Blaues Rauschen 2025: Festival-Finale mit Powell, Julie Herndon und Portrait XO

In the organizer's words:

With its open, experimental atmosphere, excellent technical facilities and dedicated team, the RWE Pavilion at the Philharmonie Essen is the perfect venue for the evening's exciting performances. It begins with a special performance of the workshop "Data Ethics in Creative Practice", which was created on the basis of an open call and is led by Portrait XO. In this 20-minute performance, the selected participants present their three-day interdisciplinary collaboration, which deals intensively with the confrontation between art and artificial intelligence and explores the boundaries between humans, machines and musical authorship. The subsequent program also moves between experimentation and sound research: Portrait XO operates at the interface of music, art and artificial intelligence and questions the classical concepts of composition and authorship. Her works explore the interactions between algorithmic processes and creative decisions, weaving analog and digital sound generation into innovative, constantly changing musical structures. Powell uses minimal music and electro-acoustic processes to create new, virtual forms of music. His work merges with the theories of electronic music, which is evolving from traditional, composition-driven musical forms to an experimental, often randomized and unpredictable soundscape. Julie Herndon is concerned with the physicality of sound and the interaction between body and technology. In her work, principles of soundscape theory and the physicality of music are combined, resulting in music that plays on the space both visually and acoustically and challenges perception.

The evening questions traditional notions of music and shows how artificial intelligence and technological developments are transforming sound, opening up new creative possibilities and raising questions about authenticity and control.