John CS Keston is an award winning transdisciplinary artist reimagining how music, video art, and computer science intersect. His work both questions and embraces his backgrounds in music technology, software development, and improvisation leading him toward unconventional compositions that convey a spirit of discovery and exploration through the use of graphic scores, chance and generative techniques, analog and digital synthesis, experimental sound design, signal processing, and acoustic piano. Performers are empowered to use their phonomnesis, or sonic imaginations, while contributing to his collaborative work. Originally from the United Kingdom, John currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he is a professor of Digital Media Arts at the University of St Thomas. He founded the sound design resource, AudioCookbook.org, where you will find articles and documentation about his projects and research.
John has spoken, performed, or exhibited original work at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2022), the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2022), the International Digital Media Arts Conference (iDMAa 2022), International Sound in Science Technology and the Arts (ISSTA 2017-2019), Northern Spark (2011-2017), the Weisman Art Museum, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Walker Art Center, the Minnesota Institute of Art, the Eyeo Festival, INST-INT, Echofluxx (Prague), and Moogfest. He produced and performed in the piece Instant Cinema: Teleportation Platform X, a featured project at Northern Spark 2013. He composed and performed the music for In Habit: Life in Patterns (2012) and Words to Dead Lips (2011) in collaboration with the dance company Aniccha Arts. In 2017 he was commissioned by the Walker Art Center to compose music for former Merce Cunningham dancers during the Common Time performance series. His music appears in The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) and he composed the music for the short Familiar Pavement (2015). He has appeared on more than a dozen albums including two solo albums on UnearthedMusic.com.
After more than two months of spare time spent searching and replacing, all of the audio and image files that were lost in the crash have been recovered. It is possible that a few things have fallen through the cracks. I have been clicking “Visit Random Entry” to do occasional spot checks since wrapping up my data recovery todo list, and a couple of things have come up missing that way.
It has been interesting to revisit the old content, but I am ready to move on and get back to posting some of my latest projects. If you’d like to help out the recovery process, click the “Visit Random Entry” link in the right sidebar a few times, and if you find something that doesn’t play, or a missing image or video, please post a comment with a link to the post in question. Thanks!
Voice Lessons is an interactive touch-screen installation that I recently presented during a graduate critique seminar at MCAD. The piece, developed in Max/MSP, granulates both sound and video as the viewer touches the screen while maintaining synchronization. I will be installing the piece again next month for an open studio night on December 9, 2011 at the MCAD Whittier Studios, 2835 Harriet Avenue South, Minneapolis. I will also be sharing more complete documentation about the piece soon. For now, please enjoy this short segment of audio sampled from the piece as it was in use.
For those of you in or near New York City, the In/Out Festival of Digital Petformance has another great lineup this year as you can see from the attached flier. Checkout their site (inoutfest.org) for the details.
Forgotten Channels is a generative music and projected video performance piece that aims to discover connections between our visual memory and our response to peculiar soundscapes.
The visuals for the piece are made up of fifteen shots selected from hundreds of mobile phone videos. The videos make up a score that was prepared by playing them on a large LCD display then re-shooting them with another mobile device to frame mysterious elements and expose the imperfections within the digital media.
To perform the piece the visual score is abstracted again by playing it on yet another mobile device positioned below a camera plugged into a computer. Custom software analyses the input to produce a real-time stream of algorithmic music. The musical information is captured and manipulated by the performer in response to the imagery.
Former A&R rep and all-around minneapolis music nut, John Kass recently posted eight tracks ripped from a couple of demo tapes that we submitted to his record label back in the mid-90s. You can check out all of the tracks on his blog gojohnnygo.com. I’m including an instrumental track below that’s loaded with some note-y Pro-One lines revealing that I have been using that synth for at least sixteen years. Crazy!
