by Chad Eby, artist
Artist Chad Eby discusses the artistic motivations and technological designs of Skärgården (The Archipelago), a networked audio and sound sculpture that re-imagines cold war paranoia in the Stockholm archipelago in light and sound, and several other related works on display during studio 300.
Chad Eby is a designer, artist, teacher and researcher. He earned his Master of Fine Arts in Imaging and Digital Arts at UMBC, IMDA in 2006 and a Master of Arts in Communication from University of Arkansas in 1998. Chad is an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky. He taught previously at Herron School of Art and Design and worked as a research engineer in the Mobile Media Services lab at Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (the Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm, Sweden. He has exhibited in a number of both local and international juried shows, including Installation Nation at Indianapolis Arts Center, Art2Make at Center for Book and Paper Gallery at Columbia College, Group Four, Foundry Art Center, Sound Objects in Valencia, Spain, and SoundLAB V in Cologne, Germany.
by Hunter Ewen, researcher, composer, & saxophonist
AI researcher and musician Dr. Hunter Ewen, of Music AI company Amper by Shutterstock, speaks on the future of music tech, how data scientists use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to generate music, and why AI won’t put us musicians out of work.
Hunter Ewen is a dramatic composer and educator. During the day, Dr. Ewen designs systems for artificially intelligent creativity. At night, he masks up and fights crime with loud noises and strange ideas. His work rails against the waning borders of science and art—meaning and meaninglessness. Ewen values clamor and deviance. Clarity and frenzy. Space... Yowls and yips and screams that masquerade as music. He's worked some of the same jobs and won some of the same awards as other composers, too.
by Annica Cuppetelli & Cristobal Mendoza, artists
Annica Cuppetelli & Cristobal Mendoza discuss the artistic motivations and technological designs of their Studio 300 works installed in Morlan Gallery.
Annica Cuppetelli and Cristobal Mendoza began collaborating as Cuppetelli and Mendoza in 2010. They create installations and objects that combine physical elements with digital technologies, composing sensual, immersive, and dynamic experiences. Based in Detroit, their work has been exhibited in the Denver Art Museum, the Bienal de Video y Artes Mediales in Chile and in festivals such as Nemo 2013 (France), Scopitone 2012 (France), ISEA 2012, FILE 2011 (Brazil), FAD 2011 (Brazil) and video_dumbo 2013 and 2011 (New York). They were selected as Kresge Artists in Detroit Fellows for 2015. Cuppetelli received a MFA in Fibers from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Mendoza received a MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design.
(audiovisual interactive installation. Tulle, camera, projector, computer, custom software)
(looped video projection on wall (00:03:30))
Hannah Claus is a transdisciplinary artist of Kanien’kehá:ka / English heritage who engages Onkwehon:we epistemology to highlight ways of understanding and being in relation with the world. She obtained her AOCAD from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1997 and her Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University in 2004. A 2019 Eiteljorg Fellow and 2020 recipient of the Prix Giverny, recent group exhibitions include Àbadakone (National Gallery of Canada; Ottawa) Blurring the Line (Eiteljorg Museum; Indianapolis) and the Biennale de l’art contemporain autochtone 2020 : Teionkwariwaienna Tekariwaiennawahkòntie | Honorer nos affinités (Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain; Montréal). Claus’ installations belong to various public collections, such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Eiteljorg Museum, North American Native Museum (Zurich, CH), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Global Affairs and the City of Montreal. Concurrent with her studio practice, Claus has been a regular sessional teacher at Kiuna College (Odanak, Quebec) from 2012 - 2020. She is currently hired as Assistant Professor in Frameworks and Interventions of Indigenous Art Practice in the Studio Art Department at Concordia University. She has been a board member of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (2013 - 2018) and currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Conseil des arts de Montréal since 2018. She is one of the co-founders of daphne, a new Indigenous contemporary arts centre based in Tiohtià:ke [Montreal]. Claus was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick and has lived in New Brunswick and Ontario. Since 2001, she lives and works with her family in Tiohtià:ke. She is a member of the Tyendinaga Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte.
(soap, water, tubing, motor, hole in the wall)
Lisa Walcott is a Holland, Michigan based installation artist and kinetic sculptor whose work explores relationships to space and cycles of deterioration and growth, through various subtle gestural objects. Walcott received her MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2010 and has continued to create and exhibit nationally. Her work explores mundane, extracted moments from familiar spaces ultimately giving lyricism to the unseen and visual articulation to the unsaid.
