There will be a fundraiser on Saturday night, 6 pm to midnight, at Castle Clinton in Battery Park ($10 donation). Everyone is invited!

FIGMENT is a celebration of creative culture from June 27-29, 2008 on Governors Island in New York Harbor. It provides an open forum for artists, helps build a creative community, and fosters participatory and public art. A broad spectrum of arts are represented, including sculpture, performance, music, installation, dance, costuming and activities. Figment is free and open to the public. Everyone can participate — with whatever inspires them! There will be almost every conceivable option. Come, engage, build, paint, sing, experience, think, wonder, listen, create, dance, wander: In short, the public can participate in a vast array of imaginative experiences that over 200 artists of FIGMENT have conceived — or bring their own games, costumes, activities, or small works of art.

FIGMENT has moved art from the pedestal onto the front lawn for everyone to enjoy, with over 200 artists to celebrate creative culture and non-commercial art with the public.

• Among the projects planned for this event are:

Starlight on the Island—A series of solar panel powered, spherical steel sculptures that will absorb sunlight to light the island at night.

• The Art of Skateboarding, an art installation and talk with homemade ramps constructed of recycled materials.

• “Circus Sideshow”, an interactive art installation and performance

• The Rose Petal Pool, children of all ages can interact with this rich sensory experience (multi-media sound installation)

• Maroguzcaju Theater Puppet Show, “Silencio, Silencio!,” about finding happiness in life’s details

• “Planetary Dance,” participatory rhythmic circular dance

And many many other events and performances, including a lecture schedule which includes discussions on Interactive and Participatory Art.

FIGMENT 2008 will also offer a range of offerings by video and film artists sharing both their personal and collective expressions—often influenced by Governors Island— including the documentation of the construction of an elaborate reclaimed wood sculpture and one NY native’s 1979 marriage in the island’s Trinity Church.

Other FIGMENT art installations will incorporate such innovative materials and resources as telescopes, a teepee, 2,000 silver colored flags, and a pair of five-foot tall wooden lips! The majority of sculptures and art pieces are touchable and climbable—resulting in much art that is interactive and child-friendly.

The work of both emerging and established choreographers will be featured as part of the many dance performances taking place throughout the 3-day event. Similarly, FIGMENT 2008 will have a range of performance art offerings, including such original and unusual unions as the merging of creative writing with art and improvisational drama exercises with therapeutic movement, sound, and role-play. In addition, visitors to the island can participate in the creation of pop-trash poetry done karaoke style, Ukrainian body painting, private readings at the “Poetry Brothel,” and the “intrepid” use of cameras to record various urban explorations.

The musical offerings of FIGMENT 2008 are extensive, as well as exceptional in their variety and innovation. They range from boogie and classic rock to futuristic Brooklyn hip-hop to the “healing” sounds of electric keyboards to traditional bawdy German songs about murder, madness and mayhem—to the accompaniment of an organ grinder! Many of the performances are also representative of the collaborative spirit of multiple disciplines working together: a sound installation incorporating restaurant kitchen recordings, live electric flute accompanied by modern dancers, a mix of acoustic and electronic dance music resulting from remixes of Rwandan mass and folktronica.

Finally, humor permeates many of the offerings, as probably best represented by the Celtic vocalist who will be singing her heartfelt songs about love, loss and indigestion.

For more information on the highly interactive and collaborative art exhibits, performances, music and dance events, and workshops encompassing all media, go to http://figmentnyc.org/2008/participate.html or contact Rosemary Siciliano :: rosemary [at] FIGMENTnyc.org :: 207.332.9008

This multimedia installation by the group Sonom is a reinterpretation of the “Faraphonía de los Cuatro Elementos” (roughly translatable as “’Lighthouse-phony’ of the Four Elements”). It springs from the idea of a lighthouse as a symbol that connects nature’s four elements: from land, it emits light, which travels through the air and reaches the sea.

