John Supko & Bill Seaman: s_traits, with Wet Ink Ensemble

Clocktower Productions and Pioneer Works, Center for Art and Innovation present the release event for composer John Supko's innovative CD, s_traits, created in collaboration with media artist Bill Seaman and the intelligent computer program, bearings_traits. The performance features musicians from Wet Ink Ensemble, performing alongside bearings_traits' spontaneously generated music, composed by navigating an 110-hour database of audio samples and forging them into multitrack pieces in real time. To complement the music, a video program, arranged by Seaman, projects free-form images in the space.

Free and open to the public! The show is followed by an after party a few blocks away at Van Dyke Park (98A Van Dyke Street), New Amsterdam Records’ headquarters.

Supko and Seaman spent three years collecting audio source material, including field recordings, analog and digital noise, acoustic and electronic instruments, cassette tapes, recordings of Seaman and Supko playing the piano, and soundtracks from documentaries made in the 1960’s and 70‘s. The bearings_traits program, designed by Supko, selects samples from this database and juxtaposes them to create spontaneous, multi-track compositions, that Supko and Seaman shaped into the 77-minute album. Each track of s_traits opens with a fragment of text written and read by Seaman, assigned randomly by the software, which serves as both introduction and title to the individual pieces.

John Supko explores intersections between traditional music, computer generated audio, spoken word art, and live performance. Supko also experiments with new forms of documentation for his music, with works such as A Free Invention for George Pitcher, a software that "performs" a new version of itself each time it is activated. Currently the Hunt Family Assistant Professor of Music at Duke University, Supko holds degrees from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music (BM) and Princeton University (PhD).

Bill Seaman's work similarly focuses on interactive computational meta-meaning systems and an expanded technological poetics. His music combines his own structured piano improvisations, composed selections of samples, and computational and analog abstractions. He is Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. Seaman holds degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA), MIT (MSVisS) and the Center for Advanced Inquiry in Interactive Art at the University of Wales (PhD).