WIGband “It’s Hard to be Perfect”

One night only: put “sin” into cnmat.

WIGband SELECTIONS and WIGGIE AWARD honoring filmmaker Helen Prince Three decades of protest and bad behavior in wigs, song and video

The notorious twosome known as WIGband, Barbara Golden and Johanna Poethig, the demimondaine/underbelly of the Bay Area contemporary music scene in a rare performance at CNMAT. They will sing a selection of their original classics from the Reagan Years, Bush Senior / Clinton Decade to the painfully present but almost over Millenium George.
Vintage footage by Helen Prince, including Trashy Girls, Its Hard to be Perfect and Silver Abs and Golden Buns, the renowned exercise video shown regularly on middle of the night cable TV, will delight audiences again along with songs “Just Say Yes”, “Paranoia” and “Don’t F—— With Me”.

“…. if you are looking for some fun with a bite to it presented by some serious artists who don’t take themselves too seriously, then check them out..” Linda Erlich SF Bay Guardian

As part of the Berkeley Big Bang 2008, Professor Edmund Campion will demonstrate real-time interactive musical applications of computers featuring the CNMAT Max/MSP/Jitter Depot and the eight channel surround system in the CNMAT Sound Spatialization Theater.

Included will be an introduction to the CNMAT Music Information Center. From tutorials on recording technique to the history of electronic music to third-party externals for Max/MSP, the Music Information Center is an ever-growing directory of materials concerned with new music in general and the creation of electronic and computer music.

On June 1 through 3, BAM/PFA and the Berkeley Center for New Media are hosting a new media arts festival on the Berkeley campus called Berkeley Big Bang 2008. This event is timed to link with 01SJ: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, a new-media-art biennial, June 4 through 8 in San Jose. Occurring together for the first time, these two events combine to create one of the nation’s largest gatherings of new media art; a virtual “big bang” of innovation and creativity. The Berkeley program will include a symposium on new media, art, science, and the body in partnership with the Berkeley Center for New Media and Leonardo: the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology; a campus media lab demonstration and open house; and an immersive game, “Black Cloud: Red Eye” by Greg Niemeyer. It is presented in tandem with BAM/PFA exhibitions of works by media artists Trevor Paglen, Jim Campbell, and Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Scott Snibbe.

John Butcher was born in Brighton, England and has lived in London since the late 1970s. His music ranges through free improvisation, various structurings, his own compositions, multitracked saxophone pieces and work with live electronics, amplification and feedback.

He has toured and broadcast in Europe, Japan, Australia and North America, and was featured, playing solo, in the BBC TV programme Date with an Artist. Compositions include pieces for Chris Burn?s Ensemble, the Austrian group Polwechsel, the Australian ensemble Elision and the American Rova Saxophone Quartet.

David Wessel co-directs CNMAT and is a Professor of Music at UC Berkeley where he teaches computer music and music perception and cognition. He performs regularly using multi-touch surfaces as gestural controllers in conjunction with software written in Max/MSP/Jitter. His most recent controller is called the SLAB and treats gestures as continuous signals rather than event triggers.

Bill Hsu is an Associate Professor at San Francisco State University, where he teaches and does research in computer music and computer architecture. He plays piano and works with electronics, and has built systems, tools, installations and compositions, in collaboration with Peter van Bergen, John Butcher, Matthew Heckert, and Lynn Hershman, among others.

This course features Max 5.0, which is scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2008.

This intensive week of evening classes features instruction in Max/MSP programming by a cast of highly experienced Max/MSP programmers.