Heribert Friedl is an Austrian sound/ visual /sensory artist based in Vienna. he studied sculpture at the university of applied arts in Vienna. Working with scents and its non visual phenomenons in combination with sounds. He has had exhibitions, sound performances and projects in cities of Hungary, Switzerland, Germany, England, Italy, the US, Cuba, and Austria. Sound collaborations with Bernhard Günter, Dale Lloyd and John Norman (radian). CD releases on Trente Oiseaux, and/OAR; mp3 releases on con-v and Earlabs.

Tomas Phillips (b. 1969) is a composer, novelist, and teacher whose sound work focuses on improvisational performance and minimalist through-composition. He began composing electronic music in the early 1990s. Limit (17:51 minutes), completed in 2008, is comprised of samples from the solo guitar work of Taku Sugimoto. The original intention was to isolate individual notes and construct a new “guitar” piece. What emerged in the compositional process, however, was something very different.

Best known for his work on, around and about the violin, Jon Rose is a global performer, presenting his group and solo projects regularly in over 30 countries. He brings over 25 years experience pioneering the use of digital technology in live music performance to the Ball Project and this Festival outcome Sphere of Influence. The ball as symbol is universally recognised. A ball flying through space has an inherent mystery; it replicates our lonely and insecure position in the universe. To sport fans, the ball verges on being a sacred object. Ball games, especially in this sport-obsessed city, are nearly a religious rite. The earth is our favourite ball - our future on it less than certain.

After the sun has set at Federation Square, a huge white ball is pushed, heaved, thrown, and rolled around in a game – or is it a ritual? As this two and a half metre ball moves, it sings, it speaks, it screams. It’s a clever ball: its motion can manipulate both sound and images. The music it makes includes sounds from the environment and vocal samples composed by Rose and sung by The Song Company and Aku Kadogo, while Hollis Taylor plays the live violin obligato. As the ball spins, it juggles with words of wisdom, power and warning. The ball, aided by purpose-built interactive technology, has evolved from an object to a virtuoso multimedia performer.

From Rose’s website:

The use of games of chance to determine musical content has fascinated composers as different as Mozart in his Musikalisches Würfelspiel, Stravinsky in his stage works based on card games (also his neo-classical wind Octet of 1923), Cage throughout his entire career, and John Zorn in his ‘game pieces’ (which are in essence structures for improvisers). Richard Strauss spent much of his time playing skat (not improvised jazz vocals but a version of the card game whist); Schoenberg and Britten were very keen on tennis; Prokofiev was a chess master; Mozart was often to be found at the billiard table; Percy Grainger was outstanding at Badminton and possibly the first recorded jogger - sometimes running from concert to concert (once accompanied by 100 Zulu warriors) and even running from stage to back of concert hall and back again, when he had too many bars tacet in a blockbuster piano concerto.

Outside of western music of course, most societies have had their practice of music integrally linked to every ceremonial necessity of their social activities - from birth to death. Also, in many non-western cultures the idea of music without physical movement (dance) would have seemed strange, if not perverse.

Functional music, cultural replacement

In Australia, we live in a country that has the oldest surviving practice of gebrauchsmusik - it is only 50 years since the chief elder of many Aboriginal groups still knew how to sing into existence every significant animate and inanimate object, the keys to survival. It is unlikely that such sophisticated and rich cultures of aurality will ever exist again. But anybody who has ever witnessed an Aboriginal Australian Rules tournament in the Northern Territory will know that ‘footie’ has gone some way to filling the physical (if not the spiritual) cultural void left by whitefella destruction. This game may have been invented by Victorians, but the Aborigines of the north have seized it with both hands and feet and made it their own. If ballet was this good, I’d go every night. Unfortunately it is for blokes only; it also (sadly) has no music. The women have to make do with basketball or must stick with painting; but there is cause for optimism, painting is still often accompanied by song.

What is it about the ball?

