Extra City is delighted to announce the premiere of Mother’s Day (2006 – 08), a multi-channel sound and video installation by Smadar Dreyfus (1963 Tel Aviv, lives and works in London). Following on from her seminal large scale installation Lifeguards (premiered at the 9th Inter-national Istanbul Biennial, 2005), Mother’s Day is part of Dreyfus’ investigation into the role of the voice in the constitution of contested public spaces, as well as its function as a mediator between individual and collective and its implication in the negotiation of cultural perspective.

Mother’s Day originates at the Israeli-Syrian ceasefire line in the Golan Heights, across which the local Druze community has been geographically separated for several decades in the absence of a peace agreement. At the heart of this installation are sound recordings of dialogues on the annual Syrian “Mother’s Day” celebration, between mothers on the Israeli-controlled side of the ceasefire line and their student daughters and sons who arrive from Damascus to what is known as the “Shouting Hill” on the Syrian side. Exchanging greetings through a sound system set up for the occasion, these voices enact an imposed boundary, striving for intimacy across the geography of the valley.

Biography

Smadar Dreyfus studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1992-94 Postgraduate Studies in Media Fine Art), after completing a Masters degree at the Royal College of Art, (1990-92 MA Illustration and Photography). She works across video photography and audio in the context of installation. Her practice increasingly centres on the way meaning is derived from a specific relationship, or a gap, between the aural and the visual.

Dreyfus’ work has been shown internationally and in solo exhibitions at IKON Gallery Off-site, Birmingham, 2005, and the Victoria Miro Gallery, London, in 2006. Most recently her work has been included in ‘Trial Balloons’ at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), Spain 2006, and the 9th International Istanbul Biennial, 2005.

She also took part in group exhibitions at the Fri-Art Centre d’Art Contemporain Friburg, Switzerland, De Appel, Amsterdam, Almanac, Art on Television, Channel A1, Amsterdam, W139, Amsterdam, Gasworks Gallery, London, The Israeli Biennial, Art Focus2, Jerusalem, The Tannery, London, and The Atatürk Cultural Centre, Istanbul. Amongst others her work was reviewed in ArtForum, Contemporary, Camera Austria, and Art Monthly.

With the historic Santa Monica Pier and adjacent world-famous Santa Monica Beach as their space, a number of unique and inviting works by artists will illuminate the area for twelve celebratory hours.

Inspired by the wildly successful Nuit Blanche in Paris, Glow takes its spirit from the fabled grunion that live in locl waters and come ashore several times a year to spawn in the same creating a momentary sensation or iridescence.

Participating artists include Shih Chieh Huang and Usman Haque.

For more information: http://www.smgov.net/smarts/glow/index.html

Socrates: What a lucky morning this is turning out to be! I was looking for one virtue and have found a whole swarm of them. — Plato, Meno

In September 2007, the Australia Council for the Arts announced the recipients of its $20,000 artists residency in the 3-D online virtual world of Second Life. Dodds, Nash, and Clemens were awarded the grant to develop an inter-disciplinary artwork which explores the possibilities of literary, music / sound art and real-time 3-D arts practices within the virtual world. The artwork is a simultaneous installation in Second Life and in a real world gallery, where gallery visitors can be directly involved in its creation via a computer interface.

[Image: left to right: Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona), Christopher Dodds (aka Mashup Islander), and Justin Clemens (aka S1 Gausman)]

BabelSwarm, a metaphor for the Tower of Babel, uses voice recognition software that converts the spoken word of real and virtual world participants into 3-D letterform images in an evolving tower of words. The letterforms generate relationships with each other through a combination of visual and sonic manifestations, fragments of narrative, environmental / user awareness capabilities and through interaction with existing data generated within Second Life itself such as the virtual winds, sunrises and sunsets. According to Justin Clemens, Second Life is an already burgeoning platform for today’s art. ‘Every era has a form that exemplifies it: in Shakespeare’s time, it was the theatre; today, it’s Second Life. It’s a question of trying to meet the new challenges of a new time - and the new spaces that it generates, ”Second Life epitomises the innovations of contemporary technology and culture: an entirely virtual world that has entirely real effects,” Justin said.

According to artist Christopher Dodds, Second Life is a step in the right direction for Australia contemporary arts practice. “It is encouraging to see the Australia Council recognising virtual worlds as legitimate environments for artistic practice, and while we thought our idea was solid, we knew the grant would receive a lot of attention and some pretty spectacular applications,” Christopher said.

Read more here [PDF] and here.

To gain access to Babelswarm you need to register an avatar name, download the Second Life application software, and then log-in to see the virtual world. This can be done in three easy steps:
1. Go to http://secondlife.com/ and follow the “Get Started” link. This will allow you to register an avatar name, download the application and then log into Second Life.
2. New users go to an instructional island where they can learn to walk, fly talk etc.
3. When ready, click on (or paste into a web browser) the following link: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ACVA/119/180/295/ Follow the instructions and your avatar will arrive in the Babelswarm foyer.

Read Bettina Tizzy’s interview with Adam Nash here.

