3.3 HubRenga
A video
of the Hub (shot by Johanna Poethig) was made during the performance
in KPFA's studio in Berkeley. Composers Barbara Golden and Kenneth Atchley
are also heard reading the poetry, along with Ramon Sender.
Itself a collaborative ensemble, it was a natural development for the
Hub to collaborate with other composers, acoustic musicians, and artists.
One of the first and most ambitious of these came about in 1989 through
the association of several members of the band with the San Francisco
composer, writer, and performance artist Ramon Sender. Ramon was also
involved in artistic collaboration using computer networks, in his case
with writers on a poetry conference hosted on the Bay Area's local computer
network called "The Well". Ramon's poets had been extending
concepts from the traditional Japanese collaborative poetry form called
"Renga", which is related in its syllabic structure to haiku.
In Renga the participants trade writing lines, linking each line to the
next using common themes. With the support of a grant from the InterArts
Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, we produced a unique poetry/music/radio
performance called "HubRenga". KPFA, the flagship Pacifica radio
station in Berkeley, was the radio sponsor for the project, and this description
of the project appeared in their Folio program guide:
"HubRenga
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."
Here are the words that were chosen by the Well's poets as the keywords,
or themes, for the HubRenga performance:
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
In 1990 John Bischoff and Mark Trayle co-authored an article called
"Paper
HubRenga"
that uses these "power words," as well as Chris Brown's favorite
lines from the original HubRenga performance as themes for discussing
the Hub, and network music generally.
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