Extra Academy: Dago Sondervan

EXTRA ACADEMY

Extra Academy organizes an open program of lectures, performances, workshops and screenings around artistic practice, reflection and research. The platform that they offer, is one where participants become acquainted with practices and visions that are hardly or not at all addressed in the media or art education. In this way they aspire to create a much broader picture of the stratification and rich complexity of what contemporary artistic practice can mean in dialogue with, among other things, art-historical, socio-political, philosophical and economic implications.

DAGO SONDERVAN

Dago Sondervan is a guest-professor at the conservatoire of Antwerp, at the live electronics department, where he teaches his students to ' live code’ their improvisations, using opens source software like Sonic Pi and TidalCycles.

He graduated as a jazz-drummer in 1991, and entered the electronic music scene DJ-ing in legendary clubs like Fuse in Brussels, introducing Jungle and Drum & Bass to the Belgian club scene. He also toured around the globe as a drummer with bands like 'Think of One' (Best “crossing border” band award from the BBC in 2007), Trixie Withley, Nivie Nielsen and the Deer Children, Mauro Pawlowski, Daan, etc. Releasing records using the monikers Anton Price and Bohrbug, he used Atari computers with generative software to create his tracks. He started programming his compositions in Symbolic Composer, a musical language based on Common Lisp, in 2002. It was from then on his dream to improvise live, using this technique. In 2010, he got in touch with the live coding scene, and found a community that seemed the answer to this longing.

Dago is a member of Bot Bop.
Bot Bop, founded in 2019 at the request of Bozar, continues its journey into the artistic potential of AI. Live coding expert Dago Sondervan and instrumentalist Andrew Claes (Stuff, BRZZVLL ...) collaborate with engineer Kasper Jordaens. Together they create an interactive environment where improvisation and computer composition flow into one another. Using algorithms and machine learning, they create AI-moderated melodic content, orchestrated in 5 movements, which will be performed in real time by a string quartet. This project premiered at Sónar Barcelona 2021. And he’s the live coder of the jazz-band “Namid & Sondervan, the first jazz collective where live coding is used as an instrument in a jazz context"

_{Extra Academy is an alliance between the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Sint Lucas School of Arts and Het Bos.}