At what point will common sense prevail, 26 sound works to be presented for a 5 year period, was commissioned by the Lewis Glucksman Gallery and curated by René Zechlin. It marks the second phase of a series of projects exploring the formation of opinion; it deals with how cognition occurs in conversation, discussion or debate.

Phelan produced the text for each of the sound pieces by participating in a range of online forums, from physics to religion. Subjects such as Commitment to truth, Youth isn’t a defense or Change is our only Commonality were inspired by previous ideas associated with the first phase of the overall formation of opinion project. These online discussions were led by the artist and then edited into scripts. Thirteen scripts were translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese or Kirundi; the others remain in English. Phelan recorded the reading of the texts by 26 different native speakers in the basement of The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, located in Cork City, Ireland. They were then recorded a second time; they had to listen to their own recording and repeat exactly what they heard the moment they heard it, thereby creating 26 regurgitated monologues.

At what point will common sense prevail is a challenging audio project that raises questions about private outlooks and current modes of personal and media communication.

Kunstradio – Radiokunst is presenting a selection of At what point will common sense prevail as part of its Curated by series.

imposition emerges from translation, a series of pieces which were developed, in turn, from overboard, our first essay in ambient poetics. imposition uses the same texts and procedures as translation. It continues an investigation of iterative, procedural removal from one text or language to another. During the performance, four passages from the source texts of imposition will be presented in any one of three shifting states: surfacing, floating or sinking. A passage will also be in one of three changing language states: German, French or English. If a passage sinks in one language it may, for example, surface in another.

imposition now distributes these states over the internet in order to enable a networked transliteral and musical performance. imposition’s main display shows the four transliterating passages on a large projection and broadcasts their states via a server on the internet. Anyone with access to a set of twelve distinct QuickTime ‘listener’ movies may download and play them on their computer. While the main movie is running, listener movies will track one of the four passages, but will do so in a single language (as selected at download time by the participant who plays the ‘listener’) while reflecting the ‘buoyancy’ of the passage to which it listens. These movies also play looping musical samples of human vocalizations which harmonize both with the main display and with other linked and listening movies. The selection and triggering of samples also reflect their linked passage’s buoyancy. For performance or installation renditions of imposition, a number of participants with laptop computers may be distributed amongst the audience. These laptops will each play their listening movie networked with the main display by wireless connection over the internet. - John Cayley

The music for imposition is ultimately generated by events arising out of the transformations that occur within the text. These are the chance operations - themselves composed through John’s programmed impositions - which govern how various predetermined features of the audio will ultimately play themselves out. More >>

Credits: John Caley (writing, concepts, text-generation, programming); Giles Perring (composition, sound design, recording, post-production); Melanie Pappenheim (vocals); and Douglas Cape (advice on visual media, additional recording)

A few months ago I wrote a note to myself: “Try to create a mask that that doesn’t have anything to do with anything” and kept wondering what that could mean until I started to imagine Mask/Mirror. Mask/Mirror a sampler to process recordings of spoken language in real time… The sampler follows both sound and meaning criteria in sorting, organizing and processing samples and in formulating utterances. It is a software tool based on MaxMSP and speech recognition software interacting with my own voice during performances. It’s also a state of mind enabling expanded spoken and vocal improvisation, expanded communication and ecstasy.

It has been developed in collaboration with Harvestworks Digital Arts Center in New York and STEIM in Amsterdam. Mask/Mirror has to do with virtually everything but at the same time it does not have anything special to do with anything special. As well as being a blank mask I can put on my face - and my voice - it’s also a mirror that let me browse and talk to my memory while I am watching into it.

All mirrors are masks and vice versa. Both are tools enabling identity.

