What does it mean to navigate? What is the importance of location specificity? What does it mean to get lost? The increasing accuracy of satellite navigation strives to eliminate the possibility of human error, but it also produces a sense of dislocation from one’s immediate environment by abstracting location as the coordinates of longitude and latitude. What place is there for one’s body, one’s senses, one’s conscious and unconscious awareness of space, if this knowledge is so apparently made redundant by GPS? What, if any, role can historical skills of navigation at sea, of observation, choice, intuition and improvisation play in navigating the spaces of the future? The symposium Navigating the Space of the Future will take these questions as its starting point to see if we can find our way within the dense environment of global positioning technologies. The field is open but the practice is just starting to form itself by looking at ways to counter locative media strategies where geographical walks are organised that use the city and the street as a playing field negating the relation between space, architecture, time, body and mind. The presentations will focus on new ways of interpreting data of location and navigation by relating these directly to the physical (space) through the use of sound.

Yolande Harris - Sun Run Sun (Artist in Residence NIMk): Sun Run Sun explores the individual experience of current location technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to (re)establish a sense of personal connectedness to one’s environment, and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future and animal navigation using sound. Sun Run Sun investigates the split between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position. A series of portable personal instruments ?satellite sounders? developed for the residency, transform satellite data directly into a sonic composition. This composition constantly varies in response to the changing location of the player as they move through their physical environment. ‘The experience of sound is internal, as a process that influences the relationship between the self and the environment. True navigation consists of a continuously coherent relationship between the two.’

David Dunn takes his research into the bioacoustics of bark beetles and entomogenic climate change, and on ultrasonic audio phenomena in both human and non-human environment as starting points to talk about Acoustic Ecologies. He wants to bring forth the sonic presence of these worlds for human contemplation of their inherent aesthetic beauty and to show the amazing continuity of life, with its capacity for infinite variation in audible communication. “Given the superabundance of how music as a human activity has been used, I believe that music has simultaneously been a strategy to evolve our capacity to structurally-couple with our environment through our aural perception, and a significant force for defining the boundaries of group affiliation and for the affirmation of cultural status, giving voice to an evolutionary heritage of an abundance of other coupling modes that are greater than the rational mind alone.” [From Acoustic Ecology and the Experimental Music Tradition by By David Dunn]

Atau Tanaka bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. He creates music for sensor instruments, wireless network infrastructures, and democratized digital forms. Tanaka is best known for his performances where he uses physical gestures to articulate music and sound synthesis and real-time image transformation. For the past years, inspired by the ever-changing social, geographic, ecological, emotional context of using mobile technology for creative ends Tanaka focusses his attention towards mobile media projects. He is exploring the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. “My interest is to take interactive music practice off the stage and outside the concert hall into the urban sphere. Mobile communications devices are meant to connect groups of people. Musical concerts, similarly, are situations that bring people together for a common purpose. Can we elicit commonalities to make a community-based musical process, creating a! shared experience among users?” In his presentation he will pay attention to the description of the architecture of an audio-visual hard- and software framework that was developed for the realization of a series of locative media artworks, and eliciting from this, he brings afore fundamental issues and questions that can be generalized and applicable to the growing practice of locative media.

Soundwok Artiject - Call for Participants: Take part immediately in a cutting-edge “artiject” in which the aesthetic consciousness of upstream sonifiers is mapped utilizing GIS technology. If you are a Southern California based or linked sound artist, experimental musician and / or composer, you are invited to participate in the first part of a unique sound art and music research artiject and study, conducted by Dr. Chung Shih Hoh and Marco Schindelmann that will involve the mapping of the dynamic social networks and aesthetic consciousness of Southern California artists involved in sound art and/or experimental music. The results of this study will also serve as material for a sound installation for SoundWalk2008. Your participation in this project is not contingent on your submitting to or taking part in SoundWalk2008.

