John C.S. Keston
John C.S. Keston is an award winning composer of electronic, experimental, and instrumental music. His work embraces the chaotic ambiguities of environmental and sensorial influences providing context within unpredictable or everyday events. His unconventional compositions convey a spirit of discovery and exploration through the use of graphic scores, chance and generative techniques, analog and digital synthesis, experimental sound design, signal processing, and acoustic piano. His compositions parallel indeterminate improvisation activating what remains immutable within traditional forms of notation-driven music. Performers are empowered to use their phonomnesis, or sonic imaginations, to contribute to the work. Originally from the United Kingdom, John currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he is a professor of creative multimedia at the University of St. Thomas. He founded the sound design resource, AudioCookbook.org, where you will find articles and documentation about his projects and research.
SYNTAX
SYNTAX questions technological idealism in an age of ecological disruption and data-driven exploitation. Widely misused technology continues to cause pollution, habitat destruction, global warming, and disinformation. Like two sides of the same coin it is responsible for immeasurable prosperity and immeasurable suffering. It threatens all life on the planet, yet most humans depend on it. To explore this question the composers have programmed the computer to program themselves. By deliberately coding and submitting to an “inversion of control” they evoke the warnings of media theorists like Douglas Rushkoff, that we risk a future wherein our behavior might be irreversibly dictated by the algorithms in the software we use instead of by our own volition. SYNTAX is a performance piece that parallels the dilemmas we face from two sides of the same coin. The collaboration includes a series of eight animated, graphic scores designed to guide the two composers through a generative narrative of improvised sound. This inverts the usual practice of creating visuals in response to sound by creating music in response to visuals. The scores that the artists read are designed as functional symbolism representing a set of rules that suggest musical ideas, sound design techniques, and timed phrases. The scores are regenerated each time the application is executed so that every performance is distinct. The software engineered to generate the graphic scores provides information to the performers in the form of animated and color coded graphics. An additional script was developed to navigate through the movements, display the titles, and transition between each piece. Each movement was written with its own graphical language, algorithms, and directives while maintaining visual and conceptual themes to work as a whole. The composers perform the piece using a combination of hardware synthesizers and software independent from the scores including sequences programmed using the Tidal Cycles live coding environment and manipulated in real time. It is the intent of the human composers for the audience to experience the projected graphic scores and musical performance together. SYNTAX is in collaboration with internationally recognized, live-coding artist Mike Hodnick (AKA Kindohm).