Suguru Goto

Suguru Goto is a composer/performer, an inventor and a multimedia artist and he is considered one of the most innovative and the mouthpiece of a new generation of Japanese artists. He is highly connected to technical experimentation in the artistic field and to the extension of the existing potentialities in the relation man-machine. In his works the new technologies mix up in interactive installations and experimental performances; he is the one who invented the so called virtual music instruments, able to create an interface for the communication between human movements and the computer, where sound and video image are controlled by virtual music instruments in real-time through computers. Lately, he has been creating the robots, which perform acoustic instruments, and he is gradually constructing a robot orchestra.

We present two videos by Suguru Goto. The first, "Robotic Music," features robot percussionists, the most studied type, as they are the simplest to build and control (and the term "simple" is an understatement, as it's still a complex undertaking).
Here, the musical value is relative, as significant research is involved. In any case, as a drum kit alone, it's not bad.

The second, however, is a more complex performance in which a human performer wearing a suit incorporating control systems "directs" a robotic performance and interacts with a video in which a partially human figure performs the same moves.
The two, an "augmented" body and a virtual body, are practically complementary.
The author states:

“Augmented Body and Virtual Body” is conceived as a music theater piece, that the elements cross and hybridize themselves in continual links/ratios of exchanges and flow without fixing itself towards any directions. The idea would be that what is real, which is artificial, what is virtual, on the verge of themselves, and to create relations of pure intensities, which degrees zero of expression without its value of positive or negative.

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