ROUND is an audio installation that will solicit spoken voice contributions from visitors and use them as part of a musical composition intended to be listened to while viewing the work on view in the galleries. The interactive audio experience will allow visitors to hear a diverse range of voices — including artists, curators, and visitors — sharing their perspectives about the exhibitions and to add their responses. The comments will be collected in a database of recordings and subsequently incorporated into the piece. Thus, there will be a continual loop of opinion and emotional response, all contained within a musical work. The flexible infrastructure developed and built for the installation will be the basis for future audio tours at the Museum.

From the Press Release:

In a culture where technology enables source information to be collected and maintained by means of collaboration—such as public drives in the workplace and wikis on the Internet—The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present Halsey Burgund: ROUND, an exhibition that will introduce … an innovative audio tour guide that operates on a similar premise. […]

The name of the exhibition alludes to both a musical round—a song in which two or more voices sing exactly the same melody but in an offset fashion—and the age-old Arthurian legend about the Knights of Camelot who sat at a round table, affording no one person a privileged position. Halsey Burgund explains, “Equality of opinion and the opportunity for two-way dialogue are core ideas of this project.”

ROUND will enable visitors to experience other Aldrich exhibitions — specifically Charlotte Schulz: An Insufficiency in Our Screens and Painting the Glass House: Artists Revisit Modern Architecture — in a new way. The hand-held tablet computers will provide patrons the opportunity to select criteria for the types of voices they would like to hear while looking at the art — female curators, male artists, or children, for instance … The flexible infrastructure developed and built for the installation will become the foundation for pause. play, a program for future audio tours at the Museum. Nina Carlson, director of education comments, “Visitors look to museum audio guides for insightful and informed commentary to enhance their experience by facilitating connections to the art they encounter in the galleries. This revolutionary type of guide suits The Aldrich, first, because it encourages a two way dialogue, and second, because we are a non-collecting museum with frequently changing exhibitions.”

Halsey Burgund is a musician and sound artist who lives and works outside Boston. Both his installations and musical performances make extensive use of spoken human voice recordings as musical elements, alongside traditional and electronic instruments. He collects these voices from otherwise uninvolved individuals whom he records in various locations, from museums to street corners to rock clubs. Halsey’s band, Aesthetic Evidence, performs music publicly, often including interactive performances in which he records audience members’ voices and uses those recordings improvisationally within songs.

Concrete Daisies is a site-specific performance / installation of dance, sound, and live-feed video projection. A stellar ensemble of dancers, musicians, and video artists will explore the interior and exterior spaces of the Velaslavasay Panorama, an historic exhibition hall, theatre and garden dedicated to the production and presentation of unusual visual experiences. The garden of concrete daisies will play foil to the theater’s own “garden of carnivorous plants and sinister foliage“. Opportunity for a bird’s eye view pointed to an investigation of that which can only be understood from above, thus introducing the concept of the labyrinth.

This performance assumes a hybrid form that collapses the boundaries between installation / live-feed video shoot / live dance / live music / and live video projection. The viewer is invited to roam through this immersive environment and grapple with the simultaneity of the live performers and how they are mediated into the visual and audio spatial mix. It is ultimately a structured improvisation where the viewer witnesses the instantaneous, responsive dialogue between dancer, cameraperson, video artist and musician.

ENSEMBLE OF PERFORMERS:

CAROLE KIM direction/video installation

dance
OGURI
ROXANNE STEINBERG
MICHAEL SAKAMOTO
SHURIU LO
JESSKE HUME

sound
ELLEN BURR flute
MARK DRESSER electro-acoustic bass
JESSE GILBERT sound spatialization
MOTOKO HONDA piano
JOE BERARDI percussion
JESSICA CATRON cello
KADET KUHNE electronics

visuals
ASTRA PRICE live video mix
BO SUL KIM live video mix
CHRISTINE MARIE shadow play
MAILE COLBERT live-feed video
MIRABELLE ANG live-feed video
ANN KANEKO live-feed video

SPECIAL THANKS TO: SASSAS for generously providing technical assistance in this production, BILL BALLOU-technical direction, JORGE MARTIN and CHAUNCY GODWIN-sound engineers:, BITA SHARIF-production assistant:, JIHYUN SONG, YOUNG-MIN SON-video documentation.

Please note: As this is an indoor/outdoor performance comfortable footwear and appropriately warm clothing are suggested. In the event of rain, the performance will be condensed primarily into the indoor spaces.

