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USER AGREEMENT

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World Premiere

August 20 & 21, 2018

6:15 PM

Bechtler Museum

Charlotte

 

music 

composed by

 

Ian Dicke

 

located in a

prepared music field

Bechtler Art Museum

Charlotte

 

in collaboration with

 

Digital Arts Center

College of Arts + Architecture

UNC Charlotte

 

performed by

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Scott Christian

percussion

Mira Frisch

cello

Lindsay Kesselman

soprano

Jessica Lindsey

clarinet

Jenny Topilow

violin

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technology and smart phone apps by

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Iosef  Yeremuk

Andrew Duncan

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Environments at all levels are being flooded with information, images and music. The proliferation of smart phones and communication networks has altered the manner in which people understand and experience space. One pressing question for architecture, art, music and theater is how to conceptualize this mixed environment, how to integrate the flow of information with the spatial settings in which it is received. User Agreement is a music composition that explores the manner in which interactivity and computation can transform music performance space.

 

The College of Arts + Architecture at UNC Charlotte is  proud to annonuce User Agreement, an original composition by Ian Dicke for performances in a prepared music field as part of an on-going collaboration between Scott Christian and the Digital Arts Center at UNC Charlotte.  The world premiere will be at the Bechtler Museum in Charlotte.

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For the performance of User Agreement, we have created “CagedSpace”, a set of technologies including a custom smart phone app, Bluetooth beacons that provide location data to the app and streaming prerecorded music. The musicians will be located throughout the museum connected by a mobile “click track.” The audience is free to move through the museum, engaging both with live performers and digitally delivered, augmented pieces of the composition. Each member of the audience will have a unique listening experience depending upon their position and movement during the performance

 

User Agreement, scored for soprano, chamber ensemble, dynamically spatialized audio, and video projections explores how the propagation of search engines and social media has drastically altered our collective perception of anonymity and privacy in the digital age. As we willingly share information about ourselves online, we leave an enormous trail of opinions and feelings that are readily searchable by anyone with an internet connection. While many positive qualities emerge from this unfettered form of communication, we tend to dismiss the potential risks that arise when multinational corporations continually track our online activities, one search query and comment at a time.

Divided into five continuous movements, User Agreement sets fragments of Twitter’s 2017 Terms of Service, which is a document that all potential users must acknowledge and accept before creating a profile. The text is at once mundane and ominous, with ambiguous descriptions of how personal data is shared with third parties contrasted with playful, yet unnerving warnings about the limitless scope of a post’s digital reach and the inferred values that are extracted.

To compliment this programmatic narrative, audience members are invited to download a free mobile application that augments the live performance with additional musical content. To encourage audience members to physically explore the concert space, the musicians are positioned in a widely spread arrangement throughout the venue. As listeners move around, their physical position is unknowingly tracked by a series of mounted beacons, which in turn delivers a unique combination of audio streams through the mobile application. As a result, no two listeners experience the work in the same fashion and the traditionally assumed anonymity of the performer/audience relationship is subverted. In addition, tweets from within a half-mile radius of the performance space are video-projected onto the walls, allowing audience members to knowingly (or inadvertently) post about their experiences in real time for all to view.Our collaboration focuses on responsive architecture, an emerging concept that embraces the interweaving of space and digital media as a critical element in contemporary architectural practice and expanded musical performance venues that provide an engaging, inclusive and unique atmosphere for both performers and audience.

 

 

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We have created a prepared music field that will allow the audience to move through the space using their smart phones to engage both with live performers and digitally delivered augmented pieces of the composition. Each member of the audience will have a unique listening experience depending upon their position and movement during the performance

 

 

The spatial setting informs the prepared music field both through the diffuse spacing of the musicians and by the configuration of performances in multiple settings using topological instruction. The movement through the space affords a new method of spatial engagement for the audience.

 

 

The historical constellation of music engages the prepared music field by developing the range of instrumental, found, and manufactured sounds as media for the piece. This project fits within a tradition of innovation and inclusion that stretches back at least a century.

