Rust Belt / Bayou by Julia Christensen [Needs Flash Player and Speakers] - Rust Belt / Bayou is an aural exploration of two cities: Cleveland, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. For the past several years, Christensen’s artistic practice has been based in extensive travel throughout the United States, surveying the ways in which communities are changing in the shadow of corporate real estate development.

During these travels, she has often been struck by the similarities between Cleveland, a city of the Rust Belt, and New Orleans, a city of the bayou. Both cities dwell on the shores of bodies of water with global reach: Cleveland on Lake Erie, New Orleans on the Mississippi River. Continue reading

[Image: David Dunn] Navigating the Space of the Future - Seminar with presentations by: Yolande Harris, David Dunn and Atau Tanaka:: April 15, 2008; 8:30 pm :: Netherlands Media Art Institute, Keizersgracht 264, 1016 EV Amsterdam :: LIVE STREAM.

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? Continue reading

Call for Performance Proposals: Tuned City - Between Sound and Space Speculation :: Garage, Kastanienallee 73, 10435 Berlin.

Tuned City is seeking proposals for short performances and artist presentations addressing issues of sound and architecture. These proposals should relate to one or more of the topics listed below, and should include links to online documentation of the proposed performance/presentation, or to similar work by the same artist / author. The deadline for proposals is April 30, 2008, but proposals will be considered as they are received. Please submit proposals in English. Continue reading

Sound Walks explores some of the possibilities of Stanza’s Soundcities. It uses the Soundcities database through the openly distributed XML-file. Choose the city you want to visit: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bergen, Bilbao, Bristol, Cork, Dresden, Ljubljana, London, Los Angeles, Napoli, Paris, Rotterdam, Salzburg, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, or Tokyo.

Soundcities is an online open source database of city sounds from around the world, that can be listened to, used in performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks. Initially all of the sounds were by Stanza, but you can now contribute your own found sounds. This is was the first online open source found sound database. First version 2003.

Sound and the City: Interdisciplinary Perspectives :: February 22, 2008 :: CRASSH, University of Cambridge.

Over the past year, the Cambridge University City Seminar at CRASSH has explored diverse and enlivening topics in the study of cities, urban space, architecture, and visual and material culture. These topics have ranged widely in time and space, from predictions for the age of the supermetropolis to the use of digital technology in architectural space to an analysis of Mussolini’s use of Rome’s imperial past in the construction of its present.

Out of these encounters emerged an aspiration to allow for a more intense investigation of a particular area within this field. This will find its preliminaryculmination in a one-day conference to be hosted by the City Seminar organisers at CRASSH in Lent term 2008. Continue reading

Moving Forest: Insurgency - presented by AKA the castle @ CONSPIRE, Transmediale08, House of World Cultures, Berlin :: February 1, 2008.

Moving Forest of the PEOPLE’S FRONT is conspiring with KEIN.ORG and INURA (International Network for Urban Research and Action) in a call for an INSURGENCY act. The Russians took Moltke bridge. The prisoners took JVA Moabit. We take the prisoners. We are all 129a. The walls are blasted. The data are mined. The phones are tapped. The lives of others. We listen through walls. The cities of others. We walk through walls.

Moving Forest, conceived by Shu Lea Cheang (Plenum, nodeLondon06) and Martin Howse (xxxxx, nodeLondon06), is a 12 hour 5 act sonic performance operating with public wifi and mobile technology - an expandable citywide operatic manoeuvre / intervention. Continue reading

LISTEN! Sonic Ecology & the City :: October 26, 2007 7:00 pm :: Society for Arts and Technology [SAT], Montreal.

Upgrade! Montreal presents Listen! Sonic Ecology & the City in collaboration with Artivistic 2007 [ un.occupied spaces ], welcoming international and local sound artists and non-musicians alike to explore the relationship between ecology, sound and politics. The collective sound jam will open with two special dance performances.

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. Continue reading

[Image: Luigi Russolo and his noise machines… something otherwise irrelevant to this post] Wired just published a conversation between neurologist Oliver Sacks and journalist Steve Silberman … about music, memory, the neurological benefits and pressures of sound, blindness, and the (possible) dangers of urban noise pollution. An excerpt:

Wired: When you were growing up, hearing music often required going to see it performed. But iPods make music ubiquitous, like mental air-conditioning. What have we gained or lost by that?

Sacks: At first it would seem to be a wonderful gain. Darwin might have had to go to London to see a concert. But I can’t help wondering if the incidence of earworms and musical hallucinations is higher now, with background music in every public place. You can’t go to a restaurant without music, and they get offended if you ask them to turn it off. They feel it’s part of their creativity – they’re doing it for you. Continue reading

Leonardo in Locarno; a concert by Emanuel Pimenta :: Locarno, Switzerland :: September 16 - 23, 2007.

The Italian historian Marino Vigan recently announced an astonishing discovery: the Swiss city of Locarno has the only extant building designed by Leonardo da Vinci. The city invited the composer Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta to create a new concert to celebrate the 500 years of Leonardo’s architectural project. Pimenta based his new piece on Leonardo’s drawings, which were transposed into virtual environments. The music will last for seven days and will be performed in the most unexpected places of the city. The audience is invited to take a walk and discover the different sounds. Participation is free and a map will orient the auditors through the spaces where the music is performed. The concert is made in association with ALCHIMARTE of Locarno and ASA Art and Technology of London. Continue reading