Funding is available from free103point9 through a regrant from New York State Council on the Arts’ Electronic Media and Film Program. Grant awards will assist artists in making works available to public audiences and may include, but are not limited to: duplication of previews, screening, and exhibition copies of moving image and sound works; promotional materials including documentation and schematics of media-installation and new-media works. The rental or purchase of equipment for exhibition/distribution by individual artists is also eligible. Artists may request funding support up to a maximum amount of $10,000.

New to the Distribution Grant this year, successful applicants will also be awarded the additional opportunity to work with a project consultant. This mentor will have expertise in the grantees’ specific genre of media art.

Application Deadline: December 31, 2008

Distribution Application Seminars & Panel Dates & Locations:

New York City & Streamed at www.free103point9.org
November 13, 2008, 6:30 p.m.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
(212) 337-0680

Catskill
December 4, 2008, 6:30 p.m.
Greene County Council for the Arts
398 Main Street Catskill, NY 12414
(518) 943-3400

More information & Contact:
http://www.free103point9.org
http://www.free103point9.org/nysca
regrant@free103point9.org

Galen Joseph-Hunter, Executive Director
free103point9: transmission arts
http://www.free103point9.org

free103point9 Wave Farm
5662 Route 23
Acra, NY 12405
(518) 622-2598

New Adventures in Sound Art invites artists of all ages and nationalities to submit works on the theme Ecology: Water, Air, and/or Sound for consideration in 2009 future programming for the annual Deep Wireless, Sound Travels, and SOUNDplay festivals, produced by New Adventures in Sound Art in Toronto, Canada. Artists may submit works in one or all of the following four categories: 1) Radio Art, 2) Electroacoustic Music, 3) Videomusic and 4) Installation Art. Individual interpretations or variations on the theme - Ecology: Water, Air, Sound - are encouraged.

All submitted works must respond in some way to the theme Ecology: Water, Air, Sound in order to be considered for 2009 NAISA programming.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nTFjVm9sTQ

As well as being technically cool, the project is yet another sign of the increasing cultural prominence of data as both material and idea - in that sense, after Design and the Elastic Mind and Wired’s “Petabyte Age“, this is more of the same. But it’s also something different, it seems to me. Like any other visualisation, House of Cards doesn’t only use data, it presents a certain sense of what data is, means, and (crucially) feels like; and this is where it’s different. The dominant narrative of data visualisation at the moment is informed by the networked optimism of web 2.0, where the social sphere, and increasingly the world as a whole, is unproblematically digitised; where more is more and truth, beauty, and commercial success all are immanent in the teeming datacloud.

House of Cards, by contrast, is a manifestation of data melancholy. Data here is low res, with a sketchy looseness of detail that evokes the gaps, the un-sampled points. This data is also abject or corrupt, the scanner intentionally jammed with reflective material, a bit like the metallic chaff used to confuse missile guidance systems. These glitches are familiar devices in electronic music and video, including Kid A-era Radiohead. However here the errors are very much in the data; they have migrated out of the music, which is human, organic and more or less intact here. This disjunction between failed data and the emotional, human domain is what characterises the data melancholy; it’s illustrated beautifully at the end of House of Cards, with the “party scene” (one of Thom Yorke’s ideas for the clip), a social scene decimated into abstract clouds of points. This theme also resonates across In Rainbows, especially in the closing track, Videotape: “this is one for the good days / and I have it all here, in red blue green.” Here image data is again a sort of failed trace of an emotional reality, all that remains of “the most perfect day I’ve ever seen.”

Yorke’s other motif for House of Cards was “vaporisation,” which is clear enough in the clip; I think its most effective in the final shots of the house; the earlier clips of Yorke disintegrating seem a bit langurous, with that undulating look of Perlin noise (is it, anyone?). The house shot in particular reminded me of Brandon Morse’s Preparing for the Inevitable; Morse’s work in general has a related feel about it, though the models seem t be synthesised rather than sampled. Again the poetics is one of cool, digital melancholy, where tragedy is stripped down to a set of vectors and forces (above: Collapse, from Flickr). Here though, rather than a failure of data (sampled representation) it’s a failure of the procedural model, or perhaps failure with, or in, the model. [posted by Mitchell Whitelaw on The Teeming Void]

Full Pull 08 is a festival for electronic/experimental music and art in Malmö and the Oresund region. It presents a wide range of music, performance, workshops, sound and video art at different venues and galleries in the region. Also appearing in the festival: BJ NILSEN (SE) ; BRANDON LABELLE (US); CARSTEN STABENOW (DE); FRANCISCO LÓPEZ (ES); HILD SOFIE TAFJORD (NO); HILDUR INGVELDARDÓTTIR GUÐNADÓTTIR (IS); MARK BAIN (US); and many others…

Tickets for events are sold here.

