Stanford’s laptop orchestra, with their Mac books programmed to create sound, notes, and music, performed last Tuesday night, April 29th, at Stanford University in a musical collaboration with China. Assistant Professor Ge Wang, brought the idea of a laptop orchestra to Stanford this year. Previously a graduate student at Princeton, where the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) was founded, Professor Wang developed a new music programming language called ChucK, which has been used extensively by PLOrk. The language allows the performers to develop new code in performance. Continue reading

The Avatar Orchestra will be performing at the Deep Listening Institute Women and Identity Festival Concert :: April 17, 2008; 7:30 PM :: Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway (at Spring Street), New York, New York.

Avatar Orchestra Metaverse is a group of composers, performers, and media artists living in Europe, East Asia and North America who explore together the interactive possibilities of the Second Life online virtual reality platform to create works with open, interactive and possibly “infinite” elements. The Orchestra works with ideas that challenge conventional practices of creating and performing music, and finds new ways to conceive of and erase notions of identity, place, social, cultural and sexual identity, and the roles of composer, performer and listener. Continue reading

Station House Opera - From Soho to Rio: What’s Wrong with the World? :: 19 April - 4 May 2008 :: Soho Theatre Bar, 21 Dean Street, London W1D 3NE + Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro :: Live streaming and archived footage here. Schedule and tickets here.

From Soho to Rio: What’s wrong with the world? is a unique event performed in real time across two continents.
Combining live performance in Soho’s theatre bar with real time video links from both locations, What’s wrong with the world? takes the distance between the two cities and uses it to create a third, surprisingly intimate location where performers in London mingle, merge and collide with their counterparts in Rio. Continue reading

Netrooms: The Long Feedback - Pedro Rebelo, 2008 :: April 2 and 4, 2008; 8:30 PDT :: Join in and contribute to a nine-site network performance!

Netrooms: The Long Feedback is a participatory network piece which invites the public to contribute to an extended feedback loop and delay line across the internet. The work explores the juxtaposition of multiple spaces as the acoustic, the social and the personal environment becomes permanently networked. The performance consists of live manipulation of multiple real-time streams from different locations which receive a common sound source. Continue reading

BLISS :: March 13, 2008, 8.30 pm, Sonic Arts Research Center (SARC), Belfast.

A distributed laptop performance between SARC’s own BLISS (Belfast Legion for Improvised Sights and Sounds) and Göteborg’s Academy of Music and Drama laptop ensemble, Sweden. This networked performance explores techniques and strategies for improvised electroacoustic music over the internet.

The Legion does not prescribe its sights or sounds; they are the product of digital and contra-digital networks of gates, tables, switches, speaker objects, cabling and data… The Legion is not a band – we don’t play weddings – but we like playing in the network! This event is a co-production between SARC and the Siren Festivalen för ny music. The performance will include works by Justin Yang and Alain Renaud. Related article.

Stéphan Barron developed the concept of Technoromanticism between 1991 and 1996 for his doctoral thesis at the University Paris VIII. He also developed the concept of Earth Art in his essay Poetry of Earth Art, reproduced here:

“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. Continue reading

Multiplace Network Culture Festival #7 - telematic networking, imaginary broadcasting, experimental mobility :: April 26 - May 3, 2008 :: CALL FOR ENTRIES - Deadline: February 29, 2008.

Multiplace 2008 invites artists and cultural workers to submit events / performances / installations / ideas of a networked character, such as online performances, streaming and radio projects, collaborative networked projects and workshops, or the works accessing the networks within a physical location, urban space or between remote venues. Use of digital technologies is not a crucial requirement.

Submitted projects will be proposed to participating venues and organisers. These will assist in providing the infrastructure (technical equipment, internet connection, material, staff, etc) for the project (if needed). Continue reading

“If relational aesthetics and open source were always commercial, can the musical score provide a way of thinking through different relationships between creativity and code? The return to improvisation in ‘livecoding’ draws parallels with experimental practices developed by maverick musicians, programmers and educators from Sun Ra, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Scratch Orchestra to Seymour Papert. Simon Yuill argues that these ‘distributive practices’ are worth extending today.

In recent years the foregrounding of ‘collaboration’ in artistic practice has acquired an aura of inherent benevolence and emancipation, as though the very act of working with others in itself ensures some form of resistance or alternative to conventions of cultural production, and confers positive moral value. Continue reading

The Cathedral Band is returning to Seattle next week to play the Icebreaker IV Festival at On The Boards, and you are invited to participate through our global sound event, Say The Music.

Here is how: simply call a local phone number in your area; leave us a personalized sound, song, word or phrase; and DJ Tamara or I will mix your sound into the performance. You will even be able to hear it in a live webcast. Local phone numbers are available worldwide - from New York to Seattle, and Brisbane to Perth, plus London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, and Rio. Continue reading

Gridjam is a real-time, geographically distributed, networked multimedia event. It is an experimental project that brings together a visual artist, composer, musicians and computer scientists, while using the new high speed international LambdaRail network. Gridjam will demonstrate real-time, low latency, interactive, distance computing through the complexity of the live, partly improvised, 3D visualized, musical performance, being both a world-class work of art and a research project into high performance collaborative network computing. Continue reading