An evening of innovative approaches to sound and image, featuring three duos that each take distinctive approaches with roots in past practices. DRAW creates immersive live sets of video and sound collage, LoVid links sound and image synthesis, and Cinemage draws on Chris Marker’s La Jetée as inspiration. With a live set by Amsterdam based turntablist dj sniff and Keir Neuringer.

DRAW is the live video and sound project of Nisi Jacobs and Michael Schumacher. They create compositions that form the basis for improvisations involving multi-screen video, algorithmically generated sound and live musicians. They make work that retains the spontaneity of improvisation while exploring in depth the relation between sound and image. Their practice involves a number of strategies to achieve this end, such as coupling specific sound and image sequences, using multi-channel setups for both video and sound, role-switching, and exploring notational techniques.

LoVid is an interdisciplinary artist duo composed of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Our work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. We combine many opposing elements in our work, contrasting hard electronics with soft patchworks, analog and digital, or handmade and machine produced objects. This multidirectional approach is also reflected in the content of our work: romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. We are interested in the ways in which the human body and mind observe, process, and respond to both natural and technological environments, and in the preservation of data, signals, and memory.

dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit) believes in the instrumental autonomy of the turntable and the musicianship of the DJ. He is a turntable musician working in the field of improvised and experimental music. His music focuses on the live reconstruction and narratization of the phonographically amplified - the music, the sound, the technology and the past. To achieve this, he uses a unique setup consisting of hand-made hardware interfaces and a custom Max/MSP software along with one turntable and DJ mixer. He is also a concert/event curator for electronic music and a researcher of music technology.

Keir Neuringer was born in New York in 1976 and has lived in Europe since 1999. He is active as an improvising saxophonist and a composer of electronic and acoustic music. He also writes texts and makes videos and installations critical of the destructive behavior exhibited and accepted by the dominant culture. He studied in the US, UK, Poland and The Netherlands.

Cinemage is Aki Onda’s audio-visual project, which performances are composed of slide projections of still photographs and guitar improvisation. Cinemage means “images for cinema,” or “homage for cinema.” The visual images in Cinemage are snapshots taken from Onda’s daily life. By documenting fragments of his personal life, something is revealed in their accumulation–the particulars within lose significance. What emerges is the architecture, and the essence, of memory. The sensibility of Cinemage is essentially filmic. The photos are more like moving images than stills and the style is similar to Chris Marker’s La Jetee. Projected on a screen, the images have the eerie familiarity of an out-of-focus memory and evoke a feeling of déjà vu. On this occasion, Alan Licht plays guitar along with Onda’s visual images.

Fred Worden, filmmaker, has been involved in experimental cinema since the 1970s. His work has been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, The Centre Pompidou, in Paris, The Pacific Film Archive, The New York Film Festival, The London Film Festival, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Toronto Film Festival, and The Hong Kong International Film Festival. He was an editor for Criss-Cross Art Communications form the 70’s through the 80’s and his writings have appeared in Cinematograph. His work is included in in the Stan Brakhage Collection and the collection of the Centre Pompidou and others. Worden’s interest in intermittent projection: how a stream of still pictures passing through a projector resonates with a viewer on a level beyond representation. Fred teaches film and video production classes as well as film history and theory courses at the University of Maryland.

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia is a non-profit performance and exhibition space that invites the public, artists and composers to engage with contemporary music and sound practices. Established in 2001 by composer Michael J. Schumacher and choreographer Liz Gerring, Diapason continues to be the sole venue in New York City (and one of few internationally) that is dedicated to both presenting multichannel sound installations and providing space for composers and sound artists to experiment, exhibit and perform.

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…

Adam Nash will lead a tour of his work on Thursday, May 22, 2008 between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. US EDT. If you would like to take part in the tour, please contact adam at yamanakanash dot net.

Trace Aureity is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

Adam Nash is a new media artist, composer, programmer, performer and writer. He works primarily in networked real-time 3D spaces, exploring them as live audiovisual performance spaces. His sound/composition and performance background strongly informs his approach to creating works for virtual environments, embracing sound, time and the user as elements equal in importance to vision. Adam’s work has been presented in galleries, festivals and online in Australia, Europe, Asia and the Americas, including SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and the Venice Biennale. He also works as composer and sound artist with “Company in Space” (AU) and “Igloo” (UK), exploring the integration of motion capture into real-time 3D audiovisual spaces. He is currently undertaking a Master of Arts by Research at the “Centre for Animation and Interactive Media” at RMIT University, Melbourne, researching multi-user 3D cyberspace as a live performance medium; and he’s a Lecturer in “Computer Games and Digital Art” in the School of Creative Media at RMIT University. Read an interview here.

The program (Pure Data) runs on a mini PC which is plugged into the aux jack of the car HiFi. Information about the drive is captured by a Wiimote controller, fixed with a suction cup inside the windshield, which continuously sends data concerning the XYZ movements of the car. The Infra Red sensor has been adapted (the filter taken out), so that it detects position and size of any luminous objects (headlamps or tail lights of other cars, areas of sunlight or shade etc).

