D A V I D   P O C K N E E

About

This is the website of David Pocknee. I am a composer, writer, editor, performer, artist and coder, currently working as a researcher for Ableton in Berlin. I am trained as a composer but I produce art in a lot of different disciplines and styles, from straight-forward concert music to site-specific installations, books, zines, websites, films, net-art, exhibitions, paintings, conceptual albums, artist collectives, comedy and T-shirts. I start from the principle that composition is a historical lineage of techniques that have traditionally been applied to music but need not be.

I make a lot of art. At the time of writing there are about 100 artworks and around 30 pieces of writing viewable on this website and at least 300 more works can be found if you follow the links to external sites. I have tried to arrange the site so that it is easy to navigate through all of this material and hopefully guide you to the works I think are the best.

I stopped composing and making art in November 2019.

I can be contacted via email by prefixing my first name to an ampersand followed by the domain name of this website.

Writing By Others

You can also learn more about my work from these things that other people have written about it:

Louis d'Heudieres - Better Know A Weisslich: David Pocknee (2015)
A really good introduction to my work.

Christian Drew - Music, art, machines and more. (2016)
A report on my talk and workshop at at Southampton University in 2016.

Weston Olencki - hasty notes towards an exploration of semantic creativity (2015)
Some thoughts about the work "Economics" and its relationship to other works on a programme of experimental music performed in Palo Alto in 2015.

James Saunders - Open Scores LAB3: report (2016)
A report on my lecture at the Open Scores Lab at Bath Spa University in 2016.

James Saunders - No Mapping (2016)
An article about the idea of mapping from the May 2016 issue of "MusikTexte" which mentions my "New Fordist Speech Construction" technique.

Robert Barry - This Is a Score. This Is Another. This Is a Third. Now Form a Band. (2017)
An article from "Sounds Like Now" magazine about the vibrant London experimental scene and the work of WEISSLICH.

Shaun Davies - DAVID POCKNEE - 30.05.2019 (2019)
An interview with Shaun Davies from Manchester curators Kinetic, talking about my work and the piece "Economics".

Nick Montfort - Podcast: “Poet/Programmers, Artist/Programmers, and Scholar/Programmers: What and Who Are They?” (2019)
"Professor Nick Monfort’s emphasis in this talk, as in his own work, is on exploratory programming, that type of programming which can be used as part of a creative or scholarly methodology." At 14:26 he talks about my work involving the Permutated Poems of Poems of Brion Gysin

Richard Glover - Interaction and Game Design in Build-a-Chord Workshop
A brief mention of my writing on sociological modelling in ensembles is included in an article in the book Collaborative and Distributed Processes in Contemporary Music-Making ed. by Richard Glover, Lauren Redhead (2018).

Links

github | vimeo | youtube | soundcloud

Biography

David is a:
composerwriter and editorartist
coderperformercurator
researcher

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I am a artist, coder, writer and editor and composer living in Berlin. I produce work in a wide variety of styles, disciplines and genres.

I hold a PhD in music composition from the University of Huddersfield. I also hold a Masters and Bachelor degree in Music Composition from the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and another Bachelor degree in Music from the University of Huddersfield.

My music has been performed by a host of ensembles, and at festivals and concert series throughout the UK, Europe and US.

In 2012, I founded the independent research organization, The Institute of Applied Cultural Economics and Sociology and its subsidiary, The New Fordist Organization, a collective of composers, visual artists and performance artists, set up to apply the principles of mass-production, industrialization and mechanized creation, pioneered by the American industrialist Henry Ford, to the visual and performing arts. The New Fordist Organization has exhibited works in group shows throughout the Netherlands, as well as their own two-month "New Fordist Manifesto" residency and exhibition at GEMAK, The Hague, NL (2013) and its follow-up exhibition at Stroom, The Hague ("Selections from The New Fordist Manifesto", 2015).

In 2016, I was artist-in-residence with iii (instrument inventors initiative). This residency was used to create a site-specific installation with the artists Ana Smaragda Lemnaru, Gregorz Marciniak, Maya Verlaak and Adam Basanta, for the experimental Zandmotor sea defence outside of The Hague. This work, "Digging Piece", was exhibited at night at the "Sand Songs" event on the Zandmotor beach in June 2016.

Between 2010-2012, as a member of the experimental music and performance art collective Acid Police Noise Ensemble, I devised and performed in a number of exhibitions and concerts.

Over the last few years, technical interests have moved to the forefront of my practice. As a coder, I have designed a wide variety of websites and some software and plug-ins. In 2017, I publically released a music composition software tool called "Dodecafinder", which uses a genetic algorithm to speedily find optimal twelve-tone rows that fit a given set of user-selected criteria. In 2018, I completed the Northcoder's software development course. In 2019, I released an javascript library called historical-permutations which collects together historical permutation algorithms from 1956 to the present day.

The rest of my life is shrouded in mystery.

My Recommendations

I am aware that there is a lot of material on this website that might be bewildering if you don't know any of my work. As I wrote in my PhD thesis: "I am an experimental composer. I write pieces because I cannot imagine them. This inability to imagine the result sometimes means the outcomes are less than desirable. Someone once described my work as "covering a wide range of styles: from the very good to the very bad." I believe that if you are staying true to the ethos of experimental music i.e. producing risky work that you do not know will be aesthetically successful, then you have to expect a high rate of failure. With such a high failure-rate implicit inthe process of making work, the only way to make good work is to make a lot of it."

If you are unsure of what to look at or don't have much time, here are some of my favourites in each section of the website:

Composition: Parameters I for string quartet (2012)

Writing: PhD Thesis (2017)

Art: The New Fordist Organization (2013)

Coding: Dodecafinder (2017)