The London art space, E:vent, is among the first to chime-in with an exhibition addressing these issues. Their show, “Sound Proof” (open April 19-May 11), features six artists “using sound materials, drawings, and annotations [to create] audio and visual maps that preserve observations of transformation.” These site-specific works focus on the Lower Lea Valley, below London, which will be virtually reinvented for London 2012. In a way, they will function as aural time capsules–records or “proof” of a space and culture if not doomed for demolition, then certainly slated for overhaul. The valuable question raised by the show is that of preservation–what is deemed worthy of saving (memories, relics, cultural practices) and what is the responsible, effective way to do so. This form of ethnographic programming takes “game art” to another level. - Marisa Olson, Rhizome.

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.

Soundpocket 1 — created for Urban Interface, Oslo (2007) — was installed in a narrow passageway connecting two parts of the city. The soundbeam, which can be as narrow as 50 cm in diameter, was mounted on a pan/tilt head which made it possible to place the sounds very precisely in the passageway. By bouncing the sound off surfaces, it seemed as if the sound could be coming from a window, door, elevator, or a poster on the wall. Most of the sounds seemed to belong to the site; others were slightly out of place, like the sound of a chandelier blowing in the wind.

I wanted it to be slight distortions to the regular soundscape of the passageway, and was pleased to see that the people who used this passageway regularly were noticing these disturbances. This could be described using the first of Barthes´ three listening modes: hearing involves “evaluation of the spatio-temporal situation“ and thus, it is linked to a “notion of territory“. It places the listener on alert when new sounds which don’t “fit in” are heard. By adding an extra layer of sound if also made people focus on the sounds which were already there.

For Soundpocket 2, HC Gilje set up an Internet radio station (using Nicecast), and played sounds from his library of field recordings. He found three locations in Oslo to serve as local radio stations. They were connected to visible cues: a huge oak tree, a small sculpture, and a small pond in the roundabout. The range of the local stations more or less corresponded to these visual cues: if you saw them you would be able to pick up the signal. Gilje used AAREFF FM transmitters placed with the three hosts, who allowed him to pick up their Internet radio streams. The result was three very local radio stations sending out a continuous soundtrack from other places, so somehow these recorded locations came in dialogue with the physical locations of the radio stations. The listening involved active participation from the public as you would need to tune in on your own radio to pick up the broadcast.

HC Gilje works with realtime environments, installations, live performance, set design and singlechannel video. Gilje has presented his work through different channels throughout the world: in concert-venues,theatre and cinema venues, galleries, festivals and through several international dvd releases, including 242.pilots live in Bruxelles on New York label Carpark and Cityscapes on Paris-label Lowave. He was a member of the video-impro trio 242.pilots, and was also the visual motor of kreutzerkompani. In october 2006 Gilje started a 3 year position as a research fellow at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway, exploring how audiovisual technology can be used to transform, create, expand, amplify and interpret physical spaces. He blogs at Conversations with Spaces.

Soundcities is an online open source database of city sounds from around the world, that can be listened to, used in performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks. Initially all of the sounds were by Stanza, but you can now contribute your own found sounds. This is was the first online open source found sound database. First version 2003.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNWLCvYgW_w
Objects on the Ground - stereo microphones - with Patrick McGinley, Hitoshi Kojo, Fantomas (18:21)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PCVsZXG2_s
Phone Tower Cables + 250% - contact mics on wires ( 12:28)

Try playing them all together!

Location Sound Films project has to do with a territory that falls somewhere between “performance”, “field recording” and “documentation”. It takes the usual idea of recording sound while adding the component of video. The following sounds and images were recorded simultaneously on a HD video camera. Little or no post-processing was involved other than the adjustment of equalization and sound levels. Various techniques were used to make recordings, some more clearly visible than others, depending on the type of sound captured. The main difference here being the use of a pair of stereo condenser microphones or piezo contact microphones. Location filming has to do with observation and reflection on events in a recored space and time, looking at what induces and affects spontaneous interventions using sound and image as the evidence.

