The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is an exploration of a real-time collaborative composition local network. All of the performers have identical performance/composition programs — a custom flexible step-sequencer — that invite play with rhythmic cycles of various lengths and timbres. The real fun starts, however, when the players begin spying on their neighbors, secretly, via the network, and stealing their ideas with the click of the mouse. Unplanned structures begin to emerge, like oil on water, as riffs propagate and evolve, sometimes returning unrecognizable to their creators. Continue reading

In a typical neural network application, layers of simulated neurons are used to compute an output based on some input. The Ecstacy of Communication explodes the network to a human scale, both in terms of space and in terms of time. The result is a spatially-situated conflation of neural network and swarm intelligence, a population of sound-making devices interacting with each other and the sounds in their environment. Our focus shifts to the very activity of the network; the generative process itself becomes the art.

See movie: http://machinatus.net/tec/tec_240.mov Continue reading

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

[Image from Variations VII: FishNet commissioned by Turbulence.org] Variations VII by John Cage with Mobius Artists Group (MAG) members Margaret Bellafiore, Lewis Gesner, Larry Johnson, Tom Plsek, and Alisia Waller; and guest artists Joshua Jade, Forrest Larson, David Miller, and Landon Rose :: April 18-19, 2008; 8 - 9:30 pm :: Mobius, 725 Harrison Ave., Boston, MA.

Variations VII is the most recent installment in the Mobius Artists Group’s exploration of John Cage’s eight compositions, titled Variations. Beginning in 1996 with Variations I, in a version for two voices performed by David Miller and Larry Johnson, MAG members and guest artists have studied and performed this series in chronological order. Continue reading

imposition - a language-driven sound installationa - by John Caley and Giles Perring :: April 17, 5:00-6:30 pm (EDT) :: Rockefeller Library, Brown University, Second Floor Computer Cluster (and elsewhere in the building) :: BRING YOUR LAPTOP :: part of Transforming the Student’s Experience as Scholar.

imposition emerges from translation, a series of pieces which were developed, in turn, from overboard, our first essay in ambient poetics. imposition uses the same texts and procedures as translation. It continues an investigation of iterative, procedural removal from one text or language to another. Continue reading

Last fall I posted about espaceSONO, a sound art show at the SAT in Montreal curated by Tobias c. van Veen. Tobias is an old friend who is active as a musician and DJ, curator and critic and in his spare time he plugs away on his Ph.D in communication & philosophy at McGill. I have wanted to interview Tobias about his creative practice for a while, but we have held off having this dialog for several months so we could specifically address his new turbulence-commissioned project, ’til death do us a part. Tobias will be performing this piece and participating in the Programmable Media II symposium in New York City (today) at Pace University.

Greg Smith: Your recently launched turbulence piece ’til death do us a part is decidely lo-tech. Not only is underlying reel-to-reel technology slightly archaic but even your references are coated with a fine layer of dust. Listening through the piece, it feels very much like an autopsy for “dead media.” Could you talk about the inspiration for the piece? Continue reading on Serial Consign.

Transmitting live from the Ocean below the Antarctic Ice: “Providing an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape is a formidable challange. After all, more than 15000 km lie between Antarctica and our institute in Germany. Underwater sound is recorded by means of two hydrophones by PALAOA (Perennial Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean), an autonomous, wind and solar powered observatory located on the Ekström ice shelf (Boebel et al., 2006).

The data stream is transmitted via wireless LAN from PALAOA to the German Neumayer Base. From there, a permanent satellite link transmits the data to the AWI in Germany. Continue reading

Singing Website Wallpaper (2007) — A Web Driven Installation with Wallpaper and Sound by Ursula Endlicher — gives voice to html by re-interpreting code as a musical score and by visualizing the musical scales as printed patterns on wallpaper. While the sound component of the installation is influenced by the actual “flow” of activity on yahoo.com, msn.com and google.com, the wallpaper pattern is inspired by the “frozen” source code from each site translated into a visual set of functionality-related symbols.

Watch a video.

[’til death do us a part] by Tobias c. van Veen (aka saibotuk) - Dead media unwinds time from its spools. Two electromagnetic machines capture the unfolding of an era in which memory encodes the loving caress of electron imprinted tape. Time out of joint falls in & out of tape sync; more inhuman than human loops the frequency. “I wanted my human experience with machinic love to have the intensity of a hands-on relationship.”

Thus, van Veen turned to reel-to-reel (RTR) tape machines and Konstantin Raudive’s experiments with blank media in which he attempted to record the ‘voices of the dead’. (Little did van Veen know that John Hudak was exploring similar terrain in Voices from the Paradise Network.) Continue reading

Acoustic Space Issue # 7: SPECTROPIA - On Spectral Ecology and Art :: CALL FOR PAPERS - Deadline for abstracts - April 21, 2007 :: We are seeking manuscripts for the upcoming Acoustic Space journal to be published for the next Art+Communication Festival. Entitled SPECTROPIA, this year festival edition will take place in Riga, October 16 - 19, 2008.

The print journal, Acoustic Space is a forum for net.radio, sound art and creative explorations in the networked electro-acoustic environments. Now in its 7th edition, Acoustic Space - SPECTROPIA issue investigates the rapid transformation of the usage of the radio frequency spectrum that we are witnessing in the 21st century. Continue reading