Rohan de Saram (Cello)

in concert with

Navid Navab (Realtime Audio, Machine Improvisation)

Sandeep Bhagwati (Comprovisations)

Noon, Nov 25 2011

Matralab welcomes musician Rohan de Saram to Montreal to work on the Native Alien project. At noon on Friday Nov 25 Rohan de Saram, Navid Navab, and Sandeep Bhagwati will be presenting a series of improvisations and Composivisation as part of the Native Alien project.

Rohan will be working at the matralab/box (EV4.520 and 502) from November 18 to the 25th with the matralab team - Navid Navab, and Julian Stein. You are welcome to attend a special research presentation on November 25th at noon in the matrabox (EV4.502).

Cellist Rohan de Saram has become well known both for his advocacy of contemporary music and for his nearly three decades of service in the Arditti Quartet, itself a bastion for the performance and championing of new music. While de Saram has, since the 1960s, been active in performing contemporary music, he has hardly neglected more traditional fare: his repertory is so vast it would take pages to list, so eclectic there's hardly a nationality or musical tradition not included. Rohan has worked with Kodaly, Shostakovich, Poulenc and Walton, as well as more recently with many leading contemporary composers such as Pousseur, Xenakis and Berio who have, amongst others, written works for him…

NATIVE ALIEN is a long term research-creation project  - the search for a software that can play in a musically inspiring way with a human music performer-improviser. We are developing this  project in close dialogue with a research group on machine improvisation at the IRCAM Centre Pompidou in Paris (Gerard Assayag / Benjamin Levy). Over the past two years, the Native Alien team (Sandeep Bhagwati / Navid Navab) have developed advanced compositional, comprovisational and sonic software architectures that now are being tried, modified and improved upon in close practical collaboration with outstanding solo performers from many different music making traditions around the world. The end product, we hope, will be an immersive environment for live-composition, as well as a musically empathic software that can play in any style, with any adventurous musician.

RSVP matralab

http://matralab.hexagram.ca

matralab@alcor.concordia.ca

EV 4.520

performing @CLIEC 2011, March 26th, 19:30

program:

Neil Rolnick(piano and computer) and Bob Gluck (computer)

-intermission-

Liselyn Adams (Flutes), Pamela Reimer (Piano), Navid Navab (realtime responsive sound), Jerome Delapierre (responsive visuals)

San Fransisco, Sep11-20

I will be in San Fransisco Sep11-20 along with Sha Xin Wei presenting ILYA.

Events:

Sep 14: Open demo/studio @ UCB

Sep 16: Transitions: CCRMA outdoor Concert, 5:30-11pm

Sep 17: Talk, workshop on spatial sound synthesis @ CNMAT, Berkeley

Sep 17: workshop: ILYA: Gestural Sound, UCB

IL Y A is a particular series of membranes inserted into a physical place to explore the emergence of social density in a common space shared by two or more people. Your movement distends what you see of the other side like smoke or some quasi-physical material. The effect is symmetrical -- any movement by the other reshapes your image as well. When one side of the membrane has no present body, IL Y A substitutes historical footage of people from the past. These historical ghosts’ movements affect the video just as the movement in the live video. IL Y A also is symmetrical between the past and the present: as you relax the figures of the dead will reappear and re-inhabit the present. In fact, their movements and gestures will drag and perturb your image as well. The affect of this work is not morbid or nostalgic, but elegiac, with a composed event structure accented by accidents.

Moving bodies from the past can act on your image just as you act on their bodies or the bodies of present others. Since the effect is symmetrical, the dead and the living intertwine and can play with the forms of each other's bodies with each other with dynamically shifting but equal agency. When no one at all is in the room, the membrane bears only historical documentary footage of the populated site, before living memory of that place. Using historical footage of activity local to the site, IL Y A will act as a lens into past as well as the present of the given site.

