Session 3

3:30–4:30 P.M.

Information as Beauty in Musical Software Design

Composer and electronics performer Sam Pluta has been designing software for live electronic music performance for the past fourteen years. Software design, like music composition, is a game of information. As humans, almost everything we care about lies somewhere in between simplicity and complexity, somewhere between too little information and too much. A composer, for instance, wants to present enough sonic information to pique the listener's interest, while at the same time not oversaturate the listener with too much complexity.

Samuel Pluta

Sam Pluta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. He is a composer and electronics performer whose work explores the intersections between instrumental forces, reactive computerized sound worlds, traditionally notated scores, improvisation, audio-visuals, psycho-acoustic phenomena, and installation-like soundscapes. Since 2009, he has served as Technical Director and composing member of Wet Ink Ensemble, one of the premiere new music ensembles in the United States.

Lisa Zaher

Lisa Zaher is the UChicago Arts Conservation Research Fellow and a member of the Concrete Traffic research team.

Burn Your Books! Ten Good Reasons to Destroy Books from South Asia and the Middle East

Why do people destroy books? In this session, we will look at examples of book destruction from the ancient period to the present day in South Asia and the Middle East and reflect on the widely varying philosophical, cultural, religious and political meanings of these acts. We will also discuss what, if anything, book destruction in other times and places tells us about how we ourselves think about knowledge.

Tyler Williams

Tyler Williams is Assistant Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. A Hindi scholar, Williams’ research interests include book history, literacy, aesthetics, and mercantile religious and literary culture in South Asia. He is currently working on two research projects: the first is a social and material history of vernacular reading practices in North India; the second is a study of the role of merchant communities in shaping Hindi literary tastes bhakti religious sensibilities in the early modern period.

Steven Rings

Steven Rings is Associate Professor in the Department of Music. His wide-ranging research incorporates transformational theory, phenomenology, popular music, and voice. He is the author of Tonality and Transformation (Oxford University Press, 2011), which received the Society for Music Theory’s 2012 Emerging Scholar Award, and his current book project explores Bob Dylan’s fifty-year performing career.

Coping with Climate Change in Mesopotamia

Present-day concerns about global warming have sparked the interest of scholars and the general public in understanding how complex societies managed (or failed) to cope with climate change in the past. While dramatic situations (from collapse to resilience) have long been the focus of study, archaeological and textual evidence from Mesopotamia in the second-third millennia BCE reveals long-term societal adaptations and elite-led strategies (not all successful) to maintain agricultural production in a changing environment.

Hervé Reculeau

Hervé Reculeau is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Reculeau is a historian of Syria and Mesopotamia in the second millennium BCE, with a focus on the environmental and social histories of the ancient Near East. As an epigrapher, he is in charge of editing some of the cuneiform tablets discovered at the ancient cities of Mari (Syria) and Aššur (Iraq).

Conserving Public Sculpture: Wolf Vostell's Concrete Traffic

This year, Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell’s sculpture Concrete Traffic (1970) returns to the University of Chicago campus after a four-year conservation study. Christine Mehring (Professor, Art History) and Lisa Zaher (UChicago Arts Conservation Research Fellow) discuss the material challenges and aesthetic decisions that guided the conservation of this monumental public sculpture consisting of a 1957 Cadillac covered in concrete. This talk will take place in the presence of the sculpture in its new location, the Ellis Parking Garage.

Christine Mehring

Christine Mehring is Professor in the Department of Art History. Her research interests include abstraction, art and design, postwar Western Europe, German art, and relations between new and traditional media. She is the author of Blinky Palermo, Abstraction of an Era (Yale University Press, 2008) and editor of Gerhard Richter: Early Work, 1951–1972 (Getty Publications, 2010). 

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