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

Rust Belt / Bayou by Julia Christensen [Needs Flash Player and Speakers] - Rust Belt / Bayou is an aural exploration of two cities: Cleveland, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. For the past several years, Christensen’s artistic practice has been based in extensive travel throughout the United States, surveying the ways in which communities are changing in the shadow of corporate real estate development.

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. Continue reading

[’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

Network Sonification by Zach Layton [Needs Quicktime Player] - In Network Sonification, a program written in java crawls across the Internet, grabbing as many related URLs as possible and analyzing their contents. Using Max/MSP, the data coming from the webcrawler program is translated into sound. The frequency and range of words, images and links on these pages create a kind of aural snapshot, giving each page a unique sonic character that is written in real time. Layton offers us a range of sonic portraits, from Boing Boing to the New York Times, enabling us to experience them as networked sonic entities rather than discrete visual/semantic pages. Continue reading

I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On by Haeyoung Kim (a.k.a Bubblyfish) [Needs Flash Player and Speakers On] - I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On is an interactive art piece inspired by Samuel Beckett’s short novel, “Molloy.” The work is presented in two parts: a blog for you to contribute your thoughts about Beckett’s writing; and the multimedia generated by your entries.

“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 Continue reading

Voices from the Paradise Network by John Hudak, with Flash programming by erational.org [Needs Flash Player and speakers on] - John writes: My mother-in-law passed away recently, reminding me of a technique that a parapsychologist named Dr. Konstantin Raudive (1906-1974) used to record what he purported to be voices of deceased spirits. With the amount of information moving around on the internet these days, and the passing of my mother-in-law, who I thought would want to get in touch (if possible), I thought I’d give Raudive’s technique a try within the digital realm. Continue reading

Air Detritus is derived from sounds that were collected from the air and water detritus of Central Park, New York. Sounds were collected via a 2-way radio submerged in a pond, and on land. The act of recycling materials into a new piece, and re-using objects and sound fragments seems a way to re-imagine the world, a symbolic treatment that enacts the idea of sustainability as an elusive but critical goal of consuming fewer materials. As a consumer working with digital tools, I have accumulated many old monitors, hard drives, cords, and interfaces that are quickly obsolete. The molded plastic and metal have a perverse dialectical relationship to the data of ones and zeros that are transported and stored. This piece is a moment of reflection upon these relationships, and our relationship to the world. - Miya Masaoka Continue reading

Flou by Jason Freeman, with Andrew Beck, Xiang Cao, Mark Godfrey, Jagadeeswaran Jayaprakash, Al Matthews, Rachel Ponder, Alex Rae, and Sriram Viswanathan [Needs Java 1.5+; Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux; Minimum 768 MB RAM and 1.5 GHz processor; Fast graphics card; Speakers or headphones]

Flou (pronounced “flew”) is not exactly a game; you do fly a ship through space, but you cannot shoot anything, score points, or win or lose. The focus, rather, is on the soundtrack: as you navigate through a 3D world and zoom through objects in space, you add loops and apply effects to an ever-evolving musical mix. You can also design your own worlds to fly through and share them with other Flou users. Continue reading

You’re Not My Father, by Paul Slocum, [Requires Quicktime plugin] is composed of a sequence of recreations of a 10 second scene from the television show Full House, overlaid with sound loops from the scene’s original music. The crews who re-shot the scene were recruited through Internet message boards and Craigslist; each was paid $150. Instructions for shooting the scene and delivering the footage were issued to the crews. To-date, the project includes participants from Austin, Cincinnati, Chicago, Dallas, Denton, London, and San Francisco. Continue reading

More of the Same by LoVid [Start slowly with 1; close each popup window before launching the next] - More of the Same extends LoVid’s investigation of electrical irregularities and human interactions. After it loads copies of a single sound sample, fissures in the digital veneer are explored as the spoken communication is played back repeatedly. Though each instantiation of the speech is identical, physical constraints affect the timing. This allows the nature of the medium to peek through the cracks in the voices. Continue reading