A performance including live chamber ensemble, electroacoustic soundscape and projected video, Psychodrama is a multiple re-scoring of the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Psycho.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYcp1_onRdo

Psychodrama: 13 Variations is funded in part by the Composer Assistance Program of the American Music Center and is made possible in part with public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

The group show Voice & Void is dedicated to the representation of the human voice – and its absence – in the visual arts. The voice and its fading away, speech and the loss of speech, both the presence and the immateriality of the voice, the relation between the voice and corporeality as well as sound and image are only a few of the many aspects addressed in this exhibition.

The exhibition studies the effects of a sensual perception being replaced by another one and the conditions under which the voice allows itself to be imparted by other means – be it written notation, technical recordings or visual representation. While the voice has very specific qualities in its immediate expression, “translated into another medium, the voice becomes apparent as a medium.” (Thomas Trummer) The works allude to the relation of image and sound so that they reciprocally define the specific characteristics of imagery and sound, either underscoring or even subverting each other.

The exhibition comprises thirteen very different approaches to “voice and void”. Historical points of reference include Joseph Beuys” legendary performance “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare”(1965) which is featured in Ute Klophaus” photographs; John Cage”s text sheets titled “Lecture on Nothing (Silence)” (1959) where acoustics of a silence imbued with “presence” is implemented both verbally and visually by means of text notations; and VALIE EXPORT”s “Tonfilm” (Sound film) from 1969, showing the draft for a performance in which the voice is manipulated by means of technological interventions in the glottis and the ear.

These early works are followed by a row of contemporary studies on the phenomenon of the voice – also touching upon its absence. One work, by American artist Rachel Berwick, is an installation with two live parrots. In his journey through South America in 1799 explorer Alexander von Humboldt discovered a parrot that was the only surviving living creature which could speak the language of the indigenous tribe of the Mayporé. Humboldt documented 40 words of this lost language that is now being reanimated in Berwick’s work.

In his site-specific installation Hans Schabus refers to the particular acoustic and visual situation of hidden spaces. He makes these spaces accessible to the visitor by transferring them into the exhibition space.

Asta Grőting”s work revolves around the process of ventroloquism where the performer is no longer just the speaker but also the recipient and interlocutor of his own “second voice”.

The exhibition is rounded off by a number of other works by artists such as Janet Cardiff/ Georges Bures Miller, Anna Gaskell, Christian Marclay, Melik Ohanian, Nedko Solakov and Julianne Swartz. They all approach the voice as the vehicle of language, communication and bodily expression.

The curator of the exhibition is Thomas Trummer who developed the project as part of an international fellowship awarded by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT (USA) where the exhibition was shown first.

On June 13 2008, Open Ear will host a free one night only event of experimental work in the ATRiuM Theatre at the University of Glamorgan’s newly built ATRiuM, Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries, Cardiff, Wales. Curated by Garrett Lynch the event will present a series of interdisciplinary performances and projections by various artists. Sound and visual artists / groups working across the areas of art, music, media and new technologies within live performance / projected contexts are invited to contribute to this event under an open theme.

What does this mean?

There is no imposed theme instead we want to present a selection of time-based work by artists based on their themes, their continuing research, as an event which will explore the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of audio-visual arts. Proposed performances / projected works can be new or pre-existing works, improvised, dynamically generated (such as software art) or pre-composed, abstract or figurative, individual or collaborative, experimental, site specific and much, much more. All proposals are required to be:

1. time-based (remember this is a audience based event in a theatre)
2. and either audio-visual, audio only or visual only work (selection preference will be given to works which are audio-visual)

Works should aim to be a maximum of 30 minutes each however this is flexible.

As the event is free we are unable to offer individual payment to artists however we will provide access to reasonable requests for equipment (please include a list of requirements in your proposal and we will attempt to cater for this) at the venue and of course the opportunity to present work in one of Cardiff’s newest cutting edge venues.

Proposals should take the form of a word / pdf / rtf / txt document (two pages maximum) with:

1. A description of the work (500 words maximum).
2. Images to give us an idea of the proposed work.
3. A full list of required equipment (please note that the event will host several performers so complex configurations involving lengthy set-up times will not be catered for).
4. Urls to previous examples of work online (videos or sound files online are particularly useful).
5. A short bio (200 words maximum).
6. Artist(s) / group / performer(s) name and full contact details.

Please email proposals as compressed attachments (.zip / .dmg / .sit / .sitx / tar.gz / .tgz) to Garrett Lynch (garrett [at] asquare dot org) no later than 12pm (GMT), Friday 16/05/08.

To get an idea of the type of events we organise please see our website (http://openear.wordpress.com/) for full details of all past events and our YouTube account for videos of pasts events.

:: The Venue ::

The University of Glamorgan’s newly built ATRiuM in Cardiff, Wales opened in 2007 and houses the Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries which comprises of Art & Design, Media & Communication and Drama & Music. Situated in central Cardiff, Wales, this specially-designed building contains cutting edge technology and facilities including industry-standard studios, a theatre and cinema.

