Stanford’s orchestra is comprised of 20 laptop stations, each with a laptop and speaker array. Each speaker array has 6 channels of sound. As Wang says, “You put that together, that’s 120 channels of sound, plus 4 subwoofers for low energy.” The Stanford performance on April 29, 2008 was a first of its kind for laptop orchestras. Musicians from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) connected with musicians 6,000 miles away in Beijing to perform - in real time via a webcast - a program that celebrated music, technology, and international collaboration, and marked the premiere of the all-new Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk). Also on the program was guest composer and painter Luo Jingjing, who collaborated with the laptop orchestra to create a new improvisational work on site.

For more information on SLOrk, see http://slork.stanford.edu/
For more information on PLOrk, see http://plork.cs.princeton.edu/
Listen to PLOrk at: http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/plork/

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http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/drive_to_discover&id=6107037

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.

PwRHm is an Avatar Orchestra work in progress that explores and embraces the sonic possibilities inherent in the frequency of the electrical currents that power most aspects of modern existence. The piece exposes the relationship between the harmonic series of the North American 60 Cycle AC current and of the European 50 Cycle AC current, and uses the breathing rhythms of the live individual performers, spread across 2 continents, to determine the dynamic between the relationships, sounds and movements of the virtual avatar players.

PwRHm uses 4 instruments created within the technical possibilities and limitations of the Second Life platform. The instrument sounds are made from sets of short sound samples of individual sine and square waves and field recordings of electric motors put together in a HUD (Heads Up Display) configuration by the Orchestra’s instrument builder, Andreas Mueller / Bingo Onomatopoeia. The sounds made by the players are therefore not streamed. Each avatar/player is playing, in real time, sounds through instrument controls visible on each of their computer screens to make the combined sound of the piece. The avatars also hold semi-transparent globes, or ‘receivers’, designed by media artist Sachiko Hayachi / Goodwind Seiling, that emit gradations of differently coloured particles according to the specific sound and volume they each play on their instruments. The set also includes two large blue water tanks that hold two of the players, and that provide illumination within the night sky surrounding the suspended virtual performance platform.

Program: Sarah Weaver with Weave Between the Body :: Avatar Orchestra Metaverse - PwRHm by Tina Pearson / Humming Pera :: Maria Chavez, avant-turntablist/performer :: ROMA: Economical and Effective.

Notes for Avatar Orchestra Metaverse performance PwRHm (2008).

Composer: Tina Pearson / Humming Pera, Victoria, Canada
Instrument Builder: Andreas Mueller / Bingo Onomatopoeia, Regensburg, Germany
Set Design: Sachiko Hayachi / Goodwind Seiling, Stockholm, Sweden www.e-garde.net

Performers for Avatar Orchestra Metaverse: Bingo Onomatopoeia (Andreas Mueller), Regensburg, Germany — Fernsing Llewelyn (Cathy Lewis), Victoria, BC, Canada — Free Noyse (Pauline Oliveros), Kingston, New York, USA — Goodwind Seiling (Sachiko Hayashi), Stockholm, Sweden — Gumnosophistai Nurmi (Leif Inge), Oslo, Norway — Humming Pera (Tina Pearson), Victoria, BC, Canada — Maxxo Klaar (Max D. Well), Regensburg, Germany — Miulew Takahe (Bjorn Eriksson), Solleftea, Sweden — Paco Mariani (Chris Wittkowsky), Regensburg, Germany — Zonzo Spyker (Viv Corringham), Minneapolis, USA, London, UK.

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.

Created, rehearsed and performed via live video link, What’s wrong with the world? combines two cities and two stories to form a single vibrating narrative of distance, delay, loss and discovery characterised by Station House Opera’s distinctive physical and visual style.

What’s wrong with the world? is a collaboration with Phila7 and Oi Futuro in Brazil and is produced by Phila7 in Brazil and Artsadmin in the UK, with support from Soho Theatre and Café Lazeez.

