OptoSonic Tea is a regular series of meetings dedicated to the convergence of live visuals with live sound which focuses on the visual component. These presentation-and-discussion meetings aim to explore different forms of live visuals (live video, live film, live slide projection and their variations and combinations) and the different ways they can come into interaction with live audio. Each evening features two different live visual artists or groups of artists who each perform a set with the live sound artists of their choice. The presentations are followed by an informal discussion about the artists’ practices over a cup of green tea. A third artist, from previous generations of visualists or related fields, is invited specifically to participate in this discussion so as to create a dialogue between current and past practices and provide different perspectives on the present and the future.

Organized by Katherine Liberovskaya and Ursula Scherrer.

About the artists:

Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and audio artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, and sampling technology. She creates solo works combining operatic bel canto and experimental extended vocal techniques with found percussion objects, spoken word, digital processing, and a MIDI controller called The BodySynthª (which allows her to manipulate sound with physical gestures.) In addition to her solo work, she has composed and recorded scores for dance, theatre, film, and new music chamber ensembles. Her large-scale multi-media works have been presented at Theater Artaud and ODC in SanFrancisco and at The Kitchen in New York, and her audio works have been presented in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in New York and the Diszesanmuseum in Cologne. Her multi-media opera Wunderkabinet based on the Museum of Jurassic Technology (created in collaboration with Matthew Brubeck and Christina McPhee) has been presented at The LAB Gallery (San Francisco) in 2005 and at REDCAT (Disney Hall, Los Angeles) in 2006. Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center in New York, the Interlink Festival in Japan, the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival in Wuppertal, Germany, and La Biennale di Venezia in Italy. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Creative Capital Fund, the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts, the ASCAP Music Award, and the NEA and Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. For more information visit www.pamelaz.com

Daniel Vatsky is a Brooklyn-based intermedia artist and VJ since 2001. He has created video for multimedia artist Laurie Anderson, comedian Chris Rock, documentary filmmaker Ric Burns, and serves as the visual coordinator of The Psychasthenia Society, a multimedia theater group combining realtime video with live music and storytelling. Recent works include “The Last Friday”, an interactive video game about the Critical Mass bicycle rides in New York City. His current project - which will be used in this performance - is a high-definition video mixer built in software. For more information: www.skyvat.net

Chris Jordan explores the medium of light, movement, and time through the use of technology. His installations have appeared at the Moma, the New Museum, the Whitney, the Museum of Natural History, Times Square, numerous galleries and clubs; and the incidental spaces inbetween. The common elements that define Chris’ work include explorations into memory, photography, film, interactivity, and of course, projections. By examining the political and social implications technology has on us through a diversity of media, his work questions and challenges the viewer to redefine traditional perceptions of audience and performer. In addition Chris teaches interactive design at Baruch College and NYU; and organizes T-Minus, G33kXmas, rooftop movies, and visualist salons in New York City.

For more information: www.seej.net/create/
www.seej.net/g33kxmas/
www.t-minus.org

Jon Cohrs (splnlss.com) is an artist/recording engineer who runs Spleenless Mastering in Brooklyn, New York. He used to perform with the now defunct Portland band, Orange and Allred and now plays in a duo with Australian composer Rae Howel, called Rabbits without Spleens. Their upcoming record will be out later this fall. For more info go to rabbitswithoutspleens.com

