Talk + concert: Pierre Berthet, Rie Nakajima, Xabier Barandiaran

Programme
19:00: Talk. Xabier Barandiaran (scientist), Pierre Berthet (musician) eta Rie Nakajima (sculptor).

 These are the main ideas of the talk:
- Music is the first human abstraction of life. It can also be understood as the first formalization of life, albeit not completely mathematical (at first).
- Music is the bringing alive of a dead object and the re-vitalizing of a community of dancers and listeners. 
- Nature as a book: What does it mean? What do we leave out? 
- The three body problem as the limit of mathematical analysis of nature.
- Art and the sciences of the artificial.
- Beyond digital simulations: the embodiments of mathematics and the interactive dimension of natural experience.
- What Galileo and Dead plants and living objetcs have in common is that they are both experiences at the edge of the embodiment of life, rhythms and mathematics.
 
19:45: Pierre Berthet performs Galileo (Tom Johnson).

Galileo is a composition/instrument that swings on five pendulums. The slowest of these hangs from a line about 260 cm long, suspended from a height of about four meters. The other four pendulums must be carefully measured, following the formula discovered by Galileo Galilei some 500 years ago, so as to make their cycles in 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5 and the time necessary for the longest. A sequence of short compositions allow us to hear all the different combinations of tempos. The piece has evolved slowly from three pendulums to five, from 10 minute to over 40, in a variety of situations.

«The day Galileo Galilei discovered the law of the pendulum, I’m sure he thought he was reading the book of nature, and when I play my pendulums I sometimes have a similar feeling. I can not control their movement and can only try to follow their rhythm, their natural rhythm. The law of the pendulum is only one among thousands of laws that control the world we live in, not counting those yet undiscovered, but it is a natural law that can be seen and heard rather easily, and often people who attend performances of Galileo also feel that they are not only hearing music, but also reading a bit from the book of nature». Tom Johnson