Impeccably choreographed… an object hurled in Singapore flies halfway round the world and hits a character in Newcastle. Guardian (Play on Earth)

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. Netrooms celebrates the private acoustic environment as defined by the space between one audio input (microphone) and output (loudspeaker). The performance of the piece consists of live mixing a feedback loop with the signals from each stream.

To participate email Pedro at P.Rebelo [at] qub.ac.uk by the 1st of April and we will send you a PD patch. You can participate from anywhere in the world with a broadband connection. All you need to do is load the patch during the performance times and listen… You can make a sound, be silent, play music, talk to others and listen… but remember it’s a long feedback loop!

Technical Requirements:

- 1 laptop with Microphone (internal or external) and Loudspeaker (internal or external)
- Pure data-extended 0.39.3-extended
- Patch provided when you email us
- Broadband Connection with UDP and TCP ports 8100 open

Performances:

April 2, 2008 Berkeley, California - CNMAT, University of California Berkeley :: The performance of Netrooms: The Long Feedback is integrated in a concert of music from the Sonic Arts Research Centre. The piece will begin at 8:30pm (PDT)

April 4, 2008 Stanford, California - CCRMA, Stanford University :: The performance of Netrooms: The Long Feedback is integrated in a concert of music from the Sonic Arts Research Centre. The piece will begin at 8:30pm (PDT)

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.

“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.

The appeal of distance is in the very loss that defines it. The tools that we use, even the very sophisticated ones, are unable to adequately convey the sense of distance. Our senses must be at their most alert to be able to conceive of the other or of elsewhere. Being absent wakes our senses up by reorganising perception: consciousness participates with the mental reconstitution of an emotion-filled puzzle. As touch is useless, it becomes virtual; unfathomable, it is exacerbated.

Fingertips become useless: we must touch with the heart, the soul, the body. Perception reorganises itself. Sight and touch are no longer supreme. The ears and voice become the vectors of exchange, of interactivity. Loss, reconstituting a void: no longer is there a vision or distorted vision.

In Orient Express, the picture taken every hour on the hour prompts us to reconstitute the intervals. Orient Express makes holes in space and time. The conception of time has been exacerbated by a focus on points.

In Thaon/New York, sound is transmitted by satellite and image by slow-scan. The sounds mix, especially during the transatlantic interactive music piece. With the collage of sounds, spatial references are lost. The image is blurred and sequential and is therefore only partial in time and space. These lace-like holes in sound and image become a shadow theatre with shades of images and shades of sounds. Here, removal and loss is what creates art from reality.

Why is this pleasurable and why is ubiquity so moving?

It is the beauty of distant presence: I share my consciousness. My body is here, but my consciousness is shared between this place and elsewhere, between me and others. Here again there is a loss, an exchange. It is the beauty of communication with another place, with another person: I participate in that elsewhere, I participate in the “else”.

In this intent, this virtual gesture, there is love: spiritual love because it is disembodied. There is eroticism because senses are sharpened and fantasy exacerbated.

It is the sublime pleasure of distance. Uncertain distance: in-between, ambiguity, ambivalence, shared value.

Creating emptiness, a space of possibilities, the utopia necessary to every birth, to all creation.

Earth art is a form of art that takes Earth in its planetary dimension, as material for artistic reflection and emotion.

Earth art is sublime because it mixes fear and a sense of wonder.

To imagine on a planetary scale is to resize one’s consciousness. Human consciousness can now extend to a planetary scale. Consciousness extension.

We are at once infinitely big and infinitely small, lost and found. In Le bleu du Ciel, the viewer looking at the average of the two skies, the one above him and the one a thousand kilometres away—mentally reconstitutes the colour of the far away sky from grey to blue. The spectator reconstitutes the atmospheric cloud cover and his consciousness spreads over the globe. Ozone, each sound makes us shift from one antipode to the other. Oscillating movement with a 20,000-kilometre amplitude. Sounds from the automobile pollution in the city of Lille, and sounds from the riddled atmosphere. Interactions between man, air and sun. Network and noosphere. Planetary interdependence.