IL Y A will be installed in galleries as well as community sites, localized with images from the sites' historical past. Assuming an archeological and ethical disposition, IL Y A connects to my larger research project concerning the material and architectural substrates to sociality.

Frankenstein's Ghosts

monstrous musings, unconscious utterances

Frankenstein's Ghosts has an open house in the Blackbox, show elements of the performance apparatus & material that we've built over the course of the research-creation project with Michael Montanaro, Liselyn Adams and the Blue Riderss ensemble, Navid Navab, Jerome Delapierre, et al.

The relationship between a creator (artist, scholar, mother, father, innovator) and his or her creation can be as threatening as that between Victor Frankenstein and his creature. This highly interdisciplinary humanities/arts project aims to use this fascinating, familiar, but not widely examined story to develop new relationships between scholarship and art, artists and the content they wish to address and between scholars and the form their ideas take.

Event Info:

Hexagram Black Box, EV building – EV OS3-845/855

June 3 and 4 2010, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. – Open Installation

June 3 and 4, 11a.m. to 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. – Presentations

Featuring:

Lori Freedman (bass clarinet)

Amy Horvey (trumpet)

Guy Pelletier (alto flute)

Jen Reimer (french horn)

Emily Shapiro (clarinet)

Michal Seta - Wireless technology

Gaïa Orain-Wark - Costumes

Navid Navab - Machine improvisation

About:

As part of Concordia University’s series of Branché events, NEXUS is a comprovisational (composition + improvisation) journey that will interpret the 2010 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in a unique musical form.

Five musicians, each equipped with a laptop computer, loudspeaker, and ‘Follow Me’ signs, wander on different paths through Concordia's downtown campus. Connected and inspired via wireless network, the musicians improvise their takes on a complex score by Sandeep Bhagwati, reacting to place, space and pace. Like pied cyber-pipers, they perform intertwined music walks all over campus - until they finally unite all their listeners at a breathtaking location for a final musical ritual.

Congress:

www.concordia.ca/congress2010

...congress2010/nexus

Performances:

May 30, June 1 & June 3

from 17h00 to 18h00

throughout Concordia University, SGW campus & gathering at the Cloud Deck, 3rd floor atrium of the MB building (1450 rue Guy).

Performance of Interstitial @ Synchresis

Navid Navab + Jerome Delapierre + Jimmy Danger

About the Event: Art Matters and CESSA present Synchresis, an evening of interdisciplinary exploration of sound, vision, and movement through performance, installation art, fixed media, and multichannel sound.

About Interstitial: Interstitial is an interactive audio-visual performance by Navid Navab and Jerome Delapierre. It is an improvisational performance piece for an interactive screen, a dancing body, and live audio/video processing. Here is a video sample of an improvisation in 2008: Video Link

Details:

Wednesday March 17th, 2010

Eastern Bloc - 7240 Rue Clark - Montreal, QC

FREE

Vernissage at 7PM

Performances begin at 8:30PM

Omax Workshops at IRCAM, Paris, Feb 2010

Sandeep Bhagwati and Navid Navab will lead workshops about the OMax programming environment and Machine Improvisation from February 14 through February 17, 2010 at IRCAM. These workshops will be organized in the context of the FQRSC funded research/creation project Native Alien. They will be also attending and participating in the "Comment analyser l’improvisation" conference at IRCAM on Feb 12-13.

Upcoming Exhibition: cAvA

December 3-18, 2009

Vernissage: Thursday December 3rd, 7pm

les territoires gallery Montreal

Performances during the Vernissage and on December 17th at 8 p.m.

Artist talk on December 17.

Photography: HyeKyong Yun

Sound Design / Interaction Design: Navid Navab

Video: Anartistic (Jerome Delapierre, Hugo)

Choreography: Soo Yeon Cho

cAvA is an inter-disciplinary piece and exhibition where augmented photography, video projection, real-time sound, and performance all mingle together to present a performative organism that immerses us in a multi-sensory space. The central theme is the recreation of a mother’s womb; a place to awaken our pre-natal memories.

