CURRENT MEMBER - BIOS


JOHN DRISCOLL is a founding member of Composers Inside Electronics and collaborated on and managed the Rainforest IV project since its inception in 1973.  He has toured extensively in the US and Europe with: Composers Inside Electronics, Douglas Dunn & Dancers, David Tudor, and also as a solo performer.  His work involves robotic instruments, compositions and sound installations for unique architectural spaces, rotating loudspeakers, and music for dance.  He has received dance commissions for his music including: the Merce Cunningham Dance Co., Douglas Dunn & Dancers, and the Dance Construction Company.  He has received numerous awards including a Berlin Residency from the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogam.


Driscoll was Manager of Arts & Technologies at the New York Hall of Science where he created an innovative Artist-in-Residence program.  He also developed the first interactive computer-based exhibits in science museums titled “Science Links” and managed the development of “Sound Sensations” (an interactive exhibition on Audio Technologies) for the NYHOS. 


He founded Shadow Interactive Inc. which developed educational software for Classroom Inc., Shedd Aquarium, NY State Dept. of Health, and others.  He worked for over 15 years with Slingo Inc. developing one of the most popular online games on AOL titled “Slingo”, slot machines, lottery tickets, and TV game shows.


Driscoll has lectured extensively on interactive media, sound installations, online game development, and Rainforest IV.  He co-authored a paper on Rainforest with Matt Rogalsky for presentation at the Getty Museum.  He holds an MFA (Sculpture) from Tyler School of Art and an MFA (interdisciplinary arts) from SUNY Buffalo.


His work is available on Edition Block/Gramavision “Rainforest IV”, Orange Mountain Music’s “Composers Inside Electronics” – from the Kitchen Archives No. 4, “20 jahre Inventionen II” – Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, “Soundings” – Neuberger Museum (video), and he is currently preparing a CD of his Berlin works “Fishing for Sound”.


He is currently working on the dissemination of a self-running Rainforest V - installation version with installations in Mexico City and Governors Island, NY, and is creating a new set of performance and installation works using ultrasonic instruments.


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PHIL EDELSTEIN’S studies at the State University of NY in Albany included computer science, theatre, math, physics and electronic music with Joel Chadabe leading to a B.S. in technology and art. He was a teaching assistantship in computer-based art with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University and one of the founding members of Electronic Body Arts.  While at the Electronic Music Studio at SUNY Albany he developed implementations of real-time software based digital and analog synthesis techniques.  He has been a board member at Harvestworks from 1987 to 2011.   


His work on video synthesis, processing and Pantomation motion capture technology with filmmaker and videographer Tom DeWitt yielded works such as “Philharmonia”, “PWB”, “Multiple Identity Marathon”. This work was supported by the WNYC-TV Lab, NYSCA, and the Research Foundation of SUNY.


An extensive series of work emanated from his participation in the seminal New Music in New Hampshire workshop in Chocorua with David Tudor in 1973.  As a core founder of Composers Inside Electronics, he has continued to carry through Tudor’s legacy into it’s 3rd decade with performances at Judson Church, Lincoln Center, Mexico City, Governors Island and many other venues. His work with Marsha Harris “Shrieks and Nuptials” is included on the CD: The Kitchen Archives No. 4 – Composers Inside Electronics.


He has held various as senior staff for financial institutions in the NY area in software and systems development. Prior to that he was responsible for software development for projects for other corporations including Digital Equipment Corporation, Xerox and GE.


His current work involves transformations of time series data and synthesis of resonance.


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TOM HAMILTON has composed and performed electronic music for over 40 years, and his work with electronic music originated in the late-60s era of analog synthesis. His ongoing series of concerts, installations and recordings contrast structure with improvisation and textural electronics with acoustic instruments. Rather than addressing traditional modes of expression, presentation and observation, Hamilton often explores the interaction of many simultaneous layers of activity, prompting the use of “present-time listening” on the part of both performer and listener.


Hamilton was a 2005 Fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, participating in a residency at the foundation’s center in Umbria. Hamilton’s performing and recording colleagues have included Peter Zummo, Bruce Gremo, Karlheinz Essl, Bruce Arnold, Rich O’Donnell, Jonathan Haas, Jacqueline Martelle, Thomas Buckner, Al Margolis, id m theft able and Richard Lerman. He has been a collaborator with visual artists, including Fred Worden (filmmaker), Van McElwee and Morey Gers (video artists), and the late Ernst Haas (photographer).


Hamilton has released 15 CDs of his music, found on Ilse, Kvist, Muse-Eek, Mutable, O.O. Discs, and Pogus Productions. His CD London Fix received an award in the 2004 Prix Ars Electronica, and a 2 CD set of his electronic music of the 1970s was named one of The Wire’s Top 50 Reissues of 2010.


An active participant in New York’s new music scene, Hamilton was the co-director of the 2004 Sounds Like Now festival, and he co-produced the Cooler in the Shade/Warmer by the Stove new music series for 14 years.


