Amir Lahav is a Visiting Scientist in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.

The Department of Music presents a year-long interdisciplinary lecture series entitled “Music and the Body” in the coming academic year. Broadly-conceived, the series is designed to inform contemporary and historical music-related questions concerning ritual and dance; display and gesture; gender and sexuality; and perception and memory. Through our choice of speakers and our active promotion efforts, we hope to draw audience members from Cognitive Science, Gender Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, and Anthropology. We also expect to attract members of the university and local communities who are interested in the social, physiological, and psychological aspects of contemporary musical practices. With this diverse group of speakers, we intend to inspire wide-ranging discussions focused on the intersections of performance, reception, ethnography, and the body.

Underwater speakers submerged in the pool will play sounds and music to an audience floating or swimming through the water. Sound travels four times quicker in water than in air so the sound is perceived not only by the ears but also by the bones and the body. Session One is undersea sounds for the under 14s. Later on the grown ups can immerse themselves in a listening gallery of international sound and some leisurely Aquadelica.

Jacob Kirkegaard has turned his ears inwards: His new work LABYRINTHITIS is an interactive sound piece that consists entirely of sounds generated in the artist’s auditory organs – and will cause audible responses in those of the audience. LABYRINTHITIS relies on a principle employed both in medical science and musical practice: When two frequencies at a certain ratio are played into the ear, additional vibrations in the inner ear will produce a third frequency. This frequency is generated by the ear itself: a so-called “distortion product otoacoustic emission” (DPOAE), also referred to in musicology as “Tartini tone”.

By arranging the tones from his ears in a composition and playing them to an audience, the artist evokes further distortion effects in the ears of his listeners. At first, each new tone can only be perceived “intersubjectively”: inside the head of each one in the audience. Kirkegaard artificially reproduces this tone and introduces it, “objectively”, into his composition. When combined with another distorting frequency, it will create another tone… until, step by step, a pattern of descending tonal structure emerges whose spiral form mirrors the composition of resonant spectra in the human cochlea.

(The effect in your ears will not appear when listening to the sound file)

Paradoxical as it may sound: we can listen to our own ears. The human hearing organ – still often perceived as a passive unidirectional medium – does not only receive sounds from the outside, it also generates its own sound from within itself. As a matter of fact, it can even be “played on”, just like an acoustic instrument.

This is Jacob Kirkegaard’s 3rd album for Touch, after ‘Eldfjall’ [Touch # T33.20, 2005] and ‘4 Rooms’ [Touch # Tone 26, 2006]

Jacob Kirkegaard is an artist with an interest in the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time and hearing. His performances, audio/visual installations and compositions deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain inaccessible to sense perception. With the use of unorthodox recording tools such as accelerometers, hydrophones or home-built electromagnetic receivers, Kirkegaard manages to capture and explore “secret sounds” - distortions, interferences, vibrations, ambiences - from within a variety of environments: volcanic earth, a nuclear power plant, an empty room, a TV tower, crystals, ice… and the human inner ear itself.

A graduate of the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne, Germany, Kirkegaard has given workshops and lectures in academic institutions such as the Royal Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen and the Art Institute of Chicago. During the last ten years, he has been presenting exhibitions and touring festivals and conferences throughout the world. Among his numerous collaborators are JG Thirlwell, Ann Lislegaard, CM von Hausswolff, Philip Jeck and Lydia Lunch. He is a member of freq_out. You can find out more on his website and you can order this release from the TouchShop.

The exhibition trilogy Les Grands Spectacles will be completed this summer with the theme of the bonds between music and visual arts. Sound of Art will present scores, objects, photographs, videos and video installations, records of actions and many more exhibits. Right at the beginning the exhibition focuses on its main themes: the radical break of the avant-garde art movements emerging at the beginning of the 20th century with 19th century bourgeois culture (dominated by the cult of genius, classical instruments, musical harmonies and melodies, etc.), and the various revaluations of its inherent categories, such as virtuosity.

