work of women artist: barcmut + gray area

come and see us this thursday at gaffta (gray area foundation for the arts) at 7.00 pm.
there'll be julia ogrydziak, cheryl e. leonard, surabhi saraf and me presenting some of our recent works in computer music.
barcmut is a fantastic community of computer musicians and audio geeks in the bay area and i have learned a lot from the experienced people in this community. i'm glad that the event is in gaffta which is an amazing non profit gallery in tenderloin that brings a variety of digital art and culture together.

the political me

my mind has been very busy with all that has been going on in my birthplace in the last six months and it has been very sad to see how people are living under a brutal dictatorship. these days i have been more nostalgic because of the 30th anniversary of the dictatorship in iran and seeing how the government is celebrating 30 years of brutality by putting so many young students in prisons ...

i have a very diverse musical background. studied western classical music since childhood and never practiced persian radif music. one of my heroes was my cousin's violin professor who used to be the tehran symphony's conductor. professor heshmat sanjari has composed some masterpieces of persian symphonic music. one of them is "persian pictures". this was the first symphony i heard live in my life when i was a kid and it brings me back to my childhood. although my favorite movement "dance of dayereh" is a very happy one, it can make me dance or cry at the same time. i took a short excerpt of the theme of this movement and mixed a piece to commemorate students who have been demonstrating in iran in the last six months, who have been in prison and who have lost their lives ...

i also wanted to show my respect to the tehran symphony. i read this article in nyt and felt sorry for them having to represent a government that has been so harsh to them and to music for the last thirty years.

click on the political prisoner to listen to my piece.

inspired by trimpin

on weekend "trimpin: the sound of invention directed" by "peter esmonde" was screened in "red vic movie house" in san francisco. if you don't know trimpin, you should definitely watch this movie. he is an amazing inventor, engineer, sound and multimedia artist and sculptor. i am totally inspired after watching this movie and we are very fortunate in the bay area that he'll be at stanford next year to collaborate with sica(stanford institute for creativity & the arts).

steve reich at stanford

"steve reich" and "beryl korot" were at stanford last night. it was such an honor to see them in person and hearing their talk about their collaborative audio/visual works. reich is one of my favorite composers and i loved to see how modest he and his wife are and i enjoyed their sense of humor.

they mainly discussed "three tales" and "the cave". both works are from 90s. three tales shows concerns on new technology, cloning, wars and weapons ... you can either get the whole dvd or watch parts of it on a dvd of several modern pieces called ohm. unfortunately the video can't show the whole work since there were live performers and singers in addition to several screens of visuals in the live performance in 90s.

the cave is an interesting look at people from different religions. it's interesting to see how diverse the interpretations of different people about the same story could be.

mopho

mopho: stanford mobile phone orchestra had it's first performance of the year last night at ccrma. the variety of interfaces were amazing and it sounds great. comparing to last year when we had only a couple of instruments on iphone making some drone-like sounds; last night's instruments were very diverse and astounding. my favorite piece was vox aeterna by ge. he used human and augmented voices generated by auto-tune of i am t-pain. another interesting piece was nick's wind chimes where he used compass and microphone of iphone to control recorded sounds slowly evolving into surround sound.

another amazing performance was jieun's colorful gathering where she brought all performers together and they jammed on her multi-touch based instrument on iphone.
i uploaded some low quality videos of the event on youtube.

ccrma fall concert

we had an amazing experience at ccrma on thursday. it was in the character of a john cage musiccircus. the audience were encouraged to amble through the building with refreshments in hand and enjoy the performances and installations all over the building.

i had an installation in the listening room. this room is very special to me because i can take advantage of 16 speakers. speakers are in octagonal setup 92 inches apart in three vertical spaces around the room, above the room and under the room.

i had a a mixed media piece for 16 channels audio + text-based visuals + paper junkmail covering the hallway. my installation was called "junkmail" as a reaction to the fact that "it takes more than 100 million trees to produce the total volume of junk mail that arrives in american mailboxes each year.” this fact and a lot more on this topic can be found on forest ethics.

there were lots of good performances all over the building, inside and outside ccrma. some of the highlights were carr's lolfo. i also liked the amazing drones of sweat shop boys. i would upload a short video of my installation as soon as i have it but here a couple of pics for now.

a short video of the installation is available on youtube.

barcmut

i have been going to the bay area computer music technology group meetups for a while and never got the chance to write about these amazing events. it's a fantastic gathering of computer musicians, programmers, djs and ... in the bay area.

last night's event was in an amazing venue in the middle of tenderloin: gray area foundation for the art. i totally recommend you to just visit this place even if you don't make it to go to any events. one of the amazing exhibits at the moment is tenderloin dynamic which is a series of maps and interactive objects to explore tenderloin district mostly through data sets.

the first presenter last night was jef scott. his work is an interactive biofeedback musical instrument using max/msp/jitter and ableton live. the data coming from body is transformed into audio/visual feedback. the physical and mental energy is transformed into more reddish colors and more industrial and rough sounds the more nervous the user is.

the second presenter was edison from monome community. he was djing breakbeats and creating sound using his diy yellow lunchbox. he also uses max/msp in addition to nintendo ds to transfer input from his love box.

the third presenter was preshish moments who also had his diy wooden controller shredder and control software written in max/msp.