Tad Ermitano (Philippines) is a media artist and sound designer whose single channel videos have been screened at a number of international festivals. Quartet was part of the juried exhibition at ISEA2008. You can listen here.

For When Absence Becomes Presence, the next installment of the WPA’s Experimental Media Series, curators Sonja Simonyi and Niels Van Tomme have organized an exhibition of international sound and video art at the WPA’s new headquarters. Dealing with issues of memory, meaning and representation, the exhibition is a play between two separate, but inherently linked conditions: absence and presence. Both states can be mediated through representations in images and sound; what is absent can become present and presence can be experienced through the realization that something is not there.

“We have known at least since Magritte that when we look at an image of a pipe, we are regarding not a real pipe but one that has been re-presented. The pipe as such isn’t there, it isn’t present; instead, it is depicted as being absent.” - Boris Groys

For a screening accompanying this exhibition, the curators are calling all video and sound artists to submit works that explore these notions in innovative ways. A selection of the received video and sound works will be presented along with works from the show on December 4, 2008 in the framework of a public screening. Selected artists will be notified during the last week of October. Additionally, two artists submitting the most compelling entries, as reviewed by the curators and based on overall quality and innovation, will be awarded the Kraft Prize for New Media of $750 and the WPA Experimental Media Prize of $750 on the night of the event. Please note that the WPA Prize will go to an artist living and working in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Sonja Simonyi is a film researcher, currently pursuing a PhD in Cinema Studies at NYU. Previously, she has worked at the National Gallery of Art’s film department where she organized the film series Modernity and Tradition: Film in Interwar Central Europe, which traveled to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, among other venues.

Niels Van Tomme is a curator and researcher. His exhibitions and screenings are shown internationally and investigate the sociopolitical aspects of contemporary audiovisual culture. Since fall 2007, he is the Curator and Director of Arts and Media at Provisions Library in Washington, DC.

DOWNLOAD FULL CALL FOR ENTRIES AND ENTRY FORM HERE: For more information please call the WPA office at (+1) 202.234.7103.

Guy Bar Amotz, Bunny Rabbit & Black Cracker, Nathalie Bruys, Heidi Happy, Kim Hiorthøy, Christine Ödlund, Jonas Ohlsson, planningtorock, Jan Rohlf, Lina Selander, Annika Ström, Venour and video clips for Björk, the Knife and CocoRosie.

Nathalie Bruys is an audio artist and co-curator of Sonic Voices, Rocking Hard. Her own way of working forms the heart of the exhibition. Bruys is interested in a multidisciplinary art practice. In addition to the fascination with sound and music, the artists Bruys has brought together for this show also share this wide-branching interest.

‘Sonic Voices, Rocking Hard’ shows a personal selection by Bruys from very diverse approaches and art forms that make use of sound and music. The works have been created by young artists with highly varied backgrounds. What they have in common is a sincere love of music, audio and art within their multifaceted artistic universe.

‘Sonic Voices, Rocking Hard’ presents forms of ‘audio art’ that appeal to the imagination, including speaker sculptures by Guy Bar Amotz and drawings by Jonas Ohlsson, Kim Hiorthøy, Nathalie Bruys and Jan Rohlf in which sound plays a role. Annika Ström shows her video ‘The Missed Concert’ and a text work. As well as looking at the drawings mentioned above, visitors to the gallery can also listen to a cd with music by Ohlsson, Hiorthøy, Ström and Bruys. Listening posts have been designed for hearing the cd. ‘Sonic Voices, Rocking Hard’ brings the visual and musical work that these artists produce together in one exhibition.

In addition there are works to be seen by musicians/artists who are better known for their musical creations than for their visual work. For instance, Planningtorock made a video installation for this exhibition with props that appear in her videos and video clips. Further there is a 3D video clip made for Björk by Encyclopedia Pictura exhibited in the form of an installation, and in the video lounge on the ground floor there are a number of video clips to be seen, for the Knife, CocoRosie, Bunny Rabbit & Black Cracker, and ‘du da, ich da’ by Heidi Happy, which was her graduation project at the Rietveld Academy in 2008. Here there is no distinction made between musician and visual artist or between visual artist and filmmaker. A number of those who made the videos also themselves made the music in them.