In “Farophonía de los Cuatro Elementos”, Sonom creates an audiovisual symphony that amplifies the perception of the natural elements that converge around lighthouses. Farophonía is synthesised through the creation of a hypnotic atmosphere based on audiovisual synaesthesia, produced through the Faróphono and a Videofaro (Video-lighthouse).

By building the Videofaro, Sonom endows the lighthouse with the autonomy to participate in artificially reconstructing the sensations and the atmosphere that are generated in a lighthouse’s natural environment. The Faróphono, a new kind of modular analogue synthesiser, synchronises the
Videofaro’s rotation rhythm and makes it possible to modify the installation at the level of sound.

and also : Edwin Van der Heide / Mark Fell & more
http://www.sonar.es/2008/eng/multimedia_rama_2k8.cfm

Pamela Z Productions presents Pamela Z in the San Francisco premiere of The Pendulum, a solo multi-media performance work exploring binaries of “Yes and No” through voice, electronics, projected video and manipulation of objects. Using a minimal set including dangling objects, and two channels of projected video, Ms. Z will perform a series of art songs and text-sound pieces with live voice, real-time processing, sampled voices and sounds and custom MIDI controllers, in the intimate performance space of the Royce Gallery.

About the inspiration for the work, the artist says:

“When I was growing up, my mother often wrote long lists of questions about things that concerned her. She would then dangle a small object -such as a needle, key, or trinket- on a thread and divine yes or no answers from the direction of its swinging - systematically writing the answers next to each question. Now in her advanced years, I have found that she amassed a great deal of documentation of her consultations with the pendulum for answers to questions both monumental and insignificant. A few years ago, while helping her to move, I discovered veritable reams of such pages- hand-written and typed. These papers chronicle a portion family history - albeit through my mother’s rather distressed and confused filter.”

Some of the language from these pages finds its way into The Pendulum as a mesh of vocal texture throughout it’s visually rich and sonically layered segments.

Pamela Z has been making solo work for voice and electronics in San Francisco since the mid 1980s. She has also composed scores for dance, film, and new music chamber ensembles and has had audio works presented at galleries and museums worldwide. She has toured extensively throughout the US and abroad in concerts and festivals including New York’s Bang on a Can, the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds, the Venice Biennale, the Dakar Biennale, and SoundCulture. For more information visit www.pamelaz.com.

Please join us as we host an international group of scholars and practitioners who are gathering to explore the roles of narrative and mediation in art practices that engage sound as a material. The symposium will consist of three panel discussions as well as an exhibition of audio-works for portable music players made expressly for the geography, architecture, and social spaces of the Princeton University campus.

The exhibition will begin the festival on the morning of Friday, March 28th. Thirty iPods and corresponding maps will be made available for check-out from the Mendel Music Library Circulation desk in the Woolworth Center for Musical Studies. After participants have had time to explore the audio-works, opening comments and a panel comprised of artists and musicians will start the symposium. The first panel will consist of musician and sound artist William Basinski, whose melancholy minimal electronic music has achieved critical acclaim; artist Jon Brumit, whose Neighborhood Public Radio project is featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial; multimedia artist Brenda Hutchinson, who will lead sunrise and sunset bell-ringings throughout the festival; as well as sound artist Michael J. Schumacher, founder of New York’s Diapason Gallery for Sound Art.

After more time Saturday to explore the site-specific audio-works, the second panel will take up the notion of narrative as it relates to sound practices. Kristin Oppenheim’s spare and hypnotic sound installations invoke layers of personal memory, while Stephen Vitiello’s work transforms incidental atmospheric noises into mesmerizing soundscapes that alter our perception of the surrounding environment. Mendi + Keith Obadike collaborate on interdisciplinary projects investigating race, history and identity, and Thomas Levin, a curator and cultural theorist, focuses on sound technologies and issues of surveillance in media practices.

The symposium’s third and final panel will address issues of mediation in sound art. Ruben Gallo will talk about Mexican sound artist Taniel Morales’s Pirate Radio. Ed Osborn will present his kinetic and audible sound installations, while Camille Norment will discuss her artistic practice, which extends the fine arts into extra-disciplinary realms such as scientific research, city planning, and interaction design. Tianna Kennedy, program director of Brooklyn’s free103point9 transmission arts network and a participating artist in the festival, will discuss issues related to transmission, participatory practice and social sculpture.

