Kate Compton + Ted Gordon

Kate Compton and Ted Gordon give talks and present an installation about the intersection of human creativity and computation. Kate Compton has a PhD in developing artificial intelligence to augment human creativity at UC Santa Cruz. Ted Gordon is a musicologist and musician whose work lies at the nexus of experimental music studies, critical organology, and science & technology studies.


Kate Compton: “The Future is Baroque”
Personal fabrication techniques like laser cutting and fabric printing are making it easier than ever to make ornate complex designs. Will the future look like beige cubes, or will it be colorful, textured, and baroque?

Kate Compton has a PhD in developing artificial intelligence to augment human creativity at UC Santa Cruz. She is a generative artist, programmer and local Santa Cruz inventor, and enjoys laser cutting, artbots, Twitterbots, and getting poets to build AIs.

Ted Gordon: “The San Francisco Tape Music Center in the Cybernetics Moment”
In the San Francisco Bay Area, a group of musicians taken with the promises of new technologies formed the San Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC) in 1962, pooling radio, telecommunications, and military surplus equipment acquired by donation, debt, and mild insurance fraud. Gordon will give the history of this studio and how it relates to what Ronald Kline called the “Cybernetics Moment.”

Ted Gordon is a musicologist and musician whose work lies at the nexus of experimental music studies, critical organology, and science & technology studies. His recently-defended dissertation maps diffractive experimental practice at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s.

This event is part of Digital Alchemy, a year-long programming initiative focusing on artists who explore the fringes of science and engineering. These artists transform, interpret, and otherwise bring life to inanimate digital systems in ways that can seem mysterious, mystical, and inscrutable. Digital Alchemy will culminate in a festival in Fall 2019, presented by Indexical in Santa Cruz.