Tristan Perich's 1-Bit Symphony

The following information is taken directly from press materials, because I didn't think I could describe it more effectively. You may visit Tristan Perich's website here.

Tristan Perich: 1-Bit Symphony (Part 1: Overview) from Tristan Perich on Vimeo.

Tristan Perich's 1-Bit Symphony is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip. Though housed in a CD jewel case, 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording in the traditional sense; it literally "performs" its music live when turned on. A complete electronic circuit—programmed by the artist and assembled by hand—plays the music through a headphone jack mounted into the case itself. The project is set to be released on Cantaloupe on August 24, 2010.

Bio:


New York-based Tristan Perich is inspired by the aesthetics of math and physics, and works with simple forms and complex systems. The challenge of elegance provokes his work in acoustic and electronic music, and physical and digital art.

The WIRE Magazine describes his compositions as "an austere meeting of electronic and organic." His works for soloist, ensemble and orchestra have been performed internationally by ensembles including Bang on a Can, Calder Quartet and Meehan/Perkins at venues from the Whitney Museum, P.S.1, Merkin Hall, the Stone and Joe's Pub to Los Angeles’ Zipper Hall and Lentos in Austria. He has received commissions from Bang on a Can, Dither Quartet, Yarn/Wire and Transit New Music.

As a visual artist, Perich has had solo exhibitions at bitforms gallery (NYC) in 2009, and Mikrogalleriet (Copenhagen) and Museo Carandente (Spoleto) in 2010. His Machine Drawings, pen-on-paper drawings executed by machine, were described as "elegantly delicate" by BOMB Magazine. His work with 1-bit video, including Eighteen Linear Constructions, exhibited in 2009 at Issue Project Room, employs binary electrical pulses to create images on cathode ray televisions. His artwork has been included in group shows at LABoral (Barcelona), iMAL (Brussels), MCLA's Gallery 51 (MA), ABC No Rio (NY), the Philoctetes Center (NY), and Greylock Arts (MA) and a traveling science museum exhibit in Arkansas. He is part of the Loud Objects (with Kunal Gupta and Katie Shima), who perform electronic music by soldering their own noise-making circuits, live, from scratch in front of the audience.

He received the Prix Ars Electronica in 2009 for his composition Active Field (for ten violins and ten-channel 1-bit music), and will be a featured artist at Sonar 2010 in Barcelona. Rhizome awarded him a 2010 comission for a microtonal audio installation with 1,500 speakers. He was artist in residence at Issue Project Room in 2008, at Mikrogalleriet in Copenhagen in 2010, and at the Addison Gallery in Fall 2010. He has spoken about his work and taught workshops around the world. He studied music, math and computer science at Columbia University, and electronic art at ITP/Tisch.