(fabric, rod, thread, spinner, wood, motor, wire)
(LED matrix, code)
Perception of time in the absence of clocks is both remarkably fluid and not well understood. Human Time Estimation plays with pace and duration through noise patterns displayed on a matrix of LEDs.
(LCD monitors, raspberry pi video players, wood, plexiglass, polarizing film, digital videos)
Frank Geiser is a midwest based artist, originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He earned his MFA from the University of Kentucky in 2021 and his BFA from Xavier University with concentrations in photography and painting in 2018. His research combines photography with philosophy and theology to understand concepts within changing identities and ascetic practices.
(glass diffusion fiber optic cable, copper, steel, wood, resin, microprocessor, laser diodes, wiring)
(microcontrollers, plywood, 3D prints)
A networked audio and sound sculpture that re-imagines cold war paranoia in the Stockholm archipelago in light and sound.
(single channel video)
A generative animation that cycles between hard geometry and the cellular automata generated by Conway's Game of Life.
(digital print, light)
Different levels of subdivision become dominant with shifting light color.
(OLEDs, acrylic, microcontroller)
Common fate is a meditation on psuedorandomness. Five independent microcontrollers make "random" choices of letters when pinged by a sixth...nonetheless, they spell coherent words due to the underlying "random" seed.
(looped video)
Most Retrieved Words began through engagements with the general public and by asking dog-owners the question, “What have you learned from your dog?” Participants were also asked to submit short audio clips of their dogs barking. This material was used to position dogs as valid sources of knowledge, wisdom, and power. The sounds of the dogs were manipulated to mimic the spacious reverberations of sacred architecture. The visual content in the work contains hundreds of videos of running dogs that were extracted from found footage. These four-legged figures appear as ghostly, supernatural, and regal.
F. C. Zuke is an artist working in video, sound, installation, interactive media, and creative coding. He creates audiovisual works that investigate the intersection of human/machine intelligence and the ways that beliefs are acquired, transmitted, and performed in society.
(generative computer images)
An algorithm generates an endless stream of possible art objects and displays the description as a notecard on an LCD screen. The subject and depictions of each virtual work come from the United States Library of Congress Subjects Index. Since the work is generated in real-time by combining phrases from databases, the descriptions are always new, unpredictable and not likely to repeat.
Holland Hopson is a sound and media artist, composer and improviser. Recent exhibits include the Southern Sonic sound art festival at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA; the Automated exhibit in the Fringe Arts Festival, Bath, UK; and Art as Message at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Korea. Holland's work uses sound and language via computer technology to engage with questions of consciousness and systems of knowledge. Much of the work involves computer code as a stand-in for human agency and decision making.
(looped video, digital images)
A short-form ambient concept album, designed for automated shuffling, allows listeners to craft new auditory experiences during each play. Here, a harmonic mixing strategy allows songs to seamlessly flow into one another regardless of order. User-created listening patterns will emerge from randomness based on preference, retention, and skips, among other metrics built into modern-day shuffling algorithms like song popularity and length. In addition to the inperson installation, a networked portal allows interactions and listening online.
Ian Rios is an artist and computer scientist who enjoys experimenting with sound. After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2018 with a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Computer Music & Ambisonics, Ian started WHY? Record Company, a decentralized avant-garde and electronic music label. Ian has lectured at the 2018 ICMA in South Korea, where he showcased his wave-field synthesis and ambisonic educational tools. Ian currently is a Web Development Bootcamp Instructor at Awesome Inc in Lexington, KY.
(looped video, digital images)
In 1837 just 7 years after the first permanent photograph was made, the earliest and most well-known photographic still life was created. This marked not only the start of Fine Art photography but also a continuation of a long-held art tradition: Learning new processes and practices using inanimate objects or the still life. For this first project, Art 2364 students were asked to choose to either create a unique still life of their own; or in the mode of street photography instead discover a still life existing serendipitously, to explore with their cameras.
Found or Created ‘Still Life’ features artworks by Transylvania University students in Prof. Corrinne LeNeave's Integrated Media: Photography class.
(digital print installation)
The way that we now experience object-hood is ungrounded. So much of our lives are no longer rooted in actual space; as we interact more and more with people and things on the internet, objects now free float in a non-space - an internet space. It is this new layered experience, this hybridized ‘reality’ that Corrinne’s work investigates. Through appropriated Internet imagery she constructs complex neo-neo dada assemblages that question the relationship between our physical bodies and our 'online' selves.
