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.

LoVid is the New York–based interdisciplinary artist duo Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Their work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. They combine many opposing elements, contrasting hard electronics and soft patchworks; handmade items and machine-produced objects; and analog and digital. This multidirectional approach is reflected in the content of their work, simultaneously romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. The artists present their performance Help Carry a Tune (2007) and perform with their Sync Armonica synthesizer.

Program 90 min.
Theater 2 (The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2), T2
In the Film exhibition Modern Mondays

The Consortium for Digital Arts, Culture and Technology (cDACT) at Stony Brook University presents the Sonic Residues Festival, April 29th to May 12th, 2008, Stony Brook University.

The Sonic Residues Festival will develop subtle and complex spaces of auditory experience, organized loosely around the theme of the remainders left by vibrations in time and space. It is concerned with sound as a medium of artistic expression encompassing performance, sculpture, phonography, experimental notation, and installation. The festival will synergistically combine a concert performance, a gallery exhibit, a series of portable media works, and provocative lectures as mediums of access to sonic residues.

The Sonic Residues Exhibition will take place in the Student Activities Center Art Gallery at Stony Brook University from April 29th to May 12th, 2008. The exhibition includes works by Mike Dory, Luke DuBois, Grady Gerbracht, Takafumi Ide, Stephen Lee, Annea Lockwood, Martine Loyato, Nobuho Nagasawa, Timothy Nohe, Jxel Rajchenberg, and others. There will also be a segment of European sound and video pieces curated by Valerie Vivancos. In addition, projects for personal media players will be available for download at the website.

The Sonic Residues Concert will take place in the Wang Center Theatre at Stony Brook University on May 12 at 7:30. The show includes Ray Anderson, Matthew Burtner, Odd Nosdam, Charlie Woodman, Pamela Z, Kinesthetech Sense, and other musicians. An after-party will follow the concert at the University Cafe, featuring music by Odd Nosdam and video by Luke DuBois.

The Sonic Residues Lecture Series includes: Luke DuBois (Keynote Speaker), March 26th at 3pm at the Humanities Institute, Rm. 1006; Melissa Ragona, May 7th at 4 pm in the Humanities Institute, Rm. 1006; and Pamela Z, May 12th at 3pm in the Wang Center Chapel.

The Organizers for the Sonic Residues Festival are Christa Erickson, Zabet Patterson, and Margaret Schedel. For further information, please contact Sean Connolly at 631.632.1056 or sonicresidues@gmail.com. Directions to Stony Brook can be found at http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/directions.shtml.

A residue draws a pattern. It can trace an evolving process, recreate an experience, or reimagine a prior event. It can weave pattern, both absent and present, into meaning. Singing beeps of cellular telephones and quick snips of overheard chatter increasingly punctuate the contemporary sonic landscape. We are constantly enveloped by sound to such an extent that its particular textures often disappear, receding into what we might term ?noise.?

Stanford’s orchestra is comprised of 20 laptop stations, each with a laptop and speaker array. Each speaker array has 6 channels of sound. As Wang says, “You put that together, that’s 120 channels of sound, plus 4 subwoofers for low energy.” The Stanford performance on April 29, 2008 was a first of its kind for laptop orchestras. Musicians from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) connected with musicians 6,000 miles away in Beijing to perform - in real time via a webcast - a program that celebrated music, technology, and international collaboration, and marked the premiere of the all-new Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk). Also on the program was guest composer and painter Luo Jingjing, who collaborated with the laptop orchestra to create a new improvisational work on site.

For more information on SLOrk, see http://slork.stanford.edu/
For more information on PLOrk, see http://plork.cs.princeton.edu/
Listen to PLOrk at: http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/plork/

E-Mail story Print Article
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/drive_to_discover&id=6107037

The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether 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

The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments. Each instrument consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety of control devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, etc…). The students who make up the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers, and software developers. The challenges are many: what kinds of sounds can they create?; how can they physically control these sounds?; how do they compose with these sounds? There are also social questions with musical and technical ramifications: how do they organize a dozen players in this context? with a conductor? via a wireless network?

In its first year of PLOrk’s existence, composers and performers from Princeton and elsewhere developed new pieces for this unprecedented ensemble, including Paul Lansky (Professor of Music at Princeton), Brad Garton (Director of the Columbia Computer Music Center), PLOrk co-founders Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, and several graduate students. They have made extensive use of a new music programming language created by Princeton graduate student (now assistant professor at Stanford University|CCRMA) Ge Wang, called ChucK, which allows the performers to develop new code in performance. In their first major performance (April 2006, Richardson Auditorium) we were joined by the renowned tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, legendary accordianist and composer Pauline Oliveros, and the exciting young percussion quartet from New York City, So Percussion. PLOrk was featured in the April issues of the MIT Press Technology Review and Wired Magazine, and performed at the Dartmouth College “Orchestras of Sameness” festival in May 2006.

