Date 11/3/08
Affiliation Composer/Artist, New York
There are people in every culture who will strive to utilize the maximum level of technology available to them to make art. If you repeat this to yourself enough every day, then genres of new media, computer art, algorithmic composition, interactive performance, etc, reveal themselves as the conceptual prisons they truly are, and the artist finds the freedom to be sui generis. If we define artistic and compositional practice historically as an evolution of new ways of seeing and hearing, then it's no surprise that in an information age artists find themselves preoccupied with the informatics behind our cultural discourse, and take command of the tools necessary to grasp the data that surrounds us.
This talk will look at the practice of making art that comments on our cultural capital in a world in which we are bombarded by information. To look at modern life is to gaze upon the interaction of subjectively charged messages; finding the metaphors linking data and art, sight and sound, music and architecture, urban fabrics and mediatized romance, intimacy and improvisation, is all about filtering, mapping, transcoding, and interpreting what goes on around us everyday... in other words, the kinds of things artists have always done.
R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season.
Stemming from his investigations of "time-lapse phonography," his recent work is a sonic and encyclopedic relative to time-lapse photography. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a single image, his work reveals the average sonority, visual language, and vocabulary in music, film, text, or cultural information. Exhibitions of his work include: the Insitut Valencià d'Art Modern, Spain; 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; San Jose Museum of Art; National Constitution Center, Philadelphia; Cleveland Museum of Contemprary Art, Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; 2007 Sundance Film Festival; and the Sydney Film Festival.
An active visual and musical collaborator, DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data. He appears on nearly twenty-five albums both individually and as part of the avant-garde electronic group The Freight Elevator Quartet. He currently performs as part of Bioluminescence, a duo with vocalist Lesley Flanigan that explores the modality of the human voice, and in Fair Use, a trio with Zach Layton and Matthew Ostrowski, that looks at our accelerating culture through elecronic performance and remixing of cinema.
DuBois has lived for the last fifteen years in New York City. He teaches at the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at NYU's Polytechnic Institute. His records are available on Caipirinha/Sire, Liquid Sky, C74, and Cantaloupe Music. His artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.
-- As of 11/3/08