Miya Masaoka resides in New York City and is a classically trained musician, composer and sound/installation artist. She has created works for solo koto, laser interfaces, explosive powders, model trains, laptop and video. She has also made works for sculpture installations and notated scores for ensembles, chamber orchestra and mixed choirs. She has been a guest with the Berkeley Symphony, Bang on a Can, So Percussion Ensemble, Pharoah Sanders and the Toshiko Akiyoshi Big Band. Her work has been performed throughout the world including the Venice Biennale 2004, the Miller Theater, NYC, Merkin Hall, V2 (Rotterdam), Ircam, (Paris), KunstRadio (Vienna), Radio Breman (Germany), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Le Centrale (Canada), and festivals including DEAF (Ireland), Victoriaville (British Columbia), London Musicians¹ Collective’s Festival of Experimental Music (England), Other Minds Festival and Redcat Theater (USA), and she has toured to India six times with violinist virtuoso Dr. L. Subramaniam. Commissions include Engine 27/Harvestworks, Gerbode Foundation, Wattis Fellowship, British Broadcasting Co. (BBC), Asian Art Foundation, Alonzo King and Lines Ballet, Kathleen Supove. Other ensembles performing her work include Volti, Ensemble of the Piedmont Choirs, San Francisco Choral Society
and Rova Saxophone Quartet. She has been awarded the prestigious Alpert Arts Award, the ASCAP and The New Langton Arts Award, NEA and Meet the Composer. Residencies include Other Minds, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Western Front (Vancouver), Jacob’s Pillow and STEIM (the Netherlands), Other Minds Residency, and the Asian Cultural Council Japan Fellowship and Bang on a Can People¹s Commissioning Grant. She has collaborated and worked with many leading artists including Pauline Oliveros, Steve Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Fred Frith, Christian Wolff, Henry Brandt, Andrew Cyrille, Reggie Workman and Vijay Iyer. Sound installations (group exhibits) include Center for Art and Visual Culture (University of Maryland), Lincoln Center Out of Doors (Homemade Instrument Day), the Kitchen (Charles Morrow¹s Cube), 2006 Winter Olympics (Torino, Italy), The Kitchen; Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music (2007). She is currently on faculty of the Bard College Milton Avery School of the Arts MFA Program in Music/Sound (since 2003).

For more information about OptoSonic Tea please visit:
http://www.diapasongallery.org/optosonic.html

Performances and informal discussions with Kabir Carter (MoogerFooger and Moog pedals and synthesizers), David Galbraith (self-built electronics), James Fei (Arp 2600 synthesizer), Kato Hideki (Octave “Cat” synthesizer, bass), Michael J Schumacher (Steiner-Parker Synthacon synthesizer), Sergei Tcherepnin (Serge modular synthesizer), Stefan Tcherepnin (Serge modular synthesizer), Ed Tomney (EMS VCS 3 “Putney” synthesizer, various).

Browsing the Synapse Database — which is searchable by “Individuals”, “Interests”, “Projects / Events / Publications,” “Organizations” and “Gallery” — I came across Nigel Helyer’s Sonic Landscapes R + D project:

From June 1999 until September 2001, Helyer worked as an Artist in Residence at Lake Technology in Sydney, developing the Sonic Landscapes Virtual Audio Reality system … The salient feature of the Sonic Landscapes project is the juxtaposition of a fictive (but very convincing) 3D immersive sound-scape, accurately positioned by cartographic software, upon a physical terrain. The effect is somewhat akin to Murray Schafer’s concept of ‘Schitzophonia’, where, by the simple act of recording, sound is split from its original physical context and projected into another context.

However within a Sonic Landscapes experience we are not simply dealing with the disembodied voices of popular music reproduced and re-contextualised via a stereo-sytem! Here we are engaging with a seemingly live sonic organism that is responsive to our presence, our orientation and the traces of our wanderings, and which appears un-cannily embedded in the site itself.

The prototype Sonic Landscapes Unit is capable of operating with a 2cm positional accuracy when employing differential GPS (Global Satellite Positioning) and with a one degree accuracy for rotational head orientation, which, when combined with Lake’’s headphones delivered virtual speaker array, provides a highly realistic immersive audio environment. Tracking technology for the Sonic Landscapes project has been provided throughout by the SNAP Lab of the University of New South Wales under the guidance of Professor Chris Rizos. Future collaborative projects are currently underway between the Artist and UNSW c.f. “Audio Nomad”.The choice of a prototype test site for the project was St Stephens graveyard in Newtown; one of Sydney’s oldest burial grounds, which provided an ideal pedestrian environment, rich in historical material and interesting physical structures.

