Networked Music Review

“WITCHin flux” by Mark Cooley

jo — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:38:26 +0000

WITCHin flux — by Mark Cooley — is an experimental remix of Yoko Ono’s 2007 release Yes, I’m a Witch and an attempt to apply classic Fluxus concerns to the context of an entirely hip yet somewhat conservatively staged reinterpretive retrospective of Yoko Ono’s musical works. Moving away from typical remix theory that re-authorizes the internal content of a piece the goal here is to deconstruct the structural constraints of the album / cd form itself and to recast some of the constants of that essentially analog form to the concepts of variability and random access apparent in Fluxus works and common to digital culture.

Once launched, WITCHin flux plays continuously while randomly accessing and remixing samples from Yoko Ono’s Yes, I’m a Witch. Technical requirements - high-speed connection, flash player installed.

Live Stage: Soundtoys Remixed [Naples]

jo — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:16:26 +0000

MAO evenings :: Brian Mackern - Soundtoys Remixed [1996-2008] :: April 11, 2008; 6 - 8 pm :: Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Via Settembrini, 79 Naples.

Soundtoys Remixed, the title of the performance that Mackern will offer to the MADRE audience, will deal with Net surfing and (real-time) remix of 40 of his soundtoys developed between 1997 and 2007. Mackernian visions will flow through the (real-time) projection on three different screens, while the surrounding sounds will hold the audience in a synesthetic embrace that will shake new reflections about the increasingly more hybrid nature of the reality we face everyday.

SOUNDTOYS / AUDIOVISUAL INTERFACES

“… Just listen to your eyes.”
Wim Wenders, Once

Brian Mackern was born in 1962 in Montevideo (Uruguay) and after technical college he started to explore the potentials, mainly sound-related, of the Web. In 1997 he became the director of Artefactos Virtuales #1, one of the first latin-american web spaces about the research and the development of Net Art projects, while in recent years he appeared among the creators of Netart_latino #2, a database whose aim was of both documenting the work of south-american netartists, and building a link between their various experiences, that risked to remain isolated in a continent that tends to keep its artists attempts “unincorporated” #3.

The sense of belonging to a specific culture and the bond with the roots are a key element to the work of Mackern. Central from this point of view is the reinterpretation of the so-called “Tormenta de Santa Rosa”. The worship of Santa Rosa from Lima in the Rio de la Plata area is celebrated in the last days of August, when the place is hit by frequent floods and big rains. These natural phenomena are associated, in the popular belief, to the presence of the Saint, and Mackern provides a personal reading of the cult in his project 34s56w.org #4.

Mackern works have been presented in biennals, festivals and exhibitions at the four corners of the world (Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Poland, Korea, etc.) and he was also prized with many awards in the above mentioned countries in over 10 years of artistic activity.

Brian Mackern is definitely an artist of the Net generation and his research is to be collocated within the tradition linked to some creative experimentations about the relationship between audio and visual objects (think about the vanguards of 1900), but it is now, in the Web, that it finds its best ground to get - finally ? depth and visibility. Thanks to the opportunities introduced by new digital tools, the dialectic tension between sounds and images has become object of endless reflections and investigations, all connected to the process of spreading of new cultural paradigms. Among them — above all — self-consciousness and self-sufficient life of the digital objects.

Within this frame, soundtoys is the personal answer of Mackern the artist to his need to find new ways of mediation between sounds and images. Every soundtoy, pure minimal meaning unit, can be remixed to others, paving the way to a complexity that, by perpetually multiplying the combination chances, becomes almost impossible to be seen as finite and leaves to the observer the task to complete the meaning of one among many possible trajectories.

#1 Artefactos virtuales experience developed from 1997 to 2002 ? http://www.internet.com.uy/vibri
#2 http://netart.org.uy/latino
#3 This is the way Alessadro Ludovico talks about Brian Mackern in an article for the austian magazine Spingerin [Noise at Margin - http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1667&lang=en]
#4 http://34s56w.org

text by Vito Campanelli - translation by Francesco Bordo

Media partner:
Neural - www.neural.it

In collaboration with:
Supportico Lopez - www.supporticolopez.com
Interferenze Festival - www.interferenze.org

Call + Response [Luxembourg]

jo — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:34:35 +0000

Call + Response :: April 25-28, 2008 :: A Series of Events hosted by Candice Breitz :: Mudam Luxembourg, 3 Park Dräi Eechelen, L-1499 Luxembourg :: Please register online before April 10! Booking is essential due to limited seating.

