Artists talk: Riz Maslen and Alo Allik
Thursday 14th of March 2013
7.00 pm
Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road, London
This Thursday we welcome artists Riz Maslen and Alo Allik.
Riz Maslen (http://neotropic.net/) is an electronic innovator and multi-instrumentalist.
British producer, singer and multi-instrumentalist Riz Maslen, who records as Neotropic and Small Fish With Spine has been described as one of the most prominent women composers working in post-techno experimental electronics. In addition to her warm electronic programming, Maslen’s music also embraces folk, psychedelic pop and her interest in experimental film-making.
The media has warmly received her albums on Ninja Tune, Oxygen Music Works, Mush Recordings, R&S and Squids Eye. She’s performed globally over the past decade at events including LA’s Coachella concert series and Montreaux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.
Neotropic’s live shows have always focused on creating a cinematic journey for the audience with the inclusion of her dark photographic and film imagery.
Alo Allik: Live coding evolution by artificial selection
Alo Allik (http://tehis.net) is an artist and a programmer with an aesthetically and geographically restless lifestyle, which has enabled him to traverse a diverse range of musical worlds including DJ-ing electronic dance music, live electronic jam sessions, electroacoustic composition, free improvisation and audiovisual performances. His interests include how to model natural processes by programming and use these models in live performance. In this presentation, he will first investigate an evolutionary programming approach to sound synthesis and then attempt to use this system in a live-coded audiovisual performance.
Since the first ingenious artificial life experiments in the 1950ies, evolutionary computing has inspired numerous problem solving and model building techniques including ways to evolve sound synthesis algorithms inspired by processes of evolution by adaptation and natural selection. In our attempts to understand these natural algorithmic processes, which are purposeless and devoid of any intention, but nonetheless directly responsible for all the complexity and intelligent behaviour in the natural world, we keep developing increasingly more powerful technology that enables us to model and simulate, albeit on a vastly simplified scale, the power of cumulative selection.
Alo Allik will explore this idea through a relatively novel concept of gene expression programming, a method of evolutionary computation that provides an alternative to the established paradigms of classic genetic algorithms and genetic programming, and apply it to sound synthesis in the SuperCollider programming environment. He’s hoping to reveal creative applications of evolutionary computation which do not necessarily presume a definite solution to a problem, but rather an open-ended option space to be explored for aesthetic experimentation.
