Ecstatic Time Machines

Ecstatic Time Machines: Pauline Oliveros and the Contemporary Timescape
with Michael Century, Professor of New Media and Music Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Thursday, November 21, 2024
6:00pm
First Floor Arts Lounge
Old Arts Building
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Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) was an experimental American composer, performer, writer, teacher and humanitarian well known for her influential conceptions of Sonic Meditation and Deep Listening. Less widely known are her engagements with sound technologies, spanning fifty years and charting the entire spectrum of electronic sound art – from sine oscillators and tape recorders through analog kits and modules, computer controls over such modules, to digital-analog hybrids and full digital programs at the cusp of artificial intelligence. She designated this panoply of ever-shifting technologies and set-ups the “Expanded Instrument System”. The key operator in the Expanded Instrument System is time delay, which sets in motion several lines of creative thought and technology design at multiple temporal scales. The EIS is a device to permit present, past and future to be experienced, in Oliveros’ own words, “simultaneously with transformations.”

Michael Century will present his ongoing research on the Expanded Instrument System from the standpoint of a performer-scholar who worked closely with Oliveros for over three decades. He will demonstrate and analyze EIS as a case study for a prospective “operative media archeology,” informed by Century’s own experimentation with EIS.

Michael Century is musician and cultural theorist, and Professor of New Media and Music in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Century has worked as an academic university teacher, new media researcher, inter-arts producer, and arts policy advisor (Banff Centre for the Arts (1979-93), McGill University (1998-2002), and Government of Canada (1993-98)). His book Northern Sparks: Innovation, Technology Policy and the Arts in Canada from Expo 67 to the Internet Age appeared in 2022 with The MIT Press.