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. Both cities have seen the boom and bust of industry and population throughout their histories – past and present. Cleveland and New Orleans look remarkably different, but Christensen has often noticed that they have sounds in common: industry, birds, water, tourists. Rust Belt / Bayou offers an interactive document of aural snapshots from recent trips to both New Orleans and Cleveland.

Rust Belt / Bayou 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

Julia Christensen is an artist whose work treads on the thin line between art and research. She also likes to tread on most of the thin lines between various media, between the electronic and the non-electronic, and between audience and performer. Julia is the author of Big Box Reuse (MIT Press, Fall 2008), a book about how communities are renovating abandoned Wal-Mart and K-Mart structures for creative new uses. Her photography, sound work, and electronic installations have shown recently at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Lincoln Center in New York City, and the DUMBO Art Center in Brooklyn, among other venues. Julia lectures widely about land use, art, music, and interdisciplinary research. She likes hearing stories, playing with her rock band in Troy, traveling in the depths of the United States, and thinking about the future.

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.

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.

Tuned City - Between Sound and Space Speculation is an exhibition and conference project planned for 1-6 July 2008 in Berlin which proposes a new evaluation of architectural spaces from the perspective of the acoustic. The project draws the traditions of critical discussion about urban space within the architecture and urban planning discourse–as well as its strategies and working methods–into the context of sound art. This expanded discussion reinforces the potential of the spatial and communicative properties of sound as a tool and means of urban practice.

At the foundations of this event are artists’ works and theoretical approaches which examine in a critical and sensitive way the given urban and architectural situations alongside their resulting socio-political implications, that re-use existing spaces or that conceive and open new spaces.

A dialog will be built at the intersection of both disciplines which traces out the complex relations and interactions of space-sound, both presenting and testing new strategies, methods, possibilities and potentials of sound work within the artistic and applied context.

TOPICS:

The Built Space:
- examples that illustrate phenomena, problems or possibilities in the relation of sound and architecture
- usage of architecture as a space for sound and as an instrument

The Public Space:
- relation of sound and city
- situated sonic practices, site-specific sound awareness
- sound as a system of social communication, division and defense
- mobile sound

The Imaginary / Speculative Space:
- hearing-space - virtual acoustic spaces
- sound space in relation to human anatomy, memory and psyche
- mechanics and principles of translating sound into architecture and vice versa

PRODUCTION TEAM:

Carsten Stabenow
Gesine Pagels
Carsten Seiffarth
Derek Holzer
Anke Eckardt
Anne Kockelkorn

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.

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. Taking as its theme the intersection of sound and the city, this seminar seeks to present theoretical, artistic and empirical accounts of the complex relationships between acoustics, sensory awareness and performance in the context of urban space, landscape and the built environment (historic and contemporary). But the concepts of ’sound’ and ‘the city’ are only intended to serve as departure points for more creative reflections on, or interventions into, this theme. A discussion of sound could well include an account of silence, just as a description of a city or urban space might well ask where the city ends and its other begins. Consequently, we expect an eclectic and illuminating discussion stemming from a variety of differing disciplines and backgrounds and forming previously unimagined connections.Confirmed speakers:

• Janet Cardiff (Installation artist, Berlin & New York)
  via videoconference
• Eric Clarke (Professor, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford)
  Various Realities: Sound, Music, and Ecological Theory
• Michael Bull (Media and Film, University of Sussex)
  Sounding Out Cosmopolitanism - Mobile Technologies and the migration of Difference
• Graham Jeffery (Institute for Performing Arts Development (IPAD), University of East London)
  Expanding the learning soundscape: notes from some interventions in urban arts education
• Juliana Hodkinson (Composer and arts writer, Copenhagen)
  Instrumentality and the urban instrumentarium: representation and agency in urban sound art
• Jacob Kreutzfeldt (Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen)
  Acoustic territoriality in a Japanese shopping area
• Robin Rimbaud/Scanner (Sound artist and composer, www.scannerdot.com)
  Imaginary Highways: Sound Polaroids in the City

A provisional programme can be downloaded HERE. [posted on Mediateletipos]

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. Derived from Kurosawa’s film version of Macbeth, Spider Web Castle, Moving Forest renders the film’s final sequences (12 minutes in length) into a 12-hour ’sonica’ of grand scale. Moving Forest reinvents a modern edition of a Castle Central (here: the House of World Cultures) and a city in revolt. Inside the castle, the downfall of the assumed power; outside in the city, the mobilised urbanites march with generated sounds of insurgence towards the imaginary Centre. Moving Forest collaborates with sound artists to compose acts and scores, at the same time, drafts a PD (pure data) conspiracy scheme, performing live with citywide performance transmitted by wifi.

