
Fred Frith/Heike Liss: Drawing Sound Concert
February 11 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

School of Music, San Jose State University, Concert Hall
Over the last twenty years, improviser and composer Fred Frith and visual artist Heike Liss have collaborated on a number of different projects including video installations, interventions and performances. More recently they have been improvising together in a variety of contexts. Liss has been developing and refining digital tools (using software based on Max MSP/ Jitter) that allow her to digitally paint and draw over projected videos, both pre-recorded and from live feeds. Frith continues to explore the essential parameters and limits of the musical “instrument”. In this work, they are confronting the difficulties specific to improvising in both visual and audio fields in a world where the visual is generally perceived as primary. How to avoid the music being taken as a soundtrack to what’s on the screen? Should the listeners/viewers be able to understand it from the same point of view as the creators? What is the equivalent of silence in projected images? How does a visual “gesture” correspond to a sonic one, or indeed should it? In the end, what kinds of interaction are possible or desirable? These are some of the issues that are addressed in . The two artists have also developed an “analog” version of the project, in which Liss draws directly on window panes. Drawing Sound has been performed in Basel, Copenhagen, London, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Sao Paolo, Stuttgart, Valdivia, and many other places large and small.
Drawing Sound is Supported by the College of Humanities & the Arts’ Artistic Excellence Programming Grant