The Solent Centre for Architecture + Design, in partnership with London-based media art innovators Hive Networks and artist Armin Medosch, have been working with Southampton City Council’s Oral History Unit on Hidden Histories, a unique project that turns the city itself into a giant outdoor gallery.

Hidden Histories makes accessible some of the highs and lows of Southampton’s 20th Century history, the glory of great ships and journeys as well as the disasters and long forgotten tales.

Hidden Histories will uncover those treasures through a revolutionary new concept of Street Radio. This is a totally new way of experiencing the city. The system utilises wireless communication technologies such as WIFI and Bluetooth in combination with FM radio to create a public interface to the city’s heritage. A selection of stories from the Oral History Unit will be broadcast from 10 nodal points linked together to form a media rich walk that transports people through the changing life of the city. Following the success of the pilot scheme it is hoped that the project can be extended further not only in Southampton but to other towns and cities as well.

The walk begins in and around the proposed ‘Cultural Quarter’ on Above Bar Street and the Civic Centre complex. You can experience the walk 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through any FM radio receiver or mobile phone with radio capacity. Route maps and radio units can be hired from Southampton’s Tourist Information Centre from Monday 17th March. A limited number of or radios will be available for borrowing. Please bring a portable radio or an FM enabled mobile phone.

You can read research notes by Armin Medosch here; sample some of his other writing here; and find out more about HiveNetworks here.

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N.I.P. artists at Pixelache 2008 Helsinki are: Teresa Dillon (UK), Kathy Hinde (UK), Torsten Lauschmann (UK), Ivan Franco (PT), Rudolfo Quintas (PT), André Gonçalves (PT) and Tom Verbruggen (NL).

‘Burning the Sound’ by Rudolfo Quintas & André Gonçalves (PT): ‘Burning the Sound’ is a sound performance about the nature of rituals, power and control. It uses fire from a regular fire lighter to subvert patterns of rhythm, exorcising the sound as a spiritual strategy. Fire was probably the first technology to exist and is knowledge based and ritualistic. Within ‘Burning the Sound’ digital, new media and ancestral technologies fuse to question contemporary strategies of invisible control. The aim of the performance is to push the ritualistic primitivism, gesture and body to technological mediated computer sound performances.

Rudolfo Quintas is a software designer, visual artist and founding member of the SWAP project who works in the field of augmented performances and interactive installation. For the piece ‘Burning The Sound’ he has been collaborating with mixed media, visual and sound artist André Gonçalves to create a dynamic visual-sound-scape, which are based on the movements that Quintas choreographs in real-time, using lighters and computer vision techniques.

André Gonçalves will also perform his piece ‘Resonant Objects’.

‘Air Stick’ by Ivan Franco (PT): Instrument maker and musician Ivan Franco. ‘Air Stick’ is a new musical instrument, created by Franco, which is ‘played-in-the-air’ (similar to a Theremin). The instrument, built using proximity sensors, allows for real-time control between hand-position and active sound manipulation.

BOP, UK: BOP are Teresa Dillon and Kathy Hinde. Since early 2007, they have been performing together and combining their backgrounds in live art, theatre, visual arts and music. As BOP they create experimental visual-sound pieces, with a theatrical, punky twist.

TokTek, NL: Musician, instrument maker, hacker and visual artist TokTek, eclectic electronic style has been described as ‘illogical hardware bending’. The outcomes or electronic ‘songs’ are played via hacked joysticks and various objects (plastic toys, records etc) to create dramatic live compositions, which break down into delicate and tender sound moments.

‘Crackle Canvas’ by Tom Verbruggen (NL): Musician, instrument maker, hacker and visual artist Tom Verbruggen (aka TokTek) has become well known for his individual ‘Crackle Canvas’ series. Drawing on his fine and visual arts background, Tom went into music but was asked one day if he would ever make any more ‘paintings’. This lead him to think about making sound-paintings, which is where the ‘Crackle Canvas’ series started.

