Ryoji Ikeda’s data.tron installation was produced as part of the of the datamatics project. Using pure data as a source for sound and visuals, datamatics combines abstract and mimetic presentations of matter, time and space in a powerful and breathtakingly accomplished series of works. data.tron is a dramatic, intense and deeply absorbing audiovisual concert, where every pixel of visual image is strictly calculated by mathematical principle, composed from a combination of pure mathematics and the vast sea of data present in the world. These images are projected onto a large screen at an extremely fast rate, up to four times faster than normal film, heightening and intensifying the viewer’s perception and total immersion within the work.

MIC Toi Rerehiko is delighted to present Ryoji Ikeda in association with co-producers Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains and Forma. Ryoji Ikeda is widely recognized as Japan’s leading electronic composer/artist and is renowned for his acclaimed solo concerts, installations, recordings and collaborative work with international luminaries such as William Forsythe, Toyo Ito and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Working across both visual and sonic media Ikeda explores the ways in which music, time and space are shaped by mathematical methods.

The once aimless material waste becomes the nexus of a unique art project that celebrates waste and the odd notion of an enjoyable wasteland through a complex means of processing and image making. The Appearance Machine’s permanent residence is in New York City, the unofficial center of the detritus crisis as home of the largest landfill in the world. The machine itself is housed in a warehouse space that doubles as a factory or lab for audiovisual ‘performances’ set to an orchestra of digitally produced sound.

The Appearance Machine is a production mill of sorts, a system that generates non-narrative audiovisual by-products, relying on a steady stream of incoming refuge to sustain itself. Trash enters a conveyer belt-like system where objects are photographed in a manner not unlike the way a photographer might capture the image of a fashion model. Artificial wind, mechanical impulses, and vibration work in concert to animate the objects to provide them with context, dimension and, to some degree, personality. Multiple camera angles ensure the same quality of perspective and dimension to produce audiovisual works of art in increments that last for about ten or fifteen minutes…” Continue reading Trash Talk: A Review of The Appearance Machine by Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig by Natasha Chuk, Furtherfield.org.

Reversing the information flow in the opposite direction we find André Gonçalves ongoing Untitled #06 project, which also utilises the turntable, this time with a servomotor attached to the needle cartridge. Sound captured from a microphone is processed, then digitised into data and used by the servo to move the cartridge accordingly. The cartridge, which has an Indian ink pen attached, draws the audio events in real-time. The resultant visualisations have semi uniform spirgraphic geometries, and as André says ‘the drawings can be seen as histograms of the audio activity of a space during a certain period of time. In his biography André describes himself as an ‘empathy programmer with googlian self-education’, something many of us with an autodidactic learning will identify with.

Finally, it would be interesting to hear what one of André’s Untitled #06 disc visualisations, if drawn in graphite, would sound like on Caleb’s Graphic Music Sequencer. [posted by Paul on Dataisnature]

First there was silence…
Then there was data…
But there was no story…
Just images and sounds…

We love it! The Sound of eBay is our affirmative low-tech contribution to the ATOMIC soundtrack of the peer-to-peer hyper-catastrophic shock-capitalism.

“Beautiful project! Especially the scary parts about sensitive data. Very well worded, too. I can’t wait to see some fear trickle through the datasphere…” Douglas Ruskoff

How it really works:

We generate unique songs by using eBay user-data. You simply enter any eBay username (your own or someone else’s), add your email address so we can notify you as soon as the song is ready for downloading. Then click „generate“ and our robots sprawl out into the net to collect data.

After about 2-3 minutes the robots bring back all kind of user-data (creditcard information, bank details, passwords and non-sensitive user-data such as bought and sold items, prices, comments, ratings, etc) to our sc3 supercollider soundgeneration-engine.

Finally, the complex software-machine starts generating a score-file which is then transformed into your unique but uniform song and presented in teletext porn style! We sell out your human needs digitally…

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.

Finally found a use for the NY Times from Bill Orcutt on Vimeo.

Ever wondered what a web site sounds like? Not the words, but the actual data on the site itself? Here’s a Lily application that let’s you “play” the data in a web page like an instrument.

When the patch starts, the browser enters a DOM inspection mode and mousing over a DOM element highlights the node. Clicking on a node writes the element’s data (its innerHTML value if it’s a text element or the binary data if it’s an image) as a sound file and the file is then loaded in a quicktime player in the patch. The sounds can then be triggered using OSC messages. While a DOM element is “playing”, the browser scrolls to and highlights the element with a thick black border.

In the video, I’m spazzing out on the NY Times homepage using the monome controller, but the demo should work with any OSC enabled controller. Sound conversion code based in part on a javascript port of the baudio project.

