Martin says:

This is fun, and not a little silly. Enjoy!

Garlic Hug:

Stop-start rhythms, garlic drones, & hiccuping beats. Found tapes & field recordings. Synth-sax skronk plus text-to-speech apocalypse.

Helen Papaioannou

Helen Papaioannou is a composer and performer based in Leeds, UK. She makes electronic music, writes ensemble compositions, improvises with a range of collaborators and composes for moving image. Kar Pouzi, Helen’s solo project, melds baritone saxophone & electronics in performances that are at once both stark and playful. Across her projects, Helen is drawn to minimal sound palettes alongside a fascination with scenarios and games that play with repetitive cycles, patterns and endurance. She has played as one half of Garlic Hug, and one third of the bands Beauty Pageant and HOKKETT.

You can watch Helen Papaioannou’s video interview piece here (contains flashing images).

Alessandro Altavilla

I am a Lecturer in Digital Creativity, where I teach the Computational Thinking and Developing Interactive Media modules. on the BSc programme. I also supervise final year students on their Interactive Media Individual Projects.

I have a background in arts and computational technology (PhD Goldsmiths University), digital media theory and practice (MRes Newcastle University) and electronic music composition and live electronics (BMus Conservatory of Music "N. Piccinni", Bari, Italy). I am also a freelance artist, sound designer, composer and electronic music performer.

In 2018 I completed an European Research Council (ERC) funded PhD in Arts and Computational Technologies at Goldsmiths’ Department of Computing. My PhD focused on listening experience and embodied sonic interactions mediated by digital technology. I contributed to the design of pedagogical techniques and methods, which I have deployed through a series of participatory sonic interaction design workshops with a variety of creative arts, technology and design students.

As part of my PhD research I co-authored a toolkit for rapid prototyping of interactive sound systems based on gestural-sound mappings, machine learning and digital sound synthesis and sample manipulation.

My artistic practice spans across digital and interactive media, investigating topics such as sense of place, memory and mediation of listening experience. My projects have involved creating mobile sound installations, radio artworks broadcasting text-to-speech data streams, exploring issues within the film archives of British colonial history, interactive music using e-textiles and responsive sonic environments.

I led creative and interactive media workshops at Ircam (Paris), Parsons New School for Design (New York), KHiB (Bergen) and Zurich University of the Arts. My work has received ACE funding and premiered at various festivals in the UK and abroad, including the Format Festival (Derby), the Marrakech Biennale of Art, Invisible Architectures (Newcastle), Royal College of Art London, Goldsmiths (University of London), Papey Listskjul (Orkney, Scotland) and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Hawick, Scotland).