Nathalie Bruys draws her inspiration from the forms of sonic art and music mentioned here, and also shows her own personal multi-disciplinary practice in this exhibition. In addition to a new installation, drawings and a cd, she presents the web project ‘Soundmuseum’ which she initiated together with Katja van Stiphout. For this exhibition the ‘Soundmuseum’ has been incorporated in an audioinstallation, and officially goes ‘on air’ on September 14 in the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The ‘Soundmuseum’ collects online audio exhibitions and compiles and archives the sounds of sonic artists.

During the Uitmarkt on August 29, 30 and 31 performances by a number of artists from the exhibition will take place on the Stubnitz boat moored on the head of Java Island. On Friday Kim Hiorthøy appears, and Jonas Ohlsson performs live together with Daniela Bershan; between performances they will be at the turntable with records. Saturday Nathalie Bruys does her thing and Planningtorock closes off the evening with a performance. More info on http://www.nimk.nl

Hold: Vessel 1 and 2 (2001 & 2007) brings together two immersive installation works that explore the intimacy and immensity of the natural world and our relationship to it. The audience is invited to carry a glass bowl into a darkened space and ‘catch’ projected images of microscopic marine life and telescopic astronomical imagery in a lens–shaped ’screen’. Hold uses moving image and technology to reveal the hidden intricacies of human immersion in the wide, complex world.

Hold: Vessel 1 features breathtaking imagery of microscopic marine life and telescopic astronomical imagery in a lens–shaped ’screen’. Hold: Vessel 2 updates this earlier version of the work with the addition of two newly commissioned video projections, to present five separate video pieces.

In creating these new projections, entitled Colonies and Light, Wallworth collaborated with specialist cinematographers, utilising current visioning technologies to produce intricate details of underwater marine life, recording how these environments have altered in the last six years.

The new projections for Hold: Vessel 2, also feature rare imagery of the 2004 Transit of Venus, an astronomical event which, in 1769, was used to compute the relative distance from the Earth to the sun, allowing calculation of the scale of the solar system. This event marked a pivotal moment in history when, for the first time, warring nations chose to cooperate in order to answer one of the leading scientific questions of the day. Wallworth makes reference to this global scientific co–operation and connects it to the effect of climate change on environments and marine species’ highly developed means of surviving in diverse communities.

Produced by Forma: Hold: Vessel 1, 2001 is courtesy of and commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, AU; Hold: Vessel 2, 2007 is commissioned by the British Film Institute.

Imagery for Hold: Vessel 2, 2007 comes from the following sources: David Hannan, Jeremy Pickett–Heaps, Dr Allan S. Jones, Australian Key Centre for Microscopy & Microanalysis, The University of Sydney, Rosemary Golding, School of Medical Sciences, The University of Sydney, Exploratorium, TRACE [Transition Region and Coronal Explorer], Stanford-Lockheed Institute for Space Research, NASA Small Explorer program2, NASA Hubble, hubblesite.org.

Photos: Colin Davison, courtesy of the National Glass Centre, Sunderland, UK (L) | Dave Morgan, courtesy of BFI, London, UK (R)

Related links:

Lynette Wallworth ›
Invisible by Night [various works] ›
Diary ›

Further information for presenters of Forma projects go to Professional ›

Video is entirely made in VVVV. Patch is rendered off-line, no post cuts. Only motion blur is applied in post processing. Audio is made in Reaktor5 and sequenced in cubase.

Lanvideosource, born in Rome in 2004, is made up of Enzo Varriale and Gianluca Lisco. See Lanvideosource’s videos here. With thanks to information aesthetics.

Cultural anthropology is the framework for Nico Vascellari’s complex and eccentric installations which combine performative and sculptural elements with drawings, collages, videos and sonic extravaganzas. Folklore, nature and the alternative underground scene contribute to the artist’s unusual analysis of contemporary visual culture. Vascellari, himself a singer in the punk band, With Love , operates using rebellious artistic gestures that originate in tribal rituals of an archaic world, on the threshold of expression and collective consciousness.

His contribution to Manifesta 7 are large scale video installations, recordings of performances that artist conducted in various natural environments (a cave near Rovereto, the Carpathian Forest, the Black Forest, Finland, Norway and Tasmania) with the participation of musicians, representing diverse musical genres, including noise, black metal, doom, folk, ambient and electronic. Overlapping layers of music, influenced by the atmosphere of nature (forests and mountains in particular), orchestrated in seemingly random sequences, present new sense of landscape. Vascellari’s work provides a journey, where the grotesque and sublime conspire towards the production of an experience that is purifying, aesthetic and sensory.