The main criteria for the festival is that artists are using signals of some kind to control the horizontal and vertical movements of a beam of light — as is found in oscilloscopes, vector monitors, and ILDA laser displays. We aren’t really interested in digital video which only has a “vector graphics” look, we are interested in people who genuinely engage with the possibilities of analog vector graphics.
Vector Hack 2022. / Conference I / History
All times are Central European Time/Croatia
Moderated by Derek Holzer (US/SE)
4:05:30
15:00-16:00
Lenka Dolanová (CZ),
A Dialogue with the Demons of the Tools: Steina and Woody Vašulka
16:15-16:45
Jen Kutler (USA)
16:45-17:15
Vibeke Sorensen (USA/DK)
17:15-17:45
Louise Ledeen (USA)
18:00-18:30
Panel
You not only create musical devices but also perform with them. Do you consider the device itself as your own artwork, or do you consider the images and sounds created with it as your artistic expression?I have long considered electronic instruments to be interactive compositions of sorts. Since the work of John Cage, David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros, and others, the idea of a composition has been radically expanded to include open ended systems rather than deterministic lists of actions to be performed as accurately as possible within a linear time frame. An electronic sound instrument concretizes specific ideas about sound and sets of sonic possibilities into a physical form for the performer to interact with. “Whose sounds are they?” is a loaded question, based on very outdated ideas of genius and individualism which ignore the fact that the electronic artist cannot be extracted from the technoscientific culture within which they create. So, whose sounds are they? Maybe they belong to the anonymous engineers at Roland who invented the 303, the 606, and the 909, and everyone else is just twiddling their knobs. I curated a journal issue several years ago (sadly offline now) to talk about the idea of the electronic schematic as score. You can read some of the texts via the Wayback Machine
Have you ever been impressed by the sounds or images of people expressing using the device you created, or have they been different from your intentions or beyond your imagination?The Benjolins which I built for people, based on the visionary circuit design by Rob Hordijk, are very good examples of how sonic ideas can take physical form.