This Month’s Performers: Set 1 - Dan Iglesia - Video Set 1 - Radio Wonderland (Joshua Fried) - Music :: Set 2 - Chika - Video Set 2 - Lilt Marathon - Music :: Set 3 - Richard Garet - Video :: Set 3 - WvS - Music

{R}ake is a performance series of alternative and collaborative electro-acoustic music and video. Performances range from pure
improvisation to more structured pieces, with video-artists and musicians working together in exploratory ways.

This month features the “electro” side of electro-acoustic music. Dan Iglesia performs experimental live video with Radio Wonderland/Joshua Fried, who creates electronic music with a laptop and multitude of eclectic devices; Chika creates her audio-reactive, illustrative video with the laptop/electronics duo Lilt Marathon; and Richard Garet creates his self-generated, sometimes aggressive, sometimes environmental video with the abstract electronic audio of WvS.

Monkey Town serves dinner during the show, so come hungry. Seating is limited — It’s a good idea to make reservations on their website.

PulseCode is still under development and more information and examples will follow. In the meantime, if you are interested, you can download an alpha version here. PulseCode currently runs on Mac OS X 10.4 and later, but should be relatively easy to port to other platforms. It is released under the GPL. If you have any questions or suggestions, you can send mail to: fokke [at] pulsecode.org.

As part of an ongoing series of recordings of unusual sounds of the Venice lagoon, these tracks were made on 29th april 2008 at 2100 in a night-depot of boats of the public transport service at “Riva dei Schiavoni”, not far from San Marco square.

You can listen here: http://www.mediateletipos.net/archives/7531 Headphones are recommended. Recorded 24/96, with binaural stereo mic.

“Sapientum super acquis” is the title attribuited to the “Magistrato alle acque” of the Serenissima Venetian Republic, an organ instituited on 1501 by the “Council of ten”, that had the job of keeping safe the delicate natural/artificial balance of the lagoon, and looking after the “health” of the water.

Today the water is mostly polluted because of Porto Marghera, one of the biggest industrial areas in the whole Europe.
The burbling of water provides a thick scrim through which are heard industrial noise, conversations, the creak of waterborne structures, footsteps and more. It’s the perfect background music for an afternoon spent reading a China Miéville novel, the sort of tale in which the dank urban setting exists thanks to a tentative compromise with the fetid mote that surrounds it.
Thanks to Enrico Coniglio and http://disquiet.com/ The track was originally posted at touchmusic.org.uk.

Ringing Rocks Park, PA

Doleros is an 8-channel surround sound installation that reconstructs the experience of audio tourism at Ringing Rocks Park, a popular boulder field in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Featuring the largest diabase (dolerite) deposit in North America, Ringing Rocks Park offers visitors the opportunity to explore the sonic qualities of the geologic detritus, which produces different ringing qualities when struck. Visitors wander among these boulders and igneous rocks with hammers as they seek out the best sounding and compare and share their discoveries. Unlike other sites of audio-tourism – the Echo Canyon in Utah, the Ear of Dionysus Cave in Sicily, or the “stalacpipe” organ in the Luray Cavern, Virginia – the exploration of the diabase deposits is a collective sound-making activity.

The audio installation at Diapason echoes the experience at Ringing Rocks Park; the surround sound consists of layered field recordings that recreate the actual physical space, and small metal constructions dispersed throughout the room represent and acknowledge the uniqueness of the rocks’ sounds by resonating independently through individually wired speakers. The result is as much an engulfing and cinematic auditory experience as a lively and playful exploration of sound. In addition to his exhibition at Diapason, Cluett will be leading an outing to Ringing Rocks as part of the 2008 Movement Research Festival. More information at: http://www.movementresearch.org

Seth Cluett (b. 1976, Troy, NY) is a composer and visual artist whose work includes photography, drawing, video, sound installation, concert music, performance, and theoretical writing. His pieces are an exploration of the role of sound in everyday life. Operating at the boundary between the auditory and the other senses, his work engages sound’s ability to be both collectively shared and distinctly personal. Many of his pieces investigate the acoustic signature of specific locations, in which sound is experienced as an activity (audio tourism) or as a geologic process.
Seth’s work has been shown/performed at the 10th Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Palais de Tokyo Museum, Théatre sur le Pavé, and GRM in Paris; the ICA, Mobius Artist Space, MassArt/nonpod in Boston; WPS1/MoMA, Issue Project Room, The Kitchen, Diapason, Engine 27, Tonic, and The Knitting Factory in New York; the Betty Rymer Gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago, Elastic Arts, Heaven, Artemisia, and Deadtech Galleries in Chicago; as well as the Deep Listening Space in Kingston, NY amongst others. His work is documented on Errant Bodies Press, Sedimental, Crank Satori, BoxMedia, and Wavelet Records. He has published articles for The Open Space Magazine, Leonardo Music Journal, 306090, Earshot, and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. For more information see http://www.onelonelypixel.org

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia is a non-profit performance and exhibition space that invites the public, artists and composers to engage with contemporary music and sound practices. Established in 2001 by composer Michael J. Schumacher, Diapason has built on his efforts at Studio Five Beekman, a sound gallery he founded in1996. With two high-quality multichannel sound systems Diapason’s listening environment draws a regular audience, and Diapason continues to be the sole venue in New York City (and one of few internationally) that is dedicated to both presenting multichannel sound installations and providing space for composers and sound artists to experiment, exhibit and perform.

