EMI History
EMI stands for Experimental Music Instruments. It is an initiative born from the collaboration between Koray Tahiroglu during his time at Helsinki Medialab (Finland), Enrique Tomas from Medialab Madrid (Spain), and David Cuartielles from the School of Arts and Communication, Malmoe (Sweden).
Koray and David met for the very first time in Toronto, Canada, during the international conference PDC2004. They presented different interactive art pieces as part of the academic exhibit of PDC.
At the time Koray's work was centered in the creation of interactive instruments that would enhance and augment the player's perfomance through a computer generated band. This automatic performance group would follow the human guitar player adding the proper drums and piano.
On the other hand David was introducing his work on technology for soundscapes, and presented a piece with 11 loops that would compose a 4 minutes long iterative landscape. The sound line was taken from different recordings made in Istanbul during 2003. Paradoxically, Koray's hometown is Istanbul.
In October 2005, Quique was part of a workshop organized by Medialab Madrid where David would teach on the use of sensor technology for the creation of interactive art pieces and installations. As a result to that workshop Quique developed a violin where the strings had been substituted by an ultrasound sensor.
At this point Quique and David opened the communication to Koray, who was still living in Helsinki, an managed to fundrise enough money for organizing a performance weekend in Malmoe, Sweden. The Swedish/Danish art group Experiments in Art and Technology kidnly financed this event, what brought us a little closer.