Creative innovation has always relied, to some extent, on the logic of call-and-response, a phrase that Breitz borrows from musicologists, who use it to describe the interactive quality that is key to musical experience in various oral cultures. Mudam warmly invites you to share your ideas with a group of artists and thinkers as they explore the logic of call-and-response and reflect on strategies of artistic appropriation and creative recycling during a three-day line-up of performances, panels and discussions.

With invited guests Cory Arcangel, Martin Arnold, Pierre Bismuth, Claude Closky, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Iain Forsyth + Jane Pollard, Surasi Kusolwong, Matthieu Laurette, Lawrence Lessig, Gabriel Lester, Bjørn Melhus, Momus, Jonathan Monk, Kaz Oshiro, Guillaume Paris, Paul Pfeiffer and James Webb.

Friday, 25 April 2008 Evening
OPENING EVENTS
Forsyth + Pollard

London-based artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard met and began working collaboratively in 1993. An interdisciplinary approach to art, music, mediation and ‘liveness’ has led to their continued engagement with the soundtrack underpinning contemporary life. Their universal yet highly personal strategies play out ideas of memory, performance and the mediated image in a challenging but highly accessible body of work.

Saturday, 26 April 2008 10am-6pm
Mondo Youtube

This day-long session brings together several artists who have explored the participatory potential of mainstream media such as advertising, the Internet, reality television, video games, MySpace and YouTube. Given the increasingly profit-driven nature of most of these formats, is it possible for a challenging culture of call-and-response to exist within these nascent public spheres, or inevitable that all criticism and innovative thought introduced into these new formats will immediately be instrumentalized towards commercial ends? Invited artists will supplement discussions of their own work with examples of mainstream media that have interested them, influenced them, or into which they have actively intervened. With:

Cory Arcangel, New York
Matthieu Laurette, Paris
Bjørn Melhus, Berlin
Guillaume Paris, Paris
Gabriel Lester, Amsterdam/Brussels

Sunday, 27 April 2008 10am-6pm
After Images

This day-long session brings together several artists who have engaged in explicit call-and-response relationships with other artists or works of art, addressing the crucial exchange and dialogue that motivates artistic practice. Each artist will talk about their own work in relation to those artists or works of art that they respond to or dialogue with in their work. With:

Surasi Kusolwong, Bangkok
Jonathan Monk, Berlin
Claude Closky, Paris
Kaz Oshiro, Los Angeles
James Webb, Cape Town
Keynote Speaker: Lawrence Lessig, San Francisco

Monday, 28 April 2008 9am-8pm
Art Goes To The Movies

Martin Arnold has written that, “The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.” This premise can be seen to inform the work of many contemporary artists who work in video today. This day-long session brings together several artists who have responded to and cannibalized mainstream cinema in their work, addressing the complex call-and-response relationship that exists between commercial cinema and contemporary art. Each artist will have the opportunity to talk about their use of found footage and their relationship to the cinematic images that they recycle in their work. With:

Paul Pfeiffer, New York
Pierre Bismuth, Brussels
Martin Arnold, Vienna
Candice Breitz, Berlin
Keynote Speaker: Diedrich Diederichsen, Berlin

Evening
Momus Live

“Ultraconformist, voyager, timelord, tennis and ping pong champion, tender pervert, poison boyfriend, hippopotamus, philosopher, folk singer, star forever.” Nick Currie, more popularly known under the artist name Momus (after the Greek god of mockery), is a songwriter, blogger and a journalist for Wired. Most of his songs are self-referential or postmodern.

Mudam can provide assistance with accommodation, food, local transport and other details for students. Call+Response will take place in the Mudam auditorium and will be open only to registered participants. All talks will be held in English. Program subject to modification.

