This event caught my attention:
Festival AGORA – IRCAM Paris France
Professional Level Meeting
Friday 22 & Saturday June 23
10h-18h / 10:00AM – 6:00PM
LE METIER DE REALISATEUR EN INFORMATIQUE MUSICALE
THE PROFESSION OF COMPUTER MUSIC DESIGNER
Un compositeur le plus souvent une singularité isolée se retrouve avec un interlocuteur privilégié – le réalisateur en informatique musicale – au travail dans un studio. Quelles pratiques (temporalités partage du travail signature de l’ouvre intégration des avancées technologiques…) et fonctions s’inventent ainsi ? Ces journées de rencontres internationales dessinent les contours de ce métier émergent de ses pratiques et de ses formations spécifiques.
A composer usually isolated meets with an honored interlocutor – the computer music producer – at work in the studio. What practices (temporality work-sharing signing the work integration of advanced technology etc.) and functions will be invented this way? The international meetings will sketch the contours of this emerging field its practices and different trainings.
This is a topic that interests me a lot both personally in terms of how I relate to and use technology in my own artistic practice but just as much in terms of how we relate to technology in general at BEK and what kind of artistic practices we try to encourage. The organizations working with electronic music and arts in Norway are small with limited resources. We have no ability of offering artists extended amounts of technical help in realizing their work. Instead we encourage artists to explore technology themselves develop their own skills and critically explore and challenge the potential and limitations of the technical means involved. For my colleague Gisle this has resulted in a strong emphasis on open-source software expressed in activities related to Piksel and informing general thinking and strategy at BEK.
I believe that there has to be room for different practices anything from the “musician meet technical developer” to the artist-coder practice that Marius Watz argues for in the curatorial statement of Generator.x. But the various positions all have to be critically examined for their potentials and limitations.
One of the strengths of the Norwegian new media scene is the ability to cross boundaries between different art practices and between art and technology. I remember Jeremy Welsh once saying that the ability to surf on the surface knowing what do exist and pick what is needed along the way is a meta-skill that will be increasingly important as the amount of information continues to increase. On the other hand I also very much see the need and value of working in-depth developing an in-depth expertise that I will never be able to match in anything of what I’m doing.
