**Due to recommendations from the CA Department of Public Health related to the Coronavirus outbreak, we are canceling this event.**
What if our physical bodies become nothing more than a shell to host our technologies? Are technological advances reducing what makes someone an individual? Will complete distributed intelligence lead to absolute homogeneity? Works featured in this concert series address such philosophical questions of our Internet Age.
Andrew Watts’s What it means to be post human again examines how technology can utilize the human body as an acoustical space, with performers modifying the playback environment while philosophizing on the most profound tenets of humanism. Constantin Basica’s Chatbots envisions a post-apocalyptic future in which the only remaining humans serve as voice donors for their overlords; while Ryan Maguire’s Ghost in the mp3 creates “ghosts” from lost sounds– sounds that we either cannot hear otherwise or which have been filtered out of our contemporary listening spaces by technologically imposed perceptual models. Julie Herndon’s A Long Postlude expressively reimagines the 19th century Graham-Bell “photohone,” a device reflecting sunlight to wirelessly convey speech, with lightbulbs becoming independent characters. Andrew Blanton’s MØDULATOR explores iPhone/iPad improvisation using one mode of human perception (sound/hearing) and mixing it with another (touch/tactility), so that the device can help us to better understand the way we perceive the world. Finally, Caroline Louise Miller’s Sound Masses for Dark Times orchestrates different voices to sound together as a mass of industrial decay, with nods to the practices of mashup and remix.
* Please note, advance ticket sales will end at 5 pm on the day of the event. Door tickets will be available 30 minutes before showtime. *