The print journal, Acoustic Space is a forum for net.radio, sound art and creative explorations in the networked electro-acoustic environments. Now in its 7th edition, Acoustic Space - SPECTROPIA issue investigates the rapid transformation of the usage of the radio frequency spectrum that we are witnessing in the 21st century. It doesn’t refer only to a quantitative increase in mobile, satellite and wireless networks, locative and pervasive media, but also to a qualitative shift in the way people communicate and the way spectrum is used in arts, education, science and commerce. The recent scientific research and artistic explorations of electromagnetic (EM) spectrum will be published in this issue, in order to introduce which chances and risks this tranformation process bears for artists and the populations at large.

For the first time, Acoustic Space journal will come out as ‘peer review’ (refereeing) publication. It will be published by the MPLab (Art Research Lab) of Liepaja University in collaboration with the RIXC, The Center for New Media Culture in Riga, Latvia.

Therefore, the publication will contain 2 main sections:

Section 1 - RESEARCH texts (’academic style’ writings with references, etc.)
Section 2 - ARTISTIC abstracts: ideas, concepts, pictures (this part will include mainly artists’ proposals for upcoming Spectropia festival exhibition - open-call is announced, deadline: April 21, 2008)

DEADLINES:

Deadline for submissions: May 19, 2008 - for completed research texts.
(For abstracts - April 21, 2007)

We encourage you to submit abstracts first. Proposals and inquiries regarding submissions should be made to Rasa Smite: rasa [at] rixc.lv

The RESEARCH texts should consist of 12000 - 15000 characters (i.e. 8 pages A4, 12 pt) + references.
(the ARTISTIC abstracts/texts - 2000-4000 characters)

Language: English (all texts will be also translated in to Latvian).

TOPICS:

The publication will cover wide range of topics under 4 main sections:

ELECTROMAGNETIC COSMOLOGY, SPECTRAL ECOLOGY AND EMF (ELECTRO-MAGNETIC FIELDS) RESEARCH: Modern cosmology constitutes the world we live in and our understanding about it by reducing ” the physical reality - galaxies, starts, planets, atoms - to electrical or electromagnetic configurations” - as stated by Bureau d’etudes (in their “Industrial dogma”). Could it be that “understanding the electromagnetic field is the only way to understand ourselves and our surroundings”? In such context the issue of “spectral ecology” will be investigated in the broadest sense possible. This section provides a critique of the industrial dogma and propaganda of electromagnetism, health and ‘green’ issues stemming from electrosmog and meriting more research, as well as sustainability and energy usage and other aspects in relation to communication and information technologies.

CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE: FROM IDEOLOGY AND CULTURE OF SPYING (AND SECURITY) TO CONVERSION OF MILITARY TECHNOLOGIES: This topic studies secret past of communication technologies of military origin. Espionage phenomenon is explored, tracing back to its origins in military history of ancient culture. This part also brings up an issue of “cultural intelligence” - contemporary conversion and culturalisation process of military technologies by exploring how former military facilities have been conversed to become important social and cultural centers and objects.

FREE SPECTRUM: WAVES AND ELECTROMAGNETIC POLITICS: This field looks at electromagnetic spectrum as a socio-political space, investigating political practices in spectrum and bringing up debate on “free waves” and “open spectrum”. The spectrum is regulated and divided: for commercial use, military, radio amateurs, etc., yet wireless community networks continue to explore the exempt part of the spectrum, making small parts of the spectrum available for all.

TECHNOLOGY MYTH, ARTISTIC INTERPRETATIONS AND CONTEMPORARY GHOST STORIES: Electromagnetic fields have become the ghosts of today - invisible and surrounding us, opening up the boundaries of our imagination and bringing technology myths to life. This topic explores the place of those myths and stories in the life of modern society.

Scientific editorial board:

Armin Medosch - PhD., Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.
Rasa Smite - PhD., Riga Stradina University; researcher at MPLab of Liepaja University; director of the RIXC, The Center for New Media Culture, Riga, Latvia.
Inke Arns - Dr. phil., artistic director of the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV), Dortmund, Germany.
Douglas Kahn - Prof. and Head of Technocultural Studies at University of California at Davis, USA.
Andrey Smirnov - Head of the Theremin Center for Electroacoustic Music at Moscow State Conservatory, Russia.
Florian Dombois - Prof. and Head of the Institute for Transdisciplinarity (Y) at Berne University of the Arts, Switzerland.
Atau Tanaka - Prof., Culture Lab of Newcastle University, UK.

