I posted about some work of Rodrigo Derteano’s last week (here) but this third work I omitted as it didn’t quite seem suitable to include with the other two works.

Recomputing Space is a sound installation which employs field recordings as a psychogeographic study of urban sound. “Following the commands and rhythm imposed by an algorithm, two persons walk around in chosen locations in the city, recording a mix of noise, language, music and the sound of their own steps. The chosen locations are public places, such as public squares, parks, tram stations etc. Continue reading

Did you know that almost anywhere that you go in a city you’ll be sharing space with someone’s private wireless computer network? All of their personal communication—e-mail, love messages, bank passwords, credit card numbers, and bizarre surfing habits—will be passing through your body without your awareness. Who are they, and how do you feel about sharing space with their personal life? David McCallum’s Warbike turns this wireless network activity into sound. As you cycle the streets, you’ll hear the activity of this invisible communications layer that permeates our public spaces. From his thesis: Continue reading

“[…] As a specific extension of the activities within the broader body of Makrolab research, the performative situations named Wardenclyffe accompanied the first station in Kassel in 1997. Makrolab operates outside the spectacle, in physically remote, non-urban spaces, it is a place of a production of knowledge and an archive of acquired data, whereas Wardenclyffe performative situations were realised within a more formal and representational frame, presenting the results of the research done within Makrolab. Continue reading

between stations by Marc Cooley - The public airways are mapped almost entirely to the mandates of consumer demographics, psychographics and other methods of locating, courting and creating compliant consumers and citizens. This sad context provides an aesthetic space where the mash-up and obliteration of those tired fictitious sites of meaning becomes a satisfying experience.

These recordings, created for podcast distribution, were made in the southeast of the United States on various points along Interstate 95 from Richmond Virginia and Fayetteville North Carolina. They capture profiles of American consciousness as competing sectors of the consciousness industry represents them and simultaneously they are the decomposition of preconfigured and seemingly stable consciousness moving at high velocity toward utter decay and slippage into forbidden, unclaimed and contested spaces. Continue reading

xxxxx workshop _18 Berlin :: July 7, 2:00 PM: Mini_maxwell: City EM (electromagnetic) sniffing and flaneur with ap/xxxxx :: A reduced companion to the Oslo Maxwell City workshop investigating artistic uses of EM (electromagnetic) substance within Berlin, Mitte. Participants will build a small variety of simple electronic sniffing device to actively explore in primarily aural manner the alternative city space of ghost EM architecture (mobile emissions, metal structures supporting existent buildings, power and lines of transmission). EM sniffing is presented as contemporary city flaneur and divining activity. References: http://anart.no/projects/maxwell-city/; http://scrying.org; Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Cape (21 Nov 2006). Please bring headphones and any audio/video recording device (minidisc, video camera, walkman). Continue reading

Garrett Lynch writes about Always Something Somewhere Else by Duncan Speakman, a sound artist exploring ideas of memory, geography and communication. The work is a GPS based soundwalk that builds itself as you experience it. To create it I worked with Hewlett Packard in Bristol and their new mscape software.

In the work the listener is asked to locate various substances that form the contemporary urban environment (glass, stone, concrete etc.). As they mark the location of each one they begin to hear interwoven stories connecting them to remote locations around the world, soundtracked with a generative music score. The narratives are progressed and concluded as the listener returns to the locations they chose. The piece is reflective and sometimes melancholy, it touches on issues of climate change and global awareness, but ultimately encourages the listener to treasure the moments around them… Continue reading

Sonic Geographies takes sound as the entry point for excavating and mapping urban experience and invisible infrastructures of the city. A series of experiments and scenarios are being developed that operate as maps and journeys but also as highly personal renderings of sonic experience – sounds of the personal world in conversation with sounds of the city. The mappings attempt to excavate the layers of sound that make up the city and create strata of difference: from the sound of a city’s church bells to the shifting sonic signatures of traffic, music radio and the layers of wireless communications. Continue reading

Net_Dérive, by Atau Tanaka and Petra Gemeinboeck with the collaboration of Ali Momeni, is a location sensitive mobile media art piece that calls for an exchange between participants in the gallery and participants in the streets. Deployed on advanced mobile phones, the work seeks to create a kind of musical instrument, thinking of the city-as-instrument.

Participants are given a kind of scarf with a mobile phone in each end and off they go to explore the neighborhood. One of the phones takes pictures every 20 secs and collects sounds, the other talks to the GPS (also in the scarf) and to the server inside the gallery space. Continue reading

Networks, Mobility, Interventions

The projects in Glowlab 09 examine urban architecture by investigating the social spaces enabled by public networks, mobile communication devices and direct intervention. In viewing the work, one might re-imagine the city as space which is defined through the nature of the interactions that take place within it.

Public Broadcast Cart by Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga: Transforms a shopping cart into a mobile radio station, transmitting via miniFM and the Internet. The Public Broadcast Cart is designed to enable any pedestrian to become an active producer of a radio broadcast by reversing the usual role of the public from audience to producer.

Hundekopf by Brian House and Sue Huang (Knifeandfork): A location-based narrative project utilizing SMS text-messaging to explore the experience of riding the Berlin Ringbahn.
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Simon Elvins is concerned with sound as an ubiquitous force. Through a series of projects he has been documenting how sound is an often ignored dimension of our physical environment. Silent London plots quiet spaces in the English capitol using noise level data. An embossed print shows quiet areas raised up from the paper, bringing them to the attention of the viewer, while noise areas become blanked out valleys. noisy areas raised up from the paper while quiet areas become blank areas of peace. His FM Radio Map serves a dual purpose. On the one hand it plots the physical locations of commercial and pirate FM radio stations broadcasting in London. But circuits conductive pencil lines placed on the back of the map also turns it into a physical interface. Using a modified radio the map can be aurally “navigated” by placing metail contacts on points on the map.

These projects are poetic but ultimately functional. Taking a conceptual design approach (Elvins studied Communication Art & Design at the Royal College of Art), they present numerical data in an aesthetic context. By choosing low-tech materials (paper, electronics) Elvins creates fragile objects whose material qualities belie their sophisticated technical content.
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