A ball flying through space has an inherent mystery; it replicates our lonely and insecure position in the universe. Any young child seems to recognise the universality and truth of the ball. It’s global. All children, even those who show little interest in games or sport, respond to this user-friendly object. Add the random qualities of the oval ball to our philosophical observation, and we approach notions of twentieth century physics - the Uncertainty Principle and Quantum Mechanics. The oval ball may adhere to Newtonian gravity, but its chance bounce-ability gives lie to Einstein’s own belief that ‘God does not play dice with the Universe’. To football fans the ball verges on being a sacred object; the ball game - a religious rite. Bill Shankly, the legendary manager of the Liverpool soccer club, was once asked if football was a matter of life and death. ‘No’ he said, ‘it’s more important than that’.

New musical forms

A casual listen to the programmes of concert hall music, jazz festivals, rock spectacles, or other mainstream genres in 2005 will inform you that very little has changed in the way that most music is structured. There seem to be very few new forms for music (content is an equally unadventurous story, but let’s not go there). In classical music, they still haven’t got over the sonata form; in jazz they still unthinkingly play the head, the solos, and the head again. In electronic dance music, there is no form; you basically switch it on, mix it with something else, then switch it off again at the end (if you’re lucky). Most team games in sport provide a set of fixed macro and mobile structures that can be utilised as a formal basis for sonic compositions. A composition can utilise the basic parameters and agreed dimensions of place, time and space, to notions of technique, base strategy, flexible game plans, sportsmanship, or fooling your opponents (theatre?). All the codes of team games such as football, volleyball, basketball, and netball have the adaptive potential for setting up musical structures with satisfying yet unknown sonic outcomes - in fact I am suggesting that the practice of sport is akin to many methods of group music making such as Gamelan or the antiphonal singing that grew out of the European Renaissance. In the interactive badminton game PERKS, I thought that it would be enough just to have two adequate badminton players simulating the game. As it turned out, the best musical result was achieved by the best players (both in technique and commitment) - faking it wasn’t possible.

The ball project

The project will consist of a series of compositions utilising the structures of team sports (such as netball and quadrugby - otherwise known as murderball) and incorporating at least four custom made balls (an Australian Rules football; a Volley ball or Net ball; a huge 3 metre plus ball for a gallery space; a small kindergarten friendly ball). The balls will be fitted with pressure sensors and accelerometers providing continuous controller data streams via radiophonic transmission for interactive software driving audio and visual content. Some games will generate visual and text commentary on the nature of competition and tribalism, and be accompanied by string quartet obligato. Other games will function on an abstract level, concentrating very much on the essence of what it is that makes the ball such a powerful object and icon in our culture. The music generated by the ball will include original composition for sampled choir (The Song Company), the sounds of the body, physical exertion, and the sounds of electronic transmission. A composition for violin and juggler, using the same interactive ball technology, is also planned. This, I hasten to add, is not an exercise in touchy-feely therapy but the rigorous development of a hybrid art form.

A short history of ball games

The Meso-American ball game Pok-A-Tok has been around since 3000 BC; players used their elbows, knees and hips to get a small rubber ball through a hoop. Being an ersatz war situation (like most ball games since), the losers were often summarily executed. In North America, the Indians had their own version of soccer called Pasuckuakohowog. When the British turned up in the 1600s, they noticed similarities to their own crazed inter-town ball tournaments (which often lasted several days). The pitch could be over a mile long, the teams consisted of as many players as possible, the ball or bladder was stuffed with anything animal or vegetable - including body parts of a recent enemy (with grass as the ubiquitous filler), and the games were always extremely violent affairs. The Chinese can also lay claim to the origins of soccer. Around the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC, during the Han Dynasty, the army trained by kicking a ball into a smallish net. Almost everyone, including the Greeks and Romans it seems, had their ball games.

Ballspeak

The Age of Enlightenment sowed the seeds of humanity’s salvation in giving us most of the useful ideas that we associate with a modern rounded society - a franchised democracy, rational behaviour, social equality, wonder at (as opposed to ruling over) the natural world. However it couldn’t contain the grab for empire and the pathological exploitation of natural resources - which continues unabated. The Enlightenment has also not prevented the recent backward summersault to about the 12th century as our species’ insecurity and evermore desperate plight on our little planet is highlighted in the current burst of reactionary religiosity.

