Collective for Piano is a project that mixes art, new technologies, music and curating, from a novel point of view. This is a proposal created by Reactives, a group formed by Urtzi Ibarguen (multimedia artist trained at the Curator of Art in New Media), Marcos Bernabé (computer scientist and sound artist) and Alexandre Galera (Musician/pianist).
Reagents are substances that react with each other to form a new substance. Different reactants give a new product different from them, and with other properties. As individuals we function as reactive agents creating new value. At the same time, we understand our artistic group as an element that reacts with other elements around it, in this case the Internet.
From the union between our group and the source code of the web pages, a new element emerges, music, in our case, more specifically, piano compositions. Our work is based on the reinterpretation of the computer code (source code) of web pages, creating different piano compositions from them that are subsequently interpreted.
What does a web page sound like? What about an artist’s website? There is no doubt that the virtual space has become a fundamental environment for the dissemination of centers, projects and the artists themselves. The strength of this new medium creates the obligation to be present in it, while at the same time it is presented as an encouraging and accommodating environment for all those creators who do not have enough notoriety in the projects and exhibitions that take place in physical space. More and more artists have their own website, and among emerging artists, we would dare to say that it is the vast majority.
Collective for piano is a project that is based on the reinterpretation of the source code of 13 web pages of artists awarded grants by Bilbao Arte (one per year from 1999 to 2011). Thus, the union and mixing of these thirteen code fragments and their subsequent reinterpretation results in the creation of a piano composition lasting several minutes. Thus, the element to be curated is not the artist’s work, but the computer code of his website; In turn, the final result is not an exhibition but a musical composition. Our artistic and curatorial work translates into ensuring that these lines of code from different artists’ websites are combined in an appropriate way so that they form a musical composition of interest, just as we would unite different works by various artists to create a typical exhibition. .
Technical summary of the process
Technically, the transformation is carried out using software that we have developed in Java. This process reads and analyzes the HTML page, obtaining different parameters such as line length or classification of the tags used. These data obtained are transferred to musical composition parameters, in this way, for example, the line length corresponds to notes of the twelve-tone scale and the different labels define the times. Once we have obtained this data, we export it to a MIDI file that we in turn use to generate the score.
Thus, the length of each of the lines of the code is equivalent to a value in hertz that is translated into a musical note. This value changes depending on the type and number of HTML tags that are combined in each line. The mixture of these values is what creates the definitive values that define each note of the audio and the score.
Urtzi Ibarguen 