Alexandra Corrinne LeNeave is a conceptual Post Internet artist and educator who lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky, holding a BFA in Video & Performance Art + MFA with an emphasis in Photography & Installation Art. Corrinne teaches Photography at Transylvania University in addition to teaching Foundations Art, Art History courses at BCTC, and Photography courses at Georgetown College and the University of Kentucky. You can check out Corrinne’s work on her website: www.corrinneleneave.com
(free to download GPS enabled phone app, map, ambient sound, digital percussion)
By downloading the free phone app, users walk and use the app's GPS navigation map to encounter and listen to geospatially located sounds and music.
Transy Soundwalk 2021 features mapping, sounds, and music by Chad Eby and Transylvania University students in Prof. Timothy Polashek's Introduction to Music Technology class.
by artists and composers from around the world
Works by digital artists and composers from around the world chosen for the Studio 300 Digital Art and Music Festival are streamed and accessible to internet users around the world from the Studio 300 website. New works added daily throughout the festival.
(interactive music technology with video)
This interactive electronics and cello/violin improvisation explores the looming concerns about fiat currency creation linked to the Covid pandemic and the potential impact on people’s livelihoods and lifestyles. In doing so, it reflects on a wide range of emotions tied to the current economy ranging from uncertainty, urgency, volatility, anxiety, and the rising concern on inflation and the fate of the dollar.
Cecilia Suhr is an intermedia artist and researcher, multi-instrumentalist (violin/cello/piano/voice), painter, improviser, and author, working at the intersection between art, music, and interactive media. Her work has been exhibited and performed across the U.S. and overseas in U.K., Australia, Greece, France, Russia, Portugal, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, etc., through galleries, biennials, museums, conferences, and festivals. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Arts and an affiliate professor of art at Miami University Regionals, OH.
(interactive music technology)
Crow Chases Red-tailed Hawk is a structured improvisation for bullroarers, whistles and other aerophones with live electronics. These custom instruments were created using generative design principles and produced with 3D fabrication techniques. The sounds of the instruments are processed by audio algorithms that are driven by the speed, intensity and direction of the instruments. The work is supported in part by a grant from the University of Alabama Office for Research and Economic Development (ORED) and by the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative (CARI).
Holland Hopson is a sound and media artist, composer and improviser. A multi-instrumentalist, he usually performs on clawhammer banjo and electronics. Holland often augments his instruments with custom-designed sensor interfaces and performs with his own highly responsive, interactive computer programs. Holland has performed in Australia, Europe and North America. He has held residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida; The Hambidge Center, Georgia; LEMURPlex, Brooklyn; and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts, New York.
(electro-acoustic music with performer)
'Bit Rot' examines the divide between the real and the unreal; live tuba playing elides with its synthesized counterpart, until both the real and synthetic performers degrade and return to their basic components. The work was originally written for Dr. Daniel Rowland, in gratitude and friendship.
Dr. Aaron Hynds is a Kentucky-based audio engineer, low brass performer, and composer. He currently works as the Lecturer of Music Business and New Media at the University of Kentucky, teaching courses in audio recording and the music industry and directing the RocKats rock ensemble. His creative practice as both performer and composer focuses on the intersection of digital and analog domains, with his chosen instruments being the tuba and the computer. Recent works include "Bit Rot" for tuba+fixed media and its successor, "Data Decay" for tuba+live electronics.
(electro-acoustic music with video)
syn (2021) is four short movements centered on an imagined future world where synthetic beings have become the prevalent species. Digital has become the new religion. Any yearning for the distant past organic way of life is shut down. The work follows a synthetic being, SB-1021, and their “sins” against this new culture.
i. corpora
ii. intima
iii. loquere
iv. viscera
Robert McClure’s music attempts to discover beauty in unconventional places using non-traditional means. His work has been featured at festivals including the Beijing Modern Music Festival, SCI National Conference, Seoul International Computer Music Festival, Ars Electronica Forum Wallis, NYCEMF, SEAMUS, IDRS, ISCM, and ICMC. Robert received his doctorate from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Robert has previously held positions at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and Soochow University in Suzhou, China. He serves as Assistant Professor of Composition/Theory at Ohio University.
(electro-acoustic music with performer)
Bow Shock is defined by Merriam – Webster as “the shock wave formed by the collision of a stellar wind with another medium (such as the magnetosphere of a planet).” I imagined the flute as being an interstellar object, like a comet, causing reactions and waves as it travels its path.