Address: ATRiuM Theatre, Adam Street, Cardiff, Wales, CF24 2FN. Detailed information on how to get here can be found on the university website.

Open Ear, audio-visual events and performances are supported by The University of Glamorgan, ATRiuM, Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries, Cardiff, Wales.

Beginning at 2:00 pm there will be in-store hearing tests administered on an audiometer :: 2:15 – 2:16 (EDT) International Minute of Silence :: 8:00 pm Concert – Brendan Murray, Asher, Jed Speare.

The concert will feature an investigation into the earliest known recording, from 1860, predating Edison’s by 28 years. A recent article in the NY Times on Edourard-Leon Scott de Martinville’s phonautogram included the sound file of this recently played-back recording. (To read the article and listen to the sound file, go here.) Brendan Murray, Asher, and Jed Speare will exclusively source this recording as the form-building basis for their concert, signaling a clear intent to transform. While juxtaposed within the confines of Twisted Village’s aeons and multitudes of recorded sound, this pause for reflection, of 148 years, beckons new sonic awareness, here for 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.

Soundwok Artiject - Call for Participants: Take part immediately in a cutting-edge “artiject” in which the aesthetic consciousness of upstream sonifiers is mapped utilizing GIS technology. If you are a Southern California based or linked sound artist, experimental musician and / or composer, you are invited to participate in the first part of a unique sound art and music research artiject and study, conducted by Dr. Chung Shih Hoh and Marco Schindelmann that will involve the mapping of the dynamic social networks and aesthetic consciousness of Southern California artists involved in sound art and/or experimental music. The results of this study will also serve as material for a sound installation for SoundWalk2008. Your participation in this project is not contingent on your submitting to or taking part in SoundWalk2008.

TABLACENTRIC is thrilled to present Ajay Kapur, whose work revolves around one queston: “How do you make a computer improvise with a human?” Using the rules set forth by the north Indian classical tradition, Ajay strives to build new interfaces for musical expression by modifying the tabla, dholak and sitar with added microchips and sensor systems, while building robotic musical instruments which can be programmed to perform along with the human performer.

Ajay Kapur is the Music Technology Coordinator at California Institute of the Arts. He received an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2007 from University of Victoria combining Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Music and Psychology with a focus on Intelligence Music and Media Technology. Ajay graduated with a Bachelor in Science and Engineering Computer Science degree from Princeton University in 2002. He has been educated by music technology leaders including Dr. Perry R. Cook, Dr. George Tzanetakis, and Dr. Andrew Schloss, combined with mentorship from robotic musical instrument sculptors Eric Singer and the world famous Trimpin. A musician at heart, trained on Drumset,Tabla, Sitar and other percussion instruments from around the world, Ajay strives to push the technological barrier in order to make new music.

lgOpre (luh - GOP - ruh) is an audiovisual installation of multichannel sound and projected digital animation created with real-time software that links vintage grid pattern algorithms with vinyl record lock-groove samples. The software behind lgOpre, written by the artist, uses customized abstract image generation routines (c.1970), appropriated color schemes, and self-similar number patterns to create an animation that is also a visual controller for a modular digital sound studio. Each of the 34 grid pattern building blocks used for lgOpre is mapped to its own set of processed and unmodified lock-groove samples. The color of the underlying grid is used to select which sound will play as the basic grids from each animation frame are visually highlighted in turn for a determinate duration before advancing to the next frame. Aleatoric color scheme variants introduce a degree of chance to the sound-image mapping.

Compositionally, lgOpre first introduces each visual building block as a full-screen matrix using black and white, grayscale or a few saturated colors to create monochromes or relatively simple patterns accompanied by solo sound samples. The screen splits in half horizontally, then vertically, producing four quadrants with increasing pattern complexity. New color schemes and faster sequencing within a single animation frame trigger the look of blocky color video games or visualized computer core dumps and densely layered multichannel sound.

Locked grooves and the title of Galbraith’s 2002 video Open Research which juxtaposed animated black and white ‘big bit’ grids with human-sized inflatable sculpture from the late-1960s helped give lgOpre its name: locked groove Open research.

David Galbraith is a composer, performer and media artist who lives and works in New York. Galbraith explores the couplings between art, music, technology and the body through his sound installations, video works, custom software and performances using self-built analog electronics. In 2005 Galbraith’s Composition 2005 No. 1: Two Straight Lines Displaced, Nudged and Gently Spun was shown at Diapason and will be included in a forthcoming DVD archive of works exhibited at Diapason.

In 2006 Galbraith received a Finishing Funds grant from the Experimental Television Center/NYSCA for lgOpre, his custom software for sound and image. Galbraith enhanced lgOpre in 2007 to support analog synthesizers at STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam. His compositions and performances have been presented at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Tonic, The Stone, Art in General, and free103point9, among other New York venues. Selected solo and group international performances include Erase & Reset: International Night Of Experimental & Electronic Music at Staatsbank Berlin; Garage Festival, Stralsund, Germany; and Musica Pro Nova, Bremen, Germany. Galbraith also performs with the analog synthesis collective Analogos at Diapason.