The young artists of Italian Futurism, for example, contrast harmonious music with the sounds of everyday life and the rise of technology; Luigi Russolo even invents special instruments, the so-called ‘Intonarumori’. At a much later time, Günther Uecker alludes to the political aspects of Futurism with his ‘Orchestra of Terror’ which consists of sound-producing objects. During the second half of the 20th century the American musician John Cage introduces a fusion of different types of art with regard to sound organisation and listeners’ perception into the world of music and art. Since then, numerous artists have dedicated objects to this important intermediary between visual arts and music. As an important inspiration for the Fluxus movement, the show presents works by Fluxus artists that refer to Cage himself, his propensity towards changing technical aspects and integrating electronic elements, or to continue the principle of ‘calculated chance’ in the actions of the Fluxus movement. In 1959 Nam June Paik for the first time introduced the concept of action music in his ‘Hommage à John Cage’.

In this work incidental tones and sounds have the same significance as the classical sounds of an instrument or the moments of silence. The correspondence between body and instrument is also made visible in the Fluxus movement. In 1967 the violoncellist Charlotte Moorman performed topless in the production of Nam June Paik’s ‘Opera sextronique’, thereby making explicit the obviously obscene correspondence between the anthropomorphous cello and the violoncellist. These and other works of art, which all make the connection between body and instrument evident, are juxtaposed to paintings from the 19th century depicting women playing the piano with ordinary distances and postures. Carricatures of Niccolò Paganini or Ludwig van Beethoven at the end of the exhibition parcours close the circle as early forerunners of a countermovement that introduces dilettantism and anti-virtuosity as a principle of art during early 20th century avantgardism.

Curators: Brigitte Felderer, Eleonora Louis
Curatorial cooperation: Andrea Hofinger, Tina Teufel

Adam Nash will lead a tour of his work on Thursday, May 22, 2008 between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. US EDT. If you would like to take part in the tour, please contact adam at yamanakanash dot net.

Trace Aureity is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

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. Read an interview here.

What does it mean to navigate? What is the importance of location specificity? What does it mean to get lost? The increasing accuracy of satellite navigation strives to eliminate the possibility of human error, but it also produces a sense of dislocation from one’s immediate environment by abstracting location as the coordinates of longitude and latitude. What place is there for one’s body, one’s senses, one’s conscious and unconscious awareness of space, if this knowledge is so apparently made redundant by GPS? What, if any, role can historical skills of navigation at sea, of observation, choice, intuition and improvisation play in navigating the spaces of the future? The symposium Navigating the Space of the Future will take these questions as its starting point to see if we can find our way within the dense environment of global positioning technologies. The field is open but the practice is just starting to form itself by looking at ways to counter locative media strategies where geographical walks are organised that use the city and the street as a playing field negating the relation between space, architecture, time, body and mind. The presentations will focus on new ways of interpreting data of location and navigation by relating these directly to the physical (space) through the use of sound.

Yolande Harris - Sun Run Sun (Artist in Residence NIMk): Sun Run Sun explores the individual experience of current location technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to (re)establish a sense of personal connectedness to one’s environment, and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future and animal navigation using sound. Sun Run Sun investigates the split between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position. A series of portable personal instruments ?satellite sounders? developed for the residency, transform satellite data directly into a sonic composition. This composition constantly varies in response to the changing location of the player as they move through their physical environment. ‘The experience of sound is internal, as a process that influences the relationship between the self and the environment. True navigation consists of a continuously coherent relationship between the two.’

David Dunn takes his research into the bioacoustics of bark beetles and entomogenic climate change, and on ultrasonic audio phenomena in both human and non-human environment as starting points to talk about Acoustic Ecologies. He wants to bring forth the sonic presence of these worlds for human contemplation of their inherent aesthetic beauty and to show the amazing continuity of life, with its capacity for infinite variation in audible communication. “Given the superabundance of how music as a human activity has been used, I believe that music has simultaneously been a strategy to evolve our capacity to structurally-couple with our environment through our aural perception, and a significant force for defining the boundaries of group affiliation and for the affirmation of cultural status, giving voice to an evolutionary heritage of an abundance of other coupling modes that are greater than the rational mind alone.” [From Acoustic Ecology and the Experimental Music Tradition by By David Dunn]

Atau Tanaka bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. He creates music for sensor instruments, wireless network infrastructures, and democratized digital forms. Tanaka is best known for his performances where he uses physical gestures to articulate music and sound synthesis and real-time image transformation. For the past years, inspired by the ever-changing social, geographic, ecological, emotional context of using mobile technology for creative ends Tanaka focusses his attention towards mobile media projects. He is exploring the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. “My interest is to take interactive music practice off the stage and outside the concert hall into the urban sphere. Mobile communications devices are meant to connect groups of people. Musical concerts, similarly, are situations that bring people together for a common purpose. Can we elicit commonalities to make a community-based musical process, creating a! shared experience among users?” In his presentation he will pay attention to the description of the architecture of an audio-visual hard- and software framework that was developed for the realization of a series of locative media artworks, and eliciting from this, he brings afore fundamental issues and questions that can be generalized and applicable to the growing practice of locative media.