One example of this (shown in the top two images above) is as follows:

Vibrating motors cause glass plates, on which various materials are placed, to oscillate. The vibrations move the materials and the frictions caused by this generate sounds, which are amplified via contact microphones and edited through DSP (Digital Signal Processing). Through a multiple channel speaker system amplified sounds are projected and reassembled into new sound architectures.

The artists’ aim is to selectively:

…mix between living structures continuously generated or evolving by chance and chain reactions on the one hand, contrasting with specifically delimited and contained space, in which these events are allowed to happen. Our compositional intentions are manifesting themselves through our deliberate containment and cautious monitoring. Thus, we are not busying ourselves with chance factors and generative systems in order to discover unexpected results, but rather to attain the vitality aspired in the compositions.

Untitled Sound Objects as an installation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P4FJxbS3GM

Untitled Sound Objects as a performance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoB1zvJupY4

Untitled Sound Objects exhibited autonomously
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiiIb_ki8Tc

[blogged by Garrett Lynch on Network Research]

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. This multiyear project was initiated and is coordinated by David Miller, but each of the projects is essentially collaborative in nature. Working through these radically open-ended compositions, among the most indeterminate of all Cage’s works, has provided the collaborators with an action-research form of insight into one key aspect of Cage’s development.

More important, however, the Mobius realizations of the Variations are aimed at unearthing the potential that these classic “avant-garde” works of the mid-twentieth century have for audiences and artists of our own time. This is especially true for the later works in the series, as they are rarely performed. The first Mobius Artists Group performance of Variations VII, given in March 2007, was the first realization of this work since its original performances in 1966, when it was presented by Experiments in Art and Technology as part of Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering.

The Mobius collaborators’ experience in preparing the 2007 performance laid the groundwork for the more fully developed version to be presented this April, including the addition of new team members Alisia Waller and Joshua Jade. The final work in the series, Variations VIII, is projected for performance in 2008-09.

BACKGROUND ON JOHN CAGE’S VARIATIONS VII: In 1966, John Cage and a set of prominent collaborators, including Billy Klüver of Bell Laboratories and David Tudor, presented Variations VII, as part of the series 9 Evenings: Art and Engineering. Performed at the immense New York City Armory under the auspices of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), Variations VII was an experiment in making audible the inaudible and transforming the results via live electronic sound processing. By the “inaudible” was meant sounds from the world beyond the Armory space (for example, a restaurant kitchen, the zoo), sounds available in the space itself but generally inaccessible (sounds of the body), and sounds produced by the transformation of non-aural data (particularly via a Geiger counter).

The team of composers working with Cage and Klüver used the metaphor of “fishing” to create a rich and dense soundscape, originating entirely with real-time sources unintended for performance. The Mobius team is developing a 21st-century presentation of Variations VII which, while taking into account what was done in 1966, aims at something different from a reproduction of the original. The sonic “fishing” activities will use a variety of means, from Web-scanning to processes which use no electronic technology. The group will also be fishing in another dimension, with real-time development of projected visual imagery using found material. Finally, the fishing will take place in a set of simultaneous, widening circles, from the performance space itself, to the surrounding neighborhood, remote physical spaces, and the global Web. See Variations VII: FishNet.

About Mobius: Mobius, founded by Marilyn Arsem in 1977, is known for incorporating a wide range of the visual, performing, and media arts into innovative live performance, video, installation and intermedia works. Mobius has produced hundreds of original works that have attained critical acclaim in Boston, nationally and internationally. Works created at Mobius have been presented throughout the North and South America, Europe and Asia.

Mobius has long been committed to creating artist exchange projects bringing artists from different geographic regions to work together. The international exchange projects with artists from Macedonia, Croatia, Poland, and Taiwan have focused on site-specific and publicly-sited work. Mobius has presented work involving thousands of artists over its 30-year history and is recognized as one of the seminal alternative, artist-run organizations in the U.S.

Mobius, Inc is funded by the Tanne Foundation; the Nonsequitur Foundation; the Boston Redevelopment Authority; the LEF Foundation; the Boston Cultural Council, a program of the Mayor’s office on Arts, Tourism, & Special Events; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; the Oedipus Foundation; and generous private support.

The group show Voice & Void is dedicated to the representation of the human voice – and its absence – in the visual arts. The voice and its fading away, speech and the loss of speech, both the presence and the immateriality of the voice, the relation between the voice and corporeality as well as sound and image are only a few of the many aspects addressed in this exhibition.

The exhibition studies the effects of a sensual perception being replaced by another one and the conditions under which the voice allows itself to be imparted by other means – be it written notation, technical recordings or visual representation. While the voice has very specific qualities in its immediate expression, “translated into another medium, the voice becomes apparent as a medium.” (Thomas Trummer) The works allude to the relation of image and sound so that they reciprocally define the specific characteristics of imagery and sound, either underscoring or even subverting each other.

