| 25 Mar 2021 | 18:00 - 20:00 | Online | |
- Description
- Programme
Description
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 Chrysi 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.
Playlist: The Known Worlds
Programme
| • | Satinder P. Gill Welcome to the Cambridge LASER Series – Why the Art & Science of data? |
| • | Prerona Prasad Introduction to the Heong Gallery |
| • | Chrysi Nanou – Cambridge LASER Co-Chair Introducing The New World project and performing Iceprints, composed by Matthew Burtner |
| • | Matthew Burtner – Eleanor Shea Professor of Music in Composition and Computer Technologies, University of Virginia. Composing Iceprints |
| • | The Metered Tide by Chris Chafe for celetto and tidal data |
| • | Chris Chafe – Director of Centre for Music Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Duca Family Professor of Humanities and Science, University of Stanford. |
| • | frostbYte – music by Daniel Blinkhorn |
| • | Aaron O’Connor – Director of the Arctic Circle Foundation (established in 2009), an artist and scientist-led annual expeditionary residency programme. The Arctic Circle Foundation |
| • | Victoria Vesna – Artist and Professor in Design Media Arts, UCLA, Director of the Art|Sci Centre in the School of Arts and California NanoSystems Institute. |
| • | 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. |
| • | A conversation – Jonathan Impett and Chrysi Nanou reflect on the processes of composing and performing to data. 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. |
| • | Closing words: Prerona Prasad |
