Visà-vis: What is the cause, and the cost, of insight? What does it mean to see the world face to face? These were questions raised by the young Rilke in a well-known passage from his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a Parisian diary he kept in 1904 while serving as personal secretary to Rodin. They are also questions lying at the heart of Vis-à-vis, a multimedia work for voice, live electronics and real-time video, which takes Rilke’s words as a dramatic point of departure.

For more info see http://huseac.fas.harvard.edu/ and http://www.soundidea.org/rovan/projects.htm

Directions:
Holyoke Street runs between Mass Ave. and Mt. Auburn street, next door to the Holyoke center. It´s two minutes from the Harvard Square T-stop (Red Line).

From November 2005 - April 2006, the work was installed at a bus transit stop in Tempe, AZ located on the NW corner of the intersection of two major streets, Priest and Broadway.

MOTIVATING IDEAS: In conceiving this public work we have built upon the idea of the transit network as a metaphorical and practical sonic force. Topographically, the visual arrangement of speaker placement simulates a transit map that moves from a dense urban arrangement on the left, toward a widely spaced arrangement on the right. As sound moves across the wall, we have modeled the notion that transit paths will evolve and perhaps grow more sluggish with use. Thus, sound travels differently through each node of the network over time. This use of the network as a musical and visual presence, is intended to more broadly reference to role of networks in our lives. Transit networks physically link our communities, but networks of social, intellectual, and cultural connection span our world as well.

As this work is situated in the desert southwest, we also considered environmental issues in its conception. The propagation of sound across the surface of the wall simulates the way that the surface of water will ripple and expand when disturbed. In addition, all the electronics in this work are powered by a solar panel mounted above the work. The use of reusable energy is an important aspect of the work.

REALIZATION: At the heart of the piece is a 6′H x 10′W interactive wall that houses a network of sensors and sound producing elements. This wall is comprised of twenty-six modules that have the same basic design and function. There are two types of modules that, like in a real world transit network, serve as hubs or straight paths. Each module contains two proximity sensors, one light sensor, ten piezo speakers, and one microcontroller computer with supporting circuitry. Adjacent modules are connected to one another such that they form a fully connected network across the entire wall that allows sounds to wash across its surface.

This internal wall of sensor/speakers is enclosed on the back by a solid panel that keeps the elements out of sight and reach of the public. The wall is enclosed on the front side by a porous sheet of metal that provides protection and security, while allowing sound to easily emanate from the speakers, and providing visibility to the sensors and resonators embedded on the inner panels. The total depth of the structure is approximately 8 inches.

A large solar panel is mounted above the wall to generate electricity for the installation and provide protection from the elements. A battery is safely housed within the structure and is recharged by the solar panel to provide power to the electronics during the day and night. The structure is rooted in the ground behind the transit stop, facing, and in close proximity to the bench where transit users converge while waiting.

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.

With live demos of Clara 2.0 (a theremin-playing robot doll) and other curiosities, Sarah explores her own approach to digital arts. Her work may use computers and embedded microprocessors - but Sarah aims to create interactive objects with a tactile and convincing quality that extend beyond the computer screen and mouse. Sewer pipes, car park technology and roboticised toys are just some of the items she’s appropriated over the last few years to create novel experiences. Sarah shows some of the thinking that goes into her work and reveals how she shamelessly mines ideas from cognitive science, stage magic, ancient music and other areas to come up with new ideas. She’ll briefly discuss her latest work, inspired by an Edwardian funfair illusion, that’s currently interesting researchers of human perception.

Trained in electroacoustics, music and a little evolutionary robotics, Sarah Angliss specialises in creating original sound installations, exhibits and live performances that mix cutting-edge science with vintage sound technology and little known stories from the history of science. An experienced creator of one-off installations and exhibits, Sarah is also a regular performer, particularly known for her skills on the theremin and musical saw.

Regularly featured in the national press, Sarah’s solo and collaborative work exploring infrasonic music, Category 4 diseases, cyborgs, extreme reverb, the uncanny valley, genetic privacy, evolutionary music, dogs in space, hurdy gurdies, Swinging London and a host of other topics has been seen and heard at venues throughout the UK. These include the Brighton Festival, Cheltenham Music and Science Festivals, Final Cut, the Eden Project, Edinburgh International Science Festival, Glasgow Science Centre, London Zoo, South Bank Centre, Science Museum, Soho Theatre, Southwold Pier and Winchester Festival of Art and Mind.

