etudes4violin& electronix

featuring DBR and DJ Scientific

April 2, 2009

At this event, Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) and Elan Vytal (DJ Scientific) presented solo and duet works from DBR's recent album, etudes4violin&electronix, and from the critically acclaimed Sonata for Violin and Turntables. In their musical exploration of contrasting cultures and instruments, DBR and DJ Scientific spoke to the history and traditions of both classical and pop music genres. We listened as turntables and laptops sung, battled, and rhymed together, honoring a full spectrum of musical inventions. Having carved a reputation for himself as an innovative composer, performer, violinist, and bandleader, Haitian-American artist Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) melds his classical music roots with his own cultural references and vibrant musical imagination. Producer, laptopist, and musician DJ Elan Vytal—aka DJ Scientific—combined precisely engineered hip-hop beats and scratched rhythms with classical and world music sounds, both live and sampled, creating a uniquely contemporary yet accessible urban sonic experience.

The Exploratorium thanks the Koret Foundation for sponsoring the four After Dark events in April 2009.

Cinema Arts Program:

Building Visions: Photon/Pixel/Photon

April 9, 2009

An ever-growing collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators, and architects, Advanced Beauty is a series of digital artworks inspired and influenced by sound. In these video sound sculptures, computer algorithms create moving images that react to changes in volume, pitch, or timbre. The films in Advanced Beauty were made using the visual programming language Processing, high-end audio analysis, and fluid dynamic simulations alongside traditional, hand-drawn cell animation. Each artist was given the same set of parameters; their work starts, finishes, and exists within a white space creating a seamless coherence, a shared environment wherein a single, floating pixel could be as engaging as a multicolored explosion. Curated by Universal Everything and the musician Freeform, Advanced Beauty is an international collaboration among a family of artists from London, Russia, New York, Japan, Buenos Aires, Glasgow, and San Francisco. The evening also featured video artist and musician Nate Boyce, who presented an audiovisual performance fusing digital and analog materials to explore the inherent plasticity of electronic sound and image. Oscillating between highly formalized permutations and raging turbulence, his real-time manipulations of complex audiovisual timbres are simultaneously hypnotic and disorienting. 

The Exploratorium thanks the Koret Foundation for sponsoring the four After Dark events in April 2009.

Sideshow Science

April 16, 2009

Visitors explored some of nature's strangest curiosities at Sideshow Science. We transformed the museum into a carnival of amazing animal acts, astounding forces of nature, mysterious mind reading, and thrilling games of skill and chance. Visitors were invited to witness the whimsical and weird, behold unbelievable technologies, and test science that defies common sense. Participants included Gilda and her Trained Goldfish; magician Wønderson Humpback; Madam Yu and the Beautiful and Strange Hermaphrodite, Planaria; and more. The 10,000 Mile Bike Race, a live performance, was adapted from Alfred Jarry's 1906 novel, The Supermale, which chronicles a 10,000-mile race between a locomotive and a five-man bicycle across Russian Siberia—fantastic promotion for chemist William Elson's "Perpetual Motion Food." During the performance, local filmmakers Jerome Hiler, Kerry Laitala, Paul Clipson, and Bill Basquin accompanied a blow-by-blow account of the race with film projections while an eight-piece ensemble played music arranged for the event by local composer and bandleader Graham Connah. Konrad Steiner directed. 

The Exploratorium thanks the Koret Foundation for sponsoring the four After Dark events in April 2009.

Walking the Talk

April 23, 2009

An open terrain of phenomena-based exhibits, the Exploratorium is designed to be navigated freely, according to personal inclination and imagination. This evening, we invited visitors to encounter the museum through the eyes of local scientists and creative thinkers in a series of unique, half-hour walking tours. Highlights included a behind-the-scenes look at our machine shop, where exhibit developers share their inspirations and challenges in building new exhibits.

The Exploratorium thanks the Koret Foundation for sponsoring the four After Dark events in April 2009.