PLAYING THE ARCHIVE 5 – Thursday JANUARY 17, 2019 8:00PM – Pike Auditorium PSU Campus (BBH Building 022)

Playing the Archive is a project conceived at the interface between developmental science and musical art. In 2013, percussionists Robyn Schulkowsky and Joey Baron joined with professor Nilam Ram and colleagues to create artistic visualizations (photo/video animation), sonifications (music), and materializations (installation/sculpture) of scientific data. Each year, the group selects a set of data archives from studies of human behavior and works to translate those data into artistic forms for presentation in their concert performances, lectures, and gallery exhibitions. Playing the Archive I (2013) and Sans-Axis (2014) initiated and refined a collaborative process for creation and performance/display of new musical scores made from longitudinal data. Workshops that accompanied Banging Out the Data (2015) and Playing the Archive II (2015) explored how audience-participation in construction of sonic graphs provokes extraction of personal meaning from scientific data. Playing the Archive III (2016) was presented in Berlin with new works exploring how acts of listening and improvisation may facilitate understanding of data, sound, silence, and emergence of human behavior. Playing the Archive IV (2017) was developed around a series of workshops with data science students in State College, PA (video below).  We are just now preparing for Playing the Archive 5, which will feature new ideas surrounding dyadic conversations and improvisations.