Net_Music_Weekly: Song of Solomon

jo — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:24:09 +0000

[Image: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, ca. 1941] Song of Solomon — by Ralph Borland and Julian Jonker — is an aleatoric audio collage and 8-channel installation that samples many versions of Mbube, aka Wimoweh aka The Lion Sleeps Tonight, in a sonic tribute to the song’s dead author Solomon Linda. By fragmenting and reordering compositional fragments of this ’song of songs’, the installation questions the assumptions about compositional innovation and imitation that inform Western intellectual property law. In this jungle of sounds, the dead Author rests.

In 1939, the Evening Birds recorded Solomon Linda’s Mbube in Johannesburg, South Africa for ten shillings. It was a hit for years, selling as many as 100 000 copies. Ten years after its release, Pete Seeger made a recording of the song as Wimoweh, which went to number 6 on the charts. Then, in 1961, songwriter George David Weiss added ten words and a new arrangement, and the song was reborn once again as The Lion Sleeps Tonight. The song also became, to a large extent, Weiss’ intellectual property. Solomon Linda died a pauper in 1962, and his struggling daughters received none of the almost $15 million that the song is estimated to have generated in its career. It was only in 2006 that Weiss’ publisher agreed, under threat of legal suit, to pay royalties to Linda’s estate.

This narrative of the lineage of Mbube / Wimoweh / A Lion Sleeps Tonight, with its focus on originality, ownership and theft, is framed by the international discourse of intellectual property law that emanates from the global North. This framework privileges stories of individual authorship and original genius, obscuring other, more complex stories of collective authorship, cultural flow and genre formation. Indeed, ‘mbube’, which is both the name of a song and the name of a generic style of performance, participates in complex lineages of cultural flow across the Black Atlantic, such as the importation to South Africa of African-American practices of jubilee singing and minstrels by Orpheus MacAdoo in the 1890’s.

For Song of Solomon, Jonker and Borland drew on the estimated 400 recorded versions of Mbube / Wimoweh / A Lion Sleeps Tonight, as well as other examples of the mbube genre and older ancestral forms. ‘Morpheus’, a custom-built software application, samples these musical texts, continually arranging and rearranging ‘original’ and ‘imitated’ compositional elements across the installation space.

Read more about the project on Borland’s website.

Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture

jo — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:36:20 +0000

Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture - Edited by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid.

If Rhythm Science was about the flow of things, Sound Unbound is about the remix–how music, art, and literature have blurred the lines between what an artist can do and what a composer can create. In Sound Unbound, Rhythm Science author Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid asks artists to describe their work and compositional strategies in their own words. These are reports from the front lines on the role of sound and digital media in an information-based society. The topics are as diverse as the contributors: composer Steve Reich offers a memoir of his life with technology, from tape loops to video opera; Miller himself considers sampling and civilization; novelist Jonathan Lethem writes about appropriation and plagiarism; science fiction writer Bruce Sterling looks at dead media; Ron Eglash examines racial signifiers in electrical engineering; media activist Naeem Mohaiemen explores the influence of Islam on hip hop; rapper Chuck D contributes “Three Pieces”; musician Brian Eno explores the sound and history of bells; Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno interview composer-conductor Pierre Boulez; and much more. “Press ‘play,’” Miller writes, “and this anthology says ‘here goes.’” The groundbreaking mix CD that accompanies the book features Nam Jun Paik, the Dada Movement, John Cage, Sonic Youth, and many other examples of avant-garde music. Most of the CD’s content comes from the archives of Sub Rosa, a legendary record label that has been the benchmark for archival sounds since the beginnings of electronic music.