We change our point of view : at the same time it develops in space, consciousness is extended. Cosmic consciousness. The ego is finally abandoned. The self vanishes. Our point of view is now a point of fractal being, at once distant and involved, particular and infinite.

Perspective no longer limits our vision. We are in another place inside us, another place in the other, up there. The you and the me meet between Earth and sky.

Here is thus a lesson on distance and on wisdom: it is a lesson for the spirit.”

Stéphan Barron

(1) SERRES Michel, Atlas, Ed. Julliard, Paris, 1994, p.24

[Image: Stéphan Barron, Le Jour et La Nuit, Two computers, one in Brazil, one in Australia, averaged the images of the skies of the two countries, 1995] Electronic art is matched with environmental sensibilities in French artist Stéphan Barron’s “technoromantic” work. Using video, computers and community agit-prop Barron has found ways to bring abstract notions of space, gardening and urban land use to neighbors and gallery goers alike. The challenge of much technology based work is often the distancing that occurs when presented by a computer screen. In works such as Night and Day Barron brings the averaged sky tones from remote cameras in Brazil and Australia together into one computer image, creating a work that emphasises the electronic and environmental systems which unite far away lands. “Ozone” manages a similar feat by converting ozone levels in French car exhaust and Australian UV levels coming through the ozone layer into music. The abstraction and mystery provide a window into the surprising connections which connect us together. More at the greenmuseum.org

CD Rom Earth Art - Art Planétaire

The CD-ROM’s summary is composed of clouds. A sound from the project is generated when the cursor is placed on one of the clouds. Clicking on a cloud opens an interactive animation that sums up each earth art project. This non-narrative, non-textual presentation emphasizes the auditory aspect of Stephan Barron’s work.

The CD-ROM includes theoretical texts by Roy Ascott, Théo Barbu, Paul Brown, Laurent Benoit, Augustin Berque, Anna Capella, Mario Costa, Jean-Paul Fargier, Jürgen Engel, Fred Forest, Edmond Couchot, Jacques Donguy, Derrick de Kerckhove, Antonin Kosik, Markus Müller, Louise Poissant, Pierre Restany, François Terrassoné … as well as 300 pages from Stéphan Barron’s doctoral dissertation on his work.

Toucher l’espace, poétique de l’Art Planétaire is published by L’Harmattan, November 2006 - The first part of the book describes artworks that use planet Earth in its geographic entirety as an art medium. It describes the emergence of this art form which developed over the last century and whose importance grew with that of telecommunication technologies. Globalisation and ecological issues are essential themes of this art form.

In the second part of the book, 25 artworks or projects are featured, recounting 23 years of the author’s own creative work. 42 colour photographs and 17 black and white pictures illustrate the text.

Earth Art takes the Earth as its raw material for emotional and introspective expression, using telecommunication technologies to highlight distance and geographical space. This art form explores the emotions and poetry of distance, and reflects on globalisation, and its human and ecological consequences; Stéphan Barron’s adventure awakens and alerts us to a broader conscience of our planet.” - Edgar Morin

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).

HOW TO SUBMIT: You are welcome to submit your proposal here. There you can also find the current list of submitted projects and ideas. Please note that your submission has to be posted by February 29, 2008.

ABOUT MULTIPLACE: Multiplace was formed as a result of collective efforts of various organisers and associations from the fields of art and technology in Slovakia and later in Czech Republic, Austria and Europe. Its first activity was Multiplace new media event in April 2002, and since then the festival is organised anually each spring focusing on networked art and culture. In 2004, a civic non-for-profit association Multiplace was founded, which operates on a basis of open organisation. Today, Multiplace plays a crucial role in communication, theory and promotion of media arts in central Europe.

