IN[ ]EX is a distributed audio sculpture in which thousands of wooden blocks with embedded technology are released into the city to engage the public as active agents. IN[ ]EX invites audience activity, movement and interaction, as well as engages with the larger urban context as the blocks are dispersed throughout the city and culture in general.

The blocks are distributed through an array of interventions that reference early models of instruction-based participatory works. As the blocks circulate, they transmit data which is collected by mesh networks and processed to create a constantly remixed sound environment in a shipping container.

IN[ ]EX explores the migration of capital, goods, and people through the ports and public spaces of Vancouver, Canada, and San José, California. By using thousands of small wooden blocks as placeholders of this activity, the project brings forward a consideration of not only the social conditions of movement in the two cities but also the ways in which the circulation of these things implicates us in the global economy and informs our diverse world-views.

Artists

Kate Armstrong is an artist and writer with interest in media, networks, distributed experience, and hybrid fields. Her artwork centres around text and experimental narrative, especially open forms that bring poetics and network function together. In the past this has taken a variety of forms including net art, psychogeographical work, audio, performance, and painting. She is a recipient of a 2004-2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts for Turbulence and is affiliated with The Upgrade! International, and bnode.

Bobbi Kozinuk uses radio, electronics, projections and performance to explore issues of gender, the environment and community involvement. He has taught over 150 people to build FM radio transmitters, empowering communities and individuals to access and work with electronic media and helped numerous artists create installations and outdoor performances.

M. Simon Levin has been creating site-based systems that explore the aesthetics of engagement using a variety of designed forms and tools for the past 18 years. These relational projects investigate the often-blurred boundaries between the private and the public resulting in poetic interventions into space and place.

Laurie Long creates time based work that combines digital and analogue technologies to explore representation of people, and place. As well, she has an extensive documentary practice. Her work has been broadcast, screened and exhibited nationally and internationally.

Leonard J. Paul has a ten-year history in making music and coding for video games working for companies such as Electronic Arts, Radical Entertainment and Rockstar Vancouver. He is the composer for the film The Corporation that has become the highest grossing Canadian documentary in history. He teaches game audio full-time at the Vancouver Film School.

Manuel Pina is interested in the relationships between power, utopias, history and the city as both site and embodiment of these relationships. His photographs and video pieces often depict urban spaces as a departure point for narratives concerning social issues. He currently lives and works in Vancouver and Havana.

Jean Routhier is an audio wrapper, his approach is similar to a store clerk, bagging everything into their sonic essence. Interested in the gaps and gasps in sounds conducive to the transmission of stories he sometimes hears in the ether, he finds inspiration in everyday situations.

Alice Ming Wai Jim is currently Curator of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A) since 2003. She has curated media art exhibitions at Centre A, with Videotage (Hong Kong), and other independent projects. She is on the curatorial committees of NFF05 (Vancouver), LITMUS (New Zealand) and ISEA2006 (San Jose).