Virtual Cities and Oceans of If - An International Virtual Residency and Event on Global Warming hosted by Aviva Rahmani on TalkShoe.com. Virtual Cities and Oceans of If addresses global warming and political conflicts by demonstrating, analyzing and interpreting the local impact of global warming at international real world sites. Aviva Rahmani talks with artists, scientists, and others every Tuesday morning at 10 am. Guests are ecological art practitioners and affiliates.

Coming up:

10:00 AM EDT Tue, January 8, 2008 “What Does Sex Have to Do With it?” with Carolee Schneemann
10:00 AM EDT Tue, January 15, 2008 “Business Systems designed by artists?” with Paul McCarthy
10:00 AM EDT Tue, January 22, 2008 “Public Art and ecological art” with Wendy Feuer
10:00 AM EDT Tue, February 19, 2008 Karen Frostig, co-editor of Blaze

Episodes are participatory and accessible live by regular phone, Skype or computer. They can be downloaded directly from the TalkShoe site or iTunes after recording.

About Aviva Rahmani

Ecological artist Aviva Rahmani’s work has reflected environmental and social concerns throughout her forty-year career. Her projects range from complete landscape restorations to museum venues that reference painting, sound and photography. Early influences on her work include interdisciplinary classical studies, activism, city planning and the merging of science with aesthetics. Rahmani’s current work reflects her interest in the application of GIS and other mapping analysis, to “explore potential solutions for urban and rural water degradation in large landscapes.” Rahmani has taught, lectured and performed internationally, and is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including two from the Nancy H. Gray Foundation for Art in the Environment in 1999 and 2000. She is currently using the internet “to perform residencies without the international travel that spews jet fuel over the earth’s waters.”

Zarah Cabañas (live visuals) + Paul Amitai (live sound); Chika IIjima (live visuals) + bubblyfish (live sound); Marie-Helene Parant (live visuals) + Jim Bell (live sound) (Montreal,Canada); David Linton (live visuals + sound); Katherine Liberovskaya / Peter Shapiro; (live visuals) + Hitoshi Kojo (live sound) (Japan/CH); Ursula Scherrer (live visuals) + Kato Hideki (live sound)

Invited artist/respondent-moderator: Bruce Tovsky

OptoSonic Tea is a new regular series of meetings dedicated to the convergence of live visuals with live sound which focuses on the visual component. These presentation-and-discussion meetings aim to explore different forms of live visuals (live video, live film, live slide projection and their variations and combinations) and the different ways they can come into interaction with live audio. Each evening features two different live visual artists or groups of artists who each perform a set with the live sound artists of their choice. The presentations are followed by an informal discussion about the artists’ practices over a cup of green tea. A third artist, from previous generations of visualists or related fields, is invited specifically to participate in this discussion so as to create a dialogue between current and past practices and provide different perspectives on the present and the future.

Organized by Katherine Liberovskaya and Ursula Scherrer

For more information: http://www.diapasongallery.org/optosonic.html.

As often, the coherence of discussions around sound can be somewhat unfocused, but I believe we’re slowly building up a ‘way of talking’ about sound through an increasing body of work that’s emerging from beneath the visual. But although as mentioned, sound can work in the sphere of emotions, I don’t think it needs to be primarily thought of in these terms. It is very easy to think of sound as purely emotional, as it is easy to think of music as expression, as a way of circumventing the problem of further understanding sound and how it works.

In terms of environment, sound can be considerably more than an emotional communication of phenomenon. For example, we listen in a functional way in order to locate ourselves and move through an environment, a kind of listening where we only act when we perceive a sonic change, we do not consciously listen continuously but when our attention is directed. We also create sound, both intentionally and as a by-product of movement, which situates us as a part of the sonic environment we are in (a factor that is suppressed in the concert setting). In this way I would like to say that our relation to environment is directly sculpted by sound, the sounds around us, the sounds that we produce and the continuum between them. And from this can arise a sense of connectedness that could become emotional.