ONLINE RESOURCES ON NETWORK ART

* Norie Neumark (2005) Relays, Delays, and Distance Art/Activism, (introduction to At a Distance - Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet)
* Overviews of network art projects, 1, 2
* Networked Performance Blog
* Networked Music Review
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-network_theory

For further information please write to admin at multiplace dot sk

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. The recent valorisation of collaboration within the arts, however, merely elides the basic condition of collaboration that all forms of production ultimately rely on in various degrees and arrangements. This can be seen as one part of the larger growth in service and communications industries whose ‘labour’ and ‘produce’ are primarily invested in the structuring and intensification of various collaborative exchanges, often minute and ephemeral, yet, when harvested on a vast scale, capable of generating seemingly endless amounts of surplus value.[1] Collaboration in the production of this ’surplus’ now extends beyond the contracted employees into the consumers themselves, who help define and create the products they themselves consume. This is exemplified in the proliferation of highly ‘personalised’ products and services, reality entertainment, and the social networks of Web 2.0, with the virtual world of Second Life notably combining all three factors.[2] Those artforms which most consciously valorise collaboration, as described in Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, merely echo this situation.[3] The social relations constructed by the artist in gestures of collaboration with audiences and others become spectacularised and commodified in forms that often do not return to those who created them but rather become tokens within the circulation of the art market.[4] In a funding system that prioritises social inclusion within the arts, like that of the UK, collaborative projects can tick the box that unlocks the piggy-bank of state patronage. In such contexts collaboration quickly becomes little more than a revenue stream.[5] Similarly, the rise of Relational Aesthetics accompanied the embrace of artistic practice by the commercial sector, often drawing upon the strategies of such art to enhance collaboration and ‘creativity’ within the workplace.[6]…” Continue reading All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses by Simon Yuill, Mute Magazine.

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. This website will give you all the info you will need, both to participate and to hear the webcast.

The Cathedral Band performance will feature DJ Tamara, AJ Sabatini as the Chronicler and William Duckworth on PitchWeb, along with local musicians Stuart Dempster and the Seattle Chamber Players. So phone in your sounds, and then tune in to hear the continually unfolding story of Cathedral as told by The Chronicler.

The performance and live webcast will take place from 8:00 - 10:00 pm PST (GMT +8) :: Saturday, January 26, 2008.

You can find more information about the Icebreaker IV Festival, including the Morton Feldman marathon and talks by Alex Ross and Kyle Gann, on the following sites: On the Boards; The Seattle Chamber Players.

Cathedral-related URLs:

iOrpheus:
site: http://www.iorpheus.com/
YouTube documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsIkLiRh1O0

The iPod Opera 2.0
video: http://cathedral.monroestreet.com/rss/ipo204.xml
audio only: http://cathedral.monroestreet.com/rss/ipo203.xml

Cathedral Radio
http://cathedral.monroestreet.com/wpan.m3u

Cathedral, the first interactive work of music and art on the web.
http://cathedral.monroestreet.com

Gridjam will utilize Jack Ox and David Britton’s Virtual Color Organ™, visualizing Alvin Curran’s music performed by musicians located in four distant locales but connected via next generation networking technologies. The Virtual Color Organ™ (VCO) is a 3D immersive environment in which music is visually realized in colored and image-textured shapes as it is heard. The visualization remains as a 3D graphical sculpture after the performance. The colors, images, shapes and even the motions and placement of the visualized musical shapes are governed by artist-defined metaphoric relationships, created by hand as aesthetic and symbolic qualities rather than algorithmically. The VCO visually illustrates the information contained in the music’s score, the composer’s instructions to the musicians, and the musicians contributions to the score as they improvise in reaction to each other’s performances and to the immersive visual experience. Illustrative of synesthesia and intermedia, the VCO displays the emergent properties within the meaning of music, both as information and as art.

Ox created the original drawings of deserts in California and Arizona from which the Desert Organ Stop was modeled, commissioned Richard Rodriguez to model the landscape, and created the hand drawn texture maps appearing in the virtual reality world. The VCO is capable of having multiple visual organ stops. An organ stop on a traditional organ is a voice that affects the entire keyboard of notes. An organ stop in the VCO is the 3D immersive environment in which the visualized music will exist and also the visual vocabulary applied to the musical objects.