“The project development over the last four months has been intense and varied, and the months of March and April hold the exhibitions and performances of five related works on the theme of navigation technologies, environment and sound. The central work is the Satellite Sounders, small portable instruments for hearing the live data from the GPS satellite network. These can be tried out by walking along the canals around NIMk and are part of the upcoming Territorial Phantom exhibition there. The two installation pieces, Dead Reckoning and Navigating by Circles present spaces of intuitive navigation in sound and video, in Amsterdam and Den Haag.”

March 20, 2008 7 -10 pm :: lecture at symposium on Eco-Visualisation organised by at Mediamatic in Amsterdam.

March 22 - April 28, 2008 :: Opening: March 22, 5 pm - Navigating by Circles: video and sound installation in the Eco-Visualisation exhibition curated by Tiffany Holmes and Hicham Khalidi at Gallery in Den Haag

March 29 - May 12, 2008 :: Opening March 28, 5 pm - Satelllite Sounders and Dead Reckoning: sonic walk and sound installation in the Territorial Phantom exhibition at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam.

April 2, 2008; 8:30 - Sun Running: performance at STEIM in Amsterdam
April 2, 2008 - Sun Run Sun: presentation at Test_Lab Topologies, V2_Insitute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam.

April 15, 2008 - Navigating the Space of the Future: symposium around the project Sun Run Sun, including presentation by David Dunn, at Netherlands Media Art Institute (montevideo) in Amsterdam.

I met David in 2006 at Mutek, and got to know him and his work through his excellent curation of our Vague Terrain issue on locative media. David’s creative practice is quite varied, and perusal of his recent work reveals interests in improv performance, modified timepieces and insect orchestras.

A shorter version of this interview was previously published on View on Canadian Art.

Your Warbike project (pictured above) takes the commonplace activity of cycling through the city and monitors telecommunications signals to transform the modified-bicycle into an instrument. Could you talk about the history of this project and how it relates to your perception of sound and the city?

It’s funny, to call cycling “commonplace” is a pretty urban perspective, and specific to cities with a vibrant downtown. I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto where bicycles certainly weren’t something that were commonplace outside of recreation and a mode of transportation for children. One of the interesting things I think about this project - and other bike projects - is that it gets people on bikes who wouldn’t normally be there. The downside, of course, is that some people have spent too long off a bike to feel comfortable trying the artwork. It doesn’t do much good to say, “Don’t worry, it’s just like riding a bike”.

The project started as an experiment exploring wardriving software when I had just acquired a wireless network card in 2003. A popular wardriving software for some reason had MIDI options in the preferences, which is kind of bizarre for a networking program. I had written a simple program to turn that MIDI data into sound and would ride to and from my school building with my laptop on and the speakers up in my backpack.

What I found was that on my rides, my perception of the space had changed. This was a route that I took several times a day, so I thought I understood the spaces. But the backpack was screaming at me something different, that there was something else going on here that I couldn’t perceive.

The experience of hearing aspects of a space, or learning something about them in a tangible sense, is far more powerful than being told explicitly, which is an abstract way of knowing something and removed from direct perception through one’s own senses.

The Warbike was my effort to share that experience with people. I thought that my changing relationship to the space was fascinating, and I’d hoped that others’ experiences would be as well.

Well, on the topic of other peoples experience, how did you find that people responded to the project at the Sound Cycles and Mobile City exhibition at Interacess? I imagine an artwork that you take for a ride may have proven a bit challenging for some people.

Well, interaction is an interesting challenge. Just because you as an artis find an activity that is incredibly fun, doesn’t mean that the public will react in the same way. The hardest hurdle is just making people feel comfortable to interact with the work. Artists and children are already accustomed to touching interactive art, but others aren’t. We’re raised to do things we have permission for, and it’s hard to convince people that they have permission to touch something.

The second is making sure that the audience is comfortable with the method of interaction. Bikes, it turns out, are not one of the comfortable methods. If the Warbike was exhibited in the country, maybe people would be more comfortable with it. But there aren’t many networks on country roads, so the Warbike is fundamentally an urban cycling project (Although, come to think of it, using it in areas with fewer networks is a little more rewarding. You do feel like you’re discovering something secret). Many people are afraid to bike in the city (and for good reason!).