Schwelle is a three part new media and performance project using cutting edge acoustic and interactive technologies to explore the extreme threshold states of consciousness that constitute human experience. Schwelle II is a live performance in which the audience confronts a lone single performer Michael Schumacher, master improviser and former dancer with William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, experiencing the traumatic transition period between death and rebirth. Utilizing wireless sensor networks in the room and on the dancer’s body, Part II creates a stage environment where light and sound take on their own choreography, performing with Schumacher, breathing, and behaving alongside him. Where does the body end and the room begin? What happens in the threshold where body and room merge, mutually influencing and transforming each other?

After runs in Berlin (Tesla) and Place des Arts/Elektra (Montreal), Schwelle II will have its French premiere at the renowned Festival EXIT International, at the Maison des Arts, Creteil, in Paris.

Concept/Direction: Chris Salter in collaboration with Michael Schumacher
Performer: Michael Schumacher
Dramaturgy: Heidi Gilpin
Lighting: Leah Xiao
Interactive Lighting Design/Programming: Harry Smoak
Sound Design/Programming: Marije Baalman, Daniel Grigsby, Chris Salter,
Philip Viel
Interaction Design/Sensing/Programming: Marije Baalman
Production Technical Director: Harry Smoak
Management: Dieta Sixt

With the support of Tesla Medien Kunst Labor-Berlin, Transmediale, ACREQ, Hexagram, Concordia University, FQRSC

An icon on the balustrade instructs participants to adopt a contemplative position - one must lay ones elbows onto the balustrade, cover ones ears, and look at the Old Town. While in this position, they hear the sounds of bombers and explosions, which travel through their arms directly into their inner ears via bone conduction.

People who attempted to block out the noise during the bombing are memorialized by Touched Echo. By striking the very same pose — blocking ones ears — visitors to the installation hear rather than obscure the terrible sounds.

Does hearing via bone conduction produce a more empathic response? Or is it the element of surprise, the lack of audio queues — speakers, headphones, amplifiers — that proves powerful?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHLobipEwBI

“Earth Art uses the planetary dimension of the earth as an artistic medium and was developed in this century as a corollary to the telecommunications revolution and to the globalization of all spheres of human activity. Earth art uses planet Earth as the raw material for emotional and introspective expression.

The appeal of distance is in the very loss that defines it. The tools that we use, even the very sophisticated ones, are unable to adequately convey the sense of distance. Our senses must be at their most alert to be able to conceive of the other or of elsewhere. Being absent wakes our senses up by reorganising perception: consciousness participates with the mental reconstitution of an emotion-filled puzzle. As touch is useless, it becomes virtual; unfathomable, it is exacerbated.

Fingertips become useless: we must touch with the heart, the soul, the body. Perception reorganises itself. Sight and touch are no longer supreme. The ears and voice become the vectors of exchange, of interactivity. Loss, reconstituting a void: no longer is there a vision or distorted vision.

In Orient Express, the picture taken every hour on the hour prompts us to reconstitute the intervals. Orient Express makes holes in space and time. The conception of time has been exacerbated by a focus on points.

In Thaon/New York, sound is transmitted by satellite and image by slow-scan. The sounds mix, especially during the transatlantic interactive music piece. With the collage of sounds, spatial references are lost. The image is blurred and sequential and is therefore only partial in time and space. These lace-like holes in sound and image become a shadow theatre with shades of images and shades of sounds. Here, removal and loss is what creates art from reality.

Why is this pleasurable and why is ubiquity so moving?

It is the beauty of distant presence: I share my consciousness. My body is here, but my consciousness is shared between this place and elsewhere, between me and others. Here again there is a loss, an exchange. It is the beauty of communication with another place, with another person: I participate in that elsewhere, I participate in the “else”.