Contributors: David Allenby, Pierre Boulez, Catherine Corman, Chuck D, Erik Davis, Scott De Lahunta, Manuel DeLanda, Cory Doctorow, Eveline Domnitch, Frances Dyson, Ron Eglash, Brian Eno, Dmitry Gelfand, Dick Hebdige, Lee Hirsch, Vijay Iyer, Ken Jordan, Douglas Kahn, Daphne Keller, Beryl Korot, Jaron Lanier, Joseph Lanza, Jonathan Lethem, Carlo McCormick, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Moby, Naeem Mohaiemen, Alondra Nelson, Keith and Mendi Obadike, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pauline Oliveros, Philippe Parreno, Ibrahim Quraishi, Steve Reich, Simon Reynolds, Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud, Nadine Robinson, Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), Alex Steinweiss, Bruce Sterling, Lucy Walker, Saul Williams, Jeff E. Winner.

Special thanks for Editorial Assistance to Roy Christopher.

About the Editor

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician living and working in New York City. His artwork has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale for Architecture, the Andy Warhol Museum, and many other venues. His written work has appeared in such publications as the Village Voice and Artforum. He is an editor of the magazine 21c (www.21cmagazine.com) and the author of Rhythm Science (MIT Press, 2004).

NMR Commission: “You’re Not My Father” by Paul Slocum

jo — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:36:06 +0000

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.

Although the commission money has been exhausted, Slocum is still accepting submissions. If you are interested in participating, read the PDF document on the website. Your footage will be added to the video sequence online and exhibited in future gallery exhibitions.

About the Process: In an email he wrote to Helen Thorington (January 11), Slocum describes the difficulties he had finding participants for the project:

Originally I was posting on Internet message boards for Full House, fan film making, and other related topics offering $80 for each completed video, hoping I could get about 18 videos. But nobody was taking the offer so I increased it to $150 and accepted that I had to reduce the number of videos. I ended up having the best results with Craigslist. You can’t post an ad to multiple cities, so I rotated the ad between different locations.

I gradually built a list of people willing to participate, which was complicated to maintain since people frequently expressed interest and later stopped responding to my emails. Most participants did not meet the deadlines I set. I received the first video in early November, and the last three in early January, less than a week before the launch date.

He then goes on to describe the formal challenges he faced:

Originally, I’d wanted the voicing of the dialogue to be so close to the original that it would maintain the hypnotic rhythm of the mockup loop I had created. I specified this in the documentation, but nobody could do it well enough, and the sound from the reshoots didn’t maintain the rhythm of the original concept. I was concerned that the piece wouldn’t work until I had the idea of overlaying the original audio onto the reshoot audio. This maintained the rhythm and emphasized the room reverb (and space) from the reshoots.

I found that the key to making the piece work out was subtle changes. Very slight timing changes made a big difference, equalization of audio, selection between two slightly different takes… Also some of the reshoots did not work aesthetically, but after a lot of experimenting I found that changes in color saturation of the clips could fix problems without changing much about the original authorship of the reshoot. I could bring out colors in dull clips, and control overly complex clips. I also discovered that the transition from under-saturated clips to over-saturated clips can be interesting.

You’re Not My Father is included in Slocum’s solo show “More House” which opens tonight at Dunn and Brown Contemporary, 5020 Tracy Street, Dallas, Texas.

You’re Not My Father 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

Paul Slocum is a musician and new media artist living in Dallas. Computers and computer culture are often the medium and subject of his work. Some of his projects are “The Dot Matrix Synth”, an 80’s dot matrix printer with re-programmed firmware to transform it into a musical instrument, “The Century Callback Project”, a phone number that calls you back 8 times in a century, and “The Time-Lapse Homepage”, a video made with HTML. He is also half of the “Tree Wave” project that creates music and video with obsolete assembly-language-programmed computer and video game gear. Paul is the director and co-founder of “And/Or Gallery” in Dallas, a gallery that specializes in new media artwork. Some of Paul’s performances and exhibitions include Transitio MX in Mexico City, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Deitch Projects, and Eyebeam in New York, Le Confort Moderne in France, README 2005 in Denmark, and The Liverpool Biennial.

Art’s Birthday 2008 [Vienna]

helen — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:09:59 +0000

INVITATION TO JOIN KUNSTRADIO’S CELEBRATION OF ART’S BIRTHDAY 2008! Celebrating Art’s Birthday is a tradition started by French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou who declared, on January 17th 1963, that Art had been born exactly 1,000,000 years ago when somebody dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water.

