With each edition of Rewire, we strive to locate music’s place within wider social and cultural conversations. This year, we focus on the shifting nature of music and musical performance, inviting a selection of inspiring artists and speakers to engage with and reflect on two festival themes: Instrumental Shifts and Staging Sounds.
Instrumental Shifts relates to moments of new questionings, understandings, and orientations. It gives space to reflect on how our reality is exchanged and replaced, what our contemporary positioning is and what the current debates that surround us are – like those on responsibility and ethics, creativity and autonomy. Explored through a symposium on Friday and talks, performances and workshops throughout the festival weekend, Instrumental Shifts will continue to zoom in on the many technological developments in process today and the effects these are having, not only on the music we hear but on the ways we exist as a society.
Explore the complete Instrumental Shifts programme below.
The Rewire 2019 discourse programme is free. Festival and Day Passes for the rest of the programme are available atTickets.
Friday, 29 March – Paard I
For his latest project, British electronic musician and producer Actress explores the creative and social potentials of machine learning and artificial intelligence with the help of an AI-based character named ‘Young Paint’. Having spent the better part of 2018 learning and programming on a diet of Actress’ unique sonic palette, ‘Young Paint’ now takes the stage as a life-size projection, paralleling its creator’s performance in a unique digital duet between man and machine.
→ https://www.youtube.com/embed/Mg1Pw0y-x8Q
Sunday, 31 March – Korzo (studio)
At once surreal, spellbinding and deeply alarming, ‘ULTRACHUNK’ is a new live improvisational duet between a classically-trained musician and her AI doppelganger. Over the course of a year, award-winning Irish vocalist and composer Jennifer Walshe engaged in a daily ritual of performing solo improvisations in front of her webcam. Collecting the hours of footage on the other end, Turkish artist Memo Akten used the video and audio material to create and train an AI that can mimic the key components of Walshe’s identity – her voice and face.
→ https://player.vimeo.com/video/314017645
Sunday, 31 March – Paard I
Yona is a first generation ‘Auxiliary Human’ – Auxuman for short – a new, virtual people who function as digital and performative companions to the human creative process. The work of London-based technologist and producer Ash Koosha, Yona uses artificial intelligence and CGI to write, sing and perform her own music while synthesising the ideas of human producers and songwriters, and connecting them to their human audience. Teaming up with her creator, Ash Koosha, Yona takes the stage for her world premiere.
→ https://www.youtube.com/embed/sgdTHbgzLr8
Sunday, 31 March – Koorenhuis (foyer)
A classically-trained double bass player and cellist, Dianne Verdonk has always craved the making and performance of electronic music. That drive ultimately inspired her to invent her own, peculiar set of electroacoustic instruments. Whether it’s the Bellyhorn, a giant instrument to sing to, Pulseyarn, a pendulum that allows her to build rhythms on the spot, or La Diantenne, an electronic instrument that translates her own personal musical expressions into rich and colourful compositions, each invention extends the range of her musical ideas into pioneering new realms.
→ https://www.youtube.com/embed/-TnFxkKVBqQ
Sunday, 31 March – Korzo
What do algorithms mean for the future of human creative practice? Will all of us soon sit at home watching algorithmically-generated music videos after robots take our jobs? In her keynote address at Rewire 2019, Dr. Rebecca Fiebrink, a Senior Lecturer of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, will delve into the realms of machine learning algorithms and how these systems are capable of creating new images, sound, and other media content. She will show how machine learning is instead opening doors to new forms of human creative expression.
Friday, 29 March – West Den Haag
On the opening day of Rewire 2019, we head to West Den Haag for the Instrumental Shifts Symposium. Organised in collaboration with The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision RE:VIVE initiative, the one-day programme invites leading researchers, academics and artists to explore and question the creativity of artificial intelligence networks, demonstrate how we train generative systems, and advocate for growing partnerships between the creative and academic worlds.
Register for the Instrumental Shifts Symposium
Saturday, 30 March – Korzo
On Saturday, Actress aka Darren Cunningham will join us for an artist talk following his performance with Young Paint, an AI-based character who has learnt not only to react but to take the lead in its interactions with Cunningham. In this conversation, we stretch through Cunningham’s music to date, taking particular interest in his collaborations and changing practice.
Saturday, 30 March – Korzo
Much of the anxiety around emerging technology and the advancement of AI centres around a worry for what our role in the future might be; be it in the arts, the workplace, as carers. While constant threats are thrown at us in regards to AI and robots one day being able to replace us, we often forget to remember the role humans have played to date and the collaborative, often dependent relationship technology has with us. In this panel, we invite Rewire 2019 performing artists Jennifer Walshe, Memo Akten and Dianne Verdonk to address the role of artists in developing and working with new technologies.
Saturday, 30 March – Het Nutshuis
Led by Dr. Rebecca Fiebrink, this year’s Music Hackspace Workshop is a hands-on introduction to user-friendly machine learning tools for creating new music and art. It will go through the basics of how machine learning is capable of generating new content, making it easier for non-programmers to build and customise systems, and enabling programmers to build new creative systems more quickly.
The workshop costs €10 and you will need to bringyour own laptop + headphones.
Register for the Music Hackspace Workshop
Sunday, 31 March – Korzo
Anna Mikkola is a visual artist exploring the ways technology, nature and culture are entangled in the process of knowledge creation. Considering that interfaces and infrastructures format lived reality, her work often depicts narratives where different entities and points in time are woven together. At Rewire 2019, she will examine the intersections of health and technology, reflecting on rituals and collective behaviour connected to technology.
Sunday, 31 March – Korzo
The author of ‘Technic and Magic: the reconstruction of reality’,Federico Campagna is a philosopher and writer with an active history in Milan’s anarchist/autonomist networks. Leading on from the practice-based conversations in the Instrumental Shifts Panel, his Rewire 2019 talk will introduce a more philosophical perspective to understand how we use technology to construct and make sense of the world around us.