Sonic Fragments is sponsored by the Princeton University Department of Music, The Peter B. Lewis Center for the Performing Arts, The Graduate School, The Sound Lab research group in the Department of Computer Science, The Aesthetics and Media Track in the Department of German, The Program in Media and Modernity, The Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

“In 2007 I began to learn to ride a bicycle. This for me was a choice not so much determined by reasons of pleasure but as a way of manifesting my need to literally move on with my life. Around the same time, I began to read Beckett’s famous Three Novels, and was moved in particular by “Molloy.” Bicycles are a very important metaphor in this book.” Haeyoung Kim

“To escape their lack of freedom, Beckett’s characters travel, taking with them a few private possessions, which reflect their personality. Of these emblematic items, by far the most important is the bicycle: it is a moving man-powered machine made for traveling (which can be both easy and difficult, according to the conditions prevailing); and it is also a prized possession through which an owner may express his personality. In this respect the bicycle is like the plot.” Janet Menzies

I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

A sound artist, composer, and audio engineer, Haeyoung Kim explores the territory of sounds in electronic music. Currently, under the name Bubblyfish, she has been creating 8-bit and experimental sound works. Haeyoung has collaborated with many respected sound and visual artists such as Malcolm McLaren, the founder of Sex Pistols, Hans Jochim Rodelius, and the Brussels based media art group, Lab[au]. Her work has been presented in art venues, clubs, festivals, and galleries internationally including The American Museum of the Moving Image, Pompidou Center, Kunsthalle Wien, MUTEK, LABoral, Lincoln Center Walter Reed Theater, and The New Museum.

Pekarnananana is the very first edition of a radical multimedia experience. A brand new event which gathers performers and artists from all over the world on a special time giving focus to contemporary performance practices. Initiated by the collective La Vitrine, Pekarnananana aims to hear from a broad range of nowadays artists, working within the realms of new music, sound and visual media. A fair cultural program featuring enlarged practices propitious for discoveries that sets the appointment with authentic and updated art forms. The event hands to you a ticket towards unexpected and rich performer’s stages.

PROGRAM: Prismic Generations (percussion, struck/bowed pitched instruments, computer, video) (2003); Mists (stone ensemble, noise) (1995); SXueAk (squeaky toys, saxophones, computer) (2007); Ted Coffey New Composition (2008); Kuik (voice, percussion, narrator, video, computer) (2006); Ted Coffey + Metasax&DRUMthings (2008); (dis)Locations (alto sax, tenor sax, video, computer) (2007); Mindcam (snowboard video, percussion, metasax) (2007); That which is bodiless is reflected in bodies (soprano sax, metalpercussion, computer) (2004).

Gridjam will utilize Jack Ox and David Britton’s Virtual Color Organ™, visualizing Alvin Curran’s music performed by musicians located in four distant locales but connected via next generation networking technologies. The Virtual Color Organ™ (VCO) is a 3D immersive environment in which music is visually realized in colored and image-textured shapes as it is heard. The visualization remains as a 3D graphical sculpture after the performance. The colors, images, shapes and even the motions and placement of the visualized musical shapes are governed by artist-defined metaphoric relationships, created by hand as aesthetic and symbolic qualities rather than algorithmically. The VCO visually illustrates the information contained in the music’s score, the composer’s instructions to the musicians, and the musicians contributions to the score as they improvise in reaction to each other’s performances and to the immersive visual experience. Illustrative of synesthesia and intermedia, the VCO displays the emergent properties within the meaning of music, both as information and as art.

Ox created the original drawings of deserts in California and Arizona from which the Desert Organ Stop was modeled, commissioned Richard Rodriguez to model the landscape, and created the hand drawn texture maps appearing in the virtual reality world. The VCO is capable of having multiple visual organ stops. An organ stop on a traditional organ is a voice that affects the entire keyboard of notes. An organ stop in the VCO is the 3D immersive environment in which the visualized music will exist and also the visual vocabulary applied to the musical objects.

