TONEWHEELS is an experiment in converting graphical imagery to sound, inspired by some of the pioneering 20th Century electronic music inventions. Transparent tonewheels with repeating patterns are spun over light-sensitive electronic circuitry to produce sound. This all-analog set is performed entirely live without the use of computers, using only overhead projectors as light source, performance interface and audience display. In this way, TONEWHEELS aims to open up the “black box” of electronic music and video by exposing the working processes of the performance for the audience to see.

Up until now, TONEWHEELS has been realized as a live performance or a workshop (at WAVES, Dortmund, May 2008). However, for Access Space, Holzer has decided to create a playable installation based on these simple optoelectronic principles. Users of Access Space will be invited to produce patterns for the spinning tonewheels as well as graphical scores to be projected on the instrument in order to play it.

The inspiration for this installation comes from the ANS synthesizer. The ANS is a pioneering electronic music instrument conceived and built by Evgeny Murzin in the Soviet Union during the late 1950’s. It is also one of the first experiments in direct graphical composition. To compose with the ANS, the user scratches lines through the opaque black covering on a glass plate. Light shines through these lines as the plate passes through the machine, and activates photocells inside it. Lines at the bottom of the plate produce low tones, while lines at the top of the plate produce high tones.

The only existing ANS is installed in the Theremin Center in Moscow. Soviet composers such as Edward Artemyev used the ANS to record the soundtracks for Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” and “Solaris”, and more recently the English group Coil released a triple CD realized on the instrument. Outside Moscow, the legacy of the ANS lives on largely in the software world. Any kind of software which allows the user to “draw” or “paint” with sound, such as the UPIC softwares developed by Iannis Xenakis at IRCAM, IanniX, HighC or the MetaSynth software, owes a great deal to the ANS.

The completed TONEWHEELS instrument (housed in a beautiful old wooden Grandfather Clock cabinet) as well as the user-designed wheels and scores will be presented on Friday, 1 August 2008 at Access Space, 1 Sidney Street, Sheffield UK. Many thanks to Jake Harries, Access Space and Andrei Smirnov for their support and assistance with this project.

See also: http://transition.turbulence.org/networked_music_review/2008/01/21/live-stage-tonewheels-bologna/ and http://transition.turbulence.org/networked_music_review/2008/04/28/tonewheels-workshop-dortmund/

The program occupies the Fiesp Cultural Center’s Art Gallery, Theater and Mezzanine, which host the exhibition, performances and lectures. FILE, the major art and technology festival in Brazil and Latin America, as well as one of the most renowned events in the world in this area, for nine years has inserted the country in the global context of art and technology, or media art, performing a compilation of the artistic productions in the fields of electronic and digital arts, and working as an indicator of those productions’ plurality. Given the diversity of digital culture, FILE is an event that nests several festivals, which occur simultaneously. Moreover, FILE offers an international symposium, an archive with more than 2,000 works and a laboratory for the production and development of new works, FILE Labo. FILE is an annual event that in 2008 has happened, with other versions, in Porto Alegre, at Santander Cultural, and in Rio de Janeiro, at Oi Futuro. This ninth edition of FILE includes around 300 artists - among groups, collectives and individual works - from more than 30 nationalities, with works in different areas of the digital culture.

FILE Hipersonica: One of the main attractions of the Festival is the sixth edition of FILE Hipersonica, that happens in August 05 to 08 at SESI’s Popular Theater, with free admission. Hipersonica is an event that emphasizes musical, sonic, visual and performatic manifestations of electronic art. This edition will present nine Brazilian and international artists who work in the edge of music and image. The presentations will explore different techniques of sound capturing, producing, emitting and programming.

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.

At the Sydney Opera House a unique experience occurs throughout the course of a day and a night. An event with no beginning and no end, no division between stage and public, no specified path to take – it is a theatre liberated from rules. From the stalls to the circles to the stage, a forest of trees has grown and spread throughout the entire Concert Hall. The light of dawn barely shines on this valley obscured by clouds. This is an in-between reality, an image of an environment, a fact that appears for a brief moment just before vanishing.

Someone walking between the trees tells a story. As the voice draws the audience into the forest, the lyrics of the song tell how to find a way out; out of the Concert Hall and into the reality of a place elsewhere.

The Concert Hall presents a geographical displacement. This image is a diversion, an extension towards another world and yet it is the same. The song is a map for a journey towards what constitutes the image. It is a line following a chain of events in the life of an environment.

The cloud of narratives obscures the necessity to find an ecology between the image and its environment.

Huyghe has been creating a variety of artworks and collaborative projects since the early 1990s. Interested in the exhibition as a moment where potential new realities can emerge, in the freedom of non-productive actions, in the layering of interpretations, both factual and fictional, and in experience as a territory of infinite possible narratives, Huyghe’s practice has earned him a reputation as one of the most experimental artists of his generation. Evident in his works is a recurring desire to introduce a space of speculation and play into art, and the impulse to consider art as a landscape in which to make manifest the way people can, and do, react to the homogenising attempts embedded in consumer culture by encouraging the dynamic reconstruction of their everyday lives.

Made possible through the generous support of The Ellipse Foundation – Contemporary Art Collection, Portugal and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. Presented by the Biennale of Sydney (2008) in association with the Sydney Opera House.

