Dara Greenwald--artist, curator, activist, writer, member of
the Just Seeds Collective, and Rensselaer doctoral candidate in the Arts Department--died
on January 9, 2012 from cancer. Memorial Weekend
Michael Century
Michael Century
Professor
Michael Century is Professor of new media and music in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which he joined in August, 2002. Raised in Calgary, Alberta, he was a piano student of Reginald Godden in Toronto, where he received his artist diploma from the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1975. His academic degrees are in musicology, from the Universities of Toronto and California at Berkeley, and he pursued doctoral studies at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) of the University of Sussex, England. In 1976-77 he studied music theory with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He also studied instrumental conducting with James Dixon and electronic music composition with Kenneth Gaburo at the University of Iowa. Long associated with The Banff Centre for the Arts, he directed the Centre's inter-arts program between 1979-1988. In 1980, he initiated and coordinated a groundbreaking workshop in Improvisational Composition under the artistic direction of Karl Berger. Also as head of Inter-arts, he curated and produced hundreds of interdisciplinary performances, lectures, films and exhibitions, notably R. Murray Schafer's Princess of the Stars (an opera at the shores of a remote mountain lake), and a multimedia production of John Cage's Songbooks. Century founded the Centre's Media Arts Division in 1988. As a producer of experimental media art, he initiated The Art and Virtual Environments project (1991-94), one of the first large-scale and sustained investigations of virtual reality technologies as a new medium for artists. During the 1990s, he worked as program director for cultural research at the Montreal Centre d'innovation en technologies de l'information, and as senior policy advisor for art and new technology to the federal Department of Canadian Heritage. In 1998, he became an adjunct professor in the Graduate Program in Communications at McGill University. As an independent consultant between 1998-2002, Century advised a host of clients including The Rockefeller Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Arts Council of England, and McGill, York, and Concordia Universities. He was a panelist and co-author for the National Academy of Science study on information technology and creative practices, Beyond Productivity (2002). At Rensselear, he is leading the growth of performance activities in contemporary music, through the Rensselaer Contemporary Music Ensemble and other projects, showcasing since 2008 performances of works by Eastman, Rzewski, Tenney, Oliveros, Leach, Cage, Feldman, Monk, Mazzolli, Glass, Riley, Reich, Klucevsek, Adams, Nyman, Crumb, Kennedy, and Lindemann, as well as Bach, Mozart, Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Weill. He is married to artist Barbara Todd and they have two sons, Louis and Adam. Click here for more detail.
Syllabi, 2010-11
Electronic Arts Overview, Fall 2010
Multimedia Century, Arts 2540, Fall 2010
History Western Music, Spring 2010
Links to selected published writing
"Time, Intensity, and Affect in Recent Media Art", in Can we fall in love with a machine?, edited by C. Hart, published by Wood Street Gallery, Pittsburg, 2006
"Encoding motion in the early computer: knowledge transfers between studio and laboratory" in Place Studies in Art, Media, Science and Technology: Historical Investigations on the Sites and the Migration of Knowledge, edited and introduced by Andreas Broeckmann and Gunalan Nadarajan, Publisher: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, Weimar, Germany, 2009
"Exact Imagination and Distributed Creativity: A Lesson from the History of Animation", Proceedings of ACM Creativity and Cognition 2007, Washington D.C.
"Open Code and Creativity in the Digital Age", in Connexions : Art, Media, Networks, Annick Bureaud and Nathalie Magnan, eds., Press of the Paris Ecole des Beaux Arts, 2002
"Towards a Transformative Set-up. A Case Study of the Art and Virtual Environments Project at the Banff Centre for the Arts", Leonardo 32:4. 1999, co-author Thierry Bardini
Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture, commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation; published in the series Leonardo Electronic Monographs, MIT Press, 2000
"As Real As What? The Stakes in Virtual Reality". Keynote speech delivered, with Martin Tuori on May 25, 1991, at the Canadian Conference on Culture and Technology, Montreal
Concert Programs
NatureSongs, Rensselaer Contemporary Music Ensemble. Tenney, Adams, Schafer, Stravinsky, Cage April 10, 2012
Michael Century Solo Recital at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. Berg, Rzewski, Riley, Klucevsek, Century. February 14, 2012
Piano Waves: Rensselaer plus College of Saint Rose, co-directed with Dr. Young Kim. Debussy, Feldman, Vivier, Rosell, J. Strauss, Ravel. Nov 9, 2011
Michael Century Solo Recital April 25, 2011 Beethoven, Century, Southam
The PolyChoral Project April 6, 2011 Caldara, Kennedy, Leach, Oliveros
Rensselaer Contemporary Music Ensemble Nov 19, 2010 Reich, Crumb, Mazzolli, Piazzola, Adams, Glass, Nyman
Rensselaer Contemporary Music Ensemble May 5, 2010 Cage, Lindemann, Rzewski, Oliveros, Schoenberg/Neal Weill/Feldman
Michael Century Solo Recital February 10, 2010 Bach, Riley, Feldman. Program Note
Rensselaer Contemporary Music Ensemble Piano X2 X4 Nov 18, 2009 Bach, Eastman, Monk, Bartok, Stravinsky, McPhee, Mozart
Michael Century Solo Recital April 22, 2009 Stravinsky, Century, Riley, Klucevsek
Rensselaer Contemporary Music Ensemble Nov 19, 2008 Rzewski Tenney Oliveros
Video documentation of musical projects
"Extraordinary Freedom Machines-Vignettes in the History of a Multimedia Century". Three lectures offered in Fall 2011 at the EMPAC Centre, Troy NY.