Music Special with The Hub

A live performance of “HubRenga”, an audience interactive music and poetry piece made possible by the communication between two computer networks. The collaborators in the creation of this piece are San Francisco Bay Area computer music band The Hub, novelist and musician Ramón Sender, and poets from a poetry conference of The Well (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), a pioneering electronic community that operates in the Bay Area facilitating communication between people interested in arts and alternative lifestyles. The poetry conference was a forum about poetry which subscribers to The Well could join to exchange ideas and work collaboratively. Ramón Sender, co-founder of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, was the moderator of the poetry conference for a number of years. The Hub, is a band of electronic music composers using their networked computers to share data in real time. During this performance, poets submitted their work to the piece via The Well. At the KPFA studio, Ramón, as moderator, browsed their submissions at they came in, reading them aloud as part of the music. One Hub member also received the texts on his computer, which was programmed to filter for specific keywords, determined in advance to trigger specific musical responses. The piece was made possible by an InterArts grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, administered by New Langton Arts in San Francisco. The program is hosted by Charles Amirkhanian. (from KPFA Folio)