John Grzinich is a mixed-media artist who has worked primarily with sound composition, performance and installation since the early 1990s. He has performed and worked on projects extensively throughout Europe and the US and have published a number of CDs on such labels as SIRR (PT), Staalplaat (NL), Edition Sonoro (UK), CUT (CH), CMR (NZ), erewhon (BE), Intransitive Recordings (US), Orogenetics (US), Elevator Bath (US), Pale-Disc (JP), Digital Narcis (JP), and Cloud of Statics(CH). Currently, he is a project coordinator for MoKS - Center for Art and Social Practice, an artist-run international residency center and project space in southeast Estonia.

John’s interests include acoustic sounds, phonography, found object sounds, sound and performance, film sound, processing and composing acoustic sounds, location sound, site-specific sound installations, collaborative sound actions, environmental sounds, extended tonal and atonal drones.

Since the early 1990s he has explored various approaches to sound generation, recording and production. His techniques range from the construction of original instrument devices and the capture of acoustic phenomenon through environmental field recordings to digital multi-tracking and manipulation. The resulting compositions are often studies in extended evolutionary permutations of a selected set of sound sources. These sources can concentrate on different properties of sound instigation and emination that can range from the textural animation of inanimate objects or an open-air mechanical noise field to overtone resonations from a set of wires stretched across a room.

Ximm made his first work from field recordings in the fall of 1998. While traveling in Vietnam, he recorded musicians, trains, moving water, crickets, monks, markets, metalwork, tired animals, and drunken tourists. The earliest work on the site is the result of his discovery of ways of working with that sound as sole medium. Later it became clear that it was important for him to apply the techniques he was learning to the sounds that define his home, the San Francisco Bay area. In 1999 he recorded during a trip to Fiji.

Ximm has worked with material gathered in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Burma (Myanmar), Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Tibet, China, and Japan. Recordings are added as he works with them.

Quiet American has been played on numerous radio programs and streaming internet stations. Ximm’s perpetually-popular one-minute vacations project was featured on WNYC’s The Next Big Thing and is regularly cited in blogs and portals. Recordings from that project were featured in Montreal’s Canadian Center for Architecture’s year-long exhibition Sense of the City in 2006.

Ximm’s collaboration with his wife, Annapurna: Memories in Sound, was awarded the Director’s Choice Honorable Mention at the 2002 Third Coast International Audio Festival. The concert series he curated and hosted from 2001-2005, Field Effects, was awarded a Best of San Francisco award from the SF Weekly and a Best of the Bay award from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. His recordings have been used in a variety of other projects, including albums by Shuttle358 and Noe Venable.

His most recent project, entitled White Sound Down, is a temporary multi-channel sound field installation in a remote section of the Bavarian Forest. White Sound Down is only accessible by cross country ski trails, and will be up until January 6, 2008.

The majority of your work examines the ‘room tones’ of man made architecture- the existent soundspace of cathedrals and, in some cases, hotels. In the past few years, with White Sound Down, as well as Stream Space Lacing and Sentinel to the Wind, you’ve begun to work within the natural environment. Why is this domain increasingly a concern for you?

Without a balance of interior and exterior spaces my work would be lacking in reflecting two major types of places people inhabit. Both are entirely normal to us, but we rarely hear them, being focused on seeing and navigating them. I’m concerned with this sonic perception of space in my work.

Spatial sound acts as an envelopment. Large-scale spaces that exhibit this envelopment carry a powerful impact when compared to the human body. We don’t normally go into this, it is part of an overall effect of a place, in which vision takes precedence, except perhaps for the typical sound signals of the place (in a forest that would be the rustling leaves and branches, wind, streams, etc.). But the background of that fascinates me. It is that on which life and phenomena occur. When my installations re-constitute a background, for instance in the atrium of a hotel or in an office space, the enhanced envelopment makes the place somehow seem more like itself — and consequently, people seem to stop and look (and listen) further into where they are. They become aware of where they are. It’s a form of “stopping the world.”

