Boston

Joseph Butch Rovan is a composer and performer on the faculty of the Department of Music at Brown University, where he co-directs MEME (Multimedia & Electronic Music Experiments @ Brown) and the Ph.D. program in Computer Music and Multimedia. Prior to joining Brown he directed CEMI, the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia, at the University of North Texas, and was a compositeur en recherche with the Real-Time Systems Team at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. Rovan worked at Opcode Systems before leaving for Paris, serving as Product Manager for MAX, OMS and MIDI hardware.

Butch will discuss is new interactive installation, Let us imagine a straight line, featuring dancer Ami Shulman — which you can visit on October 17, 2009; 1:00 – 4:00 pm at the Digital Humanites Lab (lower floor), Cogut Center for the Humanities, Pembroke Hall, 172 Meeting Street, Providence, RI.Let us imagine a straight line explores the meaning of movement and the limits of perception through multiple stagings of the body in time and space. Drawing on the work of French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey and philosopher Henri Bergson, the installation presents an interactive environment that allows participants to reveal the substance of interior bodily impulses through image, text, and sound.

Documents of 19th-century science and 20th-century phenomenology combine with the very real and present gestures of a 21st-century dancer, to produce a contrapuntal study that allows one to experience movement in relation to bodies of knowledge — and knowledge of bodies — both past and present.

Rovan has received prizes from the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition, first prize in the Berlin Transmediale International Media Arts Festival, and his work has been performed throughout Europe and the U.S. He frequently performs his own work, either with various new instrument designs or with augmented acoustic instruments.

Rovan’s research includes new sensor hardware design and wireless microcontroller systems. His research into gestural control and interactivity has been featured in IRCAM’s journal “Resonance”, “Electronic Musician”, the Computer Music Journal, the Japanese magazine “SoundArts,” the CDROM “Trends in Gestural Control of Music” (IRCAM 2000), and will appear in the upcoming book “Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies,” to be published 2009 by Palgrave Macmillan.