‘Self-Portrait as a Pataphysical Object’ by Torsten Lauschmann (UK): Self-Portrait as a Pataphysical Object is a kind of chandelier created from audio adapters and cables with a single small bulb at the centre. An object in its own right, the chandelier, could hang in the lobby of the Kiasma as a representation of Lauschmann’s humours and DIY aesthetic, which draws on the everyday and subtle nuances of human relations.

Glasgow-based artist, Torsten Lauschmann originally trained as a photographer and film-maker but currently works across various media. For example, he has performed as a VJ and solar-powered busker known as Slender Whiteman, created a film about the a street lamp’s function in consumer society (Misshapen Pearl, 2003) and launched World Jump Day (2005), an Internet campaign, which attempted to reverse global warming through a synchronized single jump across the globe. His most recent work Piecework Orchestra (2007) is an orchestra of machines, which Lauschmann controls to create sound-compositions has been created using everyday house-hold objects (hoovers, washing machine, leaf blowers). This brief selection of Lauschmanns work, demonstrates the breadth of his practice, which focuses on everyday, human behaviours, gestures and emotions.

The Special Player is an interactive performance in the context of transmediale 08 - conspire. Involving a sophisticated responsive motion tracking environment, four contemporary dancers and its visitors, The Special Player explores a massively disquieting conspirative narration.

In the performance, the ambient digital environment provides the dancers with a complex ‘Digital Aura’, which reveals the network behind the obvious. Relaying to the ancient human fears, The Special Player throws its visitors right in the center of a sinister conspiration. Using a secret motion analysis algorithm, The Special Player selects single visitors and equips them with overwhelming power.

February 1, 2008; 9:00 pm - The Special Player (interactive live temple show) - Presentation, performance and party
February 1, 2008; midnight - The Shaidon Effect DJ Set
February 2, 2008; 5:00 pm - The Special Player (interactive live set)
February 3, 2008; 5:00 pm - The Special Player (interactive live set)

I Am You: The Special Player - The Special Player is a result of an interdisciplinary cooperation project between international choreographers, contemporary dancers, the interactive live set group 02L > Outside Standing Level, the Berlin-based Picamotics/ATTOMAAKU-Platform and libavg, an open-source high-level multimedia platform with a focus on interactive installations.

A relatively new programming paradigm called Live Coding is redefining the way in which software can be applied in live performances. While improvisation has a long history in the arts, the traditional edit compile run programming model limits software use to predetermined procedures running alongside a performance; allowing a programmer very limited improvisation, live alteration, or adjustment of the software during runtime. In contrast with this traditional model, Live Coding provides expressive control over software code during runtime, which allows for live (artistic) improvisation by programmers.

In Live Coding, programmers no longer technically assist performers; they are (co-)performers, using code as an interface to improvise with either different types of performers (ranging from dancers to DJs) or in networks with other live coders.

Test_Lab: Live_Coding will feature debates and presentations on Live Coding, a networked code jamming performance, live coded music, introductions and hands-on experiences in Live Coding programming languages for code improvisation, and a live coded Augmented Reality experience.

Right now, most people’s experience with geotagged media is through a browser interface like Google maps or the Google Earth application, or a web-based piece like Sound Transit. Google Earth in particular uses the concept of overlays, in which anyone can, through Google’s API, create a unique series of data points/locations to overlay onto the Google Earth map. This overlay can contain geotagged media, text, links, etc. and it is a useful concept to extrapolate to what I see as happening in the CyberTracker and ‘Sonic Graffiti’ examples. These, in using the same metaphor, create an overlay onto the real Earth. In ‘Sonic Graffiti’, listeners in proximity to sonic graffiti pieces will hear them through a playback device. With CyberTracker, given a wireless internet connection, one could potentially access the data on the wildlife sightings at the actual points of the sightings. Teri Rueb’s ‘Core Sample’ does something along these lines in its use of GPS to play back audio depending on where the listener is along sound walk. All geotagged media, by nature, contains this potential.