STREAM is an exhibition that will surprise New York audiences, making us reconsider, rethink and re-contextualize global art making and information technology. The selected group of Portuguese artists stretch and stream their particular lenses into outposts of innovative art, be it where their work is made, in New York or elsewhere. STREAM’s media-based works require a public art space where the art is available in a one-to-one temporal engagement, a viewing that takes place in the context of continual coming and goings, with traffic and a constant flow of visitors – different from a cinema or a concert hall. STREAM is presented as an irregular flux, which overflows its margins and continuously re-establishes its limits. All are time-based works, moving in various directions, streaming from the artist’s studio to a public space: artworks that fetishize digital media, use video and audio narratives, and display performative aspects inherent to technology.

ARTISTS: PEDRO BARATEIRO / PEDRO CABRAL SANTO / FILIPA CÉSAR / LUISA CUNHA / ALEXANDRE ESTRELA / CRISTINA MATEUS / CARLOS ROQUE /ANDRÉ SIER / JOÃO SIMÕES / MIGUEL SOARES / RUI TOSCANO

This piece extends the investigation of public speech that he began in 2005 with “Parallel Rhetoric: 2001 + 2005″. The artwork consists of a software-driven installation that continuously mixes up the Inaugural and Farewell speeches of three US Presidents (Johnson, Carter, and Reagan). A pair of video teleprompters mirrors the image of each President, with the Inaugural speech on the left and the Farewell discourse on the right. A single microphone, modified as a speaker, is placed between each pair, amplifying one speech or the other but never both. Whenever there is a moment of mutual silence the sound switches to the other speech, randomly editing a meaningless conversation. The video keeps following the timeline, so the bouncing from one direction to another is even more puzzling for the observer. The emphasis placed on the emptiness of political discourse is then a vehicle to reveal the structures and artifacts of media itself. - Valentina Culatti, Neural.

The Tulca Freedom Trail is a self guided audio tour based on a remapping of the famous Boston Freedom Trail to Galway. Participants equipped with a map and the authentic audio guide walk the route of the Boston Freedom Trail - commemorating the events of the American War of Independence - which has been remapped to the streets of Galway. The tour draws on the historic connections between Galway and Boston, explores the troubled concept of American freedom in the contemporary political climate and encourages the user to see Galway in a new and unexpected way.

The project is part of an ongoing series of work entitled Cultural Tourism which seeks to facilitate a culturally minded audience in reducing their carbon footprint by enjoying the cultural highlights of the world without leaving their home town.

Tourism is essentially a cultural exchange, we go there to experience their culture they come here to experience ours and we are all collectively enriched in the process. In reality however experiencing other cultures can mean re-enacting a number of cultural set pieces whether it’s visiting specified cultural locations or walking the local culture trail. Cultural Tourism sets out to add in an element of familiarity to cultural tourism allowing the tourist to re-enact a cultural ritual of proven cultural worth that is already familiar to them. The aim is to take a ritual which has been repeated an infinite number of times and to transfer it to a different location where it is stripped of specific local reference and use it as a psychogeographical tool to interrogate and disrupt the users’ experience of their urban environment.

Drawing on the Situationalist idea of the psychogeographical dérive the project seeks to gently subvert the experience of cultural tourism by transferring a cultural experience from it’s ‘proper place’ to another city where it has no specific relevance. This disruption frees the user to experience the city in an unexpected way and may become the basis of another cultural experience independent of the culture industry. The Tulca Freedom Trail is a refinement of a concept first developed in the artist’s Joyce Walks Project.

Flooding is an installation based on the waterfall Toefrafoss which is at present disappearing under the rising waters of an enormous reservoir that has been created by a colossal dam for a hydro electrical power plant, built to power an aluminum smelter. This waterfall is just one of many that have disappeared or are affected by this single demonstration of technological power.

Flooding is Ruri’s latest work of the series Endangered Waters, and was created for Ars Electronica (2oo7). In this work she documents using video and audio, and presents in an installation how industrial interests are bringing about the flooding of an unique highland ecosystem in her country and causing its unalterable destruction. Even though the artist focuses the camera on waterfalls in her own country, Iceland, the Endangered Waters works are simultaneously local and global in concept.

Flooding is a two faceted video installation starting with a powerful expression of the waterfall Toefrafoss on one screen accompanied with the true recordings of its sound, that is followed by a collage of small frame videos that appear temporarily, allowing the viewer a peek into the lives of birds whose nests are being submerged into the rising waters of the reservoir, as well as watching the previous waterfall disappear under the surface. Parallel with the collage appears a rolling text on a second screen, - precise and conceptual. [via Cultures of Climate Change]

The inaugural issue is based on the theme of media and identity. We invite submissions that explore the diverse ways that identity is mediated by people of Asian origin, whether in the diaspora or within Asia, from branding India Shining to the western world, to the face of Islam in mainstream media.

Submission details: All submissions must include an abstract of no more than 100 words.

Text Submissions: should be in Microsoft Word and no more than 8000 words (including endnotes and references, if applicable) in length. All forms of writing are welcome - but scholarly pieces should properly cite material in accordance with the guidelines set forth in the APA Publication Manual (5th edition), the MLA Style Manual (2nd edition), or the Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition).