More information available at lilyapp.org

Japan’s leading electronic composer/artist, Ryoji Ikeda, focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. His work exploits sound’s physical property, its causality with human perception and mathematical dianoia as music, time and space. Using computer and digital technology to the utmost limit, Ikeda has been developing particular “microscopic” methods for sound engineering and composition. Using computer and digital technologies to the utmost limit, his audiovisual concerts datamatics (2006 present), C4I (2004 - present) commissioned by YCAM and formula (2000 - 2006) suggest a unique orientation for our future multimedia environment and culture. His acclaimed installations data.tron [prototype] (2007), data.film [nº1- a] (2007),data.spectra (2005), spectra [for terminal 5, jfk] (2004), spectra II (2002) and db (2002) continue to diffuse Ikeda’s aesthetic of ‘ultra minimalism’ to the art world.

The following works will be presented in the upcoming exhibition at YCAM:

datamatics [ver2.0] - datamatics [ver 2.0] is the new, full-€“length version of Ryoji Ikeda’s acclaimed audiovisual concert. Ikeda has significantly developed the earlier version of this piece (premiered in March 2006), adding a newly commissioned second part. Driven by the primary principles of datamatics, but objectively deconstructing its original elements – sound, visuals and even source codes – this new work creates a kind of meta–datamatics. Ikeda employs real-€“time programme computations and data scanning to create an extended new sequence that is a further abstraction of the original work.

See a review of datadynamics ver.2 here.

data.tron - data.tron is an audiovisual installation, where each single pixel of visual image is strictly calculated by mathematical principle, composed from a combination of pure mathematics and the vast sea of data present in the world. These images are projected onto a large screen, heightening and intensifying the viewer’€™s perception and total immersion within the work.

data.film [nº1-a] - A sculptural wall installation, data.film consists of a series of 35mm film mounted in a light box. The image on the film is constructed from microscopically printed data codes and patterns from pure digital sources, while the unusual proportions of the light box (4 cm high, 10 metres wide, 4 cm deep) create a long, narrow strip of film. Only upon close examination by the viewer can the film and its contents be recognised.

test pattern [nº1] World Premiere - Ryoji Ikeda’s new project test pattern is interrelated with his datamatics project. test pattern is a system to convert any kind of data (text, sounds, photos and movies) into barcode patterns and binary patterns of 0s and 1s. Through its application, the project’s aim is to examine the relationship between critical points of device performance and threshold of human perception. The installation comprises 8 computer monitors and 16 loudspeakers aligned on the floor in a dark space. The 8 rectangular surfaces of the screens flicker intensely with black and white images, floating and convulsing in the darkness. 16-channel sound signals are mapped as a grid matrix, passing and slicing the space sharply. Via a real-time computer program, the signal patterns are converted into 8 barcode patterns, which are tightly synchronized. The velocity of the moving images is ultrafast, some hundreds of frames per second at certain points, providing a performance test for the devices and a response test for visitors’ perceptions.

Polli is currently at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, where she’s developing 90ºS. Working with a team of scientists, she is gathering and modeling environmental data in order to communicate both the aesthetic beauty of Antarctica and the scientific importance of Antarctica to the global climate; and explore art and science collaboration. She is maintaining a daily blog - including audio recordings - about her experiences here.

As a member of the steering committee for New York 2050, a wide-reaching project envisioning the future of the New York City region, Polli is currently working with city planners, environmental scientists, historians and other experts to look at the impact of climate on the future of human life both locally and globally. She is currently co-chair of the Leonardo Education Forum, an affiliate of the MIT Press and the College Art Association of America (CAA) that promotes the advancement of research and academic scholarship at the intersections of art, science, and technology, and is a founding member and co-chair of the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology (NYSAE), a chapter of the American and World Forums for Acoustic Ecology.

q3apd was presented for two weeks during which the ‘game’ autoplayed continuously - ie there was no human input. Four bots fight each other, dying and respawning, over and over again. One of the four bots sends all of it’s control data to the program PureData where this data is used to drive a score.

It’s through the ears of this bot that we hear the composition, driven by elements such as global-position in the map, weapon-state, damage-state and jump-pad events. For this reason game-objects and architectural elements were carefully positioned so that the flow of combat would produce common points of return (phrases) and the orchestration sounded right overall.

The scene was heavily graphically reduced so as to prioritise sound within the sensorial mix.

SignalPlay is an interactive installation that employs wireless sensors to control a spatialized sound environment, allowing participants to explore a distributed collaborative system. Unexceptional.net is a web-based application for visualizing and sonifying network, database and player information of a multi-modal online role-playing game. Sonic Panoramas utilizes image sonification, immersive projection and camera-based machine vision to allow users to create an interactive musical experience from panoramic landscape imagery. Datascape is a periscope-like system for the visualization of geographic information. This system allows users to explore a 3D topography and musical soundtrack that are generated from geospatial information such as marketing demographics.

In addressing the impacts of digital technologies on culture, these artworks employ the very technologies being investigated. Through the production and exhibition of this work, I hope to engage the public with these important issues and to help shape the ways that technological methodology embeds itself in our world and in our daily experience.