The 21st C. Virtual Color Organ™: The VCO is a computational system for translating musical compositions into visual performance. This interactive instrument consists of three basic parts:

1. A set of systems or syntax that provides transformations from a musical vocabulary to a visual one.

2. A 3D visual environment that serves as a performance space and the visual vocabulary from which the 3D environment was modeled. This visual vocabulary consists of landscape and/or architectural images and provides the objects on which the syntax acts.

3. A software environment that serves as the engine of interaction for the first two parts.

The VCO is capable of having multiple visual organ stops. An organ stop on a traditional organ is a voice that affects the entire keyboard of notes. An organ stop in the VCO is the 3D immersive environment in which the visualized music will exist and also the visual vocabulary applied to the musical objects. GridJam will take place in the black and white, hand drawn desert sand and rock structures coming from real deserts in California and Arizona. The original drawings by Ox, from which the 3D modeling was made, serve as the basic texture maps for all of the musical object.

The Music: by Alvin Curran

Curran has come up with a plan for the musical part of this project which is inspired both by the pure fundamental “synesthetic” goals of Ox’s visual structures as by the technical and theatrical nature of the domed projection spaces, the local accoustics and “global” nature of the work itself.

The music itself will be composed using a fluid mix of structured indeterminacy, synchronized composition, spontaneous music structures, and live electronic processing. But the essence of the music - whose goal is - to become interchangeable with the images is to create another set of “images” real and sonic, which is the music-theater itself. The L-Rail communicatioins will enable the complete synchronization of the dislocated music groups and their ability to react as if in the same room together.

The choice of instruments, will become another prime visual element embedded in the rich texts of Jacks desert and VR sound-objects. The music shall be performed by the Del Sol string quartet, Anthony Braxton on the saxophone, and Curran on the disklavier (playing sounds which have been modeled in MAYA by Ox over the last four years. These sounds will be subjected to processing device filters (by Tom Erbe/Sound Hack), e.g. granulators. The 3D objects will go into perpetual movement patterns that metaphorically represent the filters’ processing patterns.

The music (gestures and typologies) itself will range from almost inaudible sparse noises to discreet isolated tones to pulsing synchronous rhythms to clouds and walls of sound. characterizing the music throughout will be the presence of recorded (natural) sounds from animals, people and machines and phenomena from around the world (which however embedded in the texture, are at the source of the visual materials generated)… Midi information from the processing devices will also serve as real-time transformers of some aspects of the visual objects.

GridJam: The Visualization

The original building blocks of GridJam come from a list of almost 200 collected sounds belonging to Curran. The sound files include John Cage reciting short phrases, Maria Calas singing a high note, animal sounds, objects like coins being tossed, and various musical sounds etc. Ox put them through a Max program creating graphs of melody and dynamics. She sorted them into 8 groups based on these simple visualizations and made 3D models reflecting melody from the front and dynamics on the top of the object. There are eight groups because there are eight landscape texture maps. Each object in a group has as the base of the texture map the same hand drawn landscape picture. The colors and materials are based on the timbre of each specific sound sample. These colors can be rather complicated gradients, often in layers. If the sound sample has a sequence of vowel sounds then the colors in the gradient will show these based on Ox’s color system, which defines how and where vowels are made in the vocal track. Other timbre colors come from the extensive list of timbre created by Ox.

The 3D objects made by Ox from Curran’s collected sound files will be able to appear in small bits of the whole, based on the duration of the played sound. If the Disklavier key remains depressed for longer than the actual sound file, the object will begin to appear for a second time, moving along the time line. The time line follows a path from the center of the virtual desert out, until it curves up and back towards the center. .Before reaching the center it will curve up again and move outward once more, repeating this pattern for as many times as necessary in order to accommodate the playing. Because of this path, time will move both horizontally and vertically.

