Artist Focus: Stephen Lucas

Stephen Lucas is a Doctoral student in Composition and Computer Music in the College of Music at the University of North Texas (UNT). I first met Stephen about 6 years ago at UNT while doing a concert at the Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theater, where he was a staff member with the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia (CEMI). Soon after, he began working with David Stout in the Hybrid Arts Lab and as a collaborator on various NoiseFold and modular software development projects. A composer, musician and new media artist, Stephen’s work continues to surprise me both in its scope, depth, range and humor.

Hi Stephen, thanks for taking the time to sit down with us and talk about your work. Before we dig into what you are up to now, can you tell us a little bit about how you got started working with Max?

Thanks for having me! I first used Max via studying interactive computer music at the University of North Texas; it was one of our go-to software tools for demonstrating digital audio concepts in class. I was doing a lot of work involving performance art and challenging the bounds of a performance stage and a composition. I had done very little programming before and Max was my avenue into incorporating computer interfaces into my interactive work.

That’s great. Do you remember what your first Max project was?

Early on, I was using it to be able to work with different kinds of randomness in real time. I made a notation system that would scroll through random fragments of music for a performer, and would scroll faster if it thought they were playing more accurately. I like the idea that the system reflects some kind of challenge and surprise.

How does Max fit into your workflow?

It really depends on what type of material I’m working with. A lot of times I use Max to implement some audio or video process on my materials and then combine all the parts together in another editor. If the material is specifically about some interactive process or behavior, I’ll use Max as the entire creation platform.

When you start processing things in the computer, information can get really abstract so it’s important to me to be able to do programming in a way that keeps the process flexible and maintains an awareness of the context. Like everyone, I’ve been stuck in a struggle of debugging and optimizing but Max usually has multiple methods for immediately testing and mapping data so that you can work with the ideas as flexibly as the numbers.

Do you have a favorite object? What is it and why?

I’ve been really interested in using the objects that let you reference physical simulations since this gives you a method to maintain a connection to real experience, even with processes that are completely generative. All of the jit.phys objects provide really dense sets of data output, but they’re linked with observable forces like gravity. I’ve been using a lot of gen~ for acoustic physical modeling since this lets you work with representations of real, physical interactions, but process them to places that don’t seem to make natural sense.

Moving away from Max a little bit, your work covers a lot of different terrain, from the humorous to the highly academic. How are these different directions informed by your creative process?

For me, the conceptual structure of a work drives the process more than what the end result is. Some of my work has a level of comedy, but a joke has a structure and timing like anything else. Most of my work starts with some reference material like another work, something from a different medium, or even one of my previous pieces. In multimedia art, I don’t get inspired by the more elemental components like pitch, rhythm, color, or shape; I use chunks of pre-existing content as the building blocks and then combine them and reprocess them to try and find some new kind of sense to them. If I plan the form too much from the beginning, I’m usually not as happy with the result; the more I can grow each idea from something that came before it, the more it makes sense to me but it doesn’t necessarily matter what the source is.

However, when I work with other people like my prog band Vaults of Zin or doing programming collaboration with NoiseFold, I like to think of this as a question of how do things make sense differently to different people. It’s usually more of a process of creating a framework for the main ideas to function, but everybody gets to perform at their strongest towards the common goal.

If you could show any piece anywhere, what would it be?

Since I’m usually getting inspiration more from the processed materials than how I imagine them being viewed, my main audience ends up being myself because I relive the process through the result. This has can make the work seem bizarre to a viewer, but the more they learn about the sources and their interaction, the more they become invested in the process.

However, I also work as a programmer and engineer, so I approach technical problems in the same way. I don’t necessarily imagine the end result first and then figure out how to make it happen; rather, I assemble all the parts and concepts to the exhibition and see what problems still need to be solved.

If we’re setting an infinite exhibition possibility, I could come up with some pretty wild ideas. I have an album that’s designed to play for terraforming agriculture on a distant planet, since they wanted to increase the efficiency of the plants; there’s another one that is elevator music, but specifically for when the elevator breaks and you’re trapped for eight hours. I think fiction has a place in any medium and it’s more about how a story or idea stimulates you; why shouldn’t these situations have their own music?

What are you researching or working on now that is the most exciting to you?

My main ongoing project right now is to implement virtual reality technologies as an instrument/environment that lets the performer interact spatially with objects and ideas — the same way that I think of combining and transforming reference material. This is basically a VR video game, but I’ve built the system up as physically modeled structures within Max. When I need a break from that, Stephen Lucas: Live at Brussels is my pop synth project and my inevitable combination of dense conceptual process and hot lead synth playing.

Thanks, Stephen. It’s great to get a peek inside your world.

You can find some of Stephen’s growing library of work here:Artist siteMusic streamingVideo streaming