jonathan_reus

Jonathan Reus (US/NL) is an artist and educator working with sound, electronics, computing technologies and social artefacts. Through improvised music and sound performances he investigates the alien-but-entangled relationship we share with our ecosystems of machines and information. His background includes studies in mathematics, folk art, music composition, artificial intelligence and painting. In the past he has been a computer science teacher, Fulbright research fellow, banjo picker, and cyber-hobo.


Jonathan has given talks and done workshops on music, people and machines at the NIME (New Instruments for Musical Expression) conference in Oslo, LIG Art Hall in Seoul, and at Electronic Frequencies Festival in Amsterdam and at STEIM, where he currently works developing professional workshops and organizing educational collaborations.

Crackle - iPhone app

Mobile surface controller/interactive audio-visual object

Crackle is an iPhone application currently in the beta stages of testing. It's a sound and visual instrument with a deceptively simple interface: touch it. Complexity is introduced through a dynamic topological mapping under the surface that keeps the instrument changing as you play it. It is also an encapsulated surface idiom for remotely controlling any system (lighting, remote sound, etc.) that can be interfaced with OSC. Crackle is planned to be in the Apple app store by late 2012.

Future of the Lab

Rapid Form-finding Music Workshops

Future of the Lab is an experiment in collaborative composition as playing. It is a rapid-prototyping tool for new music. A collection of musicians from different cultural and stylistic backgrounds assemble for short periods to explore for two days a rapid compositional approach. Although improvisational exercises form a core element of the composition strategy, the Future of the Lab is not an improv group or jam session. The end goal is the creation of formal structures. Future of the lab approaches to composing take the form of conducting games, improv exercises, metaphors, and on-the-spot songwriting sprints whose methodology continues to evolve and mature with each session.

A longer-term goal of Future of the Lab is the development of a freewheeling composition system which is necessarily free of stylistic bias and allows performance and composing to form a self regulating system. Concepts from cybernetics and computing serve as analogies for building on-the-fly relationships.

www.futureofthelab.com

Mapping Everything Else

Concept workshop for new instruments

Mapping Everything Else is a workshop where artists and musicians explore new new computer instruments from a non-technical approach. Using their bodies and voices, participants explore relationships between gesture, sound, metaphors, and affordances through a series of thought experiments exploring essential considerations of musical performance systems. The instrument is deconstructed: first as a library of sonic relationships, then as a complex system, and finally as a navigable landscape. The workshop was developed at STEIM through a collaboration between myself, media artist Georgios Papadakis, and researcher/composer Berit Janssen - with helpful advice from Kristina Andersen and Joel Ryan of STEIM. The workshop has been given at STEIM and at the 2011 New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference in Oslo.

NON by KIM, Catwalk Show SS2011

60-speaker real-time performance / catwalk installation

Comission from the NON by KIM experimental menswear label to develop a multi-multi-channel sound installation for their live catwalk show, premiered at the Amsterdam Fashion Week in July of 2010. This project was realized with media artists Dennis van Doremalen and Eelke Feenstra, and with composer Lars J. Brouwer.



(pre 2005)

Odds and ends