Throughout the last decades artists have continued organising annual celebrations in the spirit of Filliou’s “Eternal Network” or “La Fête permanente”. In 2008 people all over the world will again be preparing numerous networked birthday parties for art, several of these under the motto “Forever Young”.

Kunstradio invites you to join their celebration by contributing presents to their party, which will take place on site at Common Ground, QDK, Museumsquartier Q21 in Vienna from 8 pm on January 17th 2008.

These presents they invite you to upload to their present pool online.

They will listen in on your presents and streams during their party on site in Vienna, and artists will re-mix and further distribute these online and via the live Kunstradio broadcast on the cultural channel on the Austrian National Radio Ö1 from 11 – 12 pm CET, as well as on the EBU satellite.

A selection of presents will also be presented in later on air editions of Kunstradio.

Should you have any questions or plan to organise a party yourself, please do not hesitate to contact us: kunstradio [at] kunstradio.at

Spread the word! This is a party you can bring as many people and presents to as you wish!

More about Art’s Birthday can be found here: http://www.artsbirthday.net

What do we want?
A present. Not for us, for Art.

Which present?
sound, images, text, love

How?
Streamed, e-mailed, snail-mailed or uploaded at:
http://www.kunstradio.at/PROJECTS/AB2008/presents-upload.php

Format?
mp3 files, live-streams, images, webcams, etc.

When?
Until January 17th, 2008 (from 20:00 CET until late, (19:00 GMT))

Where?
on air: 11 – 12 p.m. CET Ö1 (FM 92.0, MW 1476, SW)
on line: http://www.kunstradio.at/PROJECTS/AB2008
on site: Vienna, details to be announced

Why?
To celebrate.

What?
Art’s Birthday.

Live Stage: Re-Mixer [Berkeley, CA]

jo — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 23:03:01 +0000

RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA - Opening Reception and Performances: Re-Mixer :: October 26, 2007; 7:00 p.m. :: Bancroft Lobby, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2625 Durant Avenue #2250m, Berkeley, CA.

Join us for a one-night live music mash-up and art performance. Featuring Berkeley remix artists and DJs Ripley and Kid Kameleon, this event celebrates the opening of RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA and presents live performance works that complete that exhibition. Also appearing will be the do-it-yourself DJ machine created by the Improbable Orchestra group and a live image mash-up by the artist Zebbler playing across the museum walls. This event is co-hosted by Creative Commons.

Live Stage: Furthernoise Radio [Bristol]

jo — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:47:31 +0000

FURTHERNOISE RADIO on BCFM 93.2 FM - Online Stream :: October 23, 22.00-23.00 BST (+1GMT) :: Repeated October 24, 9-10 am :: Go here for your own location time.

Tonight’s programme features Bristol noise duo Benzer, master of the drone Tuba Tom Heasley, Formication, Hassan Khan, Stephan Mathieu, Luca Formentini, Icelandic instrumental ensemble Amiina, the legendary Harry Parch and a new ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’ remix. As always we also have a live online visual mix from our regular VJ’s Grazmaster & Neil. To get the radio stream and the online visual mixing open 2 browser windows with the following URLs in each window. Subscribe to our podcasts of current and past programmes from the radio menu of the site.

Cute or Creepy?

jo — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:29:28 +0000

Kitakyushu Biennial ‘07 presents CUTE OR CREEPY?, A *CANDY FACTORY PROJECT - Featuring the following artists, musicians and companies in collaboration with TAKUJI KOGO:

John Miller, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Frederico Baronello and Associazione Turistica Pro-Loco di Lampedusa, Keiichi Miyagawa and Toto Ltd., Sean Snyder, Hiroyuki Hanada, Mike Bode & Staffan Schmidt, and *CANDY FACTORY F/Thomas Bayrle.

Exhibition : Ex-JR Kyushu office bldg :: until October 31, 2007 :: Directed by Keiichi Miyagawa +Takuji Kogo :: INSTALLATION VIEWS :: Special Guest Appearance Hiroyuki Handa; Live at Moji-Ko on October 21. More information here.