Since 1990, Hamilton has been a member of composer Robert Ashley’s touring opera ensemble, performing sound processing and mixing in both recordings and concerts. His audio production can be found in over 60 CD releases of new and experimental music, including recordings by Muhal Richard Abrams, Bruce Arnold, David Behrman, Thomas Buckner, If Bwana, Noah Creshevsky, Bernard Hoffer, George Lewis, Annea Lockwood, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, and “Blue” Gene Tyranny, and his work for Alvin Lucier received a Golden Ear award from The Absolute Sound.


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MATT ROGALSKY’S activity as a performing and exhibiting composer and media artist often focuses on exploration of abject, invisible/inaudible, or ignored streams of information. Recent sound installations include ANT/LIFE/ART/WORK, listening in to the sound world of thatching ants, and Memory Like Water, exploring the flow and malleability of memory. His live performances have included solo electronic works and collaborations with Jane Henry, Anne La Berge, Anne Wellmer, Ian Birse and Laura Kavanaugh, and others. Most recently, Rogalsky's solo electronic performance work was featured in the 2010 Ear to the Earth Festival in NYC.


Rogalsky holds an undergraduate degree in Fine and Performing Arts (Music Concentration) from the School of Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University (Canada), an MA in Music from Wesleyan University (USA), and a Ph.D. in Music from City University London (UK). He is currently Assistant Professor in the School of Music at Queen's University (Kingston Ontario Canada), and his areas of research include histories, reconstructions and new performances of late 20th century electronic and experimental music, by David Tudor, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, John Cage, and others. In May 2010 he was consultant to Rambert Dance in London UK, on behalf of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in development of Rambert's staging of Cunningham's RainForest, with music by David Tudor. While in London he also made a new performance of David Tudor's Virtual Focus in a private event hosted by art collectors Adam and Carolyn Barker-Mill.


Rogalsky's writing has been published in Organised Sound, Circuit: Musiques Contemporaines, Leonardo Music Journal, Canadian Theatre Review, Social and Cultural Geography, Public, and Musicworks. A double CD of original electroacoustic music was released in 2006 on XI Records. Other works have been released in private editions.


Another side of Rogalsky's audio work is in engineering, mixing and production. Most notable projects are acclaimed albums by The Gertrudes and PS I Love You (2009/10). He also plays electric guitar and mandolin as a member of The Gertrudes.


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DOUG VAN NORT is an experimental musician and researcher whose work is dedicated to the creation of immersive and visceral sonic experiences, and to personal and collective creative expression through composition, free improvisation and generally electro-acoustic means of production. His instruments are custom-built systems that draw on concepts ranging from spectral analysis/synthesis to artificial life and machine listening algorithms, and his source materials include any and all sounds discovered through attentive listening to the world. 


Van Nort's work has recently spanned telematic music, laptop ensemble compositions driven by evolutionary "human algorithms", improvisations in various acoustic/electronic settings, multi-channel electroacoustic pieces, sonic installations and various idiosyncratic algorithms related to machine improvisation and interactive sound sculpting. 


Van Nort often performs with his custom GREIS software designed for on-the-fly spectral and textural sound transformations. He is a member of the trio Triple Point with Pauline Oliveros and Jonas Braasch, where his focus lies in improvised transformation of the sounds arising from his acoustic partners. This group also collaborates through research and teaching, and in this context Van Nort has been actively designing and creating an intelligent system for improvisation, currently as research associate in music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A discussion of Triple Point, GREIS and this intelligent systems work was acknowledged with the "best paper award" at the 2010 International Computer Music Conference.


Recordings of Van Nort's music can be found on Deep Listening, Pogus and Zeromoon among other experimental music labels, and his writing has recently appeared in Organised Sound and the Leonardo Music Journal. He has performed at venues ranging from the [sat] in Montreal, Casa da Musica in Porto, Betong in Oslo, The Red Room in Baltimore, The Guelph Jazz Festival, Roulette, Harvestworks, the Miller Theatre, Issue Project Room and the Stone in NYC, at Town Hall (NYC) on intonarumori as part of the Performa futurist biennial, and at EMPAC in Troy, NY. His compositional work has been featured in contexts as disparate as the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD) and New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) to the Flea theatre's "music with a view" series and the NYC electroacoustic music festival at Elebash Hall. Collaboration has been an important thread of recent work, including Oliveros, Braasch, Francisco Lépez, Stuart Dempster, Chris Chafe, Al Margolis, Ben Miller, Anne Bourne, Judy Dunaway, the Composers Inside Electronics and many others. 


Van Nort holds a Ph.D. in Music Technology from McGill University where he studied with Marcelo Wanderley, Philippe Depalle and Stephen McAdams, an M.F.A. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute including studies with Pauline Oliveros and Joel Chadabe, and an M.A. and B.A. in Pure Mathematics from the State University of New York (Potsdam) including studies in Electronic Composition at the Crane School of Music.




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