On Radio 4, Roger Highfield described Sarah’s electroacoustic cabaret act at Cheltenham as ‘the most surreal and memorable moment of the festival’. Two of her recent, interactive sound shows, Senster and The Haunt, were shortlisted as ’standout shows’ of Brighton Festival 2006.

Links:

Spacedog UK (owned and run by Sarah Angliss)
NESTA interview

The IOCT Salon is managed by Chris Joseph, Digital Writer in Residence at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University. This residency is funded by Arts Council England: East Midlands.

Creative innovation has always relied, to some extent, on the logic of call-and-response, a phrase that Breitz borrows from musicologists, who use it to describe the interactive quality that is key to musical experience in various oral cultures. Mudam warmly invites you to share your ideas with a group of artists and thinkers as they explore the logic of call-and-response and reflect on strategies of artistic appropriation and creative recycling during a three-day line-up of performances, panels and discussions.

With invited guests Cory Arcangel, Martin Arnold, Pierre Bismuth, Claude Closky, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Iain Forsyth + Jane Pollard, Surasi Kusolwong, Matthieu Laurette, Lawrence Lessig, Gabriel Lester, Bjørn Melhus, Momus, Jonathan Monk, Kaz Oshiro, Guillaume Paris, Paul Pfeiffer and James Webb.

Friday, 25 April 2008 Evening
OPENING EVENTS
Forsyth + Pollard

London-based artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard met and began working collaboratively in 1993. An interdisciplinary approach to art, music, mediation and ‘liveness’ has led to their continued engagement with the soundtrack underpinning contemporary life. Their universal yet highly personal strategies play out ideas of memory, performance and the mediated image in a challenging but highly accessible body of work.

Saturday, 26 April 2008 10am-6pm
Mondo Youtube

This day-long session brings together several artists who have explored the participatory potential of mainstream media such as advertising, the Internet, reality television, video games, MySpace and YouTube. Given the increasingly profit-driven nature of most of these formats, is it possible for a challenging culture of call-and-response to exist within these nascent public spheres, or inevitable that all criticism and innovative thought introduced into these new formats will immediately be instrumentalized towards commercial ends? Invited artists will supplement discussions of their own work with examples of mainstream media that have interested them, influenced them, or into which they have actively intervened. With:

Cory Arcangel, New York
Matthieu Laurette, Paris
Bjørn Melhus, Berlin
Guillaume Paris, Paris
Gabriel Lester, Amsterdam/Brussels

Sunday, 27 April 2008 10am-6pm
After Images

This day-long session brings together several artists who have engaged in explicit call-and-response relationships with other artists or works of art, addressing the crucial exchange and dialogue that motivates artistic practice. Each artist will talk about their own work in relation to those artists or works of art that they respond to or dialogue with in their work. With:

Surasi Kusolwong, Bangkok
Jonathan Monk, Berlin
Claude Closky, Paris
Kaz Oshiro, Los Angeles
James Webb, Cape Town
Keynote Speaker: Lawrence Lessig, San Francisco

Monday, 28 April 2008 9am-8pm
Art Goes To The Movies

Martin Arnold has written that, “The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.” This premise can be seen to inform the work of many contemporary artists who work in video today. This day-long session brings together several artists who have responded to and cannibalized mainstream cinema in their work, addressing the complex call-and-response relationship that exists between commercial cinema and contemporary art. Each artist will have the opportunity to talk about their use of found footage and their relationship to the cinematic images that they recycle in their work. With:

Paul Pfeiffer, New York
Pierre Bismuth, Brussels
Martin Arnold, Vienna
Candice Breitz, Berlin
Keynote Speaker: Diedrich Diederichsen, Berlin

Evening
Momus Live

“Ultraconformist, voyager, timelord, tennis and ping pong champion, tender pervert, poison boyfriend, hippopotamus, philosopher, folk singer, star forever.” Nick Currie, more popularly known under the artist name Momus (after the Greek god of mockery), is a songwriter, blogger and a journalist for Wired. Most of his songs are self-referential or postmodern.