Jason H. Mitchell is a classically trained guitarist and a composer of instrumental and electro-acoustic music. Though he has lived throughout the United States, he grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, where the rich cultural heritage of the Texas-Mexico border region influences much of his music. Jason is currently a Lecturer of Music Composition and Technology at the University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley. He recently finished creating new programs in Music Technology and Music Business that will be offered in Fall 2022.
An active performer, teacher, and clinician, Brielle Frost has performed and given masterclasses throughout the United States, Peru, Brazil, Italy, and Canada. She is a substitute player with the Symphony of Southeast Texas and a founding member of the Ambrosia Flute Trio and the PanAmerican Trio. Dr. Frost actively presents performances, clinics, and lectures at conventions of the National Flute Association, Texas Music Educators Association, College Music Society Conference, the American Single Reed Summit, and the National Association of College Wind and Percussion Instructors. She is a reviewer for the Flutist Quarterly and has published articles in The Instrumentalist and The Flute Examiner. Dr. Frost is the Assistant Professor of Flute at Lamar University. Prior to her appointment at Lamar University, she served on the faculty at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley and Western State Colorado University.
(electro-acoustic music)
This piece serves as an exploration of otherworldly sounds affiliated with The Suffering, the antagonistic force of a video game project I have been developing for the past few years. Utilizing the sounds of nature's incredible power, including tornadoes, meteor strikes, and the 220 decibel clicks of sperm whales, the piece reflects The Suffering's nature as unpredictable yet inevitable destructive forces. Beginning in an eerie landscape, the piece moves through justly tuned, distorted and dissonant chords before reaching a frenzied chase of aggressive odd time signatures.
I am a composer and video game programmer who graduated from the University of Kentucky with a Master's in Composition in 2019 and from Transylvania University with a Bachelor's in Music Technology and Music Performance in 2015. Since graduating, I have been developing Project Promise, a turn-based strategy video game, along with my partner, artist Kristen Frost. Compositionally, I take great influence from video game legends such as Nobuo Uematsu, Yasunori Mitsuda, and Keiichi Okabe, in addition to progressive metal, jazz, and the music of Henry Mancini.
(electro-acoustic music with performer)
Machineworks: Mothership is the most recent collaboration by brothers Tim and Matt Polashek intersecting eletro-acoustic and jazz musical aesthetics. In this case, Tim creatively programmed and pushed to the limit a Moog Grandmother Semi-Modular Analog Synthesizer to provide a diverse ecosystem of sonic terain for Matt's virtuosic and lyrical improvisations on tenor saxophone. Laser light illiumnation, designed by Chris Wheeler, accompanies this premiere performance of Machineworks: Mothership.
Matthew Polashek is a saxophonist and audio engineer living in Lexington, Kentucky. His work focuses on the development of a fusion of modern jazz and contemporary art music composition techniques. He holds an MFA in Music Composition from The Vermont College of Fine Arts, M.A. in Teaching Music from the City University of New York, and a B.A. in Jazz Studies from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, where he studied saxophone with John Salerno. He also performs and teaches sax, flute, and clarinet in a multitude of genres, including by serving saxophone instructor and jazz ensemble director at Transylvania University. He has performed and recorded with internationally renowned artists including David Liebman and Bryan Lynch.
Timothy Polashek produces works in a variety of styles, including vocal, instrumental, interactive, electro-acoustic, multimedia, and text/sound music and poetry. He authored The Word Rhythm Dictionary: A Resource for Writers, Rappers, Poets, and Lyricists. Prior to earning a Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition from Columbia University, Polashek earned a M.A. in Electro-Acoustic Music from Dartmouth College, and a B.A. with honors in Music from Grinnell College. He is the Music Technology Studies Coordinator, a Professor of Music, and the Digital Arts and Media Program Director at Transylvania University, as well as Co-Director of the Transylvania Digital Liberal Arts Initiative.
Chris Wheeler is a lighting designer, audio and video engineer, musician, and owner of Anagram Media productions from Lexington, Kentucky.
(interactive music technology)
TITE Rope Jam is a collaborative work and interactive music system developed by the Transylvania Interactive Technology Ensemble (TITE Ensemble), which consists of students in Prof. Timothy Polashek's Interactive Music and Mulitimedia class. In this work, the TITE Ensemble performs on iPads to capture and wirelessly transmit musical gestures to a computer program running newly devloped and responsive sound generating algorithms. The visual and haptic interfaces on the iPads were also created and iteratively customized for this performance. Because of pandemic supply chain shortages delaying access to iPads, the TITE Ensemble is truly walking a "tight (TITE) rope" in bringing newly developed systems and performance strategies to the stage with little time for robust testing.