This is where sonifications of environmental data become so interesting, and so enigmatic. They present data collected by and for scientific means, which in itself is a string of numbers in need of interpretation. But by scaling these into sounds that fit within our human audible range, we experience a kind of magical transformation (!), a strange alchemy that makes us listen intently as the environment starts to speak as it were. And perhaps because we don’t understand it’s language, the experience is all the more be-witching! Is this why are we so willingly taken in by these affects of sonified data, or even the recorded sounds of extinct species? What is actually happening here?

The transformation of data into sound, and presentations of place through sound, inevitably have an emotional impact that can carry multiple political interpretations and subsequent manipulations. I wonder then that our discussion of sound and awareness of its impact needs to be greatly expanded, and the questions raised by sound artists working in these areas fine-tuned. What is interesting is that composers, who I would suggest are (potentially at least) the most versatile in their understanding and construction of sound and its affects through time, must work scientifically, practically, technologically (not emotionally at all!).

And so, one last provocation, I would like to question whether it is futile to think of sound in isolation, but situate it within the visual and environmental…the aesthetic as well as the political?

Yolande
http://www.yolandeharris.net

In an exchange between David McConville and Joel Chadabe, David wrote that while scientists “excel at collecting and archiving data, communicating the meaning behind the data is not their specialty. Since humanity’s long-term success is dependent on increased understanding of this data and what it can reveal about systems-oriented processes, asking what the arts can do for the sciences has never been more important.” He goes on to say that he uses sonification in his immersive displays to bring phenomena beyond human perception into conscious awareness.

Joel, who is Executive curator and producer of Ear to the Earth Festival, added “I would say that listening is close and personal. Listening creates feelings of connection and involvement. The more focused our listening, the greater will be our feelings of experiencing the environment, and the deeper and more immediate will be our understandings of the world.” He offered Suspended Sounds as an example, an immersive installation dealing with the sounds of extinct, endangered, and threatened species: “it cast a spell. We all felt the direct emotional impact of disappearing species.” Read the full exchange here.

Sound Art Limo brings together local guest sound artists and historical sound art works from the Tellusmedia / Harvestworks archives in New York, including work from artists Kiki Smith and Joseph Beuys. Each ride allows an exclusive audience of no more than 10 at a time to experience Melbourne from a totally different perspective as the limo travels across the city.

As part of Critical Conversations in a Limo, guest art critics, curators, museum directors and artists discuss their fields of expertise. These discussions will be an exciting fusion of opinions and different views allowing participants to explore new thoughts and develop a different way of seeing the world.

PED service-bureau attendants ‘perform’ 8 hour days–encouraging participants, suggesting routes, maintaining bicycles and keeping records. PED expands the parameters of performance by both invisibly performing a service bureau and orchestrating viewers to unwittingly perform (as they conspicuously ride through the city or locale on the talking-bicycles, adorned with identifying helmets). Tours typically range in length from 5 to 20 minutes, and cover a correspondingly sized area of the city/locale.

Millie Chen wrote:

“[…] We propose that PED bicycles occupy utopian territory as a viable form of public communication and democratic address.

We’ve predominantly used the pedal-activated technique, albeit altered greatly from site to site. In the first PEDs in Buffalo, in Belfast, Hamilton, etc., we stayed with the individually-equipped bikes where participants would be riding out into the city as individuals. In Chongqing, China, we adapted this system to incorporate multiple riders, all pedaling (2 to move the unit, 1 to activate the audio and steer); we built a series of 3-bike machines, welded together to operate in unison and each machine pulling a thematically-designed float (this served as reference to the hand-pulled carts that are still highly visible and to the incredible collision of ancient and new technologies that co-exist, uneasily, on the streets of cities in China).

Recently, this past winter in Rio de Janeiro, we responded to the use of walkie-talkies as a form of security and crowd control and took advantage of its use to mix live broadcast (from the hidden surveillance/broadcast post, the PED broadcaster had visual access to riders for a portion of the route) with pre-recorded.

The Chongqing and Rio situations were challenging for PED - ’security’ issues, defined very differently in each place, threw up some interesting, and at times very frustrating, blocks.

