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.
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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.
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Shaping Networked Realities

ABSTRACT: The paper introduces a networked multi-user installation and interactive mixed reality environment that combines the fields of interactive art, telecommunication and streaming technologies. Phonic Frequencies is an audiovisual data space whose appearance can be altered via networked communication devices. Visitors are active agents and participate in shaping spaces as they control audiovisual data with their telephones.

Linking the physical space to the digital network space, Phonic Frequencies opens a hybrid reality for distributed sound exchange and visual communication, blurring the boundaries between verbal communication and digital information. The work attempts to break the conventional communication cycle of bidirectional dialogue and to consider the meaning of in- and output from a different perspective.” From Phonic Frequencies: Shaping Networked Realities by Tamas Szakal, Christoph Groenegress, Wolfgang Strauss, Predrag Peranovic (c) 2003

Glimpses of Unseen Places

A landscape from beyond the edges of the browser window that gives glimpses of unseen places. dotdotdot is constructed using several different motion capture systems and improvised performances creating abstract digital portraits. These animated avatars move and react to players inputs within an online virtual environment.

“dotdotdot provides a good example of the ways in which practitioners using old media and new media can collaborate to produce an ongoing body of work challenging the canons from which each component of the work orginates. Using motion capture, web tools, animation, games engines, sound and movement dotdotdot presents a series of animated interactive vignettes. These can be manipulated in terms of speed, sound, rotation and movement so that the basis of the range of visuals on offer stays the same but also so that the viewer/player can change them to accommodate their own preferences. [via Rhizome]
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Collaborating on Interactive Performance Works

Abstract: Composers and choreographers face unique and largely unexplored problems as they collaborate on interactive performance works. Not the least of these problems is settling on schemes for mapping the various parameters of human movement to those possible in the world of sound. The authors’ collaborative piece, Seine hohle Form, is used as a case study in the development of effective mapping strategies, focusing on dance gesture to real-time music synthesis. Perceptual correlation of these mapping strategies is stressed, albeit through varying levels of abstraction. Read Seine hohle Form: Artistic Collaboration in an Interactive Dance and Music Performance Environment by Joseph Butch Rovan, Robert Wechsler and Frieder Weiß, Crossings: Electronic Journal of Art and Technology, Issue 1.2

Net Jamm

Outside the frame of the exhibition and for the opening of Unzipping Codes, the net jamm performance will be led by the members of the group OFFLINE, Brian Mackern, Arcángel Consantini, and Fernando Llanos. They will mix live inputs from the internet provided by themselves or OFFLINE colleagues that will resemble a mixture of DJ and VJ procedures while revealing the unstable nature of digital reality.

OFFLINE is a cross-border global group of artist collaborators working creatively with the Internet and related digital and networked media. The purpose of OFFLINE is to bring together online art practitioners and creative technical consultants for collaborative projects staged at real world locales such as art and music festivals, symposiums, cafeterias, rooftops and city streets. OFFLINE projects will take the form of live performances, installations, and diverse experimental augmented reality displays. OFFLINE is organized via an online mailing list and a central server.

Augmented Reality

ArtFutura’s theme this year is Augmented Reality. It’s taking place now in Barcelona [October 28th-31st]. The programme includes Howard “Smartmobs” Rheingold, Blast Theory who will perform Can You See Me Now?, the SimpleTEXT performance, Dublin’s MediaLab Europe and Montreal’s SAT will be showcasing installations and developing experimental projects, Richard Marks, creator of EYETOY, Greyworld, Fiona Raby, etc. (via)

Saturday October 30, 2004 - 4PM - 8PM, Live from Barcelona, SAT presents Phéromones, the Art Futura’s closing show. Phéromones is a network multichannel audiovisual techno performance regrouping musicians Alain Thibault, Physical Noise Theatre & Champion and VJ jocool , Ladyroll & Le couple in Barcelona as well as Yan Breuleux, Nuclear Ramjet & Johnny Ranger in Montreal.
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Live Cinema

This year Sonic Acts presents a special Live Cinema programme, in association with www.live-cinema.org.

“Live Cinema is a form of performance art in which a human performer manipulates sound and image in synergy through movement, for an audience. In the rapidly advancing field of Live Cinema there are a number of distinct movements, e.g. abstract synthetic cinema, graphic cinema and camera-based cinema. We will present a number of renowned performers from these areas in the small hall in Paradiso in a three-evening packed programme. The performances will be interspersed with interviews with the artists, and with a film and video programme specially compiled for Live Cinema organised in association with Martijn van Boven. A Sonic Acts Live Cinema special will be broadcast on television during VPRO’s Nachtpodium on Wednesday 22 September.”
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Dialtones: A Telesymphony

Dialtones, as described on Golan Levin�s web site, “is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s mobile phones. Because the exact location and tone of each participant’s mobile phone can be known in advance, Dialtones affords a diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures.”
Preparatory to the concert, members of the audience register their wireless telephone numbers at secure Web kiosks located in the performance space. In exchange for this information, they then receive seating assignment tickets for the concert venue. New “ringtones” are then automatically downloaded to their handsets. During the concert, a small group of musicians perform the phones en masse by dialing them up with a specially designed, visual-musical software instrument. “Because the audience’s positions and sounds are known to the Dialtones computer system, the performers can create spatially-distributed melodies and chords, as well as novel textural phenomena like waves of polyphony which cascade across the crowd; these musical structures, moreover, are visualized by a large projection system connected to the performers’ interfaces. Towards the end of its half-hour composition, Dialtones builds to a remarkable crescendo in which nearly two hundred mobile phones peal simultaneously.”