The 21st C. Virtual Color Organ™: The VCO is a computational system for translating musical compositions into visual performance. This interactive instrument consists of three basic parts:

1. A set of systems or syntax that provides transformations from a musical vocabulary to a visual one.

2. A 3D visual environment that serves as a performance space and the visual vocabulary from which the 3D environment was modeled. This visual vocabulary consists of landscape and/or architectural images and provides the objects on which the syntax acts.

3. A software environment that serves as the engine of interaction for the first two parts.

The VCO is capable of having multiple visual organ stops. An organ stop on a traditional organ is a voice that affects the entire keyboard of notes. An organ stop in the VCO is the 3D immersive environment in which the visualized music will exist and also the visual vocabulary applied to the musical objects. GridJam will take place in the black and white, hand drawn desert sand and rock structures coming from real deserts in California and Arizona. The original drawings by Ox, from which the 3D modeling was made, serve as the basic texture maps for all of the musical object.

The Music: by Alvin Curran

Curran has come up with a plan for the musical part of this project which is inspired both by the pure fundamental “synesthetic” goals of Ox’s visual structures as by the technical and theatrical nature of the domed projection spaces, the local accoustics and “global” nature of the work itself.

The music itself will be composed using a fluid mix of structured indeterminacy, synchronized composition, spontaneous music structures, and live electronic processing. But the essence of the music - whose goal is - to become interchangeable with the images is to create another set of “images” real and sonic, which is the music-theater itself. The L-Rail communicatioins will enable the complete synchronization of the dislocated music groups and their ability to react as if in the same room together.

The choice of instruments, will become another prime visual element embedded in the rich texts of Jacks desert and VR sound-objects. The music shall be performed by the Del Sol string quartet, Anthony Braxton on the saxophone, and Curran on the disklavier (playing sounds which have been modeled in MAYA by Ox over the last four years. These sounds will be subjected to processing device filters (by Tom Erbe/Sound Hack), e.g. granulators. The 3D objects will go into perpetual movement patterns that metaphorically represent the filters’ processing patterns.

The music (gestures and typologies) itself will range from almost inaudible sparse noises to discreet isolated tones to pulsing synchronous rhythms to clouds and walls of sound. characterizing the music throughout will be the presence of recorded (natural) sounds from animals, people and machines and phenomena from around the world (which however embedded in the texture, are at the source of the visual materials generated)… Midi information from the processing devices will also serve as real-time transformers of some aspects of the visual objects.

GridJam: The Visualization

The original building blocks of GridJam come from a list of almost 200 collected sounds belonging to Curran. The sound files include John Cage reciting short phrases, Maria Calas singing a high note, animal sounds, objects like coins being tossed, and various musical sounds etc. Ox put them through a Max program creating graphs of melody and dynamics. She sorted them into 8 groups based on these simple visualizations and made 3D models reflecting melody from the front and dynamics on the top of the object. There are eight groups because there are eight landscape texture maps. Each object in a group has as the base of the texture map the same hand drawn landscape picture. The colors and materials are based on the timbre of each specific sound sample. These colors can be rather complicated gradients, often in layers. If the sound sample has a sequence of vowel sounds then the colors in the gradient will show these based on Ox’s color system, which defines how and where vowels are made in the vocal track. Other timbre colors come from the extensive list of timbre created by Ox.

The 3D objects made by Ox from Curran’s collected sound files will be able to appear in small bits of the whole, based on the duration of the played sound. If the Disklavier key remains depressed for longer than the actual sound file, the object will begin to appear for a second time, moving along the time line. The time line follows a path from the center of the virtual desert out, until it curves up and back towards the center. .Before reaching the center it will curve up again and move outward once more, repeating this pattern for as many times as necessary in order to accommodate the playing. Because of this path, time will move both horizontally and vertically.

At the end of the performance the visualization will remain and can be more thoroughly inspected as a place with moving objects in a black and white desert environment. We will also have recorded the entire multimedia experience so that it can be played back in digital environments, such as the ever more ubiquitous digital planetarium theaters.