In Rio, it was strongly impressed on us that we should worry about the security of our persons, as privileged riders (the borrowed bikes were spiffy) and as potential security reps (we were told we might be mistaken for police because of the harness outfits that our riders wore). The rides were therefore automatically a collective experience as no one was allowed to ride off on their own. We always had at least one other rider with us, a security officer hired by the organization, even when just testing the routes prior to running the tours.

In Chongqing, the ’security’ came in the form of an 11th hour censoring. The date of the performance event, a proposed parade of the bike-cart machines through the streets of Chongqing, coincidentally fell close to the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. We were working with 38 art school students, riding bicycles, broadcasting public address - you can do the math. Although we were hyper aware from the beginning about avoiding direct engagement of controversial / sensitive topics, the content of our broadcasts became moot as the visual representation we became was too loud for comfort.” [posted on -empyre-]

Mille wrote:

“[…] I gravitated to utilizng elements like sound and scent because of their inherent power to activate memory - specifically corporeal and spatial memory, that can trigger mighty powerful reactions, emotions, in the the telling and re-telling of our experiences. I’m fascinated by the relegation to the ‘minor’ senses of these underestimated paths to perception and understanding. I think that because of their potentially subversive capacity, they become interesting tools to undermine the dominancy of spectatorship, and of the prioritizing of visual intelligence.

My collaborators and I have had a range of viewer/participant reactions that run the gamut from suspicion, fear, anger, trust,
tranquility, euphoria, trance.

I’ll mention a few instances.

In the audio installation “call,” the space is stripped bare of everything except for a translucent saffron hued curtain at one end
and the sound of a strong female voice singing in Arabic. As the visitor approaches the source of the voice, seemingly behind the
curtain, the volume gradually diminishes until, at the point of reaching the curtain, the voice is barely audible. The intentional
frustrating of the goal, that of attaining sonic (and, absurdly, linguistic) clarity through physical proximity, is meant to disorient
the visitor, creating a simultaneously embracing and cautionary state. The interaction for this piece is always interesting to observe - visitors wait very patiently and quietly in line (only one body can go through at a time because of the interactive set-up) for their turn; occasionally, a visitor will drop out of the interactive area to try to trick the sensor and to listen more intensely to the voice.

In the performative installation “The Seven Scents,” which was stationed near bodies of water in public places, Evelyn Von
Michalofski and I created pairs of ‘custom’ perfumes and soundtracks to transport visitors, who we solicitously installed in comfortable deck lounge chairs, to other places. Instead of the romanticized scents and sounds of exotic destinations, our tour consisted of smells and noises from those spaces of limbo that tired travellers find themselves in for a great duration of their trip: airport and bus terminals, parking garages, highways, elevators, etc. Yet the mere suggestion of escape allowed participants to suspend disbelief and even the slight tinges of olfactorial and sonic unpleasantness; they found meditative tranquility and possibility and reverie in participating.

“Extreme Centre” is a recent installation made in collaboration with Warren Quigley for the Centre culturel canadien in Paris. A sonic maze was built inside the gallery, dimly lit and filled with a hushed cacophony of whispering. Visitors negotiated the narrow, twisting passages, pushed along by the different voices and startling words. The words are based on quotes extracted from a range of authors from vastly varied geographies and eras, all potentially and controversially definable as ‘extreme’ in some way. We heard that one visitor came out of the maze feeling debilitated - not our intention, but we accept it.

We haven’t had any upset participants with the PED audio to date, though the Rio and Chongqing rides had cultural affect that we
couldn’t predict, being outsiders. The relationship of the Brazilians and the Chinese to certain elements sparked (positive) emotional responses from them, in particular nationalistic responses!, that we originally predicted would be received tongue-in-cheek (there’s the culture gap for you).

I agree with you, James, that head-space audio (i.e. use of headphones) does seem to pose an ironic situation of being in a
certain space but definitely not in the immediate physical space of the moment. I’ve used headphones once (in 7 Scents) but we justified it by having participants remain stationary and by the underlying notion of the piece - escape. With PED, we were adamant about staying away from headphones not only for the way it would cut riders off from being fully in the environment but of course also because of safety issues.” [posted on -empyre-]