Synapse: Collaboration between the arts and sciences has the potential to create new knowledge, ideas and processes beneficial to both fields. Artists and scientists approach creativity, exploration and research in different ways and from different perspectives; when working together they open up new ways of seeing, experiencing and interpreting the world around us. For the past decade, the Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT) has provided opportunities for artists and scientists to work together. Through Synapse, and in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts, ANAT offers residencies, the Synapse Database and now ANAT is pleased to announce its latest initiative: a moderated elist discussion on contemporary art and science collaborations in fields including bioart, artificial intelligence, robotics, climate change and space, amongst others. You can subscribe here. Continue reading

Flou by Jason Freeman, with Andrew Beck, Xiang Cao, Mark Godfrey, Jagadeeswaran Jayaprakash, Al Matthews, Rachel Ponder, Alex Rae, and Sriram Viswanathan [Needs Java 1.5+; Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux; Minimum 768 MB RAM and 1.5 GHz processor; Fast graphics card; Speakers or headphones]

Flou (pronounced “flew”) is not exactly a game; you do fly a ship through space, but you cannot shoot anything, score points, or win or lose. The focus, rather, is on the soundtrack: as you navigate through a 3D world and zoom through objects in space, you add loops and apply effects to an ever-evolving musical mix. You can also design your own worlds to fly through and share them with other Flou users. Continue reading

{R} A K E - A performance series of alternative and collaborative electro-acoustic music and video :: Set 1 - DJ Olive, Music; Dan Winckler, Video; Set 2 - Audrey Chen, Music; Richard Garet, Video; Set 3 - Charles Cohen and Hair Loss, Music; Josh Ott - Video :: January 30, 2008; 8 - 10:30 pm :: Monkey Town, 58 North 3rd Street (bet. Kent & Wythe), Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

For January, {R}ake stays close to its roots. We’ve paired-up musicians and video-artists who haven’t formally collaborated together to present a night of truly improvisational multimedia performances. Continue reading

filmachine - by Keiichiro Shibuya and Takashi Ikegami places the visitor inside a vortex of sound and light that transcends the traditional perspective of the cinematic experience.

Three circles of loudspeakers are suspended from the ceiling above an abstract landscape. On entering the space, the visitor starts the composition with a button at the center of the piece, triggering an immersive audio-visual experience in a 3-dimensional soundscape, enhanced by a specially designed LED lighting system. Continue reading

Microclimates III-VI is a sound installation and concert. The installation plays in almost complete blackout so that the ears focus on the tiny details in the sound. A 3-D sound-space is created using 3rd-order ambisonics spatialisation projected over 16 loudspeakers. The playing duration and arrangement is designed for each exhibition context. The concert version combines spatialisation performance with pre-programmed spatial information.

Natasha Barrett uses a recording technique following the acousmatic composition heritage. Here composing begins at the sound recording stage, improvising with less conventional recording techniques and capturing a spatial and spectral microphone ‘performance’. Continue reading

Gridjam is a real-time, geographically distributed, networked multimedia event. It is an experimental project that brings together a visual artist, composer, musicians and computer scientists, while using the new high speed international LambdaRail network. Gridjam will demonstrate real-time, low latency, interactive, distance computing through the complexity of the live, partly improvised, 3D visualized, musical performance, being both a world-class work of art and a research project into high performance collaborative network computing. Continue reading

Adam Nash is a new media artist, composer, programmer, performer and writer. He works primarily in networked real-time 3D spaces, exploring them as live audiovisual performance spaces. His sound/composition and performance background strongly informs his approach to creating works for virtual environments, embracing sound, time and the user as elements equal in importance to vision. Adam’s work has been presented in galleries, festivals and online in Australia, Europe, Asia and the Americas, including SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and the Venice Biennale. He also works as composer and sound artist with “Company in Space” (AU) and “Igloo” (UK), exploring the integration of motion capture into real-time 3D audiovisual spaces. He is currently undertaking a Master of Arts by Research at the “Centre for Animation and Interactive Media” at RMIT University, Melbourne, researching multi-user 3D cyberspace as a live performance medium; and he’s a Lecturer in “Computer Games and Digital Art” in the School of Creative Media at RMIT University.

Adam will be answering reader’s questions in the comments section below until January 31, 2008. Continue reading

Inside the 100 Foot Piano by An-Ting Chung :: December 13 -14, 2007; 10 am – 10 pm :: Legacy Recording Studios, 509 W. 38th St. (between 10th and 11th Ave.), New York City.

Ms. Chung will channel each note from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” as performed in 1955 by Glenn Gould, into its own respective speaker – 56 in all – while the piece plays in its entirety. The speakers, spaced six feet apart, will play the piece in unison as the music wraps around the audience. Ms. Chung calls this experiment a “sound sculpture,” or the molding of music around a space. She envisions the notes as individual tangible elements, with substance and mass that can be arrayed into an energized sonic structure throughout the giant Legacy studio space. Continue reading

The Killing Machine and Other Stories by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller :: October 21, 2007 - January 20, 2008 :: Miami Art Museum and Freedom Tower, 101 West Flagler Street, Miami, Florida.

The Killing Machine and Other Stories (1995-2007) features 11 installations that weave together independent but complementary experiences. Each piece moves to its own time and rhythm, uniting sound with moving image in order to produce stories that live side by side in time. Continue reading

Flocking Orchestra (aka DT1) by Tatsuo Unemi and Daniel Bisig: DT1 is an interactive installation that employs flocking algorithms to produce music and visuals. The user’s motions are captured by a video camera and influence the flock’s behaviour. Each agent moving in a virtual 3D space controls a MIDI instrument whose playing style depends on the agent’s state. In this system, the user acts as a conductor influencing the flock’s musical activity. In addition to gestural interaction, the acoustic properties of the system can be modified on the fly by using an intuitive GUI. The acoustical and visual output of the system results from the combination of the flock’s and user’s behaviour. It therefore creates on the behavioural level a mixing of natural and artificial reality. The system has been designed to run an a variety of different computational configuration ranging from small laptops to exhibition scale installations.