“It is difficult not to treat Mask/Mirror, with its randomized garble of words, as a willfully cryptic Oracle of Delphi reincarnated as an Apple laptop. While Bosetti had described the project as “about the aboutness of being about” what Noise got out all of this is that it’s devilishly hard not to seek meaning even where it’s clear none is forthcoming. Not until the program, in a moment of absurd hilarity, spit forth the word “hamburgers” did it all click: Mask/Mirror is a tool for shearing all meaning from language. It’s a liberation, of sorts, like the sound version of Rorschach tests: The mind is encouraged to wander freely and delight in words purely for their sound. In the information overload of contemporary times, Mask/Mirror’s playful rupturing of sense–its nonsense, in other words–is a welcome respite.” Raven Baker - Noise/Citypaper

ALESSANDRO BOSETTI, voice, electronics, Berlin / Milano / Baltimore: Alessandro Bosetti, composer and sound artist, was born in Milan, Italy in 1973. He works on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication and produced text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcastings and published recordings. In his work he moves on the line between sound anthropology and composition often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews often build the basis for his abstract compositions along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies,trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations. Since he’s curious about differences he travels. Just in 2006 he’s been living and working in West Africa, China, Taiwan, Holland, Scandinavia, United States , Germany and Italy. For the future he plans to be living and working between Berlin (D), Milano (I) and Baltimore (USA).

CHRISTIAN KESTEN, voice, Berlin, Germany: Christian Kesten was born in 1966 and works as composer, performance artist, vocalist and stage director. He lives in Berlin, Germany. His interest lies in the “space in-between”: between music and theatre, music and language, between music and the visual arts. His pieces work with the space which opens up between the sound of language and the parallel, non-illustrative action (-cycling 1990; des Kleinen Übergewicht 1995; 45 seconds 2006). They make use of everyday spaces and their sounds, including works made for train stations, in which minimal sounds of winds and brass are spread over the station and mixed with sounds of trains and passers-by (nordbahnhof 1996, bahnhof westend 1996, bahnhof zoo 1997). welcome home is written for the squeaking doors of the Nordbahnhof station in Berlin and two violins which mirror the door sounds: the passers-by experience the music while on the move. In (o.T.) für klarinette in einem raum mit langem nachhall 1(1999) and 2(2000) [(without title) for clarinet in a space with a long reverberation time] the clarinet plays to its own reverberation as a second voice, microtonally, and thus refers to the presence of space. parochial (1998) – for the group “Maulwerker” (4 female voices, trumpet/voice, clarinet/voice, alto saxophone + additional instruments) – was written especially for the space of the Parochialkirche in Berlin: sculptural shaped sounds are moved in space, while trumpet, clarinet and sax move mostly outside the space and so extending acoustic perception beyond the walls of the church.

Recently he developed the “video audio field recording”, by recording field sounds with a video camera, composing dense and light sound textures of field recordings and live instruments. The projected images are always fixed camera angles, filming spaces in-between, the incidental, the mundane: the Los Angeles catalogue; dodger stadium; cypress park; urban cafe restroom (all 2007). Kesten studied at the University of Arts (UdK) Berlin (Music: guitar, piano, voice; counterpoint/twelvetone-technique with H.Fladt; musicological thesis on “Silence in the works of John Cage and Morton Feldman”; Experimental music and music-theatre with Dieter Schnebel | Performance Art | Projects with the stage design class of Achim Freyer) and TU Berlin (German literature and linguistics). 1989-91 he studied privately with Michael Vetter (overtone singing, vocal improvisation, calligraphy/notation etc.). Movement studies with various teachers (Amos Hetz a.o.).

Since 1987, he has been performing new vocal music and experimental music-theatre throughout Europe and in New York, Rio de Janeiro, Israel, Moscow and Tokyo. He currently works with the ensemble “Maulwerker” and as soloist. In a long collaboration with Dieter Schnebel he premiered most of his music theatre works since 1987. He has recently worked with Alessandro Bosetti, Jacques Demierre, Chico Mello, Makiko Nishikaze, Iris ter Schiphorst, who wrote solo works or operas for him. Kesten conceives and curates the series “maulwerker performing music” (since 2005) in Berlin with programs like ?poems for feet“, ?pro cedere. Music as Process“, “Situationen.. Interpenetrations of art and life” or “Halt’s Maul. Screaming pieces from four decades”, with World Premieres by Antonia Baehr, Alessandro Bosetti, Bill Dietz, Jürg Frey, Robin Hayward, David Helbich, Michael Hirsch, Sven-Åke Johansson, Travis Just, Christian Kesten, Andrea Neumann, Pauline Oliveros, Dieter Schnebel, Emmett Williams, István Zelenka, a.o. Since 2006, he is co-curator of the experimental music concert series Labor Sonor at KULE Berlin.

