Guest Artists: Joseph Baader and Shuoxin Tan, Casper Schipper #

Concert and presentation

Monday, 19.01.2026, 18:00, IEM CUBE

Joseph Baader and Shuoxin Tan: point, surface, twist

At the core of this performance lies the torus, sometimes presented as a donut shape, but topologically more precise: an orientable surface with no boundaries and defined by continuous circulation.

If we follow along a path on the surface of this torus that wraps around the major circle p times and around the minor circle q times, and this path joins its own end, then we get what is called a torus knot – where p and q are coprime integers: gcd(p, q) = 1 (i.e. their greatest common divisor is 1). These numerical relationships, calculated through the greatest common divisor (gcd), serve as generative constraints within the tonal and compositional system.

Using SuperCollider, Shuoxin Tan and Joseph Baader calculated a list of various torus knots, which they will use as the basis for transforming topological characteristics into sound processes. The knots are not treated as static objects but as dynamic fields, capable of composition as well as decomposition. These transformations are articulated through shifts in timbre, density, and spatial projection.

Casper Schipper: Phases

During my residency, I explored using “ant colony optimization” (ACO) algorithms to generate musical patterns and waveforms. The specific variant I chose is used to find the shortest path through a series of abstract points. The order of the points, as well as the paths through them, were sonified in different ways: often quite directly, where position is mapped to amplitude, and sometimes more parametrically, where the points are used to control simple synthesis methods.

The canonical format of this algorithm was not very useful to me; finding the shortest path through all possible states of a musical parameter does not have much aesthetic use. In my musical application, I am more interested in the non-optimal paths and the dynamics of the system itself as it works towards a solution. I nudge the system in such a way that it never quite finds a solution; instead, it transitions between different phases (a strongly connected route of all points, local paths, complete chaos, and the spaces and transformations between those phases).