The exhibition comprises thirteen very different approaches to “voice and void”. Historical points of reference include Joseph Beuys” legendary performance “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare”(1965) which is featured in Ute Klophaus” photographs; John Cage”s text sheets titled “Lecture on Nothing (Silence)” (1959) where acoustics of a silence imbued with “presence” is implemented both verbally and visually by means of text notations; and VALIE EXPORT”s “Tonfilm” (Sound film) from 1969, showing the draft for a performance in which the voice is manipulated by means of technological interventions in the glottis and the ear.

These early works are followed by a row of contemporary studies on the phenomenon of the voice – also touching upon its absence. One work, by American artist Rachel Berwick, is an installation with two live parrots. In his journey through South America in 1799 explorer Alexander von Humboldt discovered a parrot that was the only surviving living creature which could speak the language of the indigenous tribe of the Mayporé. Humboldt documented 40 words of this lost language that is now being reanimated in Berwick’s work.

In his site-specific installation Hans Schabus refers to the particular acoustic and visual situation of hidden spaces. He makes these spaces accessible to the visitor by transferring them into the exhibition space.

Asta Grőting”s work revolves around the process of ventroloquism where the performer is no longer just the speaker but also the recipient and interlocutor of his own “second voice”.

The exhibition is rounded off by a number of other works by artists such as Janet Cardiff/ Georges Bures Miller, Anna Gaskell, Christian Marclay, Melik Ohanian, Nedko Solakov and Julianne Swartz. They all approach the voice as the vehicle of language, communication and bodily expression.

The curator of the exhibition is Thomas Trummer who developed the project as part of an international fellowship awarded by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT (USA) where the exhibition was shown first.

Avatar Orchestra Metaverse is a group of composers, performers, and media artists living in Europe, East Asia and North America who explore together the interactive possibilities of the Second Life online virtual reality platform to create works with open, interactive and possibly “infinite” elements. The Orchestra works with ideas that challenge conventional practices of creating and performing music, and finds new ways to conceive of and erase notions of identity, place, social, cultural and sexual identity, and the roles of composer, performer and listener.

PwRHm is an Avatar Orchestra work in progress that explores and embraces the sonic possibilities inherent in the frequency of the electrical currents that power most aspects of modern existence. The piece exposes the relationship between the harmonic series of the North American 60 Cycle AC current and of the European 50 Cycle AC current, and uses the breathing rhythms of the live individual performers, spread across 2 continents, to determine the dynamic between the relationships, sounds and movements of the virtual avatar players.

PwRHm uses 4 instruments created within the technical possibilities and limitations of the Second Life platform. The instrument sounds are made from sets of short sound samples of individual sine and square waves and field recordings of electric motors put together in a HUD (Heads Up Display) configuration by the Orchestra’s instrument builder, Andreas Mueller / Bingo Onomatopoeia. The sounds made by the players are therefore not streamed. Each avatar/player is playing, in real time, sounds through instrument controls visible on each of their computer screens to make the combined sound of the piece. The avatars also hold semi-transparent globes, or ‘receivers’, designed by media artist Sachiko Hayachi / Goodwind Seiling, that emit gradations of differently coloured particles according to the specific sound and volume they each play on their instruments. The set also includes two large blue water tanks that hold two of the players, and that provide illumination within the night sky surrounding the suspended virtual performance platform.

Program: Sarah Weaver with Weave Between the Body :: Avatar Orchestra Metaverse - PwRHm by Tina Pearson / Humming Pera :: Maria Chavez, avant-turntablist/performer :: ROMA: Economical and Effective.

Notes for Avatar Orchestra Metaverse performance PwRHm (2008).

Composer: Tina Pearson / Humming Pera, Victoria, Canada
Instrument Builder: Andreas Mueller / Bingo Onomatopoeia, Regensburg, Germany
Set Design: Sachiko Hayachi / Goodwind Seiling, Stockholm, Sweden www.e-garde.net

Performers for Avatar Orchestra Metaverse: Bingo Onomatopoeia (Andreas Mueller), Regensburg, Germany — Fernsing Llewelyn (Cathy Lewis), Victoria, BC, Canada — Free Noyse (Pauline Oliveros), Kingston, New York, USA — Goodwind Seiling (Sachiko Hayashi), Stockholm, Sweden — Gumnosophistai Nurmi (Leif Inge), Oslo, Norway — Humming Pera (Tina Pearson), Victoria, BC, Canada — Maxxo Klaar (Max D. Well), Regensburg, Germany — Miulew Takahe (Bjorn Eriksson), Solleftea, Sweden — Paco Mariani (Chris Wittkowsky), Regensburg, Germany — Zonzo Spyker (Viv Corringham), Minneapolis, USA, London, UK.

The chapter discusses histories of audiovisual performance, including its ancestry in color organs, visual music filmmaking, light shows, cognitive science, and more - as well as various approaches to current practice including VJ’ing, live cinema, and digital media art performance. This one is not available online, but the book is available from the usual sources.

The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music includes original contributions from many international artists, including Karlheinz Stockhausen and Max Mathews. Chapters introduce the reader to the history and practices of electronic music, including electroacoustic music composition, perceptual aspects and sound synthesis. Considers recent contemporary trends and promotes new movements in this continuously evolving field.