Given - Taken

'Given – Taken' derives from two sources:

· an extended research project with the choreographer and academic Dr Emilyn Claid, into the structuring together of oppositional elements in dance and music
· research into emergent complexities in balanced systems.

The research with Dr Claid started with workshops at The Place, London, to explore the dynamics which could result when dance and music took quite different paths. This was realised as a series of oppositional counterpoints, which might or might not resolve into consonances. We then conducted further practical research exercises, which resulted in an interim piece to evince these principles. We finally played out our ideas on a large scale in 2003 with Remember to Forget.

Unusually for our collaborative practice, I through-composed the music as Given – Taken, and Dr Claid choreographed against it. Again unusually, I considered this music for dance as a stand alone piece (hence its separate title) and later revised it extensively, incorporating new sections.

I developed mathematical and diagrammatic models of the complex evolution of multiple strands within a system in equilibrium – this form of emergence is, I believe, essential to developing holistic intelligent systems. I realised that the mathematical procedures could be enacted in music, and so used them to generate the macro and micro structures that shape the piece. The structure is loosely palindromic, with strictly palindromic sections at the beginning, middle and end, and other sections reflecting each other across the central axis. At the micro level a fragment of birdsong generates melodic and harmonic material through a mirroring process of inversion, retrograde and retrograde inversion, which further give rise to local structures in a generative process.

Stuart Jones

Research Interests

Development and application of interactive technologies in the built environment.
Use of sound to reconfigure our perceptions of space and vice versa.
Use of data sonification to communicate information about the environment in real time.

Use of interaction, in conjunction with other media, to create narrative environments.
Development of a body of theory to underpin creative practice for narrative environments

Current Research

My practice is mainly in installation or performative work, but also encompassing linear video and film, and often in collaboration with artists from other disciplines. My current key research interests are in the relationship of sound to space, and how they reconfigure each other, and in interaction, and how it may be imbedded in spaces and spatial narratives. My practice started out in musical composition, performance and improvisation, but soon branched out into installation, spreading sound and performance through spaces. I first used a computer to make a piece in 1972 and made my first interactive installation in 1973. My then attraction to interactivity derived from my interest in the balance of forces in the triangle between the maker, the audience and the resulting artefact/event, and how it might be changed by giving the audience increased agency. The agency of the audience or user remains the key concern which underlies my research: how can we use interactive technology to enable people to have realistic and valuable-to-them dialogue with and control over the artefacts and buildings that surround them? What role can sound play in such a discourse? Research in which I am currently engaged includes examining how children move from an intradiegetic to an extradiegetic position as they mature, and the implications this has for interaction design, especially in narrative environments; and the development of theory to populate an online thesaurus of terms, concepts, images and other media, as they apply in the creation and understanding of narrative environments.

• http://www.wawamoz.com/music/given-taken...