Mudam can provide assistance with accommodation, food, local transport and other details for students. Call+Response will take place in the Mudam auditorium and will be open only to registered participants. All talks will be held in English. Program subject to modification.

Sculpt is work for sensor gloves, interactive electronics and interactive projected image that explores the relationship between synthetic sound and synthetic image through the tactile nuance of human gesture.

Robert Griffin Byron won the A.B.C. Young Composer’s Award in 1995. Since then, Byron’s chamber music and orchestral works have been heard all across Australia, the United States, and Asia. His work has been performed by the most of Australia’s state orchestras. To date, Byron has received four commissions. In 1997 the West Australian Ballet commissioned the score for the ballet Orlando. In 1998 Future Films commissioned a soundtrack for an art film by Glen Eaves called Structures. The score won the A.B.C. Young Composer Film Award in 1999. Also in 1999 the Australian Ballet commissioned the full-length ballet Mirror Mirror. In 2002 the Ensemble Arcangelo commissioned the chamber work Kaleidoscope, with support from ArtsWA.

In addition to these commissions, Byron’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (Cobalt) was premiered by Michael Kieran Harvey in 1999 at the Calloway Auditorium, U.W.A. Byron’s dance work, Enlightenment, premiered in Bloomington, Indiana, at the Black Box Theater in 2004. Byron collaborated with Choreographer Liz Shea and Lighting Designer Robert Shakespeare, exploring interactive lighting, interactive sound, and choreographic movement. Byron gained second place in the Australian National Harp Composition Competition in 2004 for the work The Moon Methinks Looks with a Watery Eye. In 2006 Byron’s acousmatic work Hip or Hype? was performed at Pixerations in Providence, Rhode Island. His most recent work Swarm, for Perriott Ensemble and Interactive electronics, was premiered by the Boston-based group Dinosaur Annex in 2007.

Byron’s electronic works have been performed at numerous conferences, including the Australasian Computer Music Conference in Melbourne (2002), Perth SPECTRUM conference (2003), Western Australia Converging Technologies conference (2003), SEAMUS conference in San Diego (2003), THRESHOLD at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana (2004), and Midwest IDEAS Festival (2004, 2005, and 2006). Byron won first place in the audio section at the 2004 and 2005 IDEAS Festivals.

Byron earned his B.Mus. from Edith Cowan in 1997. In 2000 Byron received a Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composer’s Fellowship-in-Residence, where he continued his studies. He earned his M.M. in Computer Music Composition from Indiana University while on a Fulbright Fellowship in 2006. At Indiana, Byron won the 2005 Dean’s Prize for Electroacoustic Composition. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in multimedia art at Brown University.

The Brown Music Department and MEME (Multimedia & Electronic Music Experiments) presents… Atau Tanaka, a concert of interactive computer music and video featuring Japanese / American artist Atau Tanaka. Tanaka creates music for sensor instruments, wireless network infrastructures, and democratized digital forms; his work bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. Also featuring new works by current and former MEME students.

“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.

“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

Root Division is pleased to showcase a selection of contemporary sound art devices created by artists, musicians, and technologists. This international survey includes site-specific installations, interactive devices, performances, and quiet evocations. Of particular note are: Paul Slocum’s compositions for a modified dot-matrix printer (Dot Matrix Synth); Paris Mancini’s video of singer Nina Petrochko mimicking ambient sounds from the city and countryside (Sustaining Notes for Ground); Rafael Canedo’s Punchcard Symphony; and PB8’s Collective Instrument #1.

Artists: Paul Slocum, Roddy Schrock, Jeff Ray, Nina Petrochko & Paris Mancini, PB8, Candice Jacobs, Robert Jackson Harrington, Jacqueline Gordon, Luciana Ohira & Sergio Bonilha, Elinor J. Domol, Rafael Canedo.

Curated by Annie Yalon, Scott Kiernan and Deric Carner.

Root Division is an arts and arts education non-profit located in the Mission District of San Francisco. Root Division acts as an ecosystem for artists in that we provide subsidized studio space to working artists in exchange for their service in the organization. While creating opportunities for individuals to develop both creatively & professionally, Root Division promotes creative expression and builds community through having these artists teach art in after school programs, lead adult education classes, and produce special events that showcase local emerging artists. It is in these connections between artistic exploration and public engagement that we spark the powerful synergy between personal inspiration and social change.