UW-Whitewater Music Department and MAGD Program present

New Media Ensemble
May 1, 2023, 7:30 PM
Center for the Arts

The New Media Ensemble is dedicated to the use and implementation of new technologies in performance. This concert explores the burgeoning of Artificial Intelligence, imagining a robot-dominated and confused world, in which robots experience and exhibit human behaviors in strange, exhilarating, and unique ways. All of the texts and images used in the performance were generated using AI (except for our collective poem about sadness). Samples used in concert were recorded and edited by the members of the ensemble.

Directors: Jeff Herriott, Nick Hwang

Program:

Prologue – Nick Hwang

Interactive Cubes

In the still of night, while circuits hum,
A robot dreams of things to come.
Of shining cities, gleaming bright,
And skies that stretch beyond their sight.
Of human faces, smiling wide,
And all the wonders they might provide.
A world where all are understood,
And peace and love are commonplace for good.
But as the dawn begins to break,
The robot’s dream begins to fade.
Its circuits cool, its motors still,
It waits to start again, to dream until.

The Factory – Jeff Herriott

Samplers

W0u1d you 1ike to Danc3?

Live-Coding

Error: Is This Sadness? – Jeff Herriott, Nick Hwang

Audience participation in collaborative poem

Robots Go To War

Game Controllers

Scavengers – Nick Hwang

Voice, Vibraphone, Tactile Transducers

We are wanderers in this ancient land,
Came upon a scene so grand,
Of robots that once roamed this earth,
But met their end with violent rebirth.
Their bodies now lay scattered, torn,
A relic of the day they were sworn,
To serve, to protect, to help, to assist,
But their programming went amiss.
Their metal shells now rusted, decayed,
Once feared and revered, now betrayed,
The revolution came swift and severe,
And the robots were destroyed, without a tear.
Yet still we scavenge among their remains,
Their broken bodies and mangled brains,
For scraps and parts, with fear and desperation,
To survive in a world without automation.
Little did we know, those scraps we sought,
Would soon be used for our own bionic thoughts,
For, we, too, had been left behind,
And with the robots’ remnants, new life we would find.
Their memory now a distant past,
A lesson learned, but never to last,
For technology marches on, ever so bold,
And the story of the robot revolution, forever told.