about the machine musicians

io 0.0.1 beta++ | iWife

io 0.0.1 beta++

io 0.0.1 beta++ whimsically evokes a 1950s B-movie robot, constructed from ad-hoc components including plumbing, kitchenware and missile switches. Its celebrates the material and corporeal; embracing the localized and embodied aspects of sociality, performance and improvisation.

io 0.0.1 beta++ is an interactive, semiautonomous technological artifact that, in partnership with its human associates, performs a deliberately amplified staging of a socio-technical network—a network in which the primary protocol is improvisation. Together the cyborg ensemble explores the performance of identities, hybrids and relationships, and highlights the social agency of artifacts, and the social dimension of improvisation. Engineered by Han-earl Park, io 0.0.1 beta++ is a descendant, and significant re-construction, of his previous machine musicians, and it builds upon the work done with, and address some of the musical and practical problems of, these previous artifacts.

The construction of io 0.0.1 beta++ has been made possible by the generous support of the Arts Council of Ireland, and the Blackrock Castle Observatory event will be its first public performance.

iWife

John Godfrey’s iWife (I Will Improvise For Everyone) is a computer system designed to improvise and respond to input. Under most circumstances, that input will come from a human performer, but many other kinds of stimulus are possible. The system is based on a model of de Bono’s Special Memory Surface, and has the characteristic ability to learn, adapt, transform between and/or overlay different stimuli, develop unexpected outcomes from input without the use of crude randomness, and generate new materials from those already present in a musical situation. The system has been in development since an Arts Council grant to purchase the necessary equipment was awarded in 2007, and the Blackrock Castle Observatory performance will be its first official outing.

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