There wasn’t a lack of people wanting to ride it, but there definitely was a type of person who was just happy knowing what it did without feeling the need to ride it. Some were uncomfortable cycling, others it seemed just didn’t think they would get more out of the work by experiencing it. You can’t win ‘em all.

[david mccallum performs i swallow]

I know that you frequently work in software environments like Max/MSP and Pure Data. How has being fluent with code affected how you address technology in your work?

I wish that I were fluent! I think that what I do is more hacking than programming: I use my limited skill set to bash other people’s tools into submission for my own purposes.

I’m a strong believer in the craft of new media. Contemporary art seems to have divorced itself from the artisan history of the arts, and I don’t think that because the tools in new media are abstract that it’s somehow a field where it’s okay that the designers are also not craftspeople. There are aspects of a medium that you can only understand by experience. If you don’t understand the medium, the work itself risks being naiïve. This isn’t guaranteed, but the risk is higher. I also think in some sense all artwork, despite the content, is also a comment on the form and medium - and how can you comment on something you don’t really understand?

You also run the risk of been seduced by aspects of the tool. Early new media was fascinated with technology and the technology became the end, and not just the means. It was an important process to go through, but I’m certainly glad we’ve outgrown that. Now that we have a better understanding of technology we can hopefully divorce ourselves from the fetishism and appreciate it as what it is: a tool. Not understanding the medium runs a dangerous risk of falling into the gee-whizardry of technology. I’ve seen too many middle-aged artists making astoundingly boring art works exploring virtual reality and computer-rendered spaces. The sooner that artists stop using Second Life, the better.

By all this of course I also mean to say that working with technology is fun! I learn much more about myself and the work by working through the problems myself.

[david mccallum, personal art noise thing (PANT), 2005]

I’m a bit less weary of virtual worlds than you are, but I certainly agree that “craft” is something to strive towards in any medium. That said, could you perhaps point out a few examples of media artists whose engagement with technology falls into line with your ideals? What are some artists an projects that have directly informed your work?

I’ll try… People like Garnet Hertz, David Rokeby, Mark Böhlen, Leah Buchley, Ken Gregory, Jim Ruxton, Darsha Hewitt and Stephanie Brodeur, Rob Cruickshank, just to name a few. These artists make beautiful work that also comments on the medium of technology and our relationship to it, which I think is tough to do if you don’t engage the medium

I used to say that a conceptual artist is someone who doesn’t understand the medium that they work in. Now I’m starting to wonder if conceptual artists actual believe that conceptual art is itself a medium, which is kind of terrifying; even philosophers need to learn to write. [posted by Greg Smith on Serial Consign]

Browsing the Synapse Database — which is searchable by “Individuals”, “Interests”, “Projects / Events / Publications,” “Organizations” and “Gallery” — I came across Nigel Helyer’s Sonic Landscapes R + D project:

From June 1999 until September 2001, Helyer worked as an Artist in Residence at Lake Technology in Sydney, developing the Sonic Landscapes Virtual Audio Reality system … The salient feature of the Sonic Landscapes project is the juxtaposition of a fictive (but very convincing) 3D immersive sound-scape, accurately positioned by cartographic software, upon a physical terrain. The effect is somewhat akin to Murray Schafer’s concept of ‘Schitzophonia’, where, by the simple act of recording, sound is split from its original physical context and projected into another context.

However within a Sonic Landscapes experience we are not simply dealing with the disembodied voices of popular music reproduced and re-contextualised via a stereo-sytem! Here we are engaging with a seemingly live sonic organism that is responsive to our presence, our orientation and the traces of our wanderings, and which appears un-cannily embedded in the site itself.

The prototype Sonic Landscapes Unit is capable of operating with a 2cm positional accuracy when employing differential GPS (Global Satellite Positioning) and with a one degree accuracy for rotational head orientation, which, when combined with Lake’’s headphones delivered virtual speaker array, provides a highly realistic immersive audio environment. Tracking technology for the Sonic Landscapes project has been provided throughout by the SNAP Lab of the University of New South Wales under the guidance of Professor Chris Rizos. Future collaborative projects are currently underway between the Artist and UNSW c.f. “Audio Nomad”.The choice of a prototype test site for the project was St Stephens graveyard in Newtown; one of Sydney’s oldest burial grounds, which provided an ideal pedestrian environment, rich in historical material and interesting physical structures.

