{"id":32,"date":"2009-05-10T20:41:51","date_gmt":"2009-05-11T00:41:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/?p=32"},"modified":"2009-05-13T21:29:48","modified_gmt":"2009-05-14T01:29:48","slug":"robot-jams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/2009\/05\/robot-jams\/","title":{"rendered":"Robot Jams"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I heard <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ensemblerobot.org\/\">Ensemble Robot<\/a> last night at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.axiomart.org\/\">AXIOM.<\/a> It was a suitably outrageous performance and a nice final event for the 2009 <a href=\"bostoncyberarts.org\">Boston Cyberarts Festival,<\/a> which officially ends today. Ensemble Robot has robot musicians who play alone and with human performers. Two of them, a robot glockenspiel and a one-string robot instrument\/performer, were at AXIOM last night. They played several pieces, including <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ensemblerobot.com\/VideoPages\/bellelabs_mos_video.shtml\"><i>Belle Labs.<\/i><\/a> The final number involved using one of the robots as an instrument, controlled by a MIDI guitar. It was a nice finale that sounded fittingly extreme, but I have to admit that &#8220;slaving&#8221; this former silicon-based collaborator to a person in this way disturbed me a bit. I also wish that there had been time for questions and discussion, so that I would have a better idea of how autonomous the robots were, if they were listening to the other performers, and so on. In any case, if you have a chance to hear this unusual group, I highly recommend it.<\/p>\n<p>The performance, which included people playing on hacked-together non-electronic instruments, reminded me of the amazing sort of things that used to happen at <a href=\"http:\/\/miters.mit.edu\/\">MITRES,<\/a> the MIT Electronics Research Society, back when they had their open mic\/show and tell nights. I noticed that Ensemble Robot artistic director Christine Southworth is an MIT and Brown alumnus; perhaps the coincidence runs deeper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I heard Ensemble Robot last night at AXIOM. It was a suitably outrageous performance and a nice final event for the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival, which officially ends today. Ensemble Robot has robot musicians who play alone and with human performers. Two of them, a robot glockenspiel and a one-string robot instrument\/performer, were at AXIOM &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/2009\/05\/robot-jams\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Robot Jams&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12,17,14,7],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-art","tag-digital","tag-music","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}