The moon, the earth would be balls in existence and travelling through space whether we were here to observe them or not. Unlike most of our cultural language-dependent notions like money, democracy, religion, etc - playing with a ball-like object could well have existed before language. It is an ontological artefact like none other whether it be a rolling stone or a pig’s bladder. After all a wild dog will perceive a moving ball as prey and play with it without understanding the rules of either physics or soccer. Once set in motion, a ball object seems to take on a life of its own. For all intensions and purposes, in the eyes of the wild dog, the ball is alive. The domestic dog can be trained to fetch the ball. But no dog, domestic or wild, can understand what a goal or a try is. Nor does an animal understand that our continued existence on this small finite ball is tenuous - we should however.

Blow the whistle.

Metaphors of music

Music as food, or politics as music, abound throughout literature, but a spontaneous look through the sports pages of The Guardian and the culture pages of The New York Times a few years ago revealed the following:

‘For the first 45 minutes, they could find no way through the Hammer’s defence; Dicks, often at walking pace, conducting the orchestra with the Croat, Pilic, as leading violinist. Only Carbone looked to have the wit to break the tempo. West Ham’s game was too fancy for its own good at times; Dicks would play the 1812 Overture, but a minuet through midfield seems to be Harry Redknapp’s preferred melody and, on this evidence, they don’t play it well enough.’

‘The program for Saturday night’s Alice Tully Hall concert described the ‘most distinguishing features’ of The Double Tenth Junior Hight School in Taichung, Taiwan, as ‘the experimental music class and female volleyball team’. The place must therefore be positively jumping with experimental music, and has to be a major force on the Taiwan volleyball circuit, since its orchestra - which were the point of this concert - was most engaging.

The Ball Project is supported in a two year fellowship (2006/7) by The Australia Council, and with generous help from STEIM, Amsterdam.

Faster Than Sound is a sound experiment joining the dots between musical genres and digital art forms. Following its launch in June 2006, FTS returns to the cold war environment of Bentwaters airbase for more sonic exploration. Artists from a wide variety of backgrounds will collaborate and explore the worlds of electronic music genres, contemporary classical practice and interactive visual arts. A range of immersive installations, musical collaborations, a wireless walk in the woods, illuminated cold war military buildings and a large dome filled with inspiring sounds will make this a day you won’t forget. Allow yourself to be transported and experience the unexpected.

Since its inception in 1948, the Aldeburgh Festival has been recognised as at the forefront of contemporary music, providing an international platform for both new music and new artistic ideas.

“In 1971 the pacifists Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears purchased the Chapel House in Horham, Suffolk because the noise from US fighters flying from the RAF Bentwaters base near Aldeburgh was disturbing Britten’s composing. It was in Horham he wrote his late works, Death in Venice, Phaedra and the Third String Quartet. Britten died in 1976, and RAF Bentwaters closed in 1993 at the end of the Cold War, after 43 years with a US presence on the base.

Now, in an inspiring example of ‘we have overcome’, Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival is reclaiming RAF Bentwater, and on Saturday the former Cold War base joins Snape Maltings, the Jubillee Hall, and Orford Church as a festival venue.” — On An Overgrown Path

The addition of Faster than Sound to the festival programme is a further example of this commitment, and of Aldeburgh’s ability not only to commission new work but to use its unique setting to present it in a different light. The Festival has always used a wide range of Suffolk venues, the latest being Bentwaters Airbase, which is close the Snape Maltings Concert Hall, the Festival’s main venue.

May 5, and 6, 8pm :: Admission: $20 general admission; student/senior discounts available :: The Laurie Theater Spingold Theater Center campus of Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02453 :: phone: 781.736.3400 :: email: music at brandeis.edu

Performance de S.S.S. Atau Tanaka, Cécile Babiole, Laurent Dailleau avec le “Dimi H” dÈrkki Kurenniemi. Video by Christina Kral http://malaupixel.org http://pixelache.ac.

