Technosonics XVIII: DIY - FREE EARLY SHOW

Featuring: Nicolas Collins, Laetitia Sonami, Sasha Letiman, Peter Bussigel, Ted Coffey, Luke Dahl and Composition and Computer Technologies Graduate Composers

This early concert is part of the Technosonics DIY festival hosted by the McIntire Department of Music at UVa and will showcase exciting new multi-media works and experimental music performances by invited guests Nicolas Collins, Laetitia Sonami, Sasha Leitman, and University of Virginia faculty and graduate composers.

NICOLAS COLLINS

New York born and raised, Nicolas Collins spent most of the 1990s in Europe, where he was Visiting Artistic Director of Stichting STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin. From 1997 - 2017 he was Editor-in-Chief of the Leonardo Music Journal, and since 1999 has been a Professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. An early adopter of microcomputers for live performance, Collins also makes use of homemade electronic circuitry and conventional acoustic instruments. His book, Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking (Routledge), has influenced emerging electronic music worldwide.

LAETITIA SONAMI 

Laetitia Sonami is a sound artist, performer and researcher.

Sonami's sound performances, live-­‐film collaborations and sound installations focus on issues of presence and participation.  She has devised new gestural controllers for performance and applies new technologies and appropriated media to achieve an expression of immediacy through sound, place and objects.

Best known for her unique instrument, the elbow-­‐length lady's glove, which is fitted with an array of sensors tracking the slightest motion of her hand and body, she has performed worldwide and earned substantial international renown.  

Recent projects include the design of a new instrument, the Spring Spyre, based on the application of neural networks to real-time audio synthesis; an improvisation duo,Sparrows and Ortolans, with James Fei; and Le Corps Sonore, a fully immersive sound installation on six floors of the Rubin Museum, NYC in collaboration with Eliane Radigue and Bob Bielecki. 

Upcoming projects include Peripheral Vision, a text based performance piece and a new live film project with Sue-C based on Italo Calvino Cosmicomics. 

Sonami has received numerous awards among which the Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Awards.  

“...she sometimes looked like a human antenna searching the air for sounds, or like a deity summoning earth-shaking rumbles with a brusque gesture”. NY TIMES

“Experimental music is rarely this visceral and engaging” – Los Angeles Times

“Working since the 1980s, Laetitia Sonami continues to serve as an important figure for female artists working with technology. Her lady’s glove made her a well-­‐known name within the performance art scene, particularly because she was one of a few women experimenting with sound and technology.“ Complex Mag- One of 10 San Francisco personalities you should now in 2014

SASHA LEITMAN

Sasha Leitman is a composer, artist and inventor from California.  She has been making musical instruments, new interfaces for musical expression and sound art installations for the last 15 years.  After spending over a decade teaching courses and managing the Max Lab - an Interface Prototyping Lab, at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), she decided it was time to try out the other side of the Pacific.   She recently began a PhD program in Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand where she is exploring the design of computer music controllers inspired by the nuanced control of acoustic instruments.