[AKA the castle] is a temporal performance troop bringing together visual artists, writers, soundists, silk threaders, codedecoders,
macromikro, boombox mass, mobile agents, wifi fielders and urbanites to realize the 12 hour Moving Forest.

CALL for DS Revolt: go northwest 20 Allied Clearing House :: CALL for Radio Gun Revolt: Symphony of noise :: CALL for AIR: GAMEoverTAKEoverOVER :: CALL for transmission: autonomous transmitting units :: CALL for netstreams: Conspire and take remote control

CONSPIRE Transmediale08, Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
KEIN.TV is a virtual, adhoc video production unit with a mobile internet connection via satellite
INURA a network of people in action and research in urban environments.

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.

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.

IN[ ]EX explores the migration of capital, goods, and people through the ports and public spaces of Vancouver, Canada, and San José, California. By using thousands of small wooden blocks as placeholders of this activity, the project brings forward a consideration of not only the social conditions of movement in the two cities but also the ways in which the circulation of these things implicates us in the global economy and informs our diverse world-views.

Artists

Kate Armstrong is an artist and writer with interest in media, networks, distributed experience, and hybrid fields. Her artwork centres around text and experimental narrative, especially open forms that bring poetics and network function together. In the past this has taken a variety of forms including net art, psychogeographical work, audio, performance, and painting. She is a recipient of a 2004-2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts for Turbulence and is affiliated with The Upgrade! International, and bnode.

Bobbi Kozinuk uses radio, electronics, projections and performance to explore issues of gender, the environment and community involvement. He has taught over 150 people to build FM radio transmitters, empowering communities and individuals to access and work with electronic media and helped numerous artists create installations and outdoor performances.

M. Simon Levin has been creating site-based systems that explore the aesthetics of engagement using a variety of designed forms and tools for the past 18 years. These relational projects investigate the often-blurred boundaries between the private and the public resulting in poetic interventions into space and place.

Laurie Long creates time based work that combines digital and analogue technologies to explore representation of people, and place. As well, she has an extensive documentary practice. Her work has been broadcast, screened and exhibited nationally and internationally.

Leonard J. Paul has a ten-year history in making music and coding for video games working for companies such as Electronic Arts, Radical Entertainment and Rockstar Vancouver. He is the composer for the film The Corporation that has become the highest grossing Canadian documentary in history. He teaches game audio full-time at the Vancouver Film School.

Manuel Pina is interested in the relationships between power, utopias, history and the city as both site and embodiment of these relationships. His photographs and video pieces often depict urban spaces as a departure point for narratives concerning social issues. He currently lives and works in Vancouver and Havana.

Jean Routhier is an audio wrapper, his approach is similar to a store clerk, bagging everything into their sonic essence. Interested in the gaps and gasps in sounds conducive to the transmission of stories he sometimes hears in the ether, he finds inspiration in everyday situations.

Alice Ming Wai Jim is currently Curator of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A) since 2003. She has curated media art exhibitions at Centre A, with Videotage (Hong Kong), and other independent projects. She is on the curatorial committees of NFF05 (Vancouver), LITMUS (New Zealand) and ISEA2006 (San Jose).

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.

The brain is very sensitive to music; you don’t have to attend to it to record it internally and be affected by it. I think we may be exposed to too much loud and repetitive music. One patient of mine has epileptic seizures induced by music and has to wear earplugs in New York City. It’s a dangerous place for him. Read the rest at Wired… [posted on BLDGBLOG]

Urban Noise Generation - The Observer this week takes a look at the sounds of cities. “For some,” we read, “living in a city is a loud, unpleasant babble of intrusive noise. For others it is a soundscape of calming tones that lift the spirits and brighten the day. Now a £1m, three-year research project is building a database of noises that people say improve their environment. It will translate those findings into design principles to help architects create sweeter-sounding cities.” Wonderfully, the leader of the study “is looking for members of the public to take part in mass ’sound walks’ through cities or in laboratory listening tests, where the team will use MRI scanners to measure participants’ brain activity as they are played a variety of urban noises.” They will thus develop an artificial soundtrack for the urban future. More on BLDGBLOG.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql_Qy__Fq5o
Virtual music score, digital images, composition: Emanuel Pimenta :: editor: Laura Pimenta :: lab and recording: ASA Art and Technology, London.