The Russian free jazz innovator and members of the CalArts Improvisation Ensemble weave together a series of new collaborative multimedia works developed using Stolyar’s unique “Improvising Orchestra” methodology. In a continuance of their ongoing collaboration, Chase and Allen join Stolyar, forging ahead into uncharted aesthetic territory. This project was first begun in
Siberia between Allen and Stolyar following an arts conference that touched on improvised music as a means for transnational communication. Chase’s interactive visual work with the improvising trio NIRUSU III (Chase, Allen, Pearson) has been acclaimed by the LA Weekly as “pushing the edge of audio/visual improv”, and his animated/projected composition 2UIQ was featured last October at the Illuminated Corridor (San Francisco/Oakland) exhibition Mobility. In this appearance at REDCAT, Chase explores the possibility of a dynamic, spontaneously composed visual narrative that includes animated film, vector generated graphics, and electro-acoustic musical improvisation, performed by Chase and Stolyar together.

As a piano improviser, Roman Stolyar has collaborated with musicians from across the globe, including Anatoly Vapirov (Bulgaria), Carl Bergstroem-Nielsen (Denmark), Hans Schuettler, Heinz-Erich Goedecke, Ge-Suk Yeo (Germany), free jazz groups Kieloor Entartet and Day & Taxi (Switzerland), the Cohen family (Israel) and others. He has
collaborated with numerous choreographers such as Nelson Fernandes, Christin Carter, Marina Collard (UK), Colin Connor (USA), Randall Scott (Holland), Torbjorn Sternberg (Sweden) and others. He has released CDs under the labels of Ermatell Records (Novosibirsk), Electroshock Records (Moscow) and Intuitive Records (Denmark). In 2000 Stolyar was chosen as a member of the Russian Composers’ Union. He became a Vice Chairman of Siberian branch of Composers’ Union in 2001 and sits on the Board of Advisors of the International Society for Improvising Music.

Susan Allen has performed and toured with American legend, Dr. Yusef Lateef, SONOR, Composers in Red Sneakers, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Musica Viva, Speculum Musicae, and many orchestras. She has been active in studio recording in the Los Angeles area for Universal, Paramount, and Warner Brothers. She received grants from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, the Massachusetts Arts Council and the Gaudeamus Foundation. She has lectured internationally on both the harp and music pedagogy and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. Her records are on the Flying Fish, Black Saint/Soul Note, 1750 Arch, Meta, Vox, Galaxia, Nonesuch, and Opal/Warner Brothers and Ermatell labels.

Nicholas Chase has received numerous awards for his compositional work, including the Andy Warhol Prize given jointly by the Philadelphia Classical Symphony and the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. Chase has been hailed as “brilliant” by Strad Magazine. The Los Angeles Times calls his work “flamboyant, avant-garde…brawling yet taut…the Rite of Spring meets Metallica” and the LA Weekly wrote of his short opera Twenty-two, “the human brain at its most imaginative.” Chase is founder of the LA-based Musical Arts/SoundLaboratory who premiered Yusef Lateef’s String Quartet No. 1 (Bismilah) in collaboration with REDCAT in 2005, and founding director of the the Egg Ensemble, the creative team responsible for the trans-disciplinary serial (The Enigma of Salvador) Dali’s Egg, which has been presented at venues in Hollywood, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Helsinki.

This event is funded in part by a grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

“We enter a room and are plunged into semi-darkness. The room is dominated by an immense basin of water, ripples radiating across its surface in concentric rings. Intuitively we know that the sounds around us are closely related to the ripples, a fact reinforced by the water’s reflected movements on the surrounding walls through a sophisticated play of light. As we get closer, it becomes clear that the sounds are emanating from speakers concealed under the basin, the source of the ripples on the water’s surface. The water acts as a medium in the sense that it acts as middle ground: stimulated by the sound and swept by the beams of light, it produces richly evocative reflections. A latent photographic metaphor is at play in the installation: the water seems to take on the properties of a sensitive plate, with the sound imprinted upon it and revealed by the movement and stunning reflections projected on the walls. Video.

