Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, and James Bradbury beamed in on the big screen at Gray Area in the Mission last month, on March 11, so I could interview them in front of a live audience. The setting was the second-ever Algorithmic Art Assembly conference-cum-festival.
There was a meta quality to the hybrid live/Zoom scenario, in that the topic of discussion — the trio’s excellent web audio project at intersymmetric.xyz — was the way they created virtual environments for individuals to make music collaboratively from a long distance. They discussed how it arose out of the constraints of pandemic performance, how unsatisfying they found live-streaming of traditional concerts, and how they did test runs of the software with children, among other aspects of the project. (Speaking of meta, I kind of love how in the video you see my gesticulations and facial expressions repeated behind me on the video screen, and how they’re delayed ever so slightly, like a split second. It’s latency in action.)
This is the interface of their first intersymmetric.xyz project, commissioned for the No Bounds festival in 2021:
This is the interface of their second intersymmetric.xyz project, commissioned for Algorithmic Art Assembly 2022:
And here’s footage of a live performance by Fell and Treanor on the AAA version of intersymmetric.xyz, introduced by AAA founder Thorsten Sideb0ard:
On the AAA I made room code: Hi from Sweden Can you step in to that room and edit my song? I have the original om Freesound.