Adam Nash will lead a tour of his work on Thursday, May 22, 2008 between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. US EDT. If you would like to take part in the tour, please contact adam at yamanakanash dot net.

Trace Aureity 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

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. Read an interview here.

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.

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.

Based on the rapidly expanding archive of music/sound experiments to be found on Networked Music Review and the fifteen short works recently commissioned for it, the symposium aims to stimulate critical and far-ranging discussion on emerging music and sound art practice. Program here.

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. The recent valorisation of collaboration within the arts, however, merely elides the basic condition of collaboration that all forms of production ultimately rely on in various degrees and arrangements. This can be seen as one part of the larger growth in service and communications industries whose ‘labour’ and ‘produce’ are primarily invested in the structuring and intensification of various collaborative exchanges, often minute and ephemeral, yet, when harvested on a vast scale, capable of generating seemingly endless amounts of surplus value.[1] Collaboration in the production of this ’surplus’ now extends beyond the contracted employees into the consumers themselves, who help define and create the products they themselves consume. This is exemplified in the proliferation of highly ‘personalised’ products and services, reality entertainment, and the social networks of Web 2.0, with the virtual world of Second Life notably combining all three factors.[2] Those artforms which most consciously valorise collaboration, as described in Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, merely echo this situation.[3] The social relations constructed by the artist in gestures of collaboration with audiences and others become spectacularised and commodified in forms that often do not return to those who created them but rather become tokens within the circulation of the art market.[4] In a funding system that prioritises social inclusion within the arts, like that of the UK, collaborative projects can tick the box that unlocks the piggy-bank of state patronage. In such contexts collaboration quickly becomes little more than a revenue stream.[5] Similarly, the rise of Relational Aesthetics accompanied the embrace of artistic practice by the commercial sector, often drawing upon the strategies of such art to enhance collaboration and ‘creativity’ within the workplace.[6]…” Continue reading All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses by Simon Yuill, Mute Magazine.

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.

And debate and conference around web streaming and the practices of collaborative network performance :: February 16, 15:00 - 18:00, with invited speakers: Erik Minkkinen (Le Placard), Jérôme Joy (nocinema), Agnès de Cayeux (x-réseau), Manuel Schmalstieg (aether), AOM (Avatar Orchestra Metaverse), Nancy Mauro-Flude (keyworx/sistero), Jean-François Blanquet (projectsinge).

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:

Wikisonic — by Jon Brouchoud (aka Keystone Bouchard) — consists of a round room, in both the virtual and real museum (see Second Life prototype here). The interior wall contains a musical staff, with rows of notes in the key of C. Each note ‘bulb’ can be turned on or off. A trigger revolves constantly around the space, playing only those notes which have been activated. An identical installation in Second Life mirrors the real installation, such that avatars can also turn notes on and off. The result is a collaborative musical composition, made up of asynchronous decisions made by visitors to the museum. In this way, visitors are engaged as an active and dynamic part of the composition, instead of passive and static, as is most often the case in musical experience. Additionally, if viable, proximity sensors also trigger translucent wall panels, indicating the location of each Wikisonic composer. Visitors both real and virtual will have a visual indication of a presence on ‘the other side’ - further bridging the perceived gap between the real and the virtual.

Wikisonic, Experiment #1 Machinima
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJJSdjyOMDg
Interactive music composition. Architecture Island, November 2007 - Concept by Keystone Bouchard, Scripted by Dirty McLean. Wikitune composed by Bettina Tizzy, Theory Shaw and Keystone Bouchard. Also see Musical Architecture

Music Orbits - by Ron Blechner — will explore how 3-D space can act as a medium for users to interact and create music. This interaction is being prototyped in Second Life using its internal building and scripting system. The musical arrangement will physically take up virtual space; the objects will be arrayed as either a constellation, galaxy, solar system, or atomic compound. Thus, as the user interacts with the objects, it would change their position and relative location within this structure. Not only would the position change the music element, but the positions of elements relative to one another could affect each other. See the wiki pages for this project for daily details. Also, see Ron’s blog for summary updates.

Here’s an introduction to the The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop:

There are a number of events planned, including Intro to Exhibit Building in SL, February 14 at 5 pm.

The Tech Museum of Innovation engages people of all ages and backgrounds in exploring and experiencing the technologies affecting their lives, and aims to inspire the innovator in everyone. An expansive variety of interactive exhibits and unique floor programs showcase not just how technology works, but how it affects who we are and how we live, work, play and learn. The Tech’s 132,000 square feet are divided among themed galleries focused on innovation, the internet, the human body, and exploration. In addition, The Tech also features the Hackworth IMAX Dome Theater (Northern California’s only domed IMAX screen), an educational center for workshops and labs, an up scale cafe, and a retail store featuring books, gifts, and only-in-Silicon Valley items. [Thanks to Michael DiTullio for the tip.]

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. Second Life performance will feature animations and choreography by Josephine Dorado, John D. Mitchell, Edo Paulus, Christine Benham, Lauren Watson and Sean Nevin - performing from Arizona, New York, and Amsterdam. Images and sounds of the performers from Real Life will be projected into Second Life and vice versa, creating a mashup of real and virtual improv for both audiences.

Spoken word: Ione
RL dancer: Heloise Gold
Electronics/harmonica/small instruments: Pauline Oliveros
Animations / Second Life dancers: Josephine Dorado, Edo Paulus and members of ADaPT (Association for Dance and Performance Telematics). ADaPT includes Arizona State University, Herberger College Dance: John D. Mitchell, Christine Benham, Lauren Watson; Virginia Piper School of Creative Writing: Sean Nevin
Tech Asst: Zevin Polzin

International Society of Improvised Music (ISIM) is an interdisciplinary conference that brings together performers, educators, researchers, students and community members from across the world, in an effort to recognize improvisation as a powerful tool for achieving this integration.

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

Helen Thorington: I understand that you do not think of yourself as a sound artist in Second Life. I wonder if you would explain why?

Adam Nash: I think of a realtime 3D multi-user environment (3D MUVEs), like Second Life, as a post-convergent medium. This means that no single media-element (sound, vision, sociality, network, time, etc) takes precedent, rather they all exist equally in a symbiotic relationship, without which none of them could exist.

[Image: Unsung Song #16: Blue Sound Ground]

Helen: Do you have any musical training? Do you play any musical instruments? Does this help or hinder your explorations?

Adam: I don’t have any formal musical training, but I do play a few instruments badly, chiefly the drums and keyboards. I have many years’ experience playing in bands and making music for soundtracks and performances. I also have quite a lot of experience as a live performer in performance art, dance and movement. Like all experience, it both helps and hinders my explorations in 3D MUVEs. While I am able to build and expand upon musical performance techniques, I assume that the same experience severely hampers my ability to see potential in a new environment. I really love music, but I think new environments like this reveal music as an outdated concept. I still think music is useful – indeed I release a lot of my own music under a Creative Commons license via my net-label at www.concentrated-sound.net – but anachronistic. I was first drawn to realtime 3D back in 1997, when I first encountered VRML, and it struck me as a very similar environment to the inside of my own head when I was creating music for performances. It is a spatial environment in which sounds can be animated in a way that is easy to visualize but impossible to achieve in the physical world. It is a logical next step to see the environment as the performance environment as well as the composition environment, and from there quickly grows the concepts that I explore in 3D MUVEs, basically audiovisual environments that users navigate within to create their own unique experience from the elements provided by me. It’s like the composer’s mind, the instruments and the venue all rolled into one.

Helen: Tell us about composing sound for Second Life. You have called it a “technically very limited and frustrating environment.” What are the limitations and frustrations? Are there redeeming features?

Adam: Composing sound for Second Life, or any 3D MUVE, is fun, because of this ability to provide the basic audiovisual elements and then leave the user to arrange (ie, navigate) the elements as they please. This is an extremely exciting and satisfying way of working, because it removes the need for arrangement – a skill, different from composition, that is absolutely crucial in linear music. There’s nothing wrong with arrangement (often in linear music it is the thing that turns something great), but often there are an unlimited number of potential ways of arranging a piece of music and the musician is forced to choose only one.

From: Infra_Assemblage

Also, with this idea of the melding of the composition environment and performance environment, the act of creating work is often enormously enjoyable because you get to fly around and through your ideas, trying out different ways of navigation that you may never have realized were possible when conceiving of the piece. It’s like a slightly more concrete iteration of the limitless imagination scape in which all these ideas are found.

The technical limitations of Second Life are significant and many. The main limitations, for me, are the lack of a proper modeling hierarchy, and a few things to do with sound, like the 10-second limit per file and lack of control over falloff. There is also an undocumented limit to the number of simultaneous sounds that can be played. On the other hand, there are a lot of positives about working within limitations, as the artist is forced to be creative and come up with novel solutions. It also means many formal decisions are made prior to starting work, which in some ways makes things easier. Like most things, it is both blessing and curse.

[Image: Unsung Song 2: Crescent]

Helen: Avatars play an important role in your work by activating the sound. And yet you have “core problems” with them. “The avatar concept”, you say in July’s empyre discussion “is the one I find the most troubling, and it also grows from the 3d-space-as-physical-simulation misassumption. There is no need to concentrate presence into one cohesive point (an avatar).” I wonder if you would explain what you mean by this, and perhaps suggest alternatives.

Adam: Well, if avatars play an important role in my work, it’s because they play a very important role in Second Life itself. The problems I refer to are both technical and conceptual. First, the analogy of a single point of presence, from which the rest of the world is perceived, and in which the rest of the world perceives you, arises directly from our physical world, where our sensory organs are coalesced in a single unit and cannot be separated. Recently, humans have been able to spread out perception and presence through technological mediation, for example cameras, telephones, radio and the internet, and I think we are certainly slowly moving away from the concept of a single point of perception and presence, but mostly it is still how we negotiate our physical existence.

But, it is a very underexamined concept in realtime 3D, and particularly in Second Life. This is true of the entire physical world analogy that controls the working concept of Second Life. Even though it may seem natural to use 3D space to recreate physical space, that is only one possibility, and certainly not the easiest, because it can never recreate physical space, only represent it. Once we move into the sphere of representation, different modes of perception are required (one never actually walks on a map).

Because the system to which our bodies are subject (ie, physical space) is now being represented, we need also to represent our bodies, not recreate them, otherwise things quickly get confusing and the representation becomes limited in usefulness. This happens as soon as we move our ‘camera’ away from our avatar – we are no longer seeing and hearing via our avatar’s eyes and ears, rather we are perceiving from whatever point in the 3D space that our ‘camera’ is at. Yet, within this synthetic space it is perfectly feasible that we could perceive from both the position of the camera and the position of our avatar. This is not difficult or unusual, in fact we are already doing it twice simply by having a default avatar in Second Life. The first, significantly, is the physical/virtual superposition, where my physical body is seeing and hearing my avatar see and hear – already I have two points of perception (literally and conceptually). Then there is the ‘over the shoulder’ point of view that SL avatars default to, behind and above the head of your own avatar, really a camera that is following your avatar. It is seeing and hearing your avatar see and hear. So now I am seeing and hearing my camera seeing and hearing my avatar seeing and hearing. I am simultaneously perceiving from three different points, literally and conceptually. I think this is one of the reasons so many people feel so disoriented when first encountering realtime 3D space.

Since it is possible, indeed common, to perceive from two or three points, then it’s a small step to expand the number of points of perception arbitrarily, both in space and in time (lag and multiple private chats are both examples of multiple points of perception in the temporal dimension that all SL users are comfortable with).

Practicing the agency of presence via multiple points perhaps seems a more subtle or difficult concept, but again SL users constantly deal with others via multiple points of presence. For example, most users quickly become comfortable with the idea that another user may not be seeing and hearing the scene from their avatar, or that they may be simultaneously dealing with the physical world and the synthetic world and the mediation device itself. Indeed, SL specifically acknowledges this via the device of having the avatar’s eyes and head follow the user’s mouse pointer when dealing with the user interface. This means that others’ avatars are, variously, a presence notifier (the person is logged in), a mouse, a representation, none of these things, all of these things and potentially many more things besides.

[Image: Unsung Song #9:Corona]

Helen: I can fly alone through your installations and activate sounds. I can get friends to move through them with me and produce different sounds. I can play with the work and it changes. Isn’t it in fact important for your work to have the avatars’ presence concentrated in one space?

Adam: In that sense, the avatar is serving the standard function of a mouse pointer for 3D space. Again, this is mainly because of the restrictive working analogy of Second Life itself, which enforces this role for the avatar, and it’s true that some of my works are a specific comment on, and working within, that restriction. But, it is not necessary for the user’s avatar to be concentrated in one space. Ideally, for many of the works, the user would be able to branch off avatars and move spatially through works in different ways simultaneously. Similarly for time. Or, to be able to interact with different works simultaneously in space and time.

Certainly, I consider all the pieces in, say, Seventeen Unsung Songs to be all parts and aspects of the same work, quite literally. Sonically, they are all constructed from the same rational scale that I devised, based on a fundamental tone of 77Hz then proceeding in intervals of ratios over 7. All of the pieces use this scale, and one of the pieces (Blue Sound Ground, which users pass through at the entrance) contains all of the sounds used in all the other pieces, both as a conceptual readying and also a technical device to load as many sounds into the user’s cache as possible. Visually, also, all the pieces are clearly very strongly related, sharing colours methods of distributing colour across hue, saturation and opacity spectra. It would be ideal if they could be experienced in multiple modes over space and time.

[Image: Anahata,The Mute Swan]

Helen: Have you considered what kind of work you might produce if in fact presence were not concentrated in one point? If presence were distributed over time, location, data and media?

Adam: I think it implies a more involved work, a work where the user experience becomes extremely important to the work. The extent of the user interaction over multiple points determines, to large extents, how the work develops and emerges. Works could take dynamic notions much further. For example, currently we can trigger a certain sound or animation based on sensed data about an avatar’s position and other metrics – this could be expanded to include many different aspects of the nature of the user’s engagement with the work. It suggests work that exists across environments, building on gameplay techniques to build a performative and experiential vocabulary cooperatively between artist and user. This is tremendously exciting and suggests a kind of work that could accompany users through time and space, growing and changing together. This kind of thing would start to approach the mechanics of true non-linear interactivity.

Helen: It seems to me that your work adds new parameters to sound/musical composition. In most of the networked musical pieces I’ve heard or seen described, this has not been true. Music remains music, separate or separable from other things, like the space in which it is played and its audience. And while I find this very difficult to talk about, what you introduce has to do with audience immersion and presence in the space; and audience activation of the work as a result. Thinking of the participant, I think of words like “experiential” (experiencing through the movement of my avatar-body as it explores the space you have created), the bringing into existence of music/sound. Thinking from the point of view of the music/sound, it’s not like filling a space with pre-determined sound (as so many of us have done in RL), but rather creating a dimensional space with potential… And that the two constitute a unique approach to creating and experiencing music.

I’m reminded of NOX Son-O-House, a public pavilion that is both an architectural and a sound installation that allows people to not just hear sound in a musical structure, but also to participate in the composition of the sound. It is an instrument, score and studio at the same time. A sound work, made by composer Edwin van der Heide, it is continuously generating new sound patterns activated by sensors picking up actual movements of visitors.

Is this similar to the work you’re doing?

Adam: Oh, well, I certainly hope so. I’m not familiar with that work, but it sounds very similar conceptually to the process I touched on earlier, where the compositional environment, the performative environment and the experiential environment converge, and the resulting symbiotic relationship reverberates back and forward throughout the previously distinct stages, merging them into a new, post-convergent environment of interactive, emergent, audiovisual experience.

Helen: Given the desire for multiple avatars to simultaneously/collectively activate your installations, how do you reconcile the absence of avatars or the single avatar interacting with the piece with your intentions?

Adam: I’m not sure I fully understand this question, but most of my pieces can be experienced at multiple levels in terms of number of avatars, length of time spent, familiarity with 3D space, etc. Again, this is related to my desire for an approach to the medium that is not tied to a physical world analogy of a single person with a single body. Even though SL is a multi-user space, it doesn’t preclude single users, and this is true of my work too, I hope. Some works are probably more satisfying aurally when used with other people (eg, Rarer Air), but other works are designed for individuals to interact with different elements of the SL experience, besides the social, in which case the number of avatars using it doesn’t really matter too much (eg, The Space Between). Yet others are unaffected by the number of avatars accessing them (eg, Appolinarium). I really try to explore many different aspects of the realtime 3D MUVE environment in all my different works, so its difficult to align all the work with an over-riding desire on my part.

From: Bell Garden

Helen: Have you created sound installations in other virtual worlds? If yes, can you talk about the similarities and differences, pros and cons?

Adam: Again, I really don’t think of them specifically as sound installations, but yes I have worked in many different virtual worlds/environments over the past 10 years or so, including VRML/X3D, ActiveWorlds, Blaxxun/Contact, Unreal, Torque, Quest 3D, Multiverse and even GEM in Pure Data. Differences are mainly technical, with VRML/X3D being by far the freest and most able to accommodate large scale, unrestricted concepts. In practice, it’s always had some problems dealing with lots and lots of simultaneous sounds, but I think that Niall Moody has solved that with his Helian browser, though I haven’t had a chance to use it – I’d like to but SL has got the mindshare at the moment, so that’s where curators want you to work. It’s a shame VRML/X3D never gained wide acceptance in the media arts community. As for the other environments I mentioned, they’re all commercial products to greater or lesser extents, except for Pure Data, so they all have significant technical restrictions that arise as a function of the commercial aims. Multiverse looks interesting in terms of extensibility and freedom, but again I haven’t had a real chance to properly check it out. I’m trying to at the moment with my colleague John McCormick, but again we’ve been commissioned to do a mixed reality piece using Second Life, so that takes up most of our time. Pure Data (known as pd) is the opposite, it’s open source and specifically designed for audio. With the GEM library in pd you can use OpenGL to create responsive 3D environments, and John and I have been working with that a little, with promising results. Most of these environments have things that they do better than others and things they do worse. SL does a lot of things poorly and a few things well, with its popularity being its chief advantage at the moment.