Presented as a “temporal sculpture,” Ondulation (2002), (1) a composition for water, sound and light, was created by Thomas McIntosh in collaboration with composer and friend Emmanuel Madan (the pair go by the pseudonym [The User]) (2) and Mikko Hynnimen, a sound designer, lighting specialist, scenic artist and composer based in Helsinki, Finland. The installation is an extension of finale (2001), the final work created in the Silophone (3) project. During finale, various solids, liquids and gases were placed into large loudspeakers and set into motion by audio signals produced with a computer. McIntosh and Madan thus established a direct relationship between the surface of the water placed in the speaker and the sounds emitted. Waves of sound were translated into waves of water. Likewise, changes in sound intensity and the addition of other frequencies created corresponding alterations in the water’s surface.” Continue reading Thomas McIntosh, Ondulation by J.P., Daniel Langlois Foundation. Ondulation is at DEAF 07.

You Bring the Secret Location to Life

REMOTE is an interactive environmental installation containing a range of sound and visual effects. Installed in an outdoor space, the installation is activated, controlled, and navigated using a common household remote control which may be supplied by the viewer. The piece takes the form of an intervention in an outdoor space, along a street or in a small park. There’s an “insider” element to the installation since, when not activated, its location may not be immediately apparent to a passerby. Additionally, the viewer needs to know to bring a remote to the location to bring the secret to life.

At the installation site, pressing buttons on any (TV, DVD, VCR, audio, etc.) remote control triggers a myriad of responses ranging from subtle (bird calls or soft sounds emanating from hidden speakers, changes in the ambient lighting) to bombastic (more dramatic sound effects, explosions, strobe lights, or projected images). Each key press generates a unique combination of effects. Viewers may bring any remote control from home to activate the installation.

Central to my work is an interest in the expressive potential of electronic devices and in the potential for user interfaces to generate new modes of interaction. A set of social precedents now exists for interaction with electrical technology. When these precedents are followed but subverted or there is no clear immediate “functional” objective, a viewer’s expectations are challenged and an opportunity for reflection or commentary on the human-technology relationship is created. This project makes use of such ambiguity - juxtaposing the familiar with the unexpected - to encourage people to question their assumptions about technology and reflect upon their interaction with it.

The piece has a strong element of accessibility. People who may be intimidated by interactive work or by technology in general may be engaged because an everyday object is the agent of action. The experience of the installation is reminiscent of a coin-op arcade shooting gallery. Play and experimentation are encouraged as part of the experience. Participants can keep trying different units from their everyday collection because each remote interacts differently with the piece. This highlights the number and variety of remotes we use for everyday tasks, from the mundane to the complex.

Sound samples in this installation have been gathered from a wide range of sources including sound effect libraries, police scanners, popular music, short wave and CB radio, and by using peer-to-peer networks to search the internet for randomly (inadvertently?) shared audio files. The broad range of sources references the instrumental use of sound samples in music as well as common (mundane) technological interactions such as channel surfing or tuning across a radio band.

Finally, the installation presents the man-technology interface ironically. The couch potato is asked to get off of the sofa and experience art first hand, but still holding the ever-present remote. Issues related to the effects of technological mediation and the degree to which technology is an atrophying rather than an empowering force are raised.

An Evolving Opera

OPERA.tion LIFE NEXUS: Jorge Orta began this mixed media work in 1996 and it will evolve and grow in length until 2006. Based on interdisciplinary collaborations, 3 generations of artists are invited to create a module for the open-ended composition: music scores, dance sequences, sculpture, light and video projections. The federating theme is the heart = Life, the creative idiom from both a symbolic and Human perspective. Its complex mythology renders the symbol poetic.

The Babylonians designated the heart the center of intelligence and memory. For the Egyptians it represented the terrestrial support for the soul. Hypocrite refer to the heart as the intelligence organ. Plato believed the heart was the center of feelings and passion. For Aristotle the heart transformed food into blood and was the emotional centre. Its universal nature helps to converge cultural, social, religious differences and from a scientific angle it exposes a new vision of a medical problem.

OPERA.tion is a locus for debate to address the sensitive subject of life saving organ donation; thousands of people are on a waiting list for organ donations… [F]renzied individualism has left society without hearts and heart !