Large scale self-portraits on gel medium form a palpable environment within which a lace installation is used as a video projection screen. Motion sensors and detectors at various locations are used to create a sound atmosphere that is connected to the physical surroundings of the space. During the exhibition, visitors are invited to experience the sensory interaction of touch, sound, and visual and to explore how the different artistic media work together to connect with memories.

On the performance dates, December 17th and 18th at 8pm, the piece is brought to a new level as the contemporary dancers bring the visual and audio architecture to life in order to form a complete performative organism. The performers moving within the installation communicate with their memories. As they dance within space and manipulate its physical boundaries, they provoke visual and sound responses that in turn influence their movements.

Multigraphers Art Group is a Montreal based multidisciplinary artist collective that explore alternative modes of presentation and exhibition, combining artistic mediums in order to accentuate communication between the artwork and its audience. Their work always contains a theme of diversity and universalism. Multigraphers Art Group comprises Daeyoung An (dancer), Soo Yeon Cho (choreographer, dancer), Jérome DeLaPierre (video artist), Navid Navab (sound artist), HyeKyong Yun (photographer).

An Audio Visual Performance

On December 12th, 2009 Navid Navab and Shadoo performed at the Interstice Art Space.

Event: SoU nd E 12/12 : a celebration of the divergent forms of sonic art...from interactive instruments to live electronic performances....

The following video is a rough documentation of the performance.

Peformance/Theatre: Racines Ephémères - Gestures within a Realm of Shadows

Hexagram Black Box Theatre (1515 St. Catherine, Montreal)

20:30 h Friday, November 06 2009

Realtime Sound: Navid Navab

Light: Michal Seta

Script/Director: Sandeep Bagwati

Actors: ViCki Tansey, Stephanie Merulla, Bryan James, Cellahan Connor

This piece is centered around the involuntary expressions of displacement. For this work, research was done on involuntary gestures made by “Montrealers displaced by War Genocide and Human Rights Abuses” who were interviewed by a large CURA project of the same name, led by oral historian Steven High. Can we find any traces of their experiences in their normal gestural repertoire ? We analysed 12 long lifestory interviews and excerpted gestures that are then transposed into a gestural theatre work.

This show part of the conference on Remembering War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations: Oral History, New Media and the Arts, Nov. 5 - 8

**UPDATE: Here is the video from the performance:

Lamentations from Matralab on Vimeo.

Talk (Show and Tell) @ TML, Montreal, Oct 21, 2009, 5-8pm

I will be talking about my latest investigations and software developments in Spatial Sound Synthesis, Ambisonics, and Control of Spatialization along with Adrian Freed from CNMAT.

Here's the public invite:

Please join the Topological Media Lab for an informal 'show and tell' with Adrian Freed from CNMAT

Adrian will cover the following projects:

- uOSC, -spherical speaker array, -Hybridization and timbre, Etextile and resources for interactive arts .............

As part of the exchange, TML members Navid Navab and Laura Emelianoff will also share recent work.

See you there!

Tuesday, October 20, 5pm

Topological Media Lab

EV 7.725, Concordia University

1515 Ste-Catherine West

topologicalmedialab.net

Multimedia Performance, Oct 22, 2009, 6-11pm, Toronto

Multigraphers (Navid, Soo, Jerome, Terry) will be performing cAvA for the first time at the Big Art For Little Minds Festival in Toronto. cAvA is an hour long multimedia performance composed for dancing bodies, sound, video, and responsive technology. The performance shifts back and forth between academic "black box" art and pop culture, acousmatic music and aboriginal drum'nBass grooves, highly choreographed and totally improvised, video-art and the VJ culture...

[Sound: Navid, Video: Jerome, Choreography: Soo, Photography: Terry]

Here is an example video of cAvA in the prtotype process of being made: