May 24, 2020
Live stream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/oRstxKlEOIs
20:00 – 22:30
Donations: NL_CL #2: Flesh

Curator: Joana Chicau
Hosted by: Marije Baalman
Performances by: Naoto Hieda, Joana Chicau & Jonathan Reus, Angeliki Diakrousi

ABOUT NL_CL
NL_CL (Netherlands Coding Live) is a self-organized assembly of live coding artists based in The Netherlands. NL_CL organizes monthly gatherings, discussions, concerts and other cultural activities to help bring together and give a platform to this community.

FLESH

“Flesh — not as passive matter, but as a physical, relational field of interaction, intensities, techniques, histories, traces, and relics of experienced information. Our body is never “pure” flesh but is always already extending into an elaborate circuitry of technologies of all sorts. Physical indeed, but a physicality that was and is always mediated and remediated as it is pervaded by the existence of other objects; other relations and agencies — human and nonhuman.” — Myriam Van Imschoot, Rests in Pieces On Scores, Notation and the Trace in Dance (2010).

This evening of performances will focus on embodiment through practices of live coding. The stage becomes a temporary site for experimenting with algorithmic composition — from body to language; words to flesh; the oral to the written — presenting an ecology of scores and scripts for movement to unfold and new relations to emerge.

Algorithm | Degeneracy
Naoto Hieda

Algorithm | Degeneracy is a hybrid live-code-dance performance that travels between modalities such as images, emotions as words, sounds and movements through a perspective of high-functioning autism. Naoto Hieda, as a dancer and a live-coder, picks a word from a vocabulary of emotions and records movements overlaid on an image found on Google search. A chat interface is used to communicate with the audience; furthermore, each byte of an input text is translated into sound in a live-coding manner, adding another modality to express emotions. The performance takes place as a live-streaming and as an online installation in a custom virtual space where visitors can freely navigate. The online platform resembles a white gallery space, and the artifacts of the performance are installed on the fly. Contrary to the ephemerality of the performance, the recorded movements and sounds remain as a permanent exhibition.

Naoto Hieda is a Japanese artist based in Cologne, Germany. He received a Bachelor of Engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan) and Master of Engineering from McGill University (Canada). His research interest lies within algorithmic and procedural expressions bridging neurodiversity, digital media, body movements and analog fabrication. Currently, he is a Diplom II student at Academy of Media Arts Cologne (Germany), a web resident of On_the Line (S. Korea), and an emerging-artist fellow of Yoshino Gypsum Art Foundation (Japan).

Web: https://naotohieda.com/

Anatomies of Intelligence
Joana Chicau and Jonathan Reus

Anatomies of Intelligence is an artistic research initiative seeking to make connections between the formats and collections of anatomical knowledge and investigations into the “anatomy” of computational learning and prediction processes, datasets and machine learning models.

Joana Chicau and Jonathan Reus will present a performance that navigates through the interface and codes that shape their research platform. In these performance, unique elements of sound directly reflect each specific step of the algorithms being used, which are slowed to human-perceptible scales so that their aesthetic features of form and temporality can be perceived by the audience. An audio-visual journey through algorithmic processes, human and machinic imaginaries.

Wen: https://anatomiesofintelligence.github.io/

Bio

Jonathan Reus [US/NL] is a musician and artist who explores expanded forms of music-making and improvisational performance through technological artefacts. His practice is cross-disciplinary and research-based, involving open and iterative processes of collaboration with practitioners from across the arts, sciences and humanities. His work tries to confront and challenge the representational capacities of mathematical-logistical systems, algorithms, and infrastructure through a practice of invasive intuition and trust in the diversity of lived experiences.

Joana Chicau [PT/NL] is a graphic designer, coder, researcher — with a background in dance. Her trans-disciplinary project interweaves media design and web environments with performance and choreographic practices. In her practice she researches the intersection of the body with the constructed, designed, programmed environment, aiming at widening the ways in which digital sciences is presented and made accessible to the public. She has been actively participating and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative coding, algorithmic improvisation, open discussions on gender equality and activism.

 

Radio-active Monstrosities

Angeliki Diakrousi, 2020

Description of the performance

**Radio-Active Monstrosities** is a performance that challenges the ways we are listening to certain female sounding voices that are perceived as inappropriate – because of the quality of their sound, their gender, the medium’s distortions but also stereotypes and collective memories that they often awake.

These are verbal expressions that have been associated with forms of monstrosity since ancient times. Contributors are invited to record themselves in an online platform, expressing their thoughts and choose a type of distortion. They are invited to participate in forming new imaginaries around a mediated collective voice that through its ‘monstrosity’ can reveal other forms of speech.

The voice of the artist will narrate and together with the contributor’s voices will gradually distort into chaos. A series of command-line tools and scripts will record, archive, over-layer, distort and repeat the sounds.

Bio

Angeliki Diakrousi is an artist and media researcher coming from Greece and based in Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the politics and structures of art, architecture and technology, and their engagement into public spheres. Throughout the years, she has developed several dialogical and relational methodologies that unravel the political and technological potentiality of voices. Including their mediation and amplification in public and the soundscapes produced in the cities they inhabit. She has been influenced by social_based art, sound art, performance art, tactical media, and recently by feminist and hacker practices, political gatherings, co-authorship and networks. 

This program is made possible with financial support from Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, Gemeente Den Haag, Stroom Den Haag and the Fonds Podiumkunsten.