Kevin Patton, experimental musician and Maria del Carmen Montoya, new media artisit, discuss their creative collaborations as well as their week-long residency at the UO to help launch the “new media” management area of concentration in the Arts and Administration master’s program. UO Today, the Oregon Humanities Center’s half-hour television interview program, provides a glimpse […]
The elipsis catalog is a duet project of Kevin Patton and Butch Rovan using custom designed alternate controllers.Patton’s instrument, the “Fossil”, is a wireless sensor-based musical instrument that is played with the entire gestural range of arm movement as well as finger pressure. Four FSRs, a momentary button, and a twodimensional accelerometer are used to […]
Cracked Across the Brow is a composition for Tenor Saxophone and Interactive Computer Music written for Woody Witt in the fall of 2005. This documentation is from it’s Houston premiere at the University of St. Thomas’ Cullen Hall. This documentation also features the Houston-based artist Jonathan Jindra who accompanies Woody and Kevin with his visual […]
This project, led by Jeff Morris, creates a variable youTube environment for collaboration among a set of musicians. Weblogmusic is a web-based platform for performers to improvise in asynchronous virtual ensembles and for audiences to experience these performances in ways that reflect the impact of technological mediation on human interaction, the human value of a […]
THE PEOPLE TO COME is a new participatory performance installation conceived and directed by Yanira Castro. The work initiates from a solo choreographed by Castro, which is radically altered each night by the performers using material created by the local community and the audience attending the performances. The sound score was designed and implemented by […]
Perceptual Interiorities is a collaboration including Kevin Patton, Dana Reason, and Shelley Jordon. In this work, Painter Shelley Jordon and Pianist Dana Reason are connected by a custom stop-motion program designed by Kevin Patton. This program uses data from Dana’s piano to control the way that the animation is composited in real-time. The stop-motion program […]
What is the relationship between ritual and technology? Where is the locus of power? Magic? Science? We Are All Creatures of Moisture suggests that the locus is labile as the organic and the artificial interact. This piece explores the relationship between ancient ritual and technology via human endeavor through interactive multi-media performance art. The video […]
Wine Blood Blood Love 2005 with Maria del Carmen Montoya In the summer of 2005 the Station Museum in Houston, Texas approached Kevin and Carmen about creating a performance piece in response to Viennese Aktionist Hermann Nitsch’s Orgies Mysteries Theatre.WineBloodBloodLove approaches Nitsch’s themes of violence, bodily fluids and quasi religious ritual in an immediate context […]
envyCODE is a collective of interactive performers that includes Ulrich Maiss, Joseph Butch Rovan, Kevin Patton, and Maria del Carmen Montoya. envyCODE is dedicated to exploring uncommon sounds, new interfaces, and improvisation. In this example, Butch and Kevin “battle” with custom built instruments called Fossil and Banshee FOSSIL v. BANSHEE | Envycode | Live At […]
A Pocket Full of Stones, Kevin Patton Trio, LJLR-001, 2004 Guitar trio improvisations with Thomas Helton, contrabass, Richard Cholokian, percussion and drumset Carmen … Lento
The Digital Poplar Consort The Digital Poplar Consort is a family of wireless hand-made sensor based musical instruments. Each instrument provides a different interface to a gesture based system for electronic sound processing and synthesis. This project explores the ways in which musicians approach the physical interface of the instrument with their bodies when attempting […]
The TaurEx is a sensor extension for the electric guitar that tracks motion and reads performance gestures in order to provide wireless, real-time control of computer effects and sampling. Designed and built by Kevin Patton, the interface of the TaurEx allows Patton to control an array of computer effects and processing while playing — including […]
The Ambidextron Double Glove System is a glove instrument for controlling electronic sound with physical gesture. This is a performance piece entitled, Creaking the Air Original Demonstration at Grant Recital Hall
The Fault of Epimetheus is an oratorio that recounts the tale of Epimetheus and his more famous brother, Prometheus. The results of Epimetheus’ bumbling and error unleash a horror on his brother while also granting humans the rudiment technologies of survival. This primordial grief is echoed in John Berryman’s Henry from the Dream Songs whose […]
Endurance metal MinD SplitteR from MEME @ Brown on Vimeo.
Mophological Notation is a system of interactive computer-music descriptive notation that links pictographic representations to the system of spectromorphologies suggested by Dennis Smalley. The Morphological Notation (MN) uses these morphologies and adds a z-plane to the well-established time-vs-pitch schema. Ideally, MN will not only represent the sound data of the moment, but also will be […]
I Sky You 2009 with Maria Del Carmen Montoya, winners of the 2009 Rhizome commission competition Seven clear glass dual-chamber forms containing a solution of Luminol in one chamber and a chemical reagent in the secondary chamber, hang over head. Drop by drop, the Luminol is released into the reagent chamber causing bursts of brilliant […]
The October 2009 issue of Point of Departure has Kevin’s take on the electroacoustic improvising duet of FURT , A.K.A. Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer. In this column Kevin explores dealing with complexity and the impossibility of silence. You have to be engaged to listen to complex music. Otherwise, you may be prone to think […]
This column is about the structural implications of improvising with listening instruments, or real time processors that are designed by one musician to interact with another. The specific example I explore is the work of Joel Ryan in the context of his duet with Evan Parker and the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble whose new release […]
The 40 year anniversary of STEIM and the contribution Michel Waisvisz. In the ever expanding root structure of improvised musics, the rhizome of jazz still tethers a tight circle of sprouts, buds seemingly more like each other with each generation. This self similar, fractal like expansion, however, from time to time creates mutants – even […]
Night Wanderings, Kevin Patton, IYN-014, 2009 Night Wanderings is a collection of tinkering. Each track has its own unique system and interface built over years most often in the small hours of the night—trying not to wake up the neighbors (most of the time) …. Everything here is performed in realtime with no overdubbing or […]
Floating Point, Gray Code, Circumvention 057, 2010
Cicada, Kevin Patton with Thomas Helton, IYN-017, 2010 Cicada is a duet with contrabassist Thomas Helton and BrundleFLY. BrundleFLY is software designed by Kevin Patton to respond to and alter the timbre of the bass. Improvisations were recorded summer 2009 in Houston TX, at the REMS Lab, the Rice University Electroacoustic Studios.
Fresnel, Kevin Patton and Seth Paynter, IYN-016, 2009 Cover image courtesy of Maria del Carmen Montoya, a still of her piece, I Could Have Danced All Night Fresnel features the duo of Houston’s Seth Paynter on sax and ethnic reeds, and brundleFLY. brundleFLY is an interactive processor created and directed by Kevin Patton. In real […]
Performance with interactive projections @ (sub)Urban Projections November 16, 2011.
This design in the recipient of a $25,000 Venture Capital Grant. Look for a new designs Spring 2013.