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia was founded by composer Michael J. Schumacher in 2001 and its program builds on the efforts of Schumacher’s previous sound space, Studio Five Beekman, founded in 1996. Diapason is the sole venue in New York City and one of few internationally dedicated to the presentation of multichannel sound installation where composers and sound artists can realize their work for an interested public. By providing an optimum listening environment, two high quality multi-channel sound systems, a regular audience, and a place for experimentation, Diapason seeks to engage composers and the public in dialogue about the place of contemporary music and sound practice in a broader cultural context. Diapason is supported by NYSCA, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Phaedrus Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, Kirk Radke, and by generous individuals. Diapason is a 501(c)3 organization.

In their collaborative practice Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal deal with audio-acoustics and storage media used for acoustic material. Their core interests are audio-recordings, particularly of language, spoken word and speech, original footage taken from radio-broadcastings or other archives. Their work found its multiple form in the project voiceoverhead which is rooted in a record collection of approximately 350 records, including footage documenting political speeches and language orientated radio-programs. The records aurally cover historical events and were originally designed to function as “documentations of the real”. This notion of the ‘documentary’ has been questioned throughout the history of the medium itself and developed as one of the inherent debates around the emerging modes of reproduction in the late 19th century - the phonograph, film and photography. Starting with the early Lumière-movie ‘Workers Leaving the Factory,’ this discussion emerges. Harun Farocki has shown, in his 1995 video-essay on the Lumière-sequence, the complexity of a playful representational conspiracy between the audience / viewer, the document / documentarian and the documented beginning at the birth of the genre itself. This act of conspiracy takes place when any document from the archive is brought back to the public sphere as a kind of reenactment of a communicative and rhetorical figure.

Lengerer & Gal developed the idea voiceoverhead in order to locate the record collection and their artistic practice within a broader context and to include the work of other artists, filmmakers and musicians working with archived language materials in multiple ways and diverging modes. So too do divisions exist in the cultural field: such as electronic music that is entrenched in elements of language and radio-sounds and there is a sub-genre of visual artists, filmmakers and documentarians who also focus their work in this area. Both fields are conceptually and practically applying different approaches to the given speech material: differences in working and presentation methods, as well as differences in distribution and public reception. voiceoverhead presents, confronts and merges the approaches applied in these diverse cultural productions in the exhibition and in an evening of sound performances, taking place on Friday 29 February.

voiceoverhead is a co-production with the Jan van Eyck Academy.

http://www.smartprojectspace.net/

Commissioned and produced by Montalvo Arts Center, Lesley Dill redirects the classic form of opera using Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) to celebrate and investigate American Transcendentalism, a school of thought particularly prevalent in mid-19th century New England. By incorporating all of Dickinson’s 1,775 poems, Divide Light goes beyond rational reason into the world of obsessive informational insanity, which refers not only to the aficionados across the country holding yearly marathon readings of the complete body of Dickinson’s poems, but also to the overflow of information we now have at our fingertips made possible by the Internet and amazing new technologies. Divide Light parallels this global process by musically and visually translating the language of a 19th century philosophical movement into a representation of current forms of linguistic availability.

Dill has made Divide Light into a spare and closely developed theatrical presentation, layered with a haunting visual element which features large projections on a back screen and multiple scrims. The images are a combination of Dill’s stark, edgy and evocative black-and-white photographs and projected text from Dickinson’s poetry. Poems stream, scroll, flash, swirl, twirl, pop out, edge in, seep out, fade in, fall down, and rise up on the screen and scrims. The performers sing Dickinson’s words and wear them scrawled across their costumes. Poems appear in unusual places throughout the opera, interacting with the audience in unexpected ways.