Galbraith’s visual work has been included in museum exhibitions at P.S.1/MoMA (New York), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), and KW Institute of Contemporary Art (Berlin). Galbraith holds an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts (1996) and a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1988). Galbraith also participated in the studio program of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1996-97.

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia was founded by composer Michael J. Schumacher in 2001 and its program builds on the efforts of Schumacher’s previous sound space, Studio Five Beekman, founded in 1996. Diapason is the sole venue in New York City and one of few internationally dedicated to the presentation of multichannel sound installation where composers and sound artists can realize their work for an interested public. By providing an optimum listening environment, two high quality multi-channel sound systems, a regular audience, and a place for experimentation, Diapason seeks to engage composers and the public in dialogue about the place of contemporary music and sound practice in a broader cultural context. Diapason is supported by NYSCA, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Phaedrus Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, Kirk Radke, and by generous individuals. Diapason is a 501(c)3 organization.

Soundtoys Remixed, the title of the performance that Mackern will offer to the MADRE audience, will deal with Net surfing and (real-time) remix of 40 of his soundtoys developed between 1997 and 2007. Mackernian visions will flow through the (real-time) projection on three different screens, while the surrounding sounds will hold the audience in a synesthetic embrace that will shake new reflections about the increasingly more hybrid nature of the reality we face everyday.

SOUNDTOYS / AUDIOVISUAL INTERFACES

“… Just listen to your eyes.”
Wim Wenders, Once

Brian Mackern was born in 1962 in Montevideo (Uruguay) and after technical college he started to explore the potentials, mainly sound-related, of the Web. In 1997 he became the director of Artefactos Virtuales #1, one of the first latin-american web spaces about the research and the development of Net Art projects, while in recent years he appeared among the creators of Netart_latino #2, a database whose aim was of both documenting the work of south-american netartists, and building a link between their various experiences, that risked to remain isolated in a continent that tends to keep its artists attempts “unincorporated” #3.

The sense of belonging to a specific culture and the bond with the roots are a key element to the work of Mackern. Central from this point of view is the reinterpretation of the so-called “Tormenta de Santa Rosa”. The worship of Santa Rosa from Lima in the Rio de la Plata area is celebrated in the last days of August, when the place is hit by frequent floods and big rains. These natural phenomena are associated, in the popular belief, to the presence of the Saint, and Mackern provides a personal reading of the cult in his project 34s56w.org #4.

Mackern works have been presented in biennals, festivals and exhibitions at the four corners of the world (Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Poland, Korea, etc.) and he was also prized with many awards in the above mentioned countries in over 10 years of artistic activity.

Brian Mackern is definitely an artist of the Net generation and his research is to be collocated within the tradition linked to some creative experimentations about the relationship between audio and visual objects (think about the vanguards of 1900), but it is now, in the Web, that it finds its best ground to get - finally ? depth and visibility. Thanks to the opportunities introduced by new digital tools, the dialectic tension between sounds and images has become object of endless reflections and investigations, all connected to the process of spreading of new cultural paradigms. Among them — above all — self-consciousness and self-sufficient life of the digital objects.

Within this frame, soundtoys is the personal answer of Mackern the artist to his need to find new ways of mediation between sounds and images. Every soundtoy, pure minimal meaning unit, can be remixed to others, paving the way to a complexity that, by perpetually multiplying the combination chances, becomes almost impossible to be seen as finite and leaves to the observer the task to complete the meaning of one among many possible trajectories.

#1 Artefactos virtuales experience developed from 1997 to 2002 ? http://www.internet.com.uy/vibri
#2 http://netart.org.uy/latino
#3 This is the way Alessadro Ludovico talks about Brian Mackern in an article for the austian magazine Spingerin [Noise at Margin - http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1667&lang=en]
#4 http://34s56w.org

text by Vito Campanelli - translation by Francesco Bordo

Media partner:
Neural - www.neural.it

In collaboration with:
Supportico Lopez - www.supporticolopez.com
Interferenze Festival - www.interferenze.org

Live coders program in conversation with their machine, dynamically adding instructions and functions to running programs. Here there is no distinction between creating and running a piece of software - its execution is controlled through edits to its source code. Live coding has recently become popular in performance, where software is written before an audience in order to generate music and video for them to enjoy. McLean and Griffiths have played around Europe together with Adrian Ward as the live coding band “slub“. They will talk about the history and practice of live coding, and give some demos of their own live coding environments.

ALEX MCLEAN has been triggering distorted kick drum samples with Perl scripts for far too long. He is a PhD student at Goldsmiths Digital Studios.

DAVE GRIFFITHS writes programs to make noises, pictures and animations. He makes film effects software and computer games.

Dave & Alex are both members of the Openlab free software artists collective and the TOPLAP organisation for live algorithm promotion.