SOINU MAPA started thanks to a collection of recordings made by Luz Maria Sanchez in 2001. During a residence at Arteleku, this mexican sound artist did dozens of field recordings on different geographical locations of the basque country, from south to north, east to west.

This collection was archived on Arteleku mediateque, ready to be used by any artist, as Luz Maria wrote on the documentation.
Three years later, Audiolab created SOINU MAPA, in order to present in public all this collection and create a even bigger archive based on the same philosophy.

Paralelly, this collection give birth to a new project. In late 2005 the “brother” project RE:MAPA invited some basque sound artists and musicians to use this recordings and create new sound pieces, reinterpretations of the original archives (check re:mapa section).

SOINU MAPA is a project of Audiolab, the sound department of Arteleku contemporary art center from Donostia-San Sebastien. SOINU MAPA has been possible thanks to the help and support of Luz Maria Sanchez and Enrike Hurtado. [via]

To travel on a train, watch the landscape and gain an audio experience. This is the basic concept of what we propose. In the first phase, we will work with sound artists to develop the audio experience, developing and testing the basic technology needed for execution, and delivering a final working concept that can be implemented on a train ride.

The LocoSound team is: ALAIN BELLET (Graphic & Interaction Designer), Leader of the project. Works in Zurich as Freelance Designer and is teaching since 2003 as regular Professor at the University of Art and Design, Lausanne (écal) in the Media&Interaction Design Department.

IRIS RENNERT (Sound Designer) Works in the sound design and scenography field. She recently worked for the sound design of the swiss Pavillon at the World Exhibition in Aichi, Japan.

FABIEN GIRARDIN (Software Engineer) Doing his Ph.D. thesis on collaborative work in the context of mobile and ubiquitous environments at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He worked on a lot of geo-localised projects.

HANSJAKOB FEHR (Graphic & Interaction Designer) Works as Grafic Designer between Berlin and Zurich and is also developing interactive installations (former Electronician). He worked on the project “signalpain” during expo.02

OLIVER FRIEDLI (Pianist, Composer & Coder) Independent musician, composer and sound designer, he also works for the University of Art in Bern as a lecturer in sound design and media integration. He is also a Max/MSP specialist.

Bioluster is a large-scale tactile interface that offers simple, yet not immediately obvious, methods of triggering different series of sound samples. This unique interface, created with RFID & Flash technology, is paired with materials and shapes that leave the audience with a tugging sense of unwarranted nostalgia for a system that has never existed. This project has grown out of Trainor’s long use and exploration of RFID as an artistic medium to examine our changing physical relationship to computing.

Bioluster premiered on December 8, 2007 at Strange Things People Do With Electricity, an art exhibition at 911 Media Arts Center curated by Dorkbot/Seattle.

Accelerator Group is a variable group of artists, programmers, choreographers and others who collaborate to create performances, artistic prototypes, installations, and other works that explore emerging technologies in the context of material interfaces and components. Members reside in Seattle and New York with distance collaboration a key element of their creative process. Current experiments include using Flickr as a communication and documentation tool.

SignalPlay is an interactive installation that employs wireless sensors to control a spatialized sound environment, allowing participants to explore a distributed collaborative system. Unexceptional.net is a web-based application for visualizing and sonifying network, database and player information of a multi-modal online role-playing game. Sonic Panoramas utilizes image sonification, immersive projection and camera-based machine vision to allow users to create an interactive musical experience from panoramic landscape imagery. Datascape is a periscope-like system for the visualization of geographic information. This system allows users to explore a 3D topography and musical soundtrack that are generated from geospatial information such as marketing demographics.

In addressing the impacts of digital technologies on culture, these artworks employ the very technologies being investigated. Through the production and exhibition of this work, I hope to engage the public with these important issues and to help shape the ways that technological methodology embeds itself in our world and in our daily experience.