The art of fusing science with music and performance

A section in Douglas Repetto's website is simply labelled "Strange Things". It's full of bits of ongoing and past artworks - a quirky conveyor belt, a picture of bird's nests made out of forgotten machine parts, a flyer for a workshop in which participants made "vicious foals" - a herd of small walking tables that were set loose in the rotunda of the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

All of Repetto's work is full of wonderfully strange things, from unexpected robots participating in a talent show (an exhibit that came to Dublin in 2008), to "parallel processing" using "distributed" copper squirrel cages (see iti.ms/11K4jlC), to bioart installation "How to Annoy a Plant".

He fuses technology and science with art, music and performance. All of that makes Repetto, the director of research at Columbia University's Computer Music Center, a perfect fit for Trinity College's Science Gallery, where he is co-curating its new exhibition, Oscilator, opening tomorrow.

Repetto is no stranger to Ireland. He's worked with the Science Gallery in the past, and with the Ark children's art centre in Temple Bar. The idea for Oscillator emerged from a proposal he sent to the Science Gallery over a year ago. The thematic ideas suggested by the title - of sound, music, machines, movement - mirror his own passions.

"My background originally was in music, but I'm kind of self-taught at what I do. I get interested in things and just want to pursue them." He says he is not so much a technologist as he is an artist and musician. But technology often plays a significant part in his projects and installations.

These can be serious, playful, or both. They can incorporate science and biology, producing "bio-art"; they might include music, dance, recycled materials, bits of technology, even his old double bed, for a recent work in Philadelphia.

Pushing boundaries

It might all seem far away from his undergraduate music degree, but he says even then he was pushing boundaries and saw his degree "less in terms of making a beautiful piece of music, and more about making an interesting experiment". That involved playing around with computers, thinking about the physics of sound - he says he was fortunate to have a couple of music professors who were very supportive of these explorations.

He went on to graduate school at CalArts - the California Institute of the Arts, in Los Angeles county. "That was really wonderful; the whole idea was really to explore." He was in their integrated media programme and says that though he went in with a music focus, he quickly got interested in sculpture and installations.

All of this was happening, he says, "in the middle of the internet bubble, and everything was just 'Wheeeeeee!'"

At the time, it seemed possible that there would be plenty of support and funding for experiment and artistic expression within a new landscape of emerging technologies.

But it didn't quite happen like that. The net crash came, and he is quick to note that a major question for his own students is the lack of a business model to support a life focused on art and creativity. "A lot of what I do as a teacher is to get students to let go. I tell students, you're in a special place, you get this moment in your life to expand and explore." At the same time, he stresses that very few will go on to have a full-time career as a musician or artist.

"It's hard, and it's complicated. There is no good financial model, and a lot of insecurity. They need to think about what else they're going to do for income if they are going to pursue this. But it's just such an interesting way to live your life, a life of ideas, and very rewarding."

Melange of interests

He's very aware that he has a privileged position as an academic to pursue his melange of interests. He loves teaching, and also loves the opportunity to work as an artist and engage with that world of ideas.

His own projects come out of a response to a space he is asked to work with, rather than starting as an independent concept.

"I'm researching all the time - I'm constantly reading, talking to people, going to see labs, going to exhibitions," he notes, producing "an active mix in my head".

"Then, if an opportunity comes along that has particulars attached - once that happens, I start to filter through what I'm currently obsessing about. It's all very much driven by opportunity. I almost never make a piece before knowing where it's going to go."

Technology comes into his work in a similarly serendipitous way.

"It's easy to fetishise new technology, and to think - I'm going to use such and such a touchscreen. But I'm not thinking about technical gizmos at all. It's really not about the technology or the gizmos."

It's more about what kinds of tools enable him to create the work he wants to create. "A good analogy is the guy making music with a bucket and a stick in those long subway tunnels in New York. A bucket and a stick can be plenty, to make what you need."

At the same time, he does have a special fascination with technology. "I'm very interested in contemporary technology, and I follow all those things. I really track a lot of developments in the area of science, and I do a lot of experiments with things. Even in the daily life sense, I use these things - I programme computers, for example. Mainly, I want to avoid having them programme me, rather than me programming them. I want to leave to chance what tools are on hand."

His work contains a handful of themes that regularly re-emerge, he says.

"Pretty much everything I do is connected into thinking about systems - systems that I don't entirely control, or know what they'll do. I like to make some sort of system that seems to be quite simple, but will do something over time."

This is why he has such an interest in bringing biology into art, he says. "Biology comes in because - well, that's really what life is, a gradually changing system. You have parts, you have behaviours, you have unpredictability, and that's deeply exciting. So I like combining biology with computer programming, technology, robots."

Programming unpredictability

Working with technology alone, though, would be a bit too constraining. "If you want a computer to be unpredictable, you have to programme in that unpredictability, and that's very hard. You have to work to get surprise. Whereas biological creatures are very good at giving surprises, so it's really a good mix."

Visitors to Oscillator, which runs from Friday through to April 14th, can see what strange and curious things Repetto and his co-curator, TCD associate professor of physics Stefan Hutzler, have come up with for the Science Gallery.

Repetto, along with Hutzler, will also give a talk at the Science Gallery on Tuesday next week, which he promises will be "a wide-ranging chat" with a focus on "oscillation in cyclical systems, and how they pervade the world".

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