Working outside, the effect is perhaps magnified, as the scale increases and no walls retain the sound. The stream piece can sometimes be heard floating above the hills several kilometers away, but it fades in and out as the winds shift. It’s not entirely tangible. But this is perfect, because sound, no matter how well we hear it has this entirely intangible, ephemeral sense as a phenomenon of space and time. As you leave the place, the sound leaves with you slowly and ephemerally.

It’s not so much that working outdoors is an increasing concern, more like I recognize that in presenting a fuller human consciousness in the work I need to keep exploring alternative means of expression, including situations for coming to the work. For instance, working underwater would be an ideal example of upping the ante, and so the experiential harvest of a new work.

Stream Space Lacing

Given the impact of global warming, would you say that in documenting natural sound, such as snow falling in the forest, you’re capturing an experience that is “endangered”?

Originally we had planned to put up the installation last winter — but there was not enough snow in the Bavarian Forest that season! Of course the impact of global warming is serious far beyond the tourist industry in the region, even more so beyond crazy artists who want to work with the sound of falling snow. Still, I was fully aware of the environmental problems and had them very much in mind when making the work, more so after waiting a year to see some of my Bavarian friends to mount the installation.

Similarly in Finland, my wind turbine piece, Hearing Curved Space, recognizes the dire need for increasing use of renewable and clean energy sources. If you are out in nature making work, it is all but impossible not to think about these things.

Also, the sound of snow falling is a really exquisite sound, far too tempting not to record and use again in some way. You’re right, this experience is endangered. But the raw field recordings I made, while perhaps capturing the experience, as they stand are maybe too literal for the poet in me. The act of making the installation is about transforming that experience and those raw files into a finished work, that hopefully offers an essence or distillation, such that the experience is enhanced in the telling.

By taking the peripheral sound of historical sites such as cathedrals as your central focus, you perform what could almost be explained as sound excavation. What compelled you to research and record cathedrals? Would you describe this interest as archaeological? In what ways does this investigation relate to White Sound Down?

Cathedrals, synagogues, temples, mosques and churches were built to be astonishing spaces and they serve that purpose perfectly. The visual is easy to understand phenomenally. We see it and get it almost immediately. But how much do we really hear the space? Sure, if there is chanting, singing or music the space is of paramount importance in supporting the sense of the sounds heard. But what about when there is no sound program and no tourists shuffling around?

With many trips to St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague in the mid-nineties, I was struck time and again by what I could hear when nothing was sounding. It is something like the wind only with certain bands of frequencies sounding. Some cathedrals exhibit it better than others, the Cathedral of Freiburg in Germany being a spectacular case in point.

The investigation led me to dozens of cities and religious spaces all over Europe. It wasn’t archaeological so much as phenomenal. The sound rooted me in the here and now of the place. It’s all about phenomena and perception as a gate to now. Of course I knew these buildings were ancient and revered among all others, and I couldn’t help but think of myself as a “church artist” in some senses, though the work is not religious. Still some have said that it approaches a metaphysical view regarding human existence. My interest in the experience of being would seem to bear that out.

Later a German art critic noted that it sounded as if the walls of the space were yielding up all of the supplications, entreaties, requests, joyful thanks and abject miseries that people poured out to their gods over the centuries. As I often work with wind-based sounds, in particular frequency ranges they sound like voices. The sounds aren’t static or locally repetitive. They broadly animate a space. Apply these concepts to an outdoor installation in the hushed quite of the Bavarian Forest, and you get a site that seems to be speaking about itself. The mountains and the forest are already mystical in aesthetic senses that relate to beauty and any number of other subjective experiences. The sound that was already here is an underscore, I’ve just shaped it as a plastic art material which hopefully reflects what I experience.

St. James Cathedral, Chicago. Site for “Event Horizons” and “Absolute Elsewhere”

In your writing, you describe the aural backdrop of our lives as inhabiting the “negative space of memory”. But like all memories, there’s clearly an emotional dimension, and this is a notion you’ve successfully considered in your project Event Horizons. I recently visited Las Vegas and I was immediately struck by the overwhelming symphonic cacophony of slot machine bells. The sound of the casino was at once disorienting and almost sublime. I wondered why the casinos intentionally used sound in this way to impel visitors to gamble, and how they contributed to a sensation of a “non-place”. Your project In Transit reflects on the resonance of these spaces. What correlation, if any, do you see between these examples of contemporary sonic spaces and those of cathedrals? How are our emotions manipulated by the sound of these spaces, and to what end? Is this a concern for you?

