Disrupted Human: REBOOT

Event details

Kate Ledger  piano
Federico Reuben  electronics

Desmond Clarke   Narcissus
Joanna Bailie   Artificial Environment No. 8
James Williamson   Fragments to Loop
Maya Verlaak   Whispers
Federico Reuben   On Violence
Federico Reuben/Kate Ledger   Improvisation

This programme positions a pianist in different technological contexts in which she interplays with different electronic aspects. Being both disruptive and complementary to her performance, some aspects will control her playing decisions and some aspects will overpower her. Some of this will relate to the natural, physical construct of sound and how this interacts with man-made computer algorithms. A battle between nature and nurture, this programme proposes that both can overcome the other.

Installation, afternoon/evening: installation for Disklavier by Federico Reuben in the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall. Free to ticket holders.

Midlockdown listening :: HDArchive_(date.today) is an installation by Federico Reuben, conceived during the first nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. An autonomous mechanical piano (Disklavier) plays music to an empty concert hall from a digital musical archive. On 20 April 2020 at 19:37:50, Reuben unleashed an algorithm into his hard drive that spread through its folders and subfolders searching for musical data. The algorithm found 1389 MIDI files capturing his own compositions, performances, unfinished drafts and sketches, encoded messages as well as his own collection of music by other composers. The algorithm traced and chose small samples from the files, infecting, in a selected few, digital mutations and disorders and storing its results in two floppy disks, lasting a total of 6 hours, 1 minute and 32 seconds. Midlockdown listening :: HDArchive_(date.today) examines themes of isolation, listening, memory, loss, symbolic representation and cognitive structure.