“Liveware” by Shawn Lawson, Michael Century

Title:

Liveware

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Performers:



• Shawn Lawson
• Michael Century

Symposium:

• ISEA2022: 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art

Venue(s):

• CCCB: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona , Barcelona , Spain

Artist Statement:

Liveware is an audio-visual duo combining live-coded animation and musical performance. “Liveness” for each modality is understood as a fluid interplay between pre-composed and improvised dynamic processes. Similarly, the correspondence between image and sound exhibits changing levels of control and indeterminacy. Taken together as matters of degree not kind, these dimensions generate a constellation of changing processual intensities.  Liveware extends the traditions of synaesthetic syntax going back to early experimental film with recent advances in artificial intelligence to generate real time animation using algorithms trained with machine learning (ML). “Latent Cartographies “(2021) uses a ML algorithm trained on images from 100,000 historical maps. [1]. Extended techniques on acoustic piano are processed to correspond with the images^. [2] An image noise generator navigates through the latent space of the neural net, modulated by sound intensities from the music. The title of “The Isle is Full of Noises” (2019) evokes a passage from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. An 8-channel soundscape uses texts from characters Miranda and Caliban overlaid with phonemic particles of human speech, animal and nature sounds. The images are generated using an auto-visual system built with a ML trained on contrasting feature films: Videodrome and Planet of the Apes. During the performance the ML utilizes its hyper-dimensional space of learnt imagery to create real-time animation from audio spectra and audio feature data.  Post-colonial and feminist critics have posed the question why Caliban and Miranda, both victims of imperialist oppression, nonetheless are unable to truly “see” one another. Here, their encounter is re-staged and spatialized through sonic means.

1 Topi Tjukanov, Mapdreamer (2020) pre-trained network – CC0 1.0 Universal – https://archive.org/details/mapdreamer
2 The Expanded Instrument System, designed by Pauline Oliveros, is used with special permission of the Pauline Oliveros Trust and Ministry of Maat.

Category:

• Performances
• Concert - Audio/Visual
• Live Coding