The opera comes in a kit format and adapts to all venues. Crate sculptures facilitate the transport, preserve the archive of resulting collaborations: objects, music scores, video and photographic works, CD Roms, silkscreen prints, visual poetry, paintings, Body Architectures, are stored in the wooden crates, which in turn are labeled and stamped with the origin of the multiple actions throughout the world.

Jorge Orta (Rosario, Argentina 1953) lives in Paris Artist and architect, Jorge Orta has been working on large scale ephemeral works since 1973. Protagonist of an urban and social poetic language, he has developed many new and alternative forms to communicate : using mail art, video installations and performance in the early 70’s, to large scale projections in the 80’s. Over the last 20 years he has devised a polysemic alphabet of signs and symbols which allow him to address very diverse publics, and more recently he has been exploring the symbol “Heart” to consolidate art, mythology and science. Jorge’s light projection work took on its veritable dimension in 1992 when he projected giant mobile images inside the Pompidou Centre in Paris and when he embarked on a human experience to project his signs on Machu Picchu mountain in Peru. Since, he has covered the facades of the Venitian palaces at the 1995 Venice Biennale, and more obsolete places such as Capadoccia in Turkey, Cuenca in Spain, Aso volcano in Japan, Chartres and Evry cathedrales and many more.

SWM05: Distributed Bodies of Musical-Visual Form [SWM05] — by Troy Innocent and Ollie Olsen with the Shaolin Wooden Men and Harry Lee — features the distributed bodies of musical-visual form that are inhabited by the Shaolin Wooden Men (SWM), a virtual band, a ‘gang of numbers’ — me(a)tacodeflesh. SWM require your assistance to manifest as media creatures. They invite you to send them images of your local environment in which they can appear. Sending images unlocks access to the SWM05 mobile site which consists of downloadable micromusic ringtones and small screen machinima performances. The SWM are everywhere. In a meshwork of wireless entities, they are media creatures seeking a fragmented existence to be consumed in the nanoseconds of play-time in the emerging wireless net. SWM05 will transfigure the SWM by embodying them in a new materiality.

SWM05: Distributed Bodies of Musical-Visual Form is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

BIOGRAPIES

The SHAOLIN WOODEN MEN are a ‘gang of numbers’ whose bodies are ‘made of sound’. In their various manifestations they have released three full-length recordings - “S.W.M. ” (1992), “The Hungry Forest” (1994) and “Supermindway” (2001) - and a collection of singles and remixed released on the Psy-Harmonics label. The S.W.M. work across image, sound and interactivity and have performed at DEAF96 and exhibited at ISEA96. Typically, they require the assistance of creative humans to manifest as media creatures to be distributed across the net.

TROY INNOCENT has been exploring the ‘language of computers’ and the new aesthetics of digital space since 1989. In recognition of this work, Innocent has been described as “the first philologist of virtual reality”. His artificial worlds � Iconica (SIGGRAPH 98, USA), Semiomorph (ISEA02, Japan), and lifeSigns (Ars Electronica 2004, Austria) and Ludea (SIGGRAPH2006, USA) � explore the dynamic between the iconic ideal and the personal specific, the real and the simulated, and the way in which our identity is shaped by language and communication. He is currently Senior Lecturer, Department of Multimedia and Digital Arts, Monash University, Melbourne.

OLLIE OLSEN is an Australian composer, synthesist and sound designer who has been producing and performing rock, electronic and experimental music for the past thirty years. Projects include “Max Q,” “NO,” “Third Eye,” “Orchestra of Skin and Bone,” “Shaolin Wooden Men,” and “I am the Server.” Some recent collaborations and projects include performing with Negativland (from USA-2001); guest soloist with the Australian Art Orchestra (2002); and recording with Japanese bands, BOREDOMS and AOA (2001-2002.

HARRY LEE is a web developer working with Macromedia Flash, SQL, PHP and related technologies. Recent projects include database development for lifeSigns, exhibited at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in 2004, in addition to numerous corporate and education projects. He lectures in multimedia and digital arts in the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University.