Issue Project Room premieres a live performance of R. Luke Dublois’ Hard Data and presents works by Tony Conrad, David Soldier, and Brad Garton — performed by the Mivos String Quartet :: June 25, 2009; 8:00 – 11:00 pm :: Issue Project Room, At the Old American Can Factory, 232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY.

Turbulence Commission: Hard Data by R. Luke DuBois [Needs Flash plugin and speakers; wait for data to load] Hard Data is a data-mining, sonification, and visualization project that uses statistics from the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as source material for an interactive audiovisual composition based around an open-source “score” of events. Using Xenakis’ understanding of formalized music as a starting point, DuBois draws upon a variety of statistical data ranging from the visceral (civilian deaths, geospatial renderings of military actions) to the mundane (fiscal year budgets for the war) to generate a dataset that can be used for any number of audiovisual compositions. The intention of the project is to recontextualize the formal stochastic music in the context of real-world statistics, and to provide a compositional and metaphoric framework for creating an electroacoustic music relevant and significant to our time. Presented as an online, open-source work, viewers are invited to download the data set and source material for the piece and create their own interpretations.

Hard Data is a 2009 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

BIOGRAPHY

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, video artist, and programmer living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia’s Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He is best known as a co-author of Jitter, a software suite developed by Cycling’74 for real-time manipulation of matrix data. His music is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling’74, and Cantaloupe music.

MIVOS quartet is devoted to performing contemporary music. It was founded in 2008 by violinists Olivia DePrato and Joshua Modney, violist Victor Lowrie, and cellist Isabel Castellvi. They met while pursuing a master’s degree at Manhattan School of Music in the Contemporary Performance Program. Since their inception they have performed and premiered works by both young and established composers including Anna Clyne, Juan Calderon, and Kirsten Broberg. They have performed at venues such as The Stone, Issue Project Room, the Bretch Forum and for the American Music Center at the Chelsea Museum. Recently they have collaborated with clarinetist Ned Rothenberg for a performance of his quintet for clarinet and string quartet, which they will be recording on Tzadik records in the fall of 2009.