Clippings

Collaboratories Project Takes Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Stories and Myths
A new interdisciplinary project, taking a unique approach to understanding stories and myth, has been launched as one of the first programs sponsored by Chancellor Marye Anne Fox’s “Collaboratories” initiative. …
This week @ UCSD, Oct. 1, 2007

An 'Opera of Meaning' Integrates Live Performance, Internet, Multimedia and Audience Participation at UC San Diego
Kamza and Bar Kamza is an innovative, interactive theatrical piece that is hard to categorize. Told in four acts broken into 16 short scenes, it is set to sound, visuals and semantic web technology. …
calit2 newsroom, San Diego, CA, March 1, 2008

Music and Film Recombination by Machine
The meaning in music is considered to be related to expectation and surprise. This type of artistic manipulation requires capturing of context in time and creation of new unexpected alternatives. …
calit2 events, March 11th, 2008

A Musically Creative Machine?
When French composer Georges Bloch visited his alma mater UC San Diego and held a workshop at Calit2, the event morphed from a seminar into a free-wheeling, improvisational musical performance by a human performer — and a computer. …
calit2 newsroom, San Diego, CA, March 23, 2008

From San Diego CityBeat
http://www.sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/night_owls/7705/
Published: 01/20/2009

Counter-culture roll call
—Eric Wolff

Let’s start with the sheer number of stimuli at Kamza and Bar Kamza, an ArtPower! Film event at The Loft @ UCSD last Thursday: Two narrators tell the story of Jerusalem’s destruction, one armed with percussion instruments for sound effects, the other occasionally breaking into song; giant screens hang at the front and the back of the room, and projected on each are slide shows, movie clips or the talking heads of Talmudic scholars; free nosh sits on a table for anyone who’s puckish; every audience member has a pamphlet that also tells the story; and half the audience have open laptops, each of which run a specially created home page that contains its own Flickr slideshow, text of the story, polls and a chat window. It was, one might say, a tad overwhelming—but fascinating.

The premise of the show, directed by UCSD music professor Shlomo Dubnov, was to invite audience members to construct their own versions of the tale via their interactions during its telling. Audience members were encouraged to whisper amongst themselves, discuss the story during the three intermissions and take advantage of the online chat.

Few were willing to interrupt the performers—which included UCSD percussionist Steven Schick and music professor Roger Reynolds—with whispering, but the online chat was quite a success once some technological issues were overcome. Even as the story was being told, we had a free-flowing discussion of how the story illuminated issues of classism and racism and how we thought characters in the story were wise or foolish.

But then, there’s a downside to chatting. With our divided attention, some of the chatters had trouble following the story’s arc, which wasn’t straightforward to begin with. And although the discussion touched on important subjects, there was also a rambling discussion about San Diego’s burrito options (which I might have caused).

It was all very new and experimental, but it kind of worked, too. I recommend checking out Dubnov’s future incarnations, one of which will be the telling of a Japanese folk tale, the other a story from sci-fi writer Geoff Ryman.

Calit2 Music Researcher Elected to IEEE Technical Committee
UC San Diego music faculty member Shlomo Dubnov has been elected to the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Generated Music. Dubnov is an active participant in Calit2, which sponsored and hosted the world premiere of his work, Kamza and Bar Kamza , in 2008. ….
calit2 newsroom, San Diego, June 1, 2009

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