The point of departure for another discussion is in the ramifications of this virtual ‘overlay’ we are superimposing onto our physical world. Assume for the moment that we will soon all have mobile devices that will allow us to deposit and access geotagged media anywhere we can get a wireless connection. At the moment that this becomes commonplace, we will begin to build a permanent virtual overlay of media onto any and every point on the planet at which someone decides to leave some imprint of their presence. As time passes, this overlay will become more dense and complex, and at any given tagged point, one will be able to go back through that point’s history of data: for example, someone takes a picture of a glacier in Glacier National Park and tags it and uploads it at that point. Five years later, someone else at that location sees the picture on their device and is suddenly confronted with dramatic change in that glacier’s size. As another example, consider the possibility of a specific location in some city tagged with years of photos, audio recordings, text messages, and so forth. Any visitor to that point could access media from thousands of perspectives left at different points in time.

The terms ‘cyberspace’ and ‘virtual reality’ were the buzzwords of the mid to late 90s. Now, ten or so years later, the virtual world we spend so much of our time in – often in front of a computer and not interacting with the ‘real’ world – is being stretched over our physical world in such a way as to create a ‘hybrid reality’ in which we will always be connected and always moving fluidly between physical and networked interaction and communication.

I am, as usual, curious to know what you think. What other outcomes could you envision from our current technological trajectory? What aesthetic possibilities arise in such a ‘hybrid reality’? Have you had ‘hybrid reality’ experiences as described above, and if so, did you think of them as such when you had them? Perhaps most importantly, what questions does this make you ask?

Semiconductor (UK) :: July 4, Time: 8.30 p.m. For Brilliant Noise the most beautiful satellite images of the sun have been selected from an open access archive. The radiation intensity is translated into audio fragments so as to focus attention on the hidden forces of the solar system. A computer that ‘listens’ to audio files and is able to translate these into digital images, depending on the amount of resonance, is at the heart of the performance Sonic Inc: Where has the Future Gone?

Interactive Sonic Systems (ES) and Sensors_Sonics_Sights: July 7, 8.30 p.m. :: The Interactive Sonic Systems team demonstrates the electronic music instrument reactable. reactable consists of a multi-touch interface on which objects can be moved. Shifting, turning or directing these objects creates a dynamic audio art. SSS gives a performance in which visual music is created based on body movements. With their own subtle movements the trio influence the image and sound that are generated by means of sensitive sensors.

In (in)visible sounds the visitor enters the world of invisible technology. This is the world which employs the electronic fields, radio waves, frequencies and air pollution that are present around us. Erich Berger, David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, Rob Davis & Usman Haque, Informationlab (Ursula Lavrencic & Auke Touwslager), Olga Kisseleva, Brandon LaBelle & James Webb, Semiconductor, and Theodore Watson.

Invisible technologies are a part of our lives even if we are not aware of them. The rise of invisible networks had such an impact that it changed our manner of communicating, working, learning and playing. Many of our daily experiences are shaped by invisible structures based on technologies employing electromagnetic fields, radio waves and wireless networks. Whether it is computers, television networks or mobile communication instruments, many of the tools we take for granted have an invisible body that we do not consciously interact with or even think about because it is invisible for the human eye. But when technologies disappear from sight, they also disappear from our consciousness, and although we are surrounded by a whole world of invisible structures, we no longer experience our environment as constructed. We interact with invisible technology in every realm of daily life, be it through mobile phones, the TV set, radios or even electronic kitchen appliances, without actually thinking about them or knowing about their functionalities. The interest in objects is therefore shifting from the technology itself to the value they have for shaping our experience: we are no longer interested in the way a tool works but in what social or cultural status it signifies. As a result, we become increasingly removed from the technology and its influence on our daily lives, actions and thoughts. To break the cycle, the exhibition (in)visible sounds goes in search of invisible networks that exist around us. Artists visualize those unperceived yet very present technologies. Some literally expose both analogue and digital networks, while others make use of exactly the invisible, surprising us with the amount of information passed on and possibilities opened up by invisible networks.