At the end of the performance the visualization will remain and can be more thoroughly inspected as a place with moving objects in a black and white desert environment. We will also have recorded the entire multimedia experience so that it can be played back in digital environments, such as the ever more ubiquitous digital planetarium theaters.

The activities of the Network include an annual festival of environmental sound, images, and multimedia in New York City. The Network also produces forums and other events, fosters research and documentation, and enables an exchange of information, sounds, materials, and ideas within a growing community worldwide. And by providing access to the sounds of the world, the Network provides a vehicle for paying ongoing attention to the state of the world.

We are all aware that we are facing global disaster and disruption on a scale that will profoundly affect our lives and the lives of our children. It is beginning to happen already in many parts of the world. Yet, as clocked by day-to-day time, change seems to be happening so slowly that we live in a state of partial attention as we go about the details of our lives. Sometimes we ask ourselves, well, what can I do?

Here is something you can do. You can join this Network. It’s a new idea and an important one. Support us in what we’re doing, and participate. The Network can enrich your life. And by working with us in connecting people with the sounds of the world, you can help us to engage a larger and larger public in environmental awareness.

Please visit the site. Listen to a singing jaguar. Listen to the soundscapes of the Bosavi Rainforest in Papua New Guinea, Glacier Bay National Park, and Kits Beach in Vancouver. Listen to the sound of the Kauai ‘O’o, an extinct Hawaiian bird. And listen to a composition by David Monacchi based on water sounds.

Read the blog entries and go through the articles in the RESOURCES section. And become a member in the Network to participate in the blog, in an interactive listserv, and in the exchange of sounds. Become a member to benefit in many ways. And become a member to support us. Today is not too soon. Environmental actions should not be postponed.

Here is a direct link to the join-us page.

And once you’ve become a member, please participate.

Best,

Joel Chadabe
Executive Committee Member, Ear to the Earth
President, Electronic Music Foundation
joel [at] emf.org
http://www.emf.org
(518)434-4110 Voice
(518)434-0308 Fax

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Since its inception (1966), the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) has played a leading role in the development of electronic music practices in the US. It was the first publicly accessible electronic music studio on the West coast, and in the early 70s the first site where computers were used in musical performances, predating the laptop music era by over three decades.

Among its many accomplishments, it collaborated with Turbulence.org and Harvestworks on Loose Ends/ Connections (1998), a live, distributed performance that explored uses of sound in a networked collaboration with eight composer/musicians. Streamed live to the web, the performance originated from three locations: Mills College, Oakland, CA; and Harvestworks and the Morton Street Studio, New York City. A slide show of video stills from Mary Lucier’s 1998 Summer, or Grief with text from A Conversation by Allen Grossman accompanied the performance. Performances from Mills College and Harvestworks were streamed via RealAudio to the Morton Street Studio, where they were mixed with live music and sound from the performers there and streamed by RealAudio back to the web. The performers were: Pauline Oliveros, Maggi Payne, and Brenda Hutchinson - Mills College; Beth Coleman and Zeena Parkins - Harvestworks; and Scott Rosenberg, Helen Thorington, and Jesse Gilbert - Morton Street Studios. The group collaborated a second time on Feedback. [NMR blogger Peter Traub included both in Chapter III: The Aesthetics of Bits and Pieces and Other Web Based Art.]

Presented by Interpretations, 40+ year Celebration of The Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College will pay homage to the CCM’s legacy with performances by pioneers in electronic music as well as by a younger generation of composers currently working at the center. The program will feature five N.Y. premieres, including excerpts from David Behrman’s new solo work, Long Throw; Robert Ashley’s pre-recorded electro-acoustic piece, Hidden Similarities; John Bischoff’s Decay Trace (for laptop computer and small metal objects); Maggi Payne’s pre-recorded electro-acoustic piece, Distant Thunder; and a duet, Improvisation, by Pauline Oliveros (accordion) and Chris Brown (piano and electronics). The evening will also include James Fei’s The Nerve Meter (for microphones and frequency-shifted feedback).