CHAPTER 4 From Network Bands to Ubiquitous Computing: Rich Gold and the Social Aesthetics of Interactivity

Abstract

stallation and performance-in single and multiple participant, discrete and distributed modalities" (401).Recent new media histories (see Chandler and Neumark 2005; Salter 2010) have implicitly challenged the field's conventional wisdom that traces the origins of interactive computer-based art making to the mid-1980s.Around the time that the first voltage-controlled synthesizers were being invented by Donald Buchla and Robert Moog, the young composer Joel Chadabe (1997, 286) was putting together hybrid analog-digital constructions that generated music autonomously by means of pseudo-random processes.By 1977, Chadabe had created one of the earliest computer systems for live musical performance.The heart of Chadabe's cems system was a Digital Equipment Corporation pdp-11 "minicomputer," which was able to both input and transform analog data and control analog hardware.Frequently found in academic music departments, minicomputers were relatively portable in that, unlike the mainframe systems of the period, they could be loaded into a van or truck and transported to concert sites.Chadabe (1997, 291) characterized his devices as the first fruits of a practice of "interactive composition" in which the instruments "made musical decisions, or at least seemed to make musical decisions, as they produced sound and as they responded to a performer.These instruments were interactive in the sense that performer and instrument were mutually influential.The performer was influenced by the music produced by the instrument, and the instrument was influenced by the performer's controls."Roughly coterminous with Chadabe's work, a number of young composers began making interactive computer music using the new eight-bit microcomputers, systems far more portable and less expensive than Chadabe's.Much of the most influential work took place in the San Francisco Bay Area, a center for experimental music since the 1950s.Their music and ideas were developed in itinerant settings among independent researchers, designers, and artists in public performance spaces such as the Blind Lemon in Berkeley and, most crucially, the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, which became an important gathering place for new ideas and practices around the emerging interactive directions.The college already possessed a strong reputation for supporting cuttingedge music.In the 1930s, the Mills Concert Hall featured performances of works by Bla Bartk, Henry Cowell, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern, as well as the American premiere of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite.