Discussion and Performance WHAT: Yasunao Tone and Florian Hecker HOSTED BY: Computing Culture Group and Non-Event WHEN: Thursday, May 13, 2004 Talk: 4:00 PM EST Performance: 8:00 PM EST WHERE: Bartos Theatre/Lower Atrium, MIT Media Lab (E15) SUMMARY: Non-Event and the MIT Media Lab are pleased to present an evening of collaborative and solo works by avant-garde pioneer Yasunao Tone and emerging digital music composer Hecker. Together, Hecker and Tone will perform "Palimpsest," a piece using layers of sound from Tone's "Man'yo" material. Hecker will play a new version of his "Stocha Acid Vlook," and Tone will present a solo "Man'yo Wounded" piece. Tone will also present his multimedia project, "Molecular Music" for sound and film. Here, light-sensors arranged on the surface of a projection screen are triggered by Tone's films of ancient Chinese and Japanese texts to control a series of oscillators, creating electronic music. There will be a talk by the artists in Bartos Theater the day of the concert, time TBA, that will be open to the public. BIOS: Yasunao Tone has been active in creating "event" works and experimental music since the 60s and has been an organizer and participant in Fluxus, Group Ongaku, Hi-Red Center, and Team Random, Japan's first computer art group. For the past twenty years, much of Tone's work has focused on extending the possibilities of CDs as a performance medium. He transforms or "wounds" a previous composition of his by applying small pieces of tape to the CD surface and randomly overriding the player's error mechanism, creating a hypnotic blur of digital fragments as a result. He also has conducted ongoing software research in transforming the Chinese characters from "Man'yoshu," an 8th century anthology of Japanese poetry, into corresponding digital sounds, thus the "Man'yo Wounded" works for which he received the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in 2002. The work of Vienna-based artist Florian Hecker emphasizes the connections between contemporary and historic developments in computer music. His recent productions, often the result of collaborations with engineers and scientists, incorporate psycho-acoustic phenomena, disorientating the listener's spatial perception. Hecker has been working with computer music, on his own and in collaboration with artists such as Russell Haswell, Peter Rehberg, Marcus Schmickler, and Yasunao Tone, since 1996. His recent solo presentations have included performances at the Venice Biennale, Documenta11, the Pompidou Center, and the Autechre-curated All Tomorrow's Parties festival. His most recent full-lengh solo recording, Sun Pandamonium, received the Award of Distinction at the Prix Ars Electronica 2003. MIT Media Laboratory Home Page | Events Main Index