(interactive music technology)
Imagine a train full of pianos on the beach.
This piece is nothing like that.
Dr. Travis Garrison is a composer, audio engineer, and performer of electroacoustic music, and serves as Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Music Technology at The University of Central Missouri. A common thread throughout his work as a composer and performer is a blurring of the boundaries between things organic and things electronic, between the actual and the imagined, and between the real and the hyperreal. Current research interests include computer-based improvisational systems and the aesthetics, history, and theory of electroacoustic music.
(electro-acoustic music)
Inspired by the natural world, “Spiders” explores the idea of loneliness as tied to the social stigma these arachnids face. Spiderlings spinning webs through space shifts to the solitary life of an adult spider, existing in a void -- all communicated through audio. Avid Pro Tools was used to record and manipulate synthesized instruments, ambient sounds, vocals, and acoustic violin as performed by the composer.
Tammy Ray is a junior at Transylvania University on track to a music technology degree. She plays violin and is currently learning piano, both of which have helped her create music for the university’s theatre program and for music pieces with friends.
(electro-acoustic music with performer)
Transparent, Luminescent is a meditation of sorts. In the work, the recorder phases in and out of the electronics, composed of beer glasses. At times, the recorder gives premonitions of the electronics, and at times it responds to the electronics. This interplay is never light or humorous, though. The intent is that you, as a listener, find yourself unsure of which voice is which – who leads, and who follows? This is a representation of the interaction between the electronics, algorithmically generated, and the flute part, which was written by hand.
Aaron Stepp was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1985. His compositions and research span acoustic music, digital signal processing, hypermetric analysis, electro-acoustic composition, Python programming, Computer-Aided Composition, Algorithmic Composition, collaborations with dance and poetry, and food and wine pairing. He has had commissions and/or performances from Eva Legene, Merrilee Elliott, Orchestra Enigmatic, Scott County (KY) High School Band, KMEA District 7, Yarn|Wire, JACK Quartet, Splinter Reeds, and New Thread Quartet.
Merrilee Elliott serves as second flutist in the Lexington Philharmonic and performs regularly with a variety of chamber music ensembles. Besides Transylvania University and Asbury University, she teaches at the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts and maintains an active private studio. Each summer since 1984, she has performed in the Peninsula Music Festival Orchestra in Door County, Wisconsin, where she has also appeared as soloist.
(electro-acoustic music with video)
Liminal Senses explores the intersection of human and machine bodies and the ways that technology has mediated human interactions. The visual material is comprised of fragmented body parts, nature footage, and close-ups of a robot built by the artist. The sounds in the work were collected from field recordings of wind and electronic sounds discovered through disassembling electronic devices and hacking their circuit boards.
(electro-acoustic music)
Exteriores Spatium explores the concepts of heaven and hell, the soul, the origins of the earth, and space travel through the eyes of children.
Timothy Moyers Jr. is a composer and audio-visual artist originally from Chicago. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of Kentucky and supervises the Electroacoustic Music Studio. Prior to joining the University of Kentucky, Timothy was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design at IIIT-D (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology), Delhi, India where he was the Founder & Director of ILIAD, Interdisciplinary Lab for Interactive Audiovisual Development, and GDD Lab, Game Design and Development Lab.
(interactive music technology)
Bellysauce is a project exploring the mixture between the various tones of the tuba and samplers. It is based on the concept of a loose assemblage of modes with layers of live sampled tuba and electronic sounds. Because the traditional song form is eschewed, this allows for highly improvisational pieces. One of the hallmarks of live performances of Bellysauce is the technique of using false tones, which is where the performer sings a tone at the same time as a note is being played. The use of this technique with samplers allows for multiphonic sounds and textures to be developed.
Bellysauce is a project of the Nashville-based electronic musician Ryan Evans. Ryan has played across various performance spaces across the mid south, with a focus on avant guarde tones and song forms. Ryan began working with synthesizers and samplers in 2010, and has worked to combine textural sounds together with low brass instruments. He also has a more traditional electronic synthesizer project called Chimarra, named after a type of aquatic caddisfly. Ryan's music is highly inspired by nature, and harsh industrial tones and sounds convey the harsh and unforgiving natural world.