Working with sound and the specifics of the location is the main interest of artist and writer Brandon LaBelle. For his project Radioflirt (2007) he has worked together with artist James Webb, whose work explores the realms of magic, exoticism and alienation and impossible environmental phenomena. Radioflirt lets the user hear the secret narrative of the building. Utilizing a series of mini-fm radio transmitters located throughout the building, visitors are invited to follow traces of incomplete messages, hidden whispers or trembling static that appear as an ambiguous and secret narrative. Radioflirt is an intimate radio experience that aims for the heart and explores the emotional geographies of listening.

Semiconductor makes Sound Films which reveal our physical world in flux. Since 1999 UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt have been exploring many processes of digital animation to produce experimental films and live animation. Earth Moves (2006) is a continuation of their exploration into how unseen forces affect the fabric of our world. The south-east of England is explored through a series of five audio controlled photographic panoramas. Semiconductor collected sound recordings and photographs on location along the A23 at Pease Pottage, Witterings NT reserve, Findon Valley, John St Brighton and the Adur Valley cement factory. The sounds were used to re-animate the landscape at each location. The results are captivating images and sound that seem to reveal a different reality usually hidden from us. The limits of human perception are exposed, revealing a world which is unstable and in a constant state of animation as the forces of acoustic waves come into play on our surroundings.

Rob Davis is a systems developer in the Psychology Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London, particularly interested in systems that are contingent upon the environment and the entities that inhabit it, and the adaption within such systems. Usman Haque is an architect who has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass-participation performances. His skills include the design of both physical spaces, and the software and systems that bring them to life. Evolving Sonic Environment III is an acoustically-coupled analog neural network, consisting of a society of devices whose behavior collectively changes in response to the pitch ascendancy or descendency that each one detects. In contrast to earlier versions of the project (which operated at much higher frequencies), humans will be able to participate more directly in the adaptation process by making sounds of their own. Each device can output at any one time a rising and/or descending tone: however, if a device hears too much of one type of tone it may get ‘bored’ and slowly modify its behavior. On the other hand, they may all coalesce in an equilibrium where they are all ‘content’ with the state of pitches in the room. This ‘contentedness’ may get disrupted when humans enter and start making their own sounds, thus perpetuating the evolving acoustic characteristics of the space. The system will remain active for the entire duration of the exhibition, so there will be many Gigabytes of data for analysis which, it is hoped, will demonstrate that adaptation has occurred over both short term and long term occupancy of the space. If this is so there should be correlations between occupancy and acoustic spectrum patterns that may change over the weeks.

Erich Berger follows a rich tradition of video artists such as the Vasulkas, Livinus van de Bundt and Bas van Koolwijk who specifically investigate into the world of electromagnetism. His audiovisual installation TEMPEST (2004) takes its name from the U.S. government code word for a set of standards for limiting electromagnetic radiation emanations from electronic equipment. Every electronic device that is switched on, whether a mobile telephone, a laptop or a GPS receiver, generates constant electromagnetic emissions, even on standby. Hidden under the user-friendly surface are autonomous processes with their own dynamic, what British designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby called ‘The Secret Life of Electronic Objects’. TEMPEST utilizes the basic principles of the ‘Van Eck Phreaking’ technique to transform purely generative graphics into a tight and intense composition of sound, noise and light. Following a long tradition of subverting military technologies for creative purposes, Erich Berger creates an audiovisual piece in which the relationship between images and sounds is precisely determined by the electromagnetic emissions produced by the monitor. The graphics that appear on the screen in TEMPEST produce radio waves which, when captured using various radios tuned to different AM frequencies, become the sharp and vibrant sounds that go along with the images.

