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TIM PERKIS & NOISEY PEOPLE
March 16, 2019
19:30
TIM PERKIS (Live) is most widely recognized as a pioneering member of live computer network bands like The League of Automatic Composers (1978-1983) - "the first musicians to incorporate the newly available microcomputers, […] they approached the computer network as one large, interactive musical instrument made up of independently programmed automatic music machines, producing a music that was noisy, difficult, often unpredictable, and occasionally beautiful."
Since then Perkis has released dozens of recordings and performed his electronic improvised instruments with hundreds of artists in N. America, Europe and Japan, filling out his CV with diverse related research and engineering work.
In Perkis´s own words:
"I like to consider human-machine interaction as a new form of social interaction. What's interesting to me about computers is their ability to serve as a framework for embodying systems offering complexity and surprise. Unpredictability is what makes social life so interesting, it is what makes art so interesting, and it's what can make computers, as partners in art making, interesting. I don't use computers to simply carry out ideas I may have: I'd rather work in situations that force me to respond to surprises that are dealt to me by systems whose complexity and unpredictability are so high that their behavior can not be known in advance. All of my computer based art work has been concerned with creating social (or synthetic social) situations, which have enough complexity to behave like real life: in fact, to be real life of some new kind. The system in question in almost all of these pieces consists of human beings and machines in cycles of mutual influence and response."
"I like to consider human-machine interaction as a new form of social interaction. What's interesting to me about computers is their ability to serve as a framework for embodying systems offering complexity and surprise. Unpredictability is what makes social life so interesting, it is what makes art so interesting, and it's what can make computers, as partners in art making, interesting. I don't use computers to simply carry out ideas I may have: I'd rather work in situations that force me to respond to surprises that are dealt to me by systems whose complexity and unpredictability are so high that their behavior can not be known in advance. All of my computer based art work has been concerned with creating social (or synthetic social) situations, which have enough complexity to behave like real life: in fact, to be real life of some new kind. The system in question in almost all of these pieces consists of human beings and machines in cycles of mutual influence and response."
NOISY PEOPLE (2007) is a feature length video documentary that opens a window into a tightly-knit group of unusual sound artists and musicians from the San Francisco improvisational music community. An active player in the Bay Area experimental music scene myself, Perkis followed his subjects for a year, filming them in their homes and studios, rehearsals and performances. What emerges is a set of funny and lively portraits of some very creative and quirky people -- and a portrait of a way of life outside the commercial musical mainstream of America.