On June 13 2008, Open Ear will host a free one night only event of experimental work in the ATRiuM Theatre at the University of Glamorgan’s newly built ATRiuM, Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries, Cardiff, Wales. Curated by Garrett Lynch the event will present a series of interdisciplinary performances and projections by various artists. Sound and visual artists / groups working across the areas of art, music, media and new technologies within live performance / projected contexts are invited to contribute to this event under an open theme.

What does this mean?

There is no imposed theme instead we want to present a selection of time-based work by artists based on their themes, their continuing research, as an event which will explore the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of audio-visual arts. Proposed performances / projected works can be new or pre-existing works, improvised, dynamically generated (such as software art) or pre-composed, abstract or figurative, individual or collaborative, experimental, site specific and much, much more. All proposals are required to be:

1. time-based (remember this is a audience based event in a theatre)
2. and either audio-visual, audio only or visual only work (selection preference will be given to works which are audio-visual)

Works should aim to be a maximum of 30 minutes each however this is flexible.

As the event is free we are unable to offer individual payment to artists however we will provide access to reasonable requests for equipment (please include a list of requirements in your proposal and we will attempt to cater for this) at the venue and of course the opportunity to present work in one of Cardiff’s newest cutting edge venues.

Proposals should take the form of a word / pdf / rtf / txt document (two pages maximum) with:

1. A description of the work (500 words maximum).
2. Images to give us an idea of the proposed work.
3. A full list of required equipment (please note that the event will host several performers so complex configurations involving lengthy set-up times will not be catered for).
4. Urls to previous examples of work online (videos or sound files online are particularly useful).
5. A short bio (200 words maximum).
6. Artist(s) / group / performer(s) name and full contact details.

Please email proposals as compressed attachments (.zip / .dmg / .sit / .sitx / tar.gz / .tgz) to Garrett Lynch (garrett [at] asquare dot org) no later than 12pm (GMT), Friday 16/05/08.

To get an idea of the type of events we organise please see our website (http://openear.wordpress.com/) for full details of all past events and our YouTube account for videos of pasts events.

:: The Venue ::

The University of Glamorgan’s newly built ATRiuM in Cardiff, Wales opened in 2007 and houses the Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries which comprises of Art & Design, Media & Communication and Drama & Music. Situated in central Cardiff, Wales, this specially-designed building contains cutting edge technology and facilities including industry-standard studios, a theatre and cinema.

Address: ATRiuM Theatre, Adam Street, Cardiff, Wales, CF24 2FN. Detailed information on how to get here can be found on the university website.

Open Ear, audio-visual events and performances are supported by The University of Glamorgan, ATRiuM, Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries, Cardiff, Wales.

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. Both cities have seen the boom and bust of industry and population throughout their histories – past and present. Cleveland and New Orleans look remarkably different, but Christensen has often noticed that they have sounds in common: industry, birds, water, tourists. Rust Belt / Bayou offers an interactive document of aural snapshots from recent trips to both New Orleans and Cleveland.

Rust Belt / Bayou 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

Julia Christensen is an artist whose work treads on the thin line between art and research. She also likes to tread on most of the thin lines between various media, between the electronic and the non-electronic, and between audience and performer. Julia is the author of Big Box Reuse (MIT Press, Fall 2008), a book about how communities are renovating abandoned Wal-Mart and K-Mart structures for creative new uses. Her photography, sound work, and electronic installations have shown recently at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Lincoln Center in New York City, and the DUMBO Art Center in Brooklyn, among other venues. Julia lectures widely about land use, art, music, and interdisciplinary research. She likes hearing stories, playing with her rock band in Troy, traveling in the depths of the United States, and thinking about the future.

…Electromagnetic fields are biologically active. Emitting from every electronic device, electromagnetic fields affect our body and the living nature. They interact with the natural emissions and intersect the boundaries of our planet. Invisible and omnipresent, electromagnetic fields have become ghosts of the modern world…

Entitled SPECTROPIA, this year’s festival - organised by RIXC - continues artistic explorations within the invisible space of electromagnetic spectrum surrounding us. The festival programme will feature 3-day SPECTROPIA exhibition with live events, workshops and artists presentations. It will be accompanied by international conference, performances, film and video screenings.

CALL for Proposals (for 3-day exhibition with live events): There are no restrictions, however, we would prefer work which is in process/ performative/ in action, requires artist’s assistance and possibly visitor’s participation/ action though the work can be demonstrated as well. Artists who think that their work fits the main theme of “spectropia”, are invited send a brief description of the work plus Links, and other relevant information,to: rixc [at] @rixc.lv and/or to Rasa Smite rasa [at] rixc.lv.

DEADLINE: April 21, 2008

RIXC, Centre for New Media Culture
11. Novembra krastmala 35-201
Riga, LV 1050
LATVIA

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.

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/

SoundNetwork will be creating a brand new kind of social space close to the centre of the festival where artists and visitors alike can meet, relax and experience sonic art. Our cafe will be an exhibition and an exhibit. Where ever you sit to drink your coffee, eat your cake, and talk there will be access to audio work (by means of headphone outlets inserted into the furniture) or a local network that allows you to experience and interact with sonic art work on your own laptop. In addition there will be live performances at our Binary Jam event showcasing some of the best emerging talent in live sound art and experimental music.

SoundNetwork are inviting submissions of stereo (and mono) audio work to be shown as part of The Comfort of Strangers headphone exhibition. With respect to the theme of the festival, The Social, we are only seeking work created by collectives, groups, ensembles or any other kinds of collaborations from anywhere around the world. We especially welcome submissions from registered members of the network and would encourage you to register with us on our website. Work made by individuals will not be accepted for this exhibition.