Rob King

During his residence at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Rob King addressed primarily the visual challenges of network performance. One of the key aims of the residence was to explore strategies in which visualisation and notation could be employed to represent aspects of network topology and organisation. Mr King collaborated with a number of researchers and artists at SARC and created a new work for the final artistic showcase in collaboration with Pierre Proske, artist in residence at CIANT, Prague.

Biography : Rob King is a New Media artist, “visualist”, programmer and researcher based in Toronto, Ontario. He has a MA from the Communications and Culture joint graduate program at Ryerson and York Universities and a BFA in Image Arts: New Media from Ryerson University. His work explores digital interactivity, artistic “game play”, the social dynamics of networked spaces, the potentials of mobile and ubiquitous computing, and dynamic and generative processes. Rob was recently the CO-ME-DI-A artist in residence at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is now a part of the OCAD Mobile Lab in Toronto.

Justin Yang

Justin has been an extremely active artist and researcher in the CO-ME-DI-A project at SARC. He has created a number of pieces exploring the management of forces and sections in the context of large distributed ensembles (this include Webwork, performed as part of the CO-ME-DI-A showcase). Justin has played a key role in developing strategies for the management and monitoring of complex routing systems within network performance.

Biography : Born and raised in the South Bay area of Southern California, near the diner used in Pulp Fiction, the Hawthorne Grill. He has taken degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, Wesleyan University, Stanford University and is currently pursuing a Phd at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast. He has studied with some of the great artists of our time including George Crumb, Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, and Brian Ferneyhough. For the last 20 years, Yang has obsessively explored sound in as many ways as possible – as a composer, improviser, instrument builder, theorist and developer of music technology. His works include pieces for three orchestras, four tubas, two kotos and bass koto, and solo bass flute. Yang is currently working on developing paradigms for real-time composition using computer animation in notational and interactive constructs.