Metacreation Lab Newsletter | APRIL 2021

Autolume at Distopya Sound Art Festival 2021 | Istanbul

Autolume is the Metacreation Lab’s new moving image engine. This collaboration of Philippe Pasquier and Jonas Kraasch has been used to generate visuals for the Mzton music piece from French collective robonom.

Autolume Mzton was presented as part of the Distopya Sound Art Festival 2021, at the Akbank Sanat contemporary arts centre in Istanbul. The exhibition was curated by artists Selçuk Artut and Jeremy Woodruff, and will continue until June 15, 2021. 

Learn more about the exhibition at the festival's website below, or watch this showcase of the exhibit on TRT World.

Advanced Generative Art and Computational Creativity | Kadenze Online Course Discount

For a limited time, this university credit-eligible course will be available on the Kadenze learning platform at a discounted rate of $260 USD (regular tuition $300). Delivered through a partnership with Simon Fraser University, the course follows the introductory Generative Art and Computational Creativity which is open to enrollment for free at this time.

For a quick introduction check out the video overview below, or head to the Kadenze website to learn more.

Taught by Philippe Pasquier of Simon Fraser University, this advanced course proposes a deepened survey of current practices in generative arts and computational creativity with an emphasis on the formal paradigms and algorithms used for generation. The class covers evolutionary computing, neural networks, and procedural generation and how these can produce novel and valuable artifacts. 

The next session begins April 23, 2021, and you can follow the link below for more details on prerequisites and registration. 

Expressive Movement Generation with Machine Learning | PhD Thesis Defence by Dr. Omid Alemi

Congratulations to Dr. Omid Alemi - who is the latest member of the Metacreation Lab to complete a PhD with SFU’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology

We invite you to listen to his concise yet in-depth review of his research into affective movement generation. 

Lockdown Jammer|New Demos & Publication

Lockdown Jammer is a co-creative musical agent that engages in different kinds of interactive behaviours and stylistic responses. Styles of musical responses are embedded in a pre-trained latent space, emergent in the interaction, and can be influenced through the weighting of rhythmic, spectral, harmonic and melodic features. The training and run-time modules utilize the MASOM agent architecture.

A related paper by Notto Thelle has been accepted for publication at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference in Shanghai this June (NIME 2021).

More demonstrations are available in the playlist below, showing the project in action, improvising with electric guitar as user input.