[Image: Icon attached to the railing] Touched Echo, a performative installation by Markus Kison, can be experienced at Brühlsche Terrasse, Dresden until October 31, 2008. The installation takes visitors back to the night of February 13, 1945 when Dresden’s Old Town was almost completely destroyed.

An icon on the balustrade instructs participants to adopt a contemplative position - one must lay ones elbows onto the balustrade, cover ones ears, and look at the Old Town. While in this position, they hear the sounds of bombers and explosions, which travel through their arms directly into their inner ears via bone conduction. Continue reading

Programmable Media II: Networked Music, a one-day symposium examining the current and future possibilities of network-enabled music, will be held on April 11, 2008 at Pace University, NYC. The symposium is free and open to the public, and will include artist presentations and live performances.

Based on the rapidly expanding archive of music/sound experiments to be found on Networked Music Review and the fifteen short works recently commissioned for it, the symposium aims to stimulate critical and far-ranging discussion on emerging music and sound art practice.

To register, email turbulence at turbulence dot org with “Programmable Media II” as the subject. Continue reading

La Cellule d’Intervention Metamkine is an open-ended group including musicians and filmmakers researching the relationship between image and sound. Through the magic of mirrors, multiple projectors and highly ingenious live on stage editing, Metamkine produces and directs a new film with each of their performances. Working around a core narrative, they spill eddies of impromptu vignettes, accompanied by a live soundtrack of tape fragments and ancient synthesiser sounds. Jérôme Noetinger (electroacoustics), Christophe Auger (projectors 16mm), and Xavier Quérel (projectors 16mm) — who have worked together for ten years — have succeeded in pushing the boundaries of film and soundtrack into the realm of live performance. 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

The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop, a project of The Tech Museum of Innovation, is a place to design and prototype exhibits online, using the web and Second Life. You can propose an idea, and develop it with other creative thinkers and experts from around the world. Anyone can join and all contributions are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

The best projects will be eligible for prizes and will be co-developed as physical exhibits at The Tech Museum in conjunction with its upcoming Art, Film and Music exhibition that will open June 4, 2008. Here is a list of all of the projects already underway, and two musical ones: Continue reading

On January 29, 2008, WNYC’s RadioLab focused on Départs, David Lang’s composition for Salle des Departs — where families go to say goodbye to their loved ones at Hospital Raymond Poincare in Garches, France. This unique space was designed by Italian artist Ettore Spalletti in 2003; it also contains a musical soundcape by British artist Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud), which you can listen to at the end of this blog. Continue reading