 

 

The technological matrix provides a new medium of engagement with the prepared music field through the use of smart phone technology to provide precise location information and to supplement or alter the live acoustics. This project uses technology to actively prepare and interact with the space. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlotte Observer, Sept. 18, 2018 

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This ‘User Agreement’ convened app, music, art, audience

BY MEG SEITZ

Arts correspondent

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When UNC Charlotte Professor of Architecture Eric Sauda and the research team at the school’s Digital Arts Center (a.k.a. d-Arts) started to play around with how space and technology impact each other, there was no way of telling where it would lead.

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Sauda did know one thing, though.

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“We knew that we wanted to push the boundaries about how space and data and connection interact,” he says.

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In August, d-Arts premiered a multi-faceted performance that was two years in the making: “User Agreement,” done in collaboration with the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art.

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It was one of a series of design research projects, collaborative and experiential events championed by d-Arts, and drew UNCC students and staff, but also supporters of Charlotte’s ever-growing arts scene. Plans call for it to go on to California, and perhaps elsewhere.

Let’s explain its complexities.

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Audience members were asked before the performance to download a free app called CagedSpace to their mobile devices. CagedSpace employs Bluetooth beacons and streaming, pre-recorded music. Then audience members were told to open the app and put on their headphones or earbuds.

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The magic is in the way CagedSpace’s Bluetooth beacons communicate with each user’s device and respective location. As audience members moved through the space at the Bechtler, they heard augmented pieces of the composition. Scored by composer Ian Dicke, “User Agreement” featured not only the pre-recorded music, but also live performances by soprano Lindsay Kesselman and a chamber ensemble that included Scott Christian, Jenny Topilow, Jessica Lindsey and Mira Frisch.

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The composition was broken down into five unique movements. Present in each section were lyrics sung by Kesselman – lyrics that were actually text from Twitter’s 2017 Terms of Service or, as we know it, the User Agreement. It was a strategic move on Dicke’s part, as well as commentary on how social media has transformed our experience with not only personal space, but digital space.

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If it reads as if there were a lot going on at once in this experience, you’re right.

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With earbuds in, I moved through the fourth-floor gallery’s exhibition, listening to not only the music streaming through my earbuds, but also the live performances. Music shifted and changed, roared or calmed down, as I moved through the space – but it was personal to me and my movement. It was as though I had my very own soundtrack pumping through my earbuds as I experienced the art. I found myself moving differently, and secretly intrigued by how the sensory experience would shift from room to room. It was both interactive and intimate.

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“It seems like interactivity is becoming increasingly important in performance art, so I liked that they tried something new,” said Charlotte resident Hollie Martin. “I liked the exploration of how technology and music can work together to create these new, sensory experiences.”

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What was even more unusual was the idea that everyone there was also in the midst of their very own, personal experience based on their respective movements.

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As is often the case when you have headphones on, you often find yourself in your own world. When you’re in your own world in a gallery that features work by Andy Warhol and Niki de Saint Phalle, it feels like a dream – until you remember you’re in a gallery with hundreds of people. That changes how you connect with not only the art, but also each other.

UNCC architecture student Amir Naeem picked up on that interaction piece.

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“This exhibit was the first attempt by architects to combine spatial qualities with music and art,” he said. “And it ended up creating something different between people, too. You ended up watching people watch the art, too, because you’re wondering what they’re experiencing, too.”

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“There’s really no wrong way to experience this,” said composer Dicke. “I do a lot of composition with multimedia and technology, but nothing to this level. I don’t have other pieces that have this mobile app component.”

Sauda said his team started with how they wanted the CagedSpace app to work, then presented that idea to two computer science classes at UNCC. The classes did early work on it, then IT pros finished it, and did all the final development for the performances. Sauda said the app will continue to be developed and improved, working with an advanced app design class at UNCC, and they plan to make it available to other composers to use.

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There’s no doubt that “User Agreement” was doing something complex. But, at the same time, it proved a simple point: There’s always been and always will be a relationship between where we listen to music and how we listen to music. And each user’s experience is unique in an interactive and intimate way.

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And proof of the artistic merit of “User Agreement”: Through the experience, I didn’t check my phone once.

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This story is part of an Observer underwriting project with the Thrive Campaign for the Arts, supporting arts journalism in Charlotte.

 

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