Space – non-space, these seem to me not so distinguished. We could look at the internet and say “non-space,” as well as the casino or the hotel. But we inhabit them in some sense, perhaps mentally, by interaction with others or content retrieval or by avatar, or perhaps physically-corporally, though we are impeded by the means and any overwhelming generics. I’m no expert in telematics theory, and I’ll refer you to my good friend Eddie Shanken regarding the latest there, but I believe the case is made for experience; the question is what it means to inhabit. A generic contemporary space, a 7-11 for instance, is not inhabitable metaphorically as it is essentially reproduced thousands of times with whatever superficial construction discrepancies might exist. A casino and a hotel are similar. But we do live in these spaces and they have factual data that our bodies receive, whether we acknowledge it or not.

But we are so not connected to our bodies, and the generic spaces more than others seem to do all that they can to keep that disconnect in place. Events like overwhelming slots can do this. Of course, in the states it is all about sales. The focus is on the sale of the space as a sale of whatever is in it for sale. You could think of a cathedral as similar — except that a cathedral is “selling” existence. It is trying hard to make you aware of your existence (yes, for the eventual glorification of a god, but first you have to be aware of yourself before you can give thanks for being alive — so the first mission is “selling” the fact of your existence to you — and here we are not even going to begin to get into prestige and the builders of the cathedral and what THEY were selling, that’s a whole other sales department).

So the similarities between the then and now spaces are that they have missions and they effect these by the best manners they can find. The difference is in what they offer. As an artist who works with fundamentals of perception, in some senses the cathedrals are overkill — they already exhibit what I try to make more manifest. Still, people don’t seem to realize the process, though they are drawn to these spaces. That’s where I come in. The cathedrals are perfectly suited for bringing sonic perception of space and the resultant sense of self to the fore. When I enhance the sonic mechanism, I believe these senses really jump out. I’ve been told over and over that this happens.

By transposing these sense enhancements to neutral, generic spaces, particularly places of business, there is a subversion of mission. The work is more attuned to “selling” existence via phenomena, rather than selling casino chips or hotel rooms. But like a spa in the basement, my brief hope at exposing a moment of sonic-spatial phenomena and their resulting experiential aftermath becomes co-opted as a “service,” so has an acceptable business usage. It’s a funny way to co-exist, because a subversion so essential as “existence” becomes another “event” that is subsumed by the original sales message. But we’re Americans damn it, we should have it all!

Regarding the sound of spaces and emotional contact: this is a key concern, but maybe the hardest to approach — because it is subjective. It gets into the experience and memory of the perceiver. Places are powerful. They signify the past, continuity and the now. From the point of the immediate that is already overwhelming. Places such as cathedrals are built to be emotional. Historically the scale of self-sound in these interior spaces is huge, unlike any other spaces, except perhaps caverns — to which I believe they are very much related in some primal sense. We register this and it overwhelms us depending upon our degree of sensitivity and emotional range.

I have personally experienced agoraphobia only once in my life. It was just after I completed my first large-scale installation. I had just been told that I was being considered to put up a work in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. I went to the space and almost immediately had a severe panic attack based on the scale of the space, the overwhelming volume of space and what I perceived as something like the depth of sensibility and capacity for magnification that the space presented. Sure, it was too soon for me to look at a place like that with the idea of putting up work and I hadn’t slept for days while completing the previous installation, but it was more the confrontation with my own limitations within that spectacular framework. Because I really had to confront the space, in an instant I was shocked by my own complete finiteness.

I had a similar feeling, though not panicked, moving stones on the Island of Kökar in the Åland Archipelago. The flesh giving out after lifting and carrying hundreds of stones hundreds of meters for days; walking across the stone, the red granite island, I felt immeasurably finite.

