“We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us”.
– John M. Culking / Marshall McLuhan

Hosted by the Interspecifics Collective and Alberto de Campo, »A Score for Uncertainty« is a 7-day long collaborative laboratory focused on the creation of a sound composition from an unknown future, using existing but novel instruments and sound catalogues. Participants will collaborate in several improvisational and composition sessions aiming to analyze the way new devices could be involved in the creation of a futuristic soundscape. The result will be presented as a live concert at the end of the ICAS Festival week.

The Hacklab is open to specialists with finished projects that may be integrated into a machine/musical ensemble, and that are working with/on :

* DIY interactive instruments
* Data sonification systems
* Graphic composition software
* Frameworks for participatory collaborations
* Futuristic instruments
* Generative music software
* DNA-based sound systems
* Systematic music systems

Our planet’s sonic landscape has been gradually modified with each new technological upgrade, continually creating previously-unheard sonorities. We may have conquered the infinite variety of noise-sounds, as Russollo put it, yet “the machines we use for making music can only give back what we put into them” (Varèse, 1966). While theoretically we can generate any sound we imagine, implementation is often a laborious task (Hermanss, 2014).

The current context of technological democratization, where costs have fallen thus improving access to specialised knowledge and tools, has driven our generation to a cultural paradigm where the development of every new device reshapes our collective understanding of our present. How will this effect permeate our future?

18:00 – 20:00 // Festspielhaus Hellerau// 5€ / 3€
18:00 Energy Bending Lab live Interspecifics Collective
18:30 MusicMakers Hacklab Finale

Hacklab participants present the results of their week of collaboration and experimentation in short performances and presentations. Hosted by the Interspecifics Collective, which will also perform the Energy Bending Lab, a modular instrument that amplifies the microvoltage produced by microorganisms and transduces their oscillatory features into raw electronic signals that produce an unexpected array of sound patterns.

Alberto de Campo, one of the Hacklab collaborators, studied classical composition with Andrej Dobrowolski, Georg Haas, and Beat Furrer, jazz guitar with Adelhard Roidinger and Peter O'Mara, and electronic music with Curtis Roads and Stephen Travis Pope. He was a visiting scholar and research director at CREATE (UC Santa Barbara) before taking up teaching positions at IEM Graz, the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne and the Technische Universität Berlin. From 2005-2007 de Campo led the research team of the self-initiated project SonEnvir at IEM Graz, which was designed to study the applicability of data sonification in different scientific disciplines and contexts. In 2009 he became a Professor for Generative Art and Computational Art at the Institute für zeitbasierte Medien at the Universität der Künste Berlin. albertodecampo.net | @adc_xyz

Interspecifics Collective is a multispecies group experimenting at the intersection between art, science, and technology. They embrace hybridized practices among different disciplines and living organisms, open knowledge, and precarity as challenges.

http://interspecifics.cc