Cantata Park explores the notion of a “cut-up narrative”. By disassembling and reassembling a passage of text, the participant is free to extract unseen meaning from an existing text. The cut-up technique was popularised by Beat poets in the 1950’s-70’s as a method to “break the linearity” of written language, with William S. Burroughs using it extensively in his works. Burroughs believed non-pictorial languages contained a virus. By using non-linear writing techniques he believed the true meaning of language could be exposed, and the spoken word used as a weapon.

Cantata Park uses a passage of 256 words from Burroughs’ The Electronic Revolution (1971) and transfers the cut-up technique into a real-time 3D environment.

The work explores the possibilities of metaverse art, limitations of Second Life’s construction tools and scripting language, and the ability to appreciate conceptual art by proxy of an avatar.

While the spectator is inside the room and speaks close to the walls, he modifies with his voice (volume and spectrum) the whole environment around him. The words he pronounces draw a new atmosphere… a virtual desert. In this illusory dimension, infinite lines generating emptiness and distances are ‘attracted’ and skim one with the others, fading.

The projections reconstruct the scene of a 3-D software grid as a virtual extension in motion of the architectonic space (like an animated “tromp l’eoil” on the ‘Z’ raw co-ordinate). The environments in motion crossing the spectator lead it to an ‘unfinished space’. So the spectator is forced to confront himself with another atmosphere, a new ‘digital-where’. This dimension is by now ours, is the fourth dimension. Speaking at the wall is a virtual opening never averred, it is a process in constant transformation and therefore it doesn’t characterize any specific place.

A performance idea is the base of this artwork. Watching Speaking at the wall the spectator will see a place that moves naturally beyond its functionality. Therefore the term “Super-place” (I had invented) can be attributed to this video installation. Exactly the contrary happens in the ‘no-where’ in which static presences have only the function to receive temporarily. Speaking at the wall probes the notion of space or better of place in order to search new possibility and dimensions which the digital world, not so much separated from the real one, offers. In fact, in this installation the space is meant as the pure shape of intuition.

This three-dimensional interactive installation constructs a sort of virtual architectures and territories that elude the corporeal limits. The synthetic shape becomes design, structure, architecture and truth. If the space is the extension in all the directions by our intuitions of the real world in which material bodies are placed, Speaking at the wall wants to expand these possibilities of perception.

Technical requirements: To realize this interactive video installation developed on two walls and the floor, it is requested a room (4×6 metres.), a Mac power book (with triple-head output adaptor DVI-VGA) to be connected to three digital video projectors.

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.

This unique solo-show is a multi-media revelation of the human voice and its unimaginable intensity. Ten years research into human body movement, multi-sensory perception environments and digital processing has brought about this exceptional show performed by Julie Wilson-Bokowiec. Bodycoder - Voice is part of an ongoing experiment in connecting body movements with sound, intertwining the sensual with the sonic. The experiments render the voice multidimensional and examine how the natural movement vocabulary of the body can become an expressive medium and create and manipulate sound.

Only the energy, breath and raw fractured tonalities of the voice are employed to populate and animate the sound scape of Hand-to-Mouth. Mouth / Larynx and the hands of the performer engage in intimate dialogue in an act of sonic puppetry and ventriloquism.

Bodycoder - Voice features the Bodycoder System © the first generation of which was developed by company formally know as Electronic Dance Theatre in 1995/6. The primary expression functionality of the Bodycoder System is Kinaesonic. In terms of interactive technology the term Kinaesonic refers to the one-to-one, mapping of sonic effects to bodily movements. There are no pre-recorded soundfiles used in the live pieces of this program and no sound manipulations external to the performer’s control.

Nerve Theory will perform H5N1, a live multimedia performance blending video, music, voice and some very nasty dark humor. This transcontinental duo (Austria, Canada, USA) jumps on the mutating, evolving H5N1 virus, using the very real threat of a global pandemic as a launching pad for a series of bone-chilling statements about the world we live in.

Ecoarttech was formed by Cary Peppermint & Christine Nadir in 2005 with the aim of working with digital and sustainable technologies and contemporary environments to create art and texts about the environmentality of modern life.

Directions to the Palace Theater in Hamilton, New York. For more information, call 315-824-1420.

This event is part of the Creative Solutions for Sustainable Futures Forum and is sponsored by Colgate’s Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts, the Department of Art and Art History, Film and Media Studies, and Environmental Studies.

“Evoke is a massive animated 80,000 lumen projection, which will light up the facade of York Minster. The facade is brought to life by members of the public, who use their own voices to “evoke” colourful light patterns that emerge at the building’s foundations and soar up towards the sky, giving the surface a magical feeling as it melts with colour. The cathedral, built to link conceptually earth to the heavens, has been a site for the conveyance of words, dreams and aspirations for hundreds of years. The facade is designed to orient the gazes of passers-by upwards. As an attempt to continue this tradition, the patterns of Evoke are generated in realtime by the words, sounds, music and noises produced collectively by the public, determined by their particular voice characteristics. The colours will skim the surface of the Minster, pour round its features and crevasses, emerging finally near the top of the facade where they will sparkle high overhead.

People with voices of different frequencies, rhythms or cadences will be able to evoke quite different magical patterns upon the surface of the building - a staccato chirping will result in a completely different set of visual effects to a long howl for example, blending old and new to continue animating the facade of the Minster.”

Created using Processing. [blogged by Chris on Pixelsumo]