Video Submissions: should be in 320 x 240 or 240 x 180 QuickTime format with audio in 16 bit mono, and one to five minutes in length.

Audio Submissions: should be of CD quality and one to five minutes in length.

Photograph Submissions: should be in JPEG format, 300 dpi. Photos might be resized to fit our web space. Please keep in mind the web palate of colors.

Still Digital Art & Design Submissions: should be in GIF format, in the highest resolution possible. Designs might be resized to fit our web space. Please keep in mind the web palate of colors.

Web Design/Net Art Submissions: Please provide the address of a website/page hosted outside Immediacy. If we choose to feature your design, we will create an introductory page with a link to the external site.

Additional Formats are welcome, too. Please contact the editors.

All submissions will be reviewed by the iga editorial board and at least one faculty reviewer. We cannot accept work that you have submitted elsewhere.

The deadline for submission for the inaugural Fall 2007 edition is Friday, November 16, 5:00PM (extended).

Submissions must be in electronic format, and can be either emailed to info [at] imaginingglobalasia.org or delivered on CD or DVD to (55 W 13th St. Rm. 100, NY,NY 10011). Please include your contact information - name, department, student status (MA/PhD), address, phone number, and email - either in the email to which you attach your submission, or in a cover sheet enclosed with your disc. You will be notified of the status of your submission by November 26 - and if your piece is accepted for publication, you will be expected to work with the editorial team to revise the piece and ultimately present a final submission in early December.

A small part of the vast Audio Arts archive is currently showing at Tate Britain and for the first time in U.K until the 27th of August. Four hours of recorded clips of interviews with main artist from 1973 to 2006 can be accessed here online by clicking on…

Roma 16 October 2006. An interview with BILL FURLONG

IV: Audio art. Why recording?
WF: It’s difficult to say why. Certainly natural curiosity moves you towards things. I bought my first recorder in the sixties before they got popular. A small “real to real”. Somehow I’ve always been fascinated by recording. Later I started thinking about “VOICE” and discourse. The seventies were the years of conceptual art with text adding value to the actual works. As an artist I was more interested in “discussion”, the idea of language and the people that already worked in conceptual fields in Great Britain. Soon I realised there weren’t magazines capable of reporting such material inspired by conversation, sounds and discussions. The evocative force of a voice is lost with the written word as it will only ever be a written voice. Audio tapes were already a radical form of communication but only for pre-recorded music. I asked myself if it would have been possible to create a spoken magazine. Recorded voice through a production of tapes to give out. The tape was also an economic form of production and distribution.

IV: Recording as a way to distance the textuality of “art and language”. And also from Andy Warhol’s “interview” as you produced recordings.
WF: I’m glad you mentioned him. Andy Warhol, whom I interviewed and met, understood immediately the importance of recording . He recorded everything and called his recorder “my wife” . I recorded a lot to. Personally I prefer the word “conversation”. Conversing is a very creative process; it allows you to get to know the world through the people you are talking with. Therefore if you talk to someone it’s as if you are making a portrait of them: You understand their roots. Human voice is very rich, stratified, ethnic, sensual. You can talk without telling what you are thinking and vice versa…I can hold back my thoughts. For the roman exhibition I’m presenting a work called “conversation piece”. Duchamp is an other artist that understood. They knew that the voice is an important instrument to understand and communicate. It took a long time to make people understand this simple concept. We still live in an era where everything has to be documented as a will, but in the tones of a voice there are many more things than in a written page.

IV: Every body has it’s sound … does it mean that sound is a body?
WF: t’s correct to say we resonate in different ways. There is a deep truth in a voice that inspires stories, values and differences. This is why I started using voice as artistic material. A voice brings the story to the present, where we come from , what we have done , what we will do … because as we are doing this interview we are thinking of other things . voice is an expression of an entire identity. As for Joseph Beuys, voice is an “organic sculpture”.

IV: Is voice a deep material?
WF: Trough voice resonates thoughts and ideologies we carry with us .”Audio Arts” started simply as a reflection on voice as a stratified material . It started by chance, and now shows a intricate coherence . I started to use voices to unveil a complex space .

IV: How was the English audience response to audio arts in those years?
WF: The intellectual stream of “art and language” was spreading in Great Britain. But only a restricted group of art critics had understood its importance : Peter Townsend of Studio International Magazine, recently missing , the critic Caroline Tisdall, Richard Cork, or art dealers like Jack Wender and Richard Hamilton . few had understood and thought it was an important project . Acute people counting Lawrence Weiner with whom I did some recording projects in the late seventies.

