Mathias Fuchs
(Programme Leader in MSc Creative Games and MA Creative Technology, School of Art and Design, Salford University/UK)
Mathias
Fuchs (Erlangen, Germany, 1956) is an Artist, musican, media critic, who has
been working in the field of electronic arts since 1989. His main concern
is the construction of poly-sensory spaces and situations. Sound, text and
image are understood as components of a multi-dimensional sense-scape.
Studies in computer science and electronic music shaped his interest for electronic art, especially computer mediated sound generation and manipulation. Currently working on Games engines as creative tools for performers. 1988 - 1989, 2 years research fellowship at Electronic Music Studios in Stockholm. 1989 - 2002 Lecturer at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, the University of Music and the Design University in Linz. 2001 - 2002 Visiting professor for music and media at Sibelius Academy Helsinki, Finland. from 2003 on Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Creative Technology at Salford University in Manchester. He is currently working on a PhD- thesis on "Sinn und Sound" at Kunsthochschule für Medien Cologne (Prof. Hans-Ulrich Reck) and Humboldt-Universität Berlin (Prof. Thomas Macho)
Statement:
1. Most of my compositions explore the peculiarities and thrills of conflicts between carefully prepared material and live musical processes. The piece GANGART for tape-music and drummers on horseback for example set up a formal frame for the development of musical structures. The percussion instruments were mounted on the borders of the arena and had to be passed by the horses in a way specified by the score. I generated and modified rhythmical patterns by directing the orientation and speed of the horses. The unpredictable part of the piece was the immediate response of horses and riders to stimuli generated by a computer sound system. Another point I am extremely interested in, is the possibility to communicate musical material via network. Some 20 projects have been carried through during the last 5 years to find out about sound exchange and live MIDI interaction amongst musicians spread across the earth. Projects GAIA (ars electronica) and GEOMETRY OF SILENCE have been carried through in cooperation with Roy Ascott, ENTRÊ / SORTIE was an exchange of sound material and compositional structures I triggered by distributing a "sound vocabulary" amongst fellow composers (documented in LEONARDO magazine). ART'S BIRTHDAY '91 and '92 were tele-birthday parties in collaboration with Bob Adrian, Hank Bull/ Western Front, Simon Waters/ UEA Norwich, museum of progress and a lot of other composers. My most recent piece in telemusic is HAUSMUSIK, a concerto for a violin robot and MIDI-grand piano, controlled by stock exchange information, which is read by a Macintosh computer, analyzed in real-time, and transformed to musical sounds.
2. I worked regularly for Austrian Broadcast/ "Kunstradio" and "Wissenschaft" departments as a radio journalist and do musical compositions for different programs.
3. My "native" computer language is ALGOL60. I wrote applications in C, FORTRAN77 (at the VAX at EMS Stockholm), PASCAL, ALGOL, MS-QuickBASIC, Lingo (MacroMind) and TELEFUNKEN assembler. I also developed real-time software for the HP1000 controlling a digital oscillator board and for a DEC-microcomputer in the corresponding assembler languages (documented in research reports of the Royal Swedish Music Academy, Austrian Soc. for Art and Technology). I developed a compositional system, which allows to generate SD-formatted output on a Macintosh computer. The program, called MIGRATION, is a tool to enable composers to move sound objects in time and in space.