Shinichi Takemura is a designer who uses technology in an attempt to enable creativity. He believes technology should not be used to stop people thinking, but rather to enable potential in humanity. Aqua Scape is one such example. This website invites the viewer into another world, where they can be involved in situations across the globe. The viewer can listen to various sounds of water from around the world, in real time. Takemura believes that listening to sounds in real time can change peoples emotional responses, and that the Internet is a platform to unite global citizens. This website becomes a unique dynamic experience, that can never be the same, rather than a static source of information. Takemura has transformed the function of a website and is working at using the internet to facilitate change.

Just Play - Musik as Social Praxis :: Artists: Cory Arcangel / Beige, Johanna Billing, Jeremy Deller, Iain Forsyth + Jane Pollard, Kristin Lucas, Hadley + Maxwell, Elke Marhöfer / Anne-Marie Schleiner, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Abe Linkoln / Marisa Olson :: March 8 – May 18, 2008 :: Opening: March 7, 2008; 7 pm :: Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Katharinenstra_e 23, D-26121 Oldenburg.

Music plays a pivotal role in many people’s lives as part of everyday popular culture because it is so unmediated. At times as a real world, at others as a reflecting surface for one’s own and others’ projections, music provides scope for manifold liberating, activist or subversive strategies at a far remove from consumption or glamour. Continue reading

Art Now: Seb Patane - So this song kills fascists :: until January 13, 2008 :: Tate Britain, Millbank, London.

So this song kills fascists, explores ideas of performance as a means of protest. The sound work, from which the installation takes its title, questions the revolutionary potential of music while new drawings, reminiscent of Surrealist or psychographic automatic writing, suggest a non-visible dimension implicit in the music. The central installation, Last Dance of the Nodding Folk, resembles an expressionist stage set, a theme echoed in the theatrical images leaning, placard-like against it. Footage of a fire juggler introduces an element of ritualised and controlled movement, which links to the energy of the drawings and the viewer’s choreographed passage around the installation. Patane identifies an aesthetics of subculture where protest has been exchanged for stylised performance, a husk detached from belief.