2004 Seattle Improvised Music Festival
Thursday, February 19 · Consolidated Works
500 Boren Avenue N · 8 P.M. · $5-15 sliding scale donationTim Perkis with Ron Heglin
Tim Perkis has been working in the medium of live electronic and computer sound for many years, performing, exhibiting installation works, and recording in North America, Europe, and Japan. His work has largely been concerned with exploring the emergence of lifelike properties in complex systems of interaction. In addition, he is a well-known performer in the world of improvised music, having performed on his electronic improvisation instruments with over 100 artists and groups, including Chris Brown, John Butcher, Eugene Chadbourne, Fred Frith, Gianni Gebbia, Luc Houtkamp, Yoshi Ichiraku, Roscoe Mitchell, Gino Robair, ROVA saxophone quartet, Elliott Sharp, Leo Wadada Smith, and John Zorn. Ongoing groups he has founded or played in include pioneering live computer network bands the League of Automatic Music Composers and the Hub, as well as Rotodoti, the Natto Trio, and Fuzzybunny.
His occasional critical writings have been published in The Computer Music Journal, Leonardo, and Electronic Musician magazine. He has been composer-in-residence at Mills College in Oakland, California and artist-in-residence at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, and he has designed musical tools and toys at Paul Allen's legendary thinktank, Interval Research.
His chequered career as a researcher and engineer has brought him a variety of interesting projects: designing museum displays for science and music museums in San Francisco, Toronto, and Seattle; creating artificial-intelligence based auction tools for business; building scientific experimental apparati; consulting on multimedia art presentation networks for the San Francisco Art Commission and SF Airport; and creating new tools for sound and video production and analysis. Recordings of his work are available on the labels Artifact, Limited Sedition, 482, Lucky Garage, Praemedia, and Tzadik (USA); Sonore and Meniscus(France); Curva Minore and Snowdonia(Italy); and XOR(Netherlands).
Statement: “I like to consider human-machine interaction as a new form of social interaction. What's interesting to me about computers is their ability to serve as a framework for embodying systems offering complexity and surprise. Unpredictability is what makes social life so interesting, it is what makes art so interesting, and it's what can make computers, as partners in art making, interesting. I don't use computers to simply carry out ideas I may have: I'd rather work in situations that force me to respond to surprises that are dealt to me by systems whose complexity and unpredictability are so high that their behavior cannot be known in advance. All of my computer-based artwork has been concerned with creating social (or synthetic social) situations, which have enough complexity to behave like real life: in fact, to be real life of some new kind. The system in question in almost all of these pieces consists of human beings and machines in cycles of mutual influence and response.”
Ron Heglin is a trombonist and vocalist working in extended technique on trombone and vocally with spoken and sung imaginary languages. He has studied at the Center for World Music, Ali Akbar Khan College, and Indian Vocal Music with Pandit Pran Nath. Ron performs regularly within the Bay Area and in Europe, where he has performed in vocal festivals within recent years. He counts as a major musical influence his study of north Indian vocal music.
2004 Seattle Improvised Music Festival