21 June

Galerie Pictura, 18h

Jeff Morris:

Science and Fantasy

Jeff Morris creates experiences that engage audiences' minds with their surroundings. His performances, installations, lectures, and writings appear in international venues known for cutting-edge arts and deep questions in the arts. He has won awards for making art emerge from unusual situations: music tailored to architecture and cityscapes, performance art for the radio, and serious concert music for toy piano, robot, Sudoku puzzles, and paranormal electronic voice phenomena. He curates the Fresh Minds Festival of audiovisual art from all over the world, serves as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Art, Culture and Design Technologies, and created the Performance Technology (PerfTech) program at Texas A&M University (a Carnegie Tier One Research University and member of the elite Association of American Universities).

With examples from his own compositions for live sampling improvisation, feedback loops, and MusInfo's Sampo musical instrument, Dr. Morris will show how an artist's mindset enables science to reach domains ordinarily beyond its grasp: using the unreal to reason about reality and an open mind ready to capture information it wasn't expecting to find. He will also show how a scientific mindset can in turn liberate the humanities: systems thinking becomes art hacking.