A still from Paul Prudence's 'Cyclotone'
A still from Paul Prudence's 'Cyclotone'

Paul Prudence

At Coded Matter(s) #2: Sound Hackers we intend to finish the afternoon with a great big bang. That’s why we’re proud to announce what will be the final act of the event: Paul Prudence, performing Cyclotone, for the first time ever in the Netherlands.

Paul Prudence is an audio-visual performer and live-cinema artist working with computational, algorithmic and generative environments. His work, which had been shown and performed internationally, recently at Arc Festival in Bristol and at Ars Electronica in Linz, focuses on the ways in which sound, space and form can be cross-wired to create live-cinematic visual-music experiences. Paul is known for his complex time-based geometric narratives which are precisely synchronised to electroacoustic sound design and sound art compositions.

I saw 4-d geometry, 4-d space-time diagrams spinning and morphing into quasars with jets, black holes and the big bang!
Arthur Miller, Author of ‘Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung

What to expect? Audiovisual performances can be a little hard to describe without using all kinds of theoretical words (like we’re going to do below!), but think Simon Norfolk’s photos of the Large Hadron Collider, the more psychedelic parts of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 6-D hypercube animations to the 10th power and accompanied by an engrossing audio experience. Trust us, it’s good times. However, if you don’t care for fancy links and want the more technical/conceptual rundown, read on!

cy·clo·tron [sahy-kluh-tron, sik-luh-]
noun Physics
A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator in which charged particles accelerate outwards from the center along a spiral path. The particles are held to a spiral trajectory by a static magnetic field and accelerated by a rapidly varying (radio frequency) electric field.

Cyclotone (a cyclotron for sound) is an audiovisual work that takes conceptual cues from cyclotrons and particle accelerators and alludes to aspects of particle physics, space exploration and 4-dimensional space. The work is inspired to commemorate the first wave of Russian cosmonauts who conquered space physically and also the artists of the Constructivist movement who conquered space conceptually. Cyclotone cross-wires sound and video material in various ways to create precise multi-modalities via algorithmic sound analysis, audio timeline triggering, human performative interaction and associative, metaphorical and perceptual bindings.

If you really want to know more about Cyclotone and see some previews (though we recommend just going in tabula rasa, there’s an article about it over on Creative Applications too.

This performance and many others are lined up for the Sunday afternoon matinee on the 10th of November, so if you’re keen to experience this and other exciting pieces, get your tickets right here and we’ll see you then!