The vibrations from the Wii are continuously written into lookup tables (one for each axis), then read as audio (wavetable oscillators). This means that while pitch (the tune) is defined algorithmically within the program, the timbre of the sounds varies according to vibrations of the motor and other movements of the car. These movements are analyzed and categorized to distinguish bends, accelerations, decelerations, bumps in the road and standstill. These events are used to trigger variations on sequences which are automatically generated whenever the car stops.

AutoSync will soon be available for sale. The version of the program demonstrated in the video (scroll down) is progressing on a daily basis to provide more and more varied sounds and compositions. In the future, other composers and artists will be invited to work on different setups for the program so that eventually the user will be able to choose between musics generated from programs by these collaborators.

Peter Sinclair is a member of the research group Locus Sonus audio in art and professor at L’Ecole Superieur d’Art d’Aix-en Provence. The idea for the project AutoSync originated in a conversation with Lydwine Van der Hulst (at that time member of Locus Sonus).

With thanks to G. H. Hovagimyan.

“In 2007 I began to learn to ride a bicycle. This for me was a choice not so much determined by reasons of pleasure but as a way of manifesting my need to literally move on with my life. Around the same time, I began to read Beckett’s famous Three Novels, and was moved in particular by “Molloy.” Bicycles are a very important metaphor in this book.” Haeyoung Kim

“To escape their lack of freedom, Beckett’s characters travel, taking with them a few private possessions, which reflect their personality. Of these emblematic items, by far the most important is the bicycle: it is a moving man-powered machine made for traveling (which can be both easy and difficult, according to the conditions prevailing); and it is also a prized possession through which an owner may express his personality. In this respect the bicycle is like the plot.” Janet Menzies

I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

A sound artist, composer, and audio engineer, Haeyoung Kim explores the territory of sounds in electronic music. Currently, under the name Bubblyfish, she has been creating 8-bit and experimental sound works. Haeyoung has collaborated with many respected sound and visual artists such as Malcolm McLaren, the founder of Sex Pistols, Hans Jochim Rodelius, and the Brussels based media art group, Lab[au]. Her work has been presented in art venues, clubs, festivals, and galleries internationally including The American Museum of the Moving Image, Pompidou Center, Kunsthalle Wien, MUTEK, LABoral, Lincoln Center Walter Reed Theater, and The New Museum.

The result of this fusion - Islands of Consciousness - is not a simple combination of the two concepts but a great advancement. Sound and Images enter a very close relationship in which the randomly arranged musical phrases are taking direct influence on the visual outcome. So when you look at this piece keep in mind that all the visuals are assembled in realtime using photos downloaded from Flickr.com. All the transitions and effects are entirely random and only happening on you screen. Other people will see a movie and hear a soundtrack that is totally different from yours.

The infinite soundtrack is built upon Oleg Marakov’s idea to run multiple mp3 players parallel in shuffle mode just like musicians playing different instruments. In this case the instruments are not only pianos or synths but also natural atmospheres and sound effects. Islands of Consciousness consists of four parallel layers: Layer one plays synth background pads, layer two is the piano track, layer three holds ambient atmospheres and layer four contains all kinds of different sounds and effects. Just like in a regular composition the sounds vary in length and in fidelity and a very important part is also the space in between the notes - the pauses of different duration. [posted by Luca on Ecopolis]

Born from the fusion of works by two experimental electronic musicians — Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi — U.S.O.’s sound spans highly abstract digital music, to electroacoustic music. U.S.O. develops through the exploration of elementary particles arranged and organized in clouds of discrete and punctiform events, until they compose structures of extensive polymorphic and spatial complexity.

The Aural Streaming of the Performance defines a bi-directional vector where space and time become elastic variables subjected to generative and structural contingencies of every single “Event”, where every phenomenon re-arranges itself through a form of algorithmic interdependence “ab originem”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrzJNHfLtyY
U.S.O. Project @ Giardino Sonoro, Florence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm-ZiF5CSzg
U.S.O. Project - Prelude Of Noises

By exploring U.S.O., listeners will have the chance to submerge themselves in a real-time generative course, where the contingency of the experience will dynamically vary from infinitesimal to immense. Travelling through the reference Vector, they will observe both simple and complex phenomena, which consequently define wider portions of known and unknown perceptible universe. U.S.O. is undergoing a continuous evolution. More here [PDF]

The Frotzophone hijacks a Z-Machine interpreter (a virtual machine originally designed in the 1980s for running interactive fiction on many platforms, and still used today) and extracts information relating to the map that the game is simulating. This information, along with a record of the player’s movement through the map, is used to generate music. The music follows the underlying structure of the game, revealed gradually as the player progresses through it; the branching, recursive, rhizomatic structure of the game is recapitulated in the generated sound.

Among the goals of the Frotzophone is to explore the dual meanings of the words “play” and “map.” Is “playing” an instrument the same as “playing” a game? What happens when the act of playing the game is the same act as playing the instrument? Is the “mapping” of interface to action the same as the “mapping” of a virtual space? What happens when the map of the space itself serves as the basis of the interface mapping?

Stanza is a UK based artist who specialises in net art, multimedia, and electronic music. His award winning online projects have been invited for exhibition in digital festivals around the world, and Stanza also travels extensively to present his net art, giving performances of his audiovisual interactions, and making exhibitions. Stanza is interested in the engagement of the public/audience as a creative user across a variety of formats, from the web to cd rom and gallery installation.