Ritwik Banerji

Ritwik Banerji is a saxophonist, digital media artist, and anthropologist of music. As a researcher, his work focuses on the aesthetics and ethics of improvised musical interaction, the relationship between improvisation and technology constantly raised by artificial intelligence, and the relationship of Echtzeitmusik and German history. Since 2009, he has performed extensively with Maxine, a prodigy improviser with an uncanny ability to pose questions on the nature of improvising by the sheer bizarreness of her rather subtle and underwhelming physical embodiment. As a digital media artist, he has developed several interactive music systems for both performance and installation, all or none of which improvise in the manner that human beings might or should.