Machine Project

Clay Chaplin, Joseph Kudirka, Phillip Stearns
Episode Seven of You Too Can Play Difficult Music, a series of audience participation performances
Saturday April 15th 8:00pm
Machine Project
1200 D North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles, CA 90026
213 483 8761

Free

Clay Chaplin will be improvising with his bluetooth performance glove instrument called Stupid Thing. Audience members will be invited to play along using two other Stupid Things.

Joseph Kudirka’s piece explores the domain of short-range radio feedback. Here, consumer technology (portable FM recievers and transmitters) intended to isolate the individual is used to foster communal interaction between individuals.

Phillip Stearns will be presenting two of his most recent technological masterpieces. Incomplete Statement is a live audio/video improvisation using TI99 computers fitted with custom “self-observing” modifications. Adjacent Frequencies is an interactive installation piece he created with Lewis Keller that involves listening to little black boxes with strange probing devices.

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Clay Chaplin is a composer, improviser, and video artist from Los Angeles who explores audio-visual improvisation with computer instruments and networked systems. He uses computers and custom electronics as musical and visual instruments that can capture, process, playback, or generate sounds and images in real-time. Clay is continuing development of a wireless, interactive instrument named Stupid Thing which, through a connection with the body provides mobility and physicality to Clay’s performances. Clay is currently the Interim Director of Computer Music and the Experimental Media Studios for the Experimental Sound Practices program at the California Institute of the Arts . Clay’s latest CD, Satellite Stutter, is available on the Artifact Recording label.

More info on Clay Chaplin at http://music.calarts.edu/~cchaplin

Joseph Kudirka writes both kinds of music, stupid and boring, and he is the greatest composer in the world.

“Phillip Stearns makes a lots of different kinds of sounds with various instruments that he’s either collected, built, programmed or modified. These sounds can be loud, growling, squeaky, crunchy, bubbly, droning, fuzzy, crackly, and thought provoking, but mostly electronic in nature. He can often be found in the aisles of thrift stores hunting down strange old sound making devices, which he then takes home to his laboratory, straps them down on an operating table, opens them up and rewires their insides. Recently though, he’s become obsessed with analog and digital feedback and is usually wasting most of his time plugging outputs into inputs. This usually results in a fantastically horrible lot of racket and/or video art that some would describe as “epilepsy inducing”. His closest friends and family in Denver, Colorado are constantly reassuring themselves that this is simply a phase he will grow out of soon. Most also commented that they enjoyed Phillip’s quieter days as a painter, back before all this electronic nonsense he’s gotten himself into now. At present, Phillip is studying how to better integrate normally into society at the California Institute of the Arts. A more serious introspection and examples of past work can be found on the internet at www.art-rash.com/pixelform or at www.myspace.com/clobazam. Seriously.”