IV: What type of exhibitions did you do in these years?
WF: I’m an artist with a classic and visual background. Not an “editor”. Therefore I’ve done some exhibitions where I presented my recordings , voices and combined works. The archive is a public art form. Dan Graham also has an archive. I’ve never seen the difference between an “audio arts” archive and a personal one. I don’t divide the practices. The space for “audio arts” is the same one of listening. Therefore I like the idea that sending a tape to Australia it may end up in a bedroom a museum a gallery. Sound acts on the space and needs space to be heard. To hear it’s self .

IV: Have you ever used radio as a medium ?
WF: This further extends the concept of audio as sound has no barriers it can be diffused by a small radio or an auditorium. I broadcasted in Vienna. With radio I’ve presented many of my works with sound. Interviews with artists as well as interviews with people on the street. It’s important to remember that my job is recording contemporary events , recording reality . I don’t enjoy manipulating sound , it’s identity , I’d call this recording Roma 16 October 2006, sound art museum , for ever.

IV: “Recording reality”. With a recording do you produce reality or listen to it ?
WF: A recording starts by listening to it, then I reproduce it to turn it into art.

IV: Does this imply there are different ways to listen?
WF: I’ll give you an example: when I record a conversation , I listen to it many times - when I first listen - I don’t hear everything. The human ear selects whilst the recorder holds all. Therefore listening more times is interesting because within a conversation, whilst you are talking you can only hear it once. This is the reason that I insert silence in a recording. This giving the opportunity to re listen to a conversation otherwise continuous. and it allows to produce a conversation as a “sound object”.

IV: What is the difference between a conversation on the street and with an artist ?
WF: When I conduct an interview on the street I’m interested in building a particular image, of a group of people and the atmosphere surrounding. The construction of a place and a space and those inhabiting it. That’s why I don’t ask complex questions: where are you going? where are you coming from? what do you like to eat? what are you doing tonight? and I receive answers. The voices transmit their emotional state, where they come from, their worries, their passions. Simple questions that give you a lot of material . On the other hand when I interview an artist it’s to go in depth on a study. Two are the directions of my studies . Recording is the common denominator …

“conservation pieces” is a work including recordings . Sections of conversations with Marchel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, John Cage e Andy Wahrol, edited to recreate a single conversation. I like making impossible things happen . Unpredictable . Cage wants unpredictability . A conversation is unpredictable . Duchamp talking to Beuys … it makes sense because you start believing it. There is another “pieces” where I work with sound in space entitled “what are you doing in taping?” It’s a sequence recorded in Dublin whist some kids sell newspapers on the street . A kid turns round and asks me “what” I was recording as if I was committing an appropriation : are you observing me…

IV: There is therefore a communication between time and different spaces.
WF: It refers to belief, listening is believing. a perceptive faith.

IV: Audioarts Is A Social Organism?
WF: It’s a social sculpture . That’s how the art critic Mel Gooding described theoretically this involvement of different people as a part of a sound sculpture which embodies the people I meet. An Organism which becomes a corporation of sounds.

the italian translation of this interview was published on Teknemedia [posted by Ilari Valbonesi on EcoPolis]

A simultaneous walking tour for Second Life avatars and real people, connected to each other by a pair of walkie talkies. One operating from the Second Life virtual world, the other running on any internet enabled mobile phone. Connect to a Second Life avatar and make a simultaneous walk in both real life and the virtual world, using a specially developed pair of walkie talkie devices. A number of thematic walks will be scheduled throughout the festival period starting at certain times, announced in both Second Life time and real time at http://slwalkietalkie.com.

Second Life inhabitants can pick up a walkie talkie at the 0031 area in SL (see website for exact location). Festival attendees can check out the available Second Life walking companions by browsing a list on http://slwalkietalkie.com on their mobile phone. Clicking on one of the avatar names turns the phone into a walkie-talkie communication device connected to the Second Life avatar of choice.

Scenario

1) Communicate using the walkie-talkie and agree on a duration for the walk. Decide who’s in charge of guiding the walk. Pick one of the suggested destinations or tasks, or think of a custom goal yourself.

2) While walking, one instructs the other how to walk. When to make turns, in which direction to go. Avatars are requested not to fly, but to keep a NY pace. People are requested not to fly either.

3) Notify each other of peculiarities encountered on the way. Keep in touch. Be curious!

4) After finishing your walk, submit a snapshot taken on the way. “The ultimate virtual sight” or a picture of “a sight even better than reality”. Or whatever suits your walk best. Optionally, agree on a title for the walk you had and submit that too. The recieved pictures from both worlds will be united and shown side by side in a gallery of simultaneous walks.

glich-gen by DreamAddictive lab :: Glitch is the digital deconstruction of an image that suffers a rupture in its source code, this rupture is known as a system error. Glich-gen uses a series of errors processed through a source code in actionscript 2 in order to generate computer animations based on image errors.