The performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery Friday on Oct 28, 2005 was great. I was a bit nervous from the rehersal the night before. I had incorporated the rhyming code i’ve been working on into the template generation system and we made some last minute tweeks at the rehersal which were causing some occasional runtime errors. Running of the software over again would usually produce the desired result. The system generated two texts for the performance, one a more abstract piece, the second a set of rhyming couplets. During testing and rehersal, the abstract piece always seemed much stronger than the rhyming couplets… but at the performance, the abstract piece came out kind of clunky, a bit too long, but the rhyming couplets were just right, humorous and strangley abstract and contextually relevant at the same time…. Unfortunately, after the performance, the texts were lost in the digital ether.

The performance was called "Conflict Diamonds" and was an attempt to take some of the more controversial political conflicts of the VAG’s history and recontextualize them within a live improvisational framework. Our group was called "housband" and consisted of Tom Cone (organisation/aria), Viviane Houle (voice, sounded superb in the resonating space of the rotunda), Andrew Klobucar and David Ayre (text/manipulation), Stefan Smulovitz (kenaxis software and viola), Michael Turner (text/research) and Andrea Young (electroacoustic intro).

 For more photos from the event, click here.