In their work the Australian artists David Haines and Joyce Hinterding make a connection between natural phenomena and our electronically saturated world. In the live sound and video installation Purple Rain (2004) they explore the world of data transaction: the digital video projection of a mountain avalanches in response to fluctuations in the television broadcast images detected by antennas. The more signals the antennas detect, the more raging and violently the snow collapses. The power of the avalanche thus depends on the amount of electromagnetic energy and communication data that reaches the installation room via the antennas. The false video image of an illusionary natural disaster is of intense sublime power. It displays the raging energy around us produced by telecommunication and satellite networks. Haines and Hinterding use the image of the avalanching mountain like a metaphor for the natural world as threatened by and interwoven with the power of invisible networks.

Audio Space (2005-2007) is an interactive 3D ‘augmented aural space’. In the installation, visitors can leave messages for each other in space in the form of text or sound. The user - wearing a headset made up of headphones and a microphone - hears all the sounds left in simulated 3D audio, allowing them to pinpoint the location of the sound and find it in the space. Interactive artist and designer Theo Watson turns the space into a memory of the people who have interacted with it. The user can respond to messages left by previous users or seed conversation for future discussions. The combined sounds create rich, evolving atmospheres for different parts of the room, and for the user it creates a superimposed sonic environment that seems tangible and very real. The visitor gets the feeling of walking in a space filled with the ghosts of previous visitors.

Olga Kisseleva is interested in the ways people use electronic information-gathering and data-processing technologies to visualize our environment. With Landstream (2006), the Russian artist found her own way to translate a continuous flow of digital information, a stream of waves and signals understandable for only a small scientific audience, into graphic images that anyone can read . For realizing Landstream she worked with scientists from Russia, the Sorbonne and Stanford to measure the density, quality and movement of electromagnetic fields around nuclear stations, airports, and other locations. They developed an experimental program to track and translate them into graphical images. Her colorful paintings are translations of those graphics and map the dynamic flow of electronic information through the landscape in real time. Besides the new images, Kisseleva also presents documentation of the work process in order to give the audience a new insight into what she calls the electromagnetic pollution that surrounds us. The poetic abstract images let us discover a new world.

Cell Phone Disco (2006) is an experimental installation made of flashing cells. By multiplication of a mobile phone gadget, Ursula Lavrencic and Auke Touwslager from Informationlab created a space for experiencing the invisible body of the mobile phone. The flashing cells consist of one or more LEDs, a battery, and a sensor that detects electromagnetic radiation transmitted by an active mobile phone. When the sensor detects EM waves it sets off the LEDs to flash for a couple of seconds. The installation has two parts: Flashing cells with sensors of higher sensitivity are used to detect electromagnetic radiation from active mobile phones. This way a mobile aura appears around the phone, revealing a part of its invisible body. While the user moves around talking on his phone, this aura follows the conversation like a light shadow through the space. Much less sensitive cells are used to create a canvas for an inkless marker. Moving the phone close to the cells leaves a trace of light, an electromagnetic drawing. Cell Phone Disco lets the visitor experience the invisible body of his or her own mobile phone, a function that we use but never consciously experience.

In addition to the works in the exhibition a selection of video works from the Institute’s own collection can be viewed on monitors. These afford insight into an important historic tradition.

Audio Nomad is a research collaboration between artist Dr. Nigel Helyer (Sonic Objects), Dr. Daniel Woo (Human Computer
Interface Lab, UNSW) and Prof. Chris Rizos (Satellite Navigation and Positioning Lab, UNSW), producing art / science research
outcomes with location-sensitive spatial audio technology. The author is a PhD candidate working with Audio Nomad, developing spatial audio synthesis and researching perception of audio augmented reality. Audio Nomad produced two versions of Syren, a ship-based location sensitive spatial audio installation that renders sounds to a multichannel speaker array in relation to visible landmarks and regions as the vessel navigated waterways, first on the Baltic Sea (Helyer, Woo et al. 2004; Woo, Mariette et al. 2005), then Sydney Harbour (Helyer, Woo et al. 2006; Woo, Mariette et al. 2006).

