Triptych · Alla Yanovsky | Josep Manuel Berenguer

The project of this work was very open from the beginning. It consisted of improvisation inspired by the productions of a group of sixteen virtual machines, which, in turn, would start from the sound productions of the human performers to generate their behavior, actually, also, improvisations. It might seem that with such a loop there was a risk of falling into absurd feedback, but it was not like that at all. The material that was generated is too complex and changeable for the iterations of the computational agents involved in the process to always occur in the same places. In this case, feedback became an essential element of creation. In fact, there are those who base intelligence on that characteristic so typical of metabolic processes, including those of neurons, where feedback is, most of the time, negative; that is, they generate a lower output level in response to higher input levels. Those that behave inversely, the positive ones, which deliver a higher output level at higher input levels, end up in saturation, but they can also generate unexpected situations, because when the systems reach their limit of resistance to stress, demons come out from everywhere in the form of swirls and fluctuations. They are chaotic processes that, ultimately, often involve noise of various kinds.

In the case of Triptych and all the other music where Autoimpro, the software developed by Berenguer based on the behavior of computational agents that improvise based on the input that humans provide, it is the set of events itself that determines more events, in a tangle of cross-feedbacks that no single will has sufficient influence or can disentangle.

A tangle of human and machine wills, Triptych is a piece in three movements where the performers investigate the properties of their expanded instruments, testing the response capacity of the machines, always knowing that despite using some technologies that are part of the conglomerate what today we call Artificial Intelligence, what is important is, above all, art, which is beyond the canonical organization of materials, to which, over time, we become accustomed and confused with art, when, actually, it is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of artistic reflections about the world.

Josep Manuel Berenguer
Barcelona, Spain, 1955

Josep Manuel Berenguer is coordinator and professor of Psychoacoustics and Experimental Music of the Master in Sound Art at the University of Barcelona and director of the Orquestra del Caos. Honorary President of the CIM/UNESCO International Conference of Electroacoustic Music, President of Quantum Art Lab, member of the Board of Trustees of the Phonos Foundation and of the Académie Internationale de Musique Électroacoustique de Bourges. His initially electroacoustic work has been oriented towards installation and, despite his doubts about the appropriateness of those terms, towards real time and interactivity. The topics developed include issues related to the philosophy and history of science, the limits of language, ethics, life and artificial intelligence, robotics, the metabolism of information, as well as the very limits of understanding and human perception of the world. Luci, who explores the emergent complex behaviors of additions of simple elements, received the ARCO-Beep Award for Electronic Art. His installation @bienenVolk receives information on the behavior of bees from a hive installed in the old Museum of Zoology in Barcelona and sends it to a sound space delimited by 16 speakers anywhere in the world. His presentation was at the Akademie der Künste · Berlin on September 30, 2017 with a live concert entitled Bienen.

Alla Yanovsky  
Kyiv, Ukraine, 1962

Alla Yanovsky is a composer, flutist, pianist, jazz musician, and sound artist. She began his training studying classical music at the Kyiv Conservatory, where she learned piano, flute and later musical composition. She composes electronic music and for symphony orchestra, specifically for the Ukrainian TV and Radio Symphony Orchestra. With the idea of ​​opening new horizons, she began studying jazz with a specialty in piano and jazz improvisation, as well as conducting a Big Band orchestra, playing jazz and studying for years in Israel and the US. She has lived in Spain since 1999, creating his own projects as a pianist with the most prestigious musicians on the national jazz scene. Going through modal jazz and free jazz, she began to be interested in electroacoustic improvisation and sound art around 2015, to further explore the expressive and technical possibilities of the flute, sound objects and her own installations, sets that she began to create to record this type of music and perform live. She is also the inventor of experimental instruments made of metal, wood and other materials, which she usually makes for each particular project. Her interest hovers between improvisational musical performance and research in the field of sound art and electroacoustic music.