In this intent, this virtual gesture, there is love: spiritual love because it is disembodied. There is eroticism because senses are sharpened and fantasy exacerbated.

It is the sublime pleasure of distance. Uncertain distance: in-between, ambiguity, ambivalence, shared value.

Creating emptiness, a space of possibilities, the utopia necessary to every birth, to all creation.

Earth art is a form of art that takes Earth in its planetary dimension, as material for artistic reflection and emotion.

Earth art is sublime because it mixes fear and a sense of wonder.

To imagine on a planetary scale is to resize one’s consciousness. Human consciousness can now extend to a planetary scale. Consciousness extension.

We are at once infinitely big and infinitely small, lost and found. In Le bleu du Ciel, the viewer looking at the average of the two skies, the one above him and the one a thousand kilometres away—mentally reconstitutes the colour of the far away sky from grey to blue. The spectator reconstitutes the atmospheric cloud cover and his consciousness spreads over the globe. Ozone, each sound makes us shift from one antipode to the other. Oscillating movement with a 20,000-kilometre amplitude. Sounds from the automobile pollution in the city of Lille, and sounds from the riddled atmosphere. Interactions between man, air and sun. Network and noosphere. Planetary interdependence.

We change our point of view : at the same time it develops in space, consciousness is extended. Cosmic consciousness. The ego is finally abandoned. The self vanishes. Our point of view is now a point of fractal being, at once distant and involved, particular and infinite.

Perspective no longer limits our vision. We are in another place inside us, another place in the other, up there. The you and the me meet between Earth and sky.

Here is thus a lesson on distance and on wisdom: it is a lesson for the spirit.”

Stéphan Barron

(1) SERRES Michel, Atlas, Ed. Julliard, Paris, 1994, p.24

[Image: Stéphan Barron, Le Jour et La Nuit, Two computers, one in Brazil, one in Australia, averaged the images of the skies of the two countries, 1995] Electronic art is matched with environmental sensibilities in French artist Stéphan Barron’s “technoromantic” work. Using video, computers and community agit-prop Barron has found ways to bring abstract notions of space, gardening and urban land use to neighbors and gallery goers alike. The challenge of much technology based work is often the distancing that occurs when presented by a computer screen. In works such as Night and Day Barron brings the averaged sky tones from remote cameras in Brazil and Australia together into one computer image, creating a work that emphasises the electronic and environmental systems which unite far away lands. “Ozone” manages a similar feat by converting ozone levels in French car exhaust and Australian UV levels coming through the ozone layer into music. The abstraction and mystery provide a window into the surprising connections which connect us together. More at the greenmuseum.org

CD Rom Earth Art - Art Planétaire

The CD-ROM’s summary is composed of clouds. A sound from the project is generated when the cursor is placed on one of the clouds. Clicking on a cloud opens an interactive animation that sums up each earth art project. This non-narrative, non-textual presentation emphasizes the auditory aspect of Stephan Barron’s work.

The CD-ROM includes theoretical texts by Roy Ascott, Théo Barbu, Paul Brown, Laurent Benoit, Augustin Berque, Anna Capella, Mario Costa, Jean-Paul Fargier, Jürgen Engel, Fred Forest, Edmond Couchot, Jacques Donguy, Derrick de Kerckhove, Antonin Kosik, Markus Müller, Louise Poissant, Pierre Restany, François Terrassoné … as well as 300 pages from Stéphan Barron’s doctoral dissertation on his work.

Toucher l’espace, poétique de l’Art Planétaire is published by L’Harmattan, November 2006 - The first part of the book describes artworks that use planet Earth in its geographic entirety as an art medium. It describes the emergence of this art form which developed over the last century and whose importance grew with that of telecommunication technologies. Globalisation and ecological issues are essential themes of this art form.

In the second part of the book, 25 artworks or projects are featured, recounting 23 years of the author’s own creative work. 42 colour photographs and 17 black and white pictures illustrate the text.

Earth Art takes the Earth as its raw material for emotional and introspective expression, using telecommunication technologies to highlight distance and geographical space. This art form explores the emotions and poetry of distance, and reflects on globalisation, and its human and ecological consequences; Stéphan Barron’s adventure awakens and alerts us to a broader conscience of our planet.” - Edgar Morin