Percussionists Robyn Schulkowsky and Joey Baron join with Professor Nilam Ram and his colleagues, including CAS Professor Denise Solomon, to create artistic visualizations (photo/video animation), sonifications (music), and materializations (installation/sculpture) of scientific data.

Each year, Schulkowsky, Baron, and Ram select a set of data archives from studies of human behavior and work 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) and IV (2017), presented at the Max Plank Institute in Berlin and at Penn State University, explored how acts of listening and improvisation facilitate understanding of data, sound,  and silence. 

This year’s performance supplements crowd favorites with explorations of dyadic data from lab-based conversations and emergent behavior in stage-based improvisations. All are welcome!