Transition Soundings — an interactive public sound art sculpture by David Birchfield, David Lorig, Kelly Phillips, and Assegid Kidané — is a free standing, fully self contained outdoor installation. Located at a bus stop in Tempe, Arizona, the structure has the appearance of a large transit map with hubs and paths connecting locations across its surface. However, this stylized ‘map’ is actually a large network of sensors and speakers that trace paths in sound across the surface of the wall. As users move and gesture in front of the piece, a network of proximity sensors initiates sonic events that wash across the surface in a fashion that references ripples across the surface of water. Sound events propagate through the network in a way that mimics movement of traffic, ideas, currents, and connections in the networks of our lives. Continue reading

The Olympics are not simply a matter of fun and games. They are a multi-national media spectacle that–as we’ve seen in recent protests–can arouse and galvanize political action. The event’s organizers pitch it as a zone outside of politics, but of course issues of national identity, human rights, autonomy, economic might, and foreign policy all coalesce around the Olympics. While much of the current attention to these matters is directed at Beijing, groups in Montreal and London are already forming to address the impact that the arrival of the famous torch (ceremoniously relayed in a model invented by the Nazis to promote a strong image of the Third Reich around the 1936 Berlin games) will have upon local communities. Continue reading

Rust Belt / Bayou by Julia Christensen [Needs Flash Player and Speakers] - Rust Belt / Bayou is an aural exploration of two cities: Cleveland, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. For the past several years, Christensen’s artistic practice has been based in extensive travel throughout the United States, surveying the ways in which communities are changing in the shadow of corporate real estate development.

During these travels, she has often been struck by the similarities between Cleveland, a city of the Rust Belt, and New Orleans, a city of the bayou. Both cities dwell on the shores of bodies of water with global reach: Cleveland on Lake Erie, New Orleans on the Mississippi River. Continue reading

SoundWalk2008 - Call for Artists: Artists who utilize, in any manner, sound in their work are invited to submit to the Fifth Annual SoundWalk event to be held in Long Beach CA on September 20, 2008. Please go here for submission requirements and further information. Deadline: July 1, 2008.

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. Continue reading

Yolande Harris invites you to the events that mark the culmination of her artist residence project Sun Run Sun: Sonic Navigations at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in collaboration with STEIM in Amsterdam.

“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.” Continue reading

Harmony in the Age of Noise :: April 23 - August 10, 2008 :: Opening: April 23; 4:00-5:30 pm :: Tisch Library Rooftop, Tufts University, Medford, MA.

Close your eyes and listen. It is the Age of Noise: hums, buzzes, whines, traffic, ventilation systems, disc drives, cell phones, sirens, aircraft, muzak, televisions, radios, car alarms, leaf blowers, jack hammers, compressors — biproducts of an overheated visual culture bombard us endlessly. It’s no surprise that many people withdraw from our public hearing space and retreat into iPods or buildings with windows that don’t open. Harmony in the Age of Noise intends to empower the sense of hearing and deconstruct this sea of noise. In transforming this barrage of sounds into information about the way we live, the piece attempts to restore harmony and balance to the senses. Continue reading

Sound Walks explores some of the possibilities of Stanza’s Soundcities. It uses the Soundcities database through the openly distributed XML-file. Choose the city you want to visit: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bergen, Bilbao, Bristol, Cork, Dresden, Ljubljana, London, Los Angeles, Napoli, Paris, Rotterdam, Salzburg, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, or Tokyo.

Soundcities is an online open source database of city sounds from around the world, that can be listened to, used in performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks. Initially all of the sounds were by Stanza, but you can now contribute your own found sounds. This is was the first online open source found sound database. First version 2003.

Synapse: Collaboration between the arts and sciences has the potential to create new knowledge, ideas and processes beneficial to both fields. Artists and scientists approach creativity, exploration and research in different ways and from different perspectives; when working together they open up new ways of seeing, experiencing and interpreting the world around us. For the past decade, the Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT) has provided opportunities for artists and scientists to work together. Through Synapse, and in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts, ANAT offers residencies, the Synapse Database and now ANAT is pleased to announce its latest initiative: a moderated elist discussion on contemporary art and science collaborations in fields including bioart, artificial intelligence, robotics, climate change and space, amongst others. You can subscribe here. Continue reading

Apropos the Bat House Project I posted on Networked Performance yesterday, here’s Alvin Lucier’s Vespers. It was published on a Sonic Arts Union LP (Electric Sound, Mainstream) in 1971. In the Liner Notes, Lucier wrote:

“I would like to pay my respects to all living creatures who inhabit dark places and who, over the years, have developed the art of echolocation (sounds sent out into an environment returning as messengers with information as to shape, size and substance of the environment and the objects in it). I am envious of the astonishing acuity of such creatures — dolphins, certain species of nocturnal birds, and bats, particularly those of the family Vespertilionidae, the common bat of Europe and North America. Continue reading

SOINU MAPA is an open collaborative project. Based on “phonography” or the art of recording environmental sounds, our aim is to show, share and exchange field recordings made in the Basque Country. Here, you will find more than 100 sound recordings, that tell us a little bit more about the different sound realities of the Basque country. If you also like to record sounds and want to share your work with us, just contact us and participate! In order to distribute them freely, all recordings are published under Creative Commons license.

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. Continue reading