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, virtual 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.
Roboterstück is presented as an ongoing installation, with the agents performing a new composition every 15 minutes, with each performance usually lasting between 3 and 5 minutes.
Unlike all of my other multi-agents works, Roboterstück makes no attempt at anything human-like, either in conception, or performance, by Ajay Kapur’s NotomotoN (an 18-armed robotic percussionist).
Performance from Deus Ex Machina II, Vancouver, May 2012
