Where: University of Iceland, Edda room 208 (the new building with the sagas library)

When: Friday, April 25th, 3-5 pm

Facebook event

Deep Drawing

Imagine your signature, its particular loops with its particular rhythms. Imagine writing your signature over and over until it becomes a loop and a beat. Hold onto that sound. Now imagine a machine that tries to guess your signature just from the sound. With enough mics and training, would it, could it, reproduce your signature? Deep Drawing explores the sound of drawing and writing through a deep learning model. An AI co-performer interprets the musical gestures of the human co-performer drawing on an amplified wooden surface to create projected visual drawings corresponding to the sound. Trained on a bespoke dataset of idiosyncratic drawing, Deep Drawing explores novel audio pre-processing and network architecture to design an original sound source localization system that ultimately tests the machine’s capabilities of bringing the intricate and soft noises of graphite on wood to visual life.

Julie Zhu

Julie Zhu is a composer, artist, and carillonist. Her work is conceptual and transdisciplinary, operating on an expansive definition of algorithm. Creative and ethical use of AI and machine learning in the arts is one of her research interests as an Assistant Professor in Performing Arts Technology at the University of Michigan.

An advocate for intermedia composition, Zhu collaborates with artists and musicians globally. The results of these collaborations have been exhibited at and performed in studios and residencies throughout Europe, North America, and Asia, but namely Carnegie Hall (NYC), Herbst Theatre (San Francisco), IRCAM (Paris, France), digitIZMir (Izmir, Turkey), Tetramatyka Festival (Lviv, Ukraine), Sansusī (Latvia), Chicago Home Theater Festival, Miami Design District, College Band Director’s National Association, ICMC (Shenzhen, China), among others. Notable commissions came from Radio France, GMEM, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the University of Chicago Carillon.

Many of Zhu’s pieces are characterized by constraints: whether it is putting a percussionist (or herself) in a wooden box, drawing circles that are amplified through a speaker dome, or hiding the harpsichordist and keyboard in a cardboard house with live video, or developing the just-intonated harmonic architecture for the specific rotation, orbit, and angle of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars in a string quartet. For Zhu, art is best as an anonymous gesture and as a trap.

As a carillonist, Zhu regularly performs on the Burton and Lurie Tower at the University of Michigan and concertizes in the summer. During her time as a visual artist in New York City, she was the resident carillonneur at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue.

https://smtd.umich.edu/profiles/julie-zhu/

We look forward to seeing you!

Free entry, accessible to all.