Artists Statement

This footage was recorded at the Musical Metacreation Weekend in the University of Sydney, part of the ISEA 2013 exhibition. Credit: Arne Eigenfeldt, Ajay Kapur. Recording by Xavier Ho.

Roboterstück is a tongue-in-cheek homage to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s famous total-serialist work Klavierstück XI, in which the performer glances at a sheet of music and randomly chooses to play from 15 notated fragments. In this case, agents negotiate a texture – from 16 possible combinations – based upon the following features: slow/fast; sparse/dense; loud/soft; rhythmic/arhythmic. When the same texture has appeared three times, the performance is complete. Unlike all of Eigenfeldt’s other multi-agents works, Roboterstück makes no attempt at anything human-like, either in conception, or performance, by the NotomotoN (an 18-armed robotic percussionist). https://aeigenfeldt.wordpress.com/works/music-for-robots

• Arne Eigenfeldt is a composer of live electroacoustic music, and a researcher into intelligent generative music systems. His music has been performed around the world, and his collaborations range from Persian Tar masters to contemporary dance companies to musical robots. He has presented his research at conferences and festivals such as International Computer Music Conferences (Miami 04, Barcelona 05, New Orleans 06, Copenhagen 07, Belfast 08, Montreal 09, New York 10, Huddersfield 11), Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States (Indiana 05, Iowa 07), New Interfaces for Musical Expression (Genoa 08), ArtTech (Porto 08), EvoMusArt (Tubingen 09, Torino 11, Malaga 12), Generative Art (Milan 09), Computational Creativity (Lisbon 10, Mexico City 11, Dublin 12), Sound and Music Computing (Marseille 06, Barcelona 10, Padova 11, Copenhagen 12), Electronic Music Studies (Leichester 07, Buenos Aires 09, Shanghai 10, New York 11, Stockholm 12), and has received major research support from SSHRC and NSERC/CCA. He teaches music technology at Simon Fraser University, and is the co-director of the MAMAS (Metacreation Agent and Multi-Agent Systems) Lab. https://aeigenfeldt.wordpress.com
• Ajay Kapur is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, educator and musician. He is known for his work in musical robotics and digital musical instrument design, as well as his work on massive open online courses (MOOCs), education-related machine learning, and digital arts pedagogy. Kapur is currently a professor and associate Provost at California Institute of the Arts, an advisor at Victoria University of Wellington. [https://wikitia.com/wiki/Ajay_Kapur accessed 19.01.2022]  https://www.ajaykapur.com