Press Reviews       MAX/MSP/JITTER WORKSHOP Press Reviews of the Workshop on April 11 to 16, 2005     back    The Forum Neues Musiktheater (FNM) sees itself not simply than a site for presenting experimental performances but essentially as a laboratory to disseminate and explore new technologies. Their Max/MSP/Jitter Workshop this week at the Römerkastell in Cannstatt. A Live VJ & DJ Performance Lounge tonight and Laetitia Sonami’s “series” concert tomorrow complete the program. Andreas Breitscheid, the artistic director of the FNM, describes the interactive audio and video software used in the workshop as “an object-oriented programming language.” Compared to the software for producing and controlling electronic sounds that was developed years ago by IRCAM in Paris, the new technology is considerably more user-friendly and versatile. In one of FNM’s recent productions, for example, the shadows of the dances in Delusions could be “processed” in real time; in Last Desire the figure of Jochanaan was animated on a wall with 1,000 light bulbs. (…) Highly complex sound structures can be produced, and singers’ voices or dancers’ movements can be analyzed and digitally distorted live. In a project with the choreographer William Forsythe, for example, a piece is being developed in which their bodies produce specific sounds and musical processes. “I always wanted the dancers to be their own instruments,” says Forsythe by way of welcoming this new unity of dance and music. But the software also permits so-called outer generating structures: the program works with a self-extending syntax that builds on probability inputs and composes, almost on its own, the musical and visual structures. Jeremy Bernstein, one of the workshop teachers, sees the virtual space of the video and sound installation as an aesthetic extension of the viewer’s real experience of space. Nevertheless the software is more a tool than a partner in the creative process. “What the system produces depends on what is input into it,” he says, in order to put the potential originality of the computer-controlled processes into perspective. Still, Bernstein is often surprised by the results, and he consciously puts “uncontrolled input” into play as a probability factor. For Manuel Poletti, one of the FNM’s software experts, producing highly complex programs is an incentive for creative artists today. Whether this will radically alter the aesthetic of new musical theater, or whether live musicians will continue to play an important role, depends on the interests of the composers in question and on their openness to the new technology. Cannstatter Zeitung
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