Day Two: Friday 7 November
Bathway Theatre
4 – 5pm, Concert 4 – Audiovisual and Live
Salvatore Siriano – Upwelling
Upwelling (2023) is a multimedia composition that weaves together the artist’s experiences juxtaposed with the transformative capabilities of digital technology. Since recently relocating to the Fox River Valley, 45 miles west of Chicago, I have been captivated by the interplay of images and sounds, exploring their convergence in a digital realm through the use of Max/MSP and TouchDesigner.Upwelling delves into the dynamics of memory and time, employing digital manipulation to explore these themes in depth. The work includes images I filmed along the Fox River, from my travels, and from my parents’ Super 8mm home movies, all of which are manipulated and interact with the music. Upwelling ponders the unpredictable nature of memory—how it can resurface randomly or be triggered by specific events—and its significant impact on shaping our present experiences, identities, cultural values, and relationships. Ultimately, the work reflects on the interconnectedness of our memories and the profound role they play in shaping the human experience.
Salvatore Siriano is a Chicago-based composer, audiovisual artist, and educator exploring the intersection of sound, images, and nature through technology. His work combines field recordings, synthesis, acoustic instruments, and imagery he captures along the Fox River and during his travels. Although his background is in acoustic composition, Siriano began creating electronic audiovisual works in 2020, building a practice that bridges musical craft with digital experimentation.
Recent presentations of his audiovisual works include the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF), Seoul International Computer Music Festival (South Korea), Art Alive Festival (Portugal), the Performing Media Festival, WOCMAT Conference (Taiwan), Central Washington New Music Festival, Contemporary Venice (Italy), the Indianapolis Arts Center, Richmond Center for the Arts, Cernan Earth and Space Center, Aurora Public Art Gallery, Napoleon Electronic Media Festival, and the New Music on the Bayou Festival. Collaborating with Chicago-based photographer Alice Hargrave, he crafted immersive sound collages for her exhibitions Sea Change at Aurora University and A Forest Shouting at Chicago’s ALMA Art.
Since 2020, Siriano has served as a music faculty member at Triton College, where he teaches music theory and technology to many first-generation college students like himself. As a music educator, he has presented workshops on making music education more equitable through technology, including at the Illinois Council for Exceptional Children Convention. In the summer of 2024, he taught music at the Roi Et School for the Blind in Thailand in partnership with the U.S. Embassy, Northern Illinois University, and Mahidol University. In 2023, he was named Triton College’s Outstanding Full-Time Faculty Member of the Year.
Antoine Goudreau – co.loss..deus:_
“Advent of the monolithic computer era. Just as swiftly came its downfall.”
_co.loss..deus:_ is an exploration of the limits of digital image denoising using Blender’s raytracing Cycles engine and NVIDIA’s OptiX denoising algorithm.
By limiting raytracing to a single sampling of the 3D scene, the denoiser receives too few pixels to faithfully restore the image, thus creating raw materials that are simultaneously blurry and sharp.
A poignant analogy for digital degradation, the work also employs a musical treatment reminiscent of vaporwave, video game cutscenes, and plunderphonics.
Composer and performer of experimental music, Antoine Goudreau explores the perceptual constructs of sound, movement, and visuals to stimulate both conscious and unconscious thought in his audience. He designs his works as personalized experiences that guide participants toward the liminal spaces of human experience.
As a musician, he challenges the ritualistic conventions of concerts by using unconventional spaces and integrating the audience’s diverse perspectives and listening positions as compositional elements. As a media artist, he creates physical and synthetic spaces that allow direct interaction with the sonic medium.
The concept of “jank” informs his approach to human-machine interaction and computer-assisted composition. Glitches in video games and their use in retro game speedruns are among his primary sources of inspiration.
Goudreau has collaborated with several community centers in the Outaouais region, notably with the Bizarre Love Triangle collective in Artengine’s spaces. Actively engaged in the Montreal music scene, he has served on the decision-making committee of Vivier InterUniversitaire and the artistic committee of Codes d’accès. His works have been performed in Canada, the United States, Spain and Indonesia.
Sara Ramírez Márquez – Fragility
Piece inspired by the scripture Corinthians 12: 1-10.
• Paul’s vision.
• A Thorn in the Flesh
(Reina, C. D. (1964). La Santa Biblia: Reina-Valera 1960.)
11.12.24.
Sara Ramírez Márquez, 2001. Originally from Bogotá, she is a composer for film and media, as well as an electroacoustic composer. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Electroacoustic Composition at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Her interests revolve around immersive sound, environmental sound, and religious studies.
cristiana palandri & Rosario Grieco – Il sogno di Kubic for electronics
It doesn’t matter to know if Kubic survived a dull and uninhabited land.
If you feel and think about our species, about a vanished world, from an extraterrestrial colony.
Whether the reality of Kubic’s dreams is found in the folds of an immense solitude or whether he himself is the dream of other life forms – including us, who wish to be elsewhere. Even inside him. In spaces that no longer exist or have never existed. In the form of everyone’s dependence on everyone and everything on what’s left. The vigil of a castaway.
It doesn’t matter whether Andrea, the woman who appears to us, is Kubic in another form, an autonomous, human and living being, or a hallucination.
In Kubic’s Dream, everything is a ghost.
Anatomy is a technical device captured in an ancient and exhausting ritual dance.
Waking is sleep, thoughts are constraints, illusions possibilities and pain, and the dissolved body is to the point of enjoying abandonment.
Adrift of dream machines and celestial bodies.
While they remain in us, vigilant, the eye and the listening.
The orbit of an eclipse.
Music, text, costumes and direction: Cristiana Palandri
Set design: Rosario Grieco and Cristiana Palandri
Videos and light design: Rosario Grieco
Dancer: Camilla Paris
Kerry Francksen & Simon Atkinson – and dancer ‘Betwixt & Between II – Exposition’
This exposition presents the next iteration of the authors’ long-standing collaborative explorations into the delicate and complex relationships between live-digital dance performance and acousmatic sound. Building on previous work, Betwixt & Between II seeks to ‘reflect forwards’ on the interplay between the body, media and sound. 10 years on, many of the authors’ underlying concerns still resonate today, including ideas of intimacy, fragility, connection, and imagination. In our increasingly technologized world, opportunities to reconnect with bodies, images, and sounds reflectively and deliberately feel ever more significant. By challenging some of the normative traditions of combining movement, media, and music, particularly in terms of working generatively and spontaneously, this interactive and intuitive work presents bodies, media and sounds simultaneously as mutual sensuous entities.
Kerry Francksen is an experienced practice-based researcher and digital dance artist, with over 25 years of experience in the sector. Her primary areas of interest and expertise include digital performance practices, collaborative creativity, multi-media installation, and performance and technology. She has worked extensively as an educator and researcher, and as a facilitator on both academic and professional arts projects. She is fascinated by the potential for bodies and technologies to converge, and her work focuses on the intimate and often complex relationships of embodied practice in new media environments. This provides the focus and intrigue for both her scholarly and professional practice.
Simon Atkinson has a background in music and music technology education. Since 2000 he has lived and worked in Leicester, for many years leading the development music technology courses at De Montfort University, where he is Associate Professor and a founding member of the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre (MTI). He works in music composition, often exploring opportunities made possible through digital technologies, and often exploring the evolution of timbre and texture over time. He has also worked in a very eclectic range of inter-art form projects, collaborations, and community-based projects, including installation, performance, work for screen and dance.