So you could say there is a profound sadness and longing to these spaces, and the sound brings that forward as much as it does the power of the places. It’s paramount that we shouldn’t forget that humans made the cathedrals and the longing of the people that made them still sings every day. That longing is also in the forest, and paradoxically, and very sadly, it’s in the hotels and casinos, too. We can’t escape it.

Interview conducted via email on December 29, 2007. [blogged by Ceci Moss on A Million Keys]

We hear while we are in the womb, long before we see. For the rest of our lives, hearing essentially precedes the rest of the sensorium, as we move through a world of sonic fragments which affect us phenomenally and emotionally but of which we are often unaware. These fragments are mediated by our environment, our bodies, our individual and collective memories, and the technologies that pervade contemporary life: from books to radio to television to iPods. Through these mediations sounds give rise to stories, which though they might be as hazy as an aura, begin to narrate the world we move through as they themselves move through our bodies and minds.

Sonic Fragments is a sound art festival and symposium exploring how these mediations effect meaning in our lives, and how artists are actively engaging narrative and mediation in their work. We are hoping for a diverse and interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars and artists, between theory and practice.

Central to the festival will be the presentation of works written specifically for mobile mp3 players which engage the spaces, places, objects, and paths on or near the Princeton University campus. We are soliciting works of ten minutes or less. These works will be available on mp3 players at a kiosk throughout the festival, downloadable from the festival website, and may also be compiled onto a limited edition CD-R for later distribution.

Sound works may be created for any location on or near campus. We are hoping that people will engage Princeton’s weird nooks and crannies as well as its wonderful art collection, perhaps atop one of the many Neogothic towers, inside Henry Moore’s sculpture Oval with Points, or in front of Ellen Gallagher’s large-scale Blubber. We hope that each piece will exhibit a distinct relationship to its site. Existing works which are not site-specific will not be considered.

A few resources to help you find a site:

Most crucially, you must visit and just poke around. New Jersey Transit (about 1 hr, 15 minutes from NYC) http://www.njtransit.com.

But to get a taste of what the campus is like…

Princeton University
http://www.princeton.edu

Wikipedia Entry on Princeton University
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University

Campus Scenes
http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/#scenes

Flickr Photos of Princeton
http://flickr.com/search/?q=princeton

Orange Key Virtual Tour
https://www.princeton.edu/oktour/virtualtour/index.htm

Princeton University Art Museum
http://www.princetonartmuseum.org

Putnam Collection of Sculpture
https://www.princeton.edu/oktour/virtualtour/Hist10-OvalPoints

Princeton University: An Interactive Campus History
http://etcweb.princeton.edu/Campus

Please send an email containing the following to sonicfragments[at]gmail.com by February 15:

1. A short (200-word max) description of your project as it relates to the site
2. A short (100-word max) bio
3. The completed piece (10 minutes or under)
4. A photo or graphic which can be used as your ‘album art’ – we suggest a photo of the site.

Deadline: February 15, 2008

For more information, please contact Betsey Biggs at sonicfragments[at]gmail.com

Chain Tape Collective is nothing short of brilliant, and also a sign of our times, as distances and locations no longer are obstacles on the way to diffusion of the arts. Earlier on we had the tape exchange underbrush of the musical sub culture, sometimes resulting in commercial releases such as Nonsequitur Foundation’s “The Aerial” (1990 -) and the even more wild “Cassette Mythos Audio Alchemy” CD (1991) …

Chain Tape Collective is world wide and works within projects, specifying the work needed to be done, which I think is a very good way to keep ideas flowing and have the different projects develop within their basic frames. As seen above, concerning Locations, these frames are not very hard to stay within, and they don’t restrict creativity, but rather gives it a trajectory, an aim. I’m sure these kinds of initiatives pick up a lot of creative goings-on that would otherwise not be diffused like this across our globe…” Continue reading Chain Tape Collective (CT) Project: Locations Volume 1 by Ingvar Loco Nordin. [via]