Incubated in the heart of Silicon Valley at Montalvo’s Sally and Don Lucas Artist Programs residency as an interdisciplinary collaboration between Dill, a visual artist, and Colorado-based composer and conductor Tom Morgan, Divide Light has expanded to include additional creative collaborators. Philadelphia-based stage director Eleanor Holdridge is on board, and the project is under the musical direction of Daniel Hughes, who also serves as director of The Choral Project, San Jose.

Divide Light features a number of San Francisco Bay Area-based organizations, including The Choral Project, whose mission is to connect to one another through choral theater, education and musical excellence, and San Francisco-based Del Sol String Quartet, recognized for its ability to showcase living composers in relevant, responsive and deeply passionate performances.

Recomputing Space is a sound installation which employs field recordings as a psychogeographic study of urban sound. “Following the commands and rhythm imposed by an algorithm, two persons walk around in chosen locations in the city, recording a mix of noise, language, music and the sound of their own steps. The chosen locations are public places, such as public squares, parks, tram stations etc.

The algorithm they follow is composed of a number of simple commands (left, right, forward, back, stop) and a metronome. It is rendered into sound and received on headphones. It tells the two microphone operators how to walk and provides the walking rhythm which structures their recordings. Both recorded soundtracks are later played back at the soundscape-installation, which consists of 30 loudspeakers ordered in a 5×6 matrix, placed on the floor approximately 2 meters from each other. The sounds “move” from speaker to speaker, reconstructing the paths of the microphone operators at the time of the recording.” [posted by Garrett on Network Research]

Imagery: I am interested in expressing how we humans have parasitic tendencies. In one hand we create but in the other we consume and create voids. I am particularly interested in playing with the expression “milking the cash cow” by literally having the instrument sap colours out of currencies (notes/bills). I have selected a series of currencies from nations that celebrate their abundance of certain natural resources and manpower. Its interesting to observe how countries create a reference to their “cash cow” via currencies. And in particular one sees patterns of representation through iconography- such as farmers, tractors, cash crops, chimneys, industrial sheds, mineral deposits, mines etc, all of which serve as mastheads of development for emerging economies.

In the globalized landscape such countries see themselves as offshore providers of resources to larger and richer countries. It is amusing that emerging economies are in ways the cash cow for richer nations who often sift for foreign resources before they begun to consume their own as an act of self-preservation or find it cheaper to do so in their neo-imperialistic spirit. It is this vicious underrepresented portrait of national interests vs vested interests that I want to express through this instrument and performance. To me it is important to represent the consumed and less the consumer and so the selection only includes currencies of developing economies.

Udder in use
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtBahNEohQg

The screen component for the performance reacted to the instrument I built for the NIME class. For this I had to interface MAX/MSP to C++ via openFrameworks and OSC. The visual idea was to extract colours out of images and simultaneously erase them in the process. Image pixels were used to read colours and then the colours were mapped onto a stroke that was modulated depending on sensor values from the instrument. The speed with which the image lost colours depended on how the instrument was played (fast/slow) and on certain other parameters.

From his webste:

I graduated in Communication Design from Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology located in Bangalore, India in 2004. I intend to pursue a creative practice where I would like to understand and deploy sociable media and context driven communication platforms. I am particularly inspired by the open source software movement and would like to combine some of its ethics into my creative practice. I dislike categorising my practice as either being Art or Design and prefer to simply call it creative practice, where I am learning to embrace creative sensibilities that arise from both, artistic as well as design thought processes and references. To me design and art is a way of thinking rather than doing.

My recent most exhibited work is titled ‘The Lowlands’ project, which explores alternative mapping practices in order to elicit unspoken and unseen territories in my sub-urban neighborhood of Bangalore. The Lowlands Project was exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz in September 2005. I interpret this project as a stepping-stone towards understanding social spaces, geography, and locative media and technologies.