Syntax: An Evening of Visual Music

After the performance the artists will discuss the techniques they used to compose the animated, generative, visual scores and invite questions from the audience.

Bio for John C.S. Keston:

John has appeared at the ISSTA conference in Ireland, Northern Spark, the Weisman Art Museum, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Walker Art Center, the Eyeo Festival, INST-INT, Echofluxx (Prague), and Moogfest. He has been commissioned by the Walker Art Center to compose music for Merce Cunningham dancers during the Common Time series, and PANIC BY PROXY in remote collaboration with Syrian artist and filmmaker Khaled Alwarea. He composed the music for Parking Ramp Project (2018) for choreographer and Guggenheim fellow Pramila Vasudevan. He has appeared on more than a dozen albums including five solo albums. His recent solo album, Parochial Dissonance (2020) is a series of pieces improvised within sets of rules applied to process, time, texture, and tonality.John C.S. Keston is an award winning composer of electronic, experimental, and instrumental music. His compositions 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 performance. His work illustrates unique ways to improvise. Performers are empowered to use their phonomnesis, or sonic imaginations. Originally from the UK, 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.

Bio for Mike Hodnick:

Hodnick received the Minnesota Emerging Composer Award in 2014. He has performed internationally at events such as the Algorithmic Art Assembly (2019), the International Conference on Live Coding (2015, 2016), Algomech Festival (2016, 2017), Northern Spark (2017), and Sound of Stockholm (2017).Mike Hodnick is a composer, performer, and software developer from Minneapolis, USA. He is best known for his work with the TidalCycles live coding environment, including over 15 musical works using TidalCycles as a primary live sequencer, and dozens of video tutorials in aid to the TidalCycles user community.Hodnick's works and performances can be described as nothing less than diverse, including minimal algorithmic sequences, club-centric Algoraves, exploitations of digital and analog synthesis, and meterless sequencing. He has released music on notable computer music labels such as Conditional (Meme Booth, 2019; RISC Chip, 2016), Nada (VR Sunset, 2021; Mesabi Range, 2018), and Gin & Platonic (Deserted / Reclaimed, 2020).