The game of life

What happens when a mathematical concept is the foundation of composing and improvising music and interpreted by visual arts?

Experimental LAB with the live art performance ‘Game of Life’ will investigate this explorative way of creating music through building blocks based on the famous mathematician John Horton Conway’s Game of Life. A cellular automaton game with four simple rules, which evolution is determined by its initial state and therefore a zero-player game.

Six musicians and one visual artist are going to take you to the soundscapes of „Life“. The group consists of one visual artist (currently studying at KABK) and six musicians who met at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. The group represents people from Poland, Hungary, Taiwan, Norway and Denmark with very different musical and artistic backgrounds which gives the group an unique instrumentation; piano, bass, guitar, percussion, saxophone, flute and visual art. Translating the rules from Conway’s Game of life into rules applied in composing and improvising music creates an interesting outcome which reflects the core idea and visuals feeling of the mathematical game. The group experiments with opposite concepts such as light and dark, systematic and random, sound and silence, order and chaos. Combining these elements in collaboration with visual art gives the audience the opportunity to experience the game evolve supported by music within a minimalistic and improvised soundspace.

The output is unpredictable. The performances will always turn out differently, since it is determined by the starting point of the game and the rules that apply in that specific situation. Everything can happen.

Tibor Szilveszter - composer and piano
Márton Menyhért - composer, Guitar and modular synthesizers
Irja Linnerud - Visual arts
Te-Ping Teng - Marimba/percussion
Zalán Berta - Bass guitar
Zofia Kęsy - saxophone
Kim Mai Tich Nguyen Thordsen - flute

**Over Experimental LAB **
EXPERIMENTAL LAB is a newly formed diverse group of young artists based in the Hague working with minimal and improvised music combined with visual arts.
The group consists of one visual artist (currently studying at KABK) and six musicians who met at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. The group represents people from Poland, Hungary, Taiwan, Norway and Denmark with very different musical and artistic backgrounds which gives the group an unique instrumentation; piano, bass, guitar, percussion, saxophone, flute and visual art. Combining these elements, the group is working towards creating a rare collaboration between music and visual art in an experimental setting.