HubRenga copy KPFA folio

Thursday Sept. 7 [1989] 9-11 PM Music Special hosted by Charles Amirkhanian

Tonight's show is a live performance from KPFA's sound studio of "HubRenga", an audience-interactive, music/poetry piece made possible by the communication between two computer networks. The collaborators in the creation of this piece are Bay Area computer music band The Hub, novelist and musician Ramon Sender, and poets from the poetry conference of The Well.

The Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is an electronic network that operates in the Bay Area facilitating communication between people interested in arts and alternative lifestyles. The poetry conference is a continuing forum about poetry which subscribers to The Well can join to exchange their ideas and work. A participant uses a personal computer and modem to phone up The Well, and then browses through contributions that other users have made about the topic of interest, and can leave responses, or start new ideas that remain in the Well for others to read.

Ramon Sender, a co-founder of the seminal San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960's, has been the moderator of this conference in the past few years. The Hub is a band of electronic music composers that uses a small micro-computer (also called "the hub") to share data among each of it's member's independent computer-music systems. The Hub has developed a repertoire of pieces that uses this interdependence in a lively, performance oriented way.

During the performance poets will submit poetry to the piece through the Well. At KPFA, Ramon, as moderator, will browse through the submissions as they come in, reading them aloud as a part of the music. One Hub member will be also receiving the texts on his computer, which will be programmed to filter it for specific "key words" that have been determined in advance of the performance to trigger specific musical responses from The Hub. During the performance, poets will be listening to the piece over the radio while they are shaping it through their communication with The Well. The purpose of the piece is to create with this technology a situation in which a large network of collaborators is tied together from various remote locations in creating an interactive performance.

The piece was made possible by an InterArts grant from the NEA, administered by New Langton Arts in San Francisco.

HUBRENGA "power" wordlist:

embrace echo twist rumble keystone whisper charm magic worth Kaiser schlep habit mirth swap split join plus minus grace change grope skip virtuoso root bind zing wow earth intimidate outside phrase honor silt dust scan coffee vertigo online transfer hold message quote shimmer swell ricochet pour ripple rebound duck dink scintillate old retreat non-conformist flower sky cage synthesis silence crump trump immediate smack blink