The Avatar Orchestra will be performing at the Deep Listening Institute Women and Identity Festival Concert :: April 17, 2008; 7:30 PM :: Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway (at Spring Street), New York, New York.

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. Continue reading

Programmable Media II: Networked Music, a one-day symposium examining the current and future possibilities of network-enabled music, will be held on April 11, 2008 at Pace University, NYC. The symposium is free and open to the public, and will include artist presentations and live performances. If you’re not in New York, join us in Second Life.

To register, email turbulence at turbulence dot org with “Programmable Media II” as the subject.

Participants: Andrew Beck, Jason Freeman, Mark T. Godfrey, Sawako Kato, Zach Layton, LoVid, Adam Nash, Helen Thorington, Peter Traub, Dan Trueman, Tobias C. Van Veen. Bios here. Continue reading

“If relational aesthetics and open source were always commercial, can the musical score provide a way of thinking through different relationships between creativity and code? The return to improvisation in ‘livecoding’ draws parallels with experimental practices developed by maverick musicians, programmers and educators from Sun Ra, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Scratch Orchestra to Seymour Papert. Simon Yuill argues that these ‘distributive practices’ are worth extending today.

In recent years the foregrounding of ‘collaboration’ in artistic practice has acquired an aura of inherent benevolence and emancipation, as though the very act of working with others in itself ensures some form of resistance or alternative to conventions of cultural production, and confers positive moral value. Continue reading

Stream on You - Stream de Toi - Streaming and the Practices of Collaborative Network Performance :: February 15-17, 2008 :: iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technology, 30 Quai des Charbonnages / Koolmijnenkaii 30, 1080 Brussels.

Live and online performances February 16 (join us): 21:00 (CET), aether :: 22:30 (CET), Avatar Orchestra Metaverse :: February 17: 15:00 - 20:00, nocinema :: and all the week-end session of Le PlacardBxl. Continue reading

The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop, a project of The Tech Museum of Innovation, is a place to design and prototype exhibits online, using the web and Second Life. You can propose an idea, and develop it with other creative thinkers and experts from around the world. Anyone can join and all contributions are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

The best projects will be eligible for prizes and will be co-developed as physical exhibits at The Tech Museum in conjunction with its upcoming Art, Film and Music exhibition that will open June 4, 2008. Here is a list of all of the projects already underway, and two musical ones: Continue reading

Dancing in Second Life - Mixed Reality Performance in Second Life & Real Life - part of The International Society for Improvised Music (ISIM) Second Annual Conference: Building Bridges :: December 14, 2007; 2-3 pm EST / 20:00-21:00 GMT+1 :: Locations: online in Second Life: Funk Soup Theater, Gembong West, 31/75/551 and at Northwestern University School of Music, Lutkin Hall. Attendance is limited. RSVP with your Second Life name. First time in Second Life? Check out our SL help page.

In this session, Second Life avatars will dance with improvised music from Real Life at ISIM. Real Life performers are Pauline Oliveros - electronics, harmonica & small instruments with spoken word artist Ione & dancer Heloise Gold. Continue reading

Adam Nash is a new media artist, composer, programmer, performer and writer. He works primarily in networked real-time 3D spaces, exploring them as live audiovisual performance spaces. His sound/composition and performance background strongly informs his approach to creating works for virtual environments, embracing sound, time and the user as elements equal in importance to vision. Adam’s work has been presented in galleries, festivals and online in Australia, Europe, Asia and the Americas, including SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and the Venice Biennale. He also works as composer and sound artist with “Company in Space” (AU) and “Igloo” (UK), exploring the integration of motion capture into real-time 3D audiovisual spaces. He is currently undertaking a Master of Arts by Research at the “Centre for Animation and Interactive Media” at RMIT University, Melbourne, researching multi-user 3D cyberspace as a live performance medium; and he’s a Lecturer in “Computer Games and Digital Art” in the School of Creative Media at RMIT University.

Adam will be answering reader’s questions in the comments section below until January 31, 2008. Continue reading

Over the last 18 months the Locus Sonus Lab has been focusing on a process which revolves around a network of live audio streams. The audio source for each stream is simply an open microphone which continually uploads to a server - and from there available from anywhere via the WWW - chosen (or given) soundscapes or sound environments, as playable material.

Our intention being to provide a permanent (and somewhat emblematic) resource to tap into as raw material for our artistic experimentation. We have now established a worldwide community of streamers each person being responsible for the installation and maintenance of his mike. Several different art forms have developed from this project: Continue reading

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Upcoming on November 29th, 2007 at 8pm [UK Time] a novel network performance concert called Disparate Bodies between three different sites in Europe. The sites are: Belfast (Sonic Arts Research Centre); Hamburg (Hochschule für Musik und Theatre); and Graz (Insitut für Elektronische Musik and Akustik).

Disparate Bodies will be also be streamed into Second Life. This unique event showcases strategies for performance over the network including instrumental, audio-visual and laptop work. The event features music by John Cage, a network piece by Pedro Rebelo and structured improvisations with a distributed instrumental sextet and a laptop trio. Continue reading