasons.
(Here are some of those people: Freida Abtan, Adrian Freed, and David Wessel.) We also had a walk around the poster/presentation area, while filling up on coffee and smart cake to keep us going for the rest of the day.

We hung out for a long time with Scott Hewitt. One of the things we discussed was the tool Rod and I want to build that’ll allow me to live sample & synthesize sound via the gestures I already make while painting. He encouraged us to build the hardware, just hunker down, and figure out some of the programming so we’ll have a better understanding of what the thing will do. He said it could be a 10 year long project. That’s both exciting and induces and incredible sense of laziness in me.

But I digress…

The concert was really well attended. It was held at The Graduate, the university’s on-campus bar. Believe it or not, this crowd of academics got a little rowdy, but people were just having a good time (and were probably very drunk). There were four acts and we went on third. While Rod wasn’t too crazy about it I really liked seeing this one guy do some live coding, projected large on a screen, so you could see what he was doing. It was fun to watch.

Our performance went so-so. Rod and Anton think it went better than I think it went though. I just couldn’t get into it and kept repeating myself. The venue itself was really hot (Miami hot), and this was exasperated by the fact that I perform in front of two friggin hot-ass work lamps not four feet behind me. After 15 minutes I was dripping sweat and black paint. Niiiiice and griiiiity.

The painting is now owned by P.A. Tremblay and can been seen in his office at the university.

You can listen to the performance here:

TSC @ ICMC2011 by Takahashi