A Forest of Lines has been produced with assistance from CULTURESFRANCE, the Embassy of France in Australia, Lumens Arte, Rent-A-Garden (Terrey Hills) and the Technical Direction Company of Aust (TDC). Poster M/M (Paris)

The 16th Biennale of Sydney continues until Sunday, 7 September 2008 in venues across Sydney and online.
Artistic Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

On June 19, 20 and 21, Edwin van der Heide presented his “LSP”, a performance where image and sound play equally important roles. Sound / video combinations often reduce the spatial perception of sound because of the two-dimensional nature of the image. The performance “LSP” used audio controlled lasers to create a three-dimensional environment that totally immerses the audience and allows for a constant change of perspective. Image and sound originate from the same real-time computer generated sine wave composition. “LSP” represents a system of direct equivalence of image and sound, where frequency ratios in sound, de-tuning and phase shifts have their direct visual counterparts.

In 1815 Nathaniel Bowditch described a way to produce visual patterns by using a sine wave for the horizontal movement of a point and another sine wave for the vertical movement of that point. The shape of the patterns depends on the frequency and phase relationship of the sine waves. The patterns are known as Lissajous figures, or Bowditch curves.

“LSP” interprets Bowditch’s work as a possible starting point to develop relationships between sound and image. Since sine waves can also be used to produce pure (audible) tones, it is possible to construct a direct relationship between sound and image. Frequency ratios in sound, de-tuning and phase shifts can have a direct visual counterpart.

Although theoretically all sounds can be seen as sums of multiple sine waves, music in general is often too complex to result in interesting visual patterns. The research of “LSP” focuses on the subject of composing signals that have both a structural musical quality and a time-based structural visual quality. Different relationships between sound and image are used throughout both the performance and the installation form.

Edwin van der Heide studied Sonology at the Royal Conservatory, where he graduated in 1992. He is working as autonomous artist in the field of sound, space and interaction. His current work is hard to define in the traditional terms of music, sound art or media art because he is often working on the edge and the characteristics of the used medium. Over the years the focus of his work has shifted to sound installations, interactive installations and environments. The performance aspect is still present in part of the work but the emphasis has shifted to the content of the environment and less focus on the performer.

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]

[Thanks to information aesthetics]

Located near the mountain’s summit, INNER NATURE (2008) completes a trilogy of forest installations close to sites of previous work, SENTINEL TO THE WIND (2006) and WHITE SOUND DOWN (2007). The new sound installation, an expressive sonic field shaped from principle frequencies extracted from a recording of wind rustling through the trees, is complemented by the programs from the previous installations to form a three-part work, a sixty-minute cycle of sound presented for the first time in its entirety.

Presented by Berghof Gibacht Gibacht (Waldmünchen), Germany

MIRROR OF THE MOON (2008) A Video and Sound Installation :: June 5 - 8, 2008 :: Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy :: 8th Annual Conference of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME)

Wave sounds of the Mediterranean Sea, filtered to the same frequencies as the resonance of the museum gallery space and then expressively shaped, create a multi-channel sonic environment for this installation. Video of the sea’s wave motion is projected downward onto a large disc of white marble, which echoes the marble floor of the 18th Century villa chamber. A confluence of wave motions of water, sound, light and gravity is manifest in the sea-tuned gallery.

Project support: the Berufsverbandes Bildender Kunstler Niederbayern/Oberpfalz e.V., Kulturverein Bayrischer Wald e.V., the Voithenberg Foundation, the City of Waldmünchen, the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation and Emerson College.

In the framework of “Waves -The Art of the Electromagnetic Society”, HMKV in the PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, May 10 - June 29, 2008, opening: Friday, May 9, 2008, 19:00, www.hmkv.de

Tonewheels is an experiment in converting graphical imagery to sound, inspired by some of the pioneering twentieth-century electronic music inventions. Transparent tonewheels with repeating patterns are spun over light-sensitive electronic circuitry to produce sound and light pulsations and textures, while projected graphical loops and textures add richness to the visual environment. This all-analogue set is performed entirely live without the use of computers, using only overhead projectors as light source, performance interface, and audience display. In this way, Tonewheels aims to open up the ‘black box’ of electronic music and video by exposing the working processes of the performance for the audience to see.

The Tonewheels workshop will provide an introduction to simple techniques of optical synthesis using overhead projectors, transparencies, motors, lasers, LEDs, simple integrated circuit chips, photoresistors, phototransistors, and photodiodes. It will require no previous knowledge of electronics to take part. Participants will make simple circuits to turn light directly into sound and drive motors which can spin or move transparencies over these circuits. They will also have an opportunity to design sound-producing transparencies, either on the computer using Inkscape or similar drawing software, or by hand using ink pens.

http://umatic.nl/tonewheels.html

Enquiries about the workshop, registration until May 22, 2008: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, info@hmkv.de or Tel +49 - 231 - 823 106

Schedule:
Thu 11:00-19:00 Workshop
Fri 11:00-18:00 Workshop (from 18:00 video
program “Abstracts of Syn” by Medienturm Graz)
Sat 11:00-19:00 Workshop
Sat 20:00 final presentation and performance by Derek Holzer
Sun 11:00 brunch

Regulations:
- the participants will pay the costs for travel, food and accomodation
- free admission
- HMKV recommends the City Hotel Dortmund
(http://www.cityhotel-dortmund.de) or Ruhgebiet
(http://www.ruhgebiet.de)

For any further information, please contact:
Hartware MedienKunstVerein
Guentherstrasse 65
D-44143 Dortmund
T ++49 (0) 231 - 823 106
F ++49 (0) 231 - 882 02 40
info@hmkv.de
www.hmkv.de

Workshop and exhibition venue:
PHOENIX Halle Dortmund
Hochofenstr. / Ecke Rombergstr.
Dortmund-Hoerde

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.