New Audio Nomad works implement personal location-sensitive spatial audio on headphones, for pedestrian users. Virtual Wall will trace the now-absent Berlin Wall through Berlin-Mitte, overlaying space with a complex two-dimensional soundscape generated on a mobile device (Helyer, Woo et al. 2006). More >>

Anna Dumitriu sampled and cultured various locations in the city of Brighton for normal flora bacteria and moulds, revealing this incredible, unseen and sublime world to us through a series of beautifully enhanced digital micrographs. Luciana Haill, Ian Helliwell, Ollie Glass and Juliet Kac created a series of sound works to accompany the images. Microbiologist John Paul wrote scientific text descriptions of the microbes.

The images created a kind of dialectic, bringing together the pure emotion of the sound responses and the analytical texts. Philosopher’s such as Schopenhauer have written much on music’s ability to capture and express emotion “as an immediate objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself”.

By bringing in the use of GPS in the initial creation of the work, mapping the locations where the microbiological swabs were taken, the work drew together the microscopic and the macroscopic, drawing a thread between the satellites orbiting the earth and the bacteria at our feet.

A guided walk around the sites took place in September 2006, bio-hazard precautions were unnecessary but were taken anyway. We also carried GPS to track our route and a geiger counter to take unnecessary radiation readings.

Anna Dumitriu and Luciana Haill have co-authored a paper on Bio-tracking, which was presented at The International Mobile Music Technology Workshop at STEIM in Amsterdam. See more on that here. Bio-tracking is featured on the website We Make Money Not Art, see the interview by Regine Debatty here.

A Community of Soundscapes in Boulder, Colorado: Applications for participating in the Boulder program will close on May 21st, 2007. Participants in the project will be involved in activities of sound mapping from July 23 to August 10, 2007. Group meetings will take place 6-9 PM on July 23, July 30, and August 6. Individual sound walks and online activities will take approximately 3 to 5 hours per week.Meetings will take place on weekdays after business hours (M-F 6-9), whereas hikes can be taken any time during the week according to availabilities and preferences. Part of the work will need to be conducted online at your home computer. If you don’t have a computer at home, technical support and facilities will be provided at a CU university lab twice a week after business hours (M-F 6-9).

Participating will expand your listening skills and help you gain new insights into the environment and the community in which you live. Your participation will also contribute to the development of an innovative infrastructure to give voice, express, and explore different perspectives and interpretations of the natural environment.

The Boulder project is supported by the CU-Boulder Outreach Committee and is a partnership with the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) and the Boulder Water Quality Department.[via mediateletipos]

Jaygo Bloom suspects the invisible, therefore he seeks to reverse the need for this technological transparency. BUMP! reinstates the virtual world with an offline voice. BUMP! is an online project that translates an online keystroke into an actual real time and physical event. BUMP! will reinstate the presence of this technological intervention over its environment via the quick shot, rapidfire, 8bit sounds emanating out of its location based folly sound modules located throughout participating venues of Futuresonic 2006. BUMP! presents an interesting view of networked interaction and social performance.

Jaygo Bloom concludes, “By attaching a physical connection to things we perceive as virtual, we can begin to make the intangible tangible.”

Jaygo Bloom is a UK based multimedia artist whose practice includes audio visual installation, game hacking, film making and physical computing. Over the past year he has been developing a wide variety of new online and offline projects ranging from his globally aware interactive games console “Tao Joystick” to his 8bit latino percussion interface “Marrackattack”. Working independently and also as part of the Glasgow based audio visual team ‘Pointless Creations’. Popular for his public interventions, blue screens and old sports car, other successful projects have included Glasgow International05, Pixelache05, Recontres Paris/Berlin, and Pong.Mythos.