The CLEAT Series focuses on work composed for the 16-channel speaker system in our space, allowing audiences to experience different approaches to spatial audio. This month we’ll have a performance from Big Pal with Emily Craver and the piece Campos|Temporales from Paul Hertz and Christopher Walczak. Experimental pop trio Big Pal is presenting High Energy News Music with choreography by dancer Emily Craver. It is a non-heroic sci-fi world-building exercise that teeters along the borders separating work and play, excitement and mania. The music was written Big Pal (Doug Barber, Patrick Glennon, Chrystine Rayburn), movement performed by Sarah Bodony, Emily Craver, and Sophia Smith, and media contributions by Yıldız Güventürk, Emily Pacilio, and Gavin Price. Campos | Temporales was developed as a large scale architectural video installation for 150 Media Stream, a curated video exhibition space in the lobby of 150 Riverside Plaza in Chicago. As an intermedia collaboration between digital visual artist Paul Hertz and composer Christopher Walczak, the animation is generated by transforming audio signals into pixel values and writing them to a space-filling curve, typically a Hilbert Curve. The curve visits every pixel in an image in a symmetrical labyrinthine pattern. We can’t wait to hear and see what both groups havre to offer on the 16 channel CLEAT system! We’ll kick things off at 8pm.

$15 / $10 w/ Student ID – Tickets Available at the Door

Artist Bios

Featuring music by the experimental pop trio Big Pal and choreography by dancer Emily Craver, High Energy News Music is a non-heroic sci-fi world-building exercise that teeters along the borders separating work and play, excitement and mania. Guided meditations collapse into the technologically mediated grind. Office parties disappear into imagined utopias, while data corruption and networked desires pull the performers into the signal flows that drive and shape daily life in the era of the post-human. High Energy News Music features music designed for Elastic Arts’ 16 channel CLEAT system written and performed by Big Pal (Doug Barber, Patrick Glennon, Chrystine Rayburn), movement performed by Sarah Bodony, Emily Craver, and Sophia Smith, and media contributions by Yıldız Güventürk, Emily Pacilio, and Gavin Price. https://bigpal.bandcamp.com
https://www.emilybcraver.com
https://www.instagram.com/dead_definition/

Campos | Temporales was developed as a large scale architectural video installation for 150 Media Stream, a curated video exhibition space in the lobby of 150 Riverside Plaza in Chicago. As an intermedia collaboration between digital visual artist Paul Hertz and composer Christopher Walczak, the animation is generated by transforming audio signals into pixel values and writing them to a space-filling curve, typically a Hilbert Curve. The curve visits every pixel in an image in a symmetrical labyrinthine pattern. The regular patterns of waves in the one-dimensional audio signal form two-dimensional patterns in the resulting image. The patterns are animated by cyclic changes in phase, color and amplitude, resulting shimmering illusions of motion, swirling pixels, flowing colors, and coalescing and dispersing of abstract images, at various overlapping scales and speeds. The animation and the musical composition share algorithmic processes and data structures, both historical and contemporary. The musical composition was inspired by the compositional system of the late composer Stephen Dembski, a mutual friend of both Hertz and Walczak.

Paul Hertz explores algorithmic processes and intermedia in visual art and music. Living in Spain from 1971 to 1983, he began an ongoing practice of collaborative projects with actors and musicians. His recent work includes the virtual world “Fools Paradise,” with composer Stephen Dembski, 2018, and the algorithmic animation “Campos | Temporales,” with composer Christopher Walczak, 2022. Hertz is the 2023 Spain/Chicago artist-in-residence at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. His curatorial work includes Imaging by Numbers (2008), at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum, Northwestern University and La Finca/The Homestead (1995), one of the earliest art exhibitions on the WWW.

Christopher Walczak As a self-taught guitarist and bassist, provoked by a family of passionate and latitudinous overachievers, creating music is a part of everyday life for ChristopherWalczak. He is currently Associate Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Southern Illinois University Carbondale where he serves as instructor, music theory coordinator, director of the annual Outside The Box new music festival, and maintains the Center for Experimental Electronic Music. His music has been commissioned, performed, and recorded by numerous orchestras and ensembles of national and international acclaim including the Southern Illinois Symphony Orchestra, Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, the UW-Madison Symphony Orchestra, the Shepherd School of Music Symphony Orchestra, the UW-Milwaukee Wind Ensemble, Zeitgeist Ensemble, Brightmusic, Relache, sonic apricity, Apollo Chamber Players, Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra, and members of Grammy Award winning eighth blackbird. As a music theorist, Christopher specializes in transformational networks, synthetic tonal systems and innovative analytical approaches.