From: A Rose Heard at Dusk

Helen: You refer to your SL pieces as “audiovisual sculpture” and “site-specific installations.” Can you talk about the difference, and what makes Seventeen Unsung Songs site-specific, but not A Rose Heard at Dusk?

[Image: A Rose Heard at Dusk]

Adam: I guess “audiovisual sculpture” refers to all my work in 3D environments, whereas something like Seventeen Unsung Songs is a collection of inter-related audiovisual sculptures that were commissioned by Sugar Seville specifically for an island that already existed, therefore it is “site-specific”. It wouldn’t be possible to recreate Seventeen Unsung Songs in its entirety without having an island that was very similar to East of Odyssey, but it would of course be possible to install individual pieces from within that show in different places.

Helen: What do virtual worlds offer you as an artist that real world spaces don’t?

Adam: To me, this comes back to my concept of the post-convergent medium. The physics of realworld spaces make it impossible to attempt such things as continuous realtime dynamic animation of arbitrary numbers of sound and vision sources based on continuous realtime sensing of presence and other metrics. However, the comparison still considers the primary role of virtual spaces to be a recreation of physical space, which is not what I think. The kind of art that I have ever attempted in real world spaces has always been primarily performative and very different from virtual work. I guess there was a point of crossover when I was still working with The Men Who Knew Too Much and looking to combine real world and virtual art, but since 2002 any work I’ve done that involves so-called mixed reality has chiefly been in the service of others like Igloo, but then I tend to do the music/sound and some performance. I don’t see virtual spaces as a separate reality, I very much see virtual space as wholly contained within the real world.

Helen: We’re seeing more and more artists combining sound/music and moving images/video, referring to themselves as a/v artists and VJs. Why do you think this is?

Adam: I guess it’s a natural progression from a past that had discrete partitions between all sorts of experience, as a result of both technical and conceptual limitations. As media starts to converge, and access to both the means of production and means of distribution becomes easier, it becomes more viable technically to enact the kind of concepts that naturally emerge. In particular, two generations of music video and clubbing combine with more meme-like concepts of emergence and networks to create a desire to operate across a range of media. Most people’s media vocabulary is of a sufficient level of sophistication that practitioners are driven to explore new modes of expression to engage meaningfully with an audience.

Helen: Are there any other artists working in the same vein as you?

Adam: Plenty of really interesting artists operating in Second Life, many of whom share aspects of exploration and practice with each other, myself included. Some who come to mind are Gazira Babelli, Annabeth Robinson/AngryBeth Shortbread, Christopher Dodds/Mashup Islander, Bingo Onomatapoeia and the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, DC Spensley/Dancoyote Antonelli, Brad Kligerman, Juria Yoshikawa, Keystone Bouchard, Daruma Picnic, Christine Webster/Wildo Hofmann and Andrew Burrell/Nonnatus Korhonen. That’s just a short list, there are lots of people doing lots of interesting work all over Second Life.

Helen: Who are some of the artists you most admire?

Adam: John Power, John McCormick, Burno Martelli and Ruth Gibson (Igloo), Bruce Mowson, Melinda Rackham, George Clinton, Prince, Greg Egan, Yoko Ono, Morton Feldman, Brian Eno, Mark Rothko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. There are so many artists whose work I really appreciate, but those are the ones I genuinely admire.

Helen: Do you have predictions for sound art trends, developing technologies, the 3-D web? Have you any thoughts on what the future impact of immersion/presence might be? Do you think it might make “play” and “fun” more important to our lives.

Adam: I think we’re entering the post-convergent era, where distinctions between sound, vision and other media elements will cease to be meaningful. I definitely think play and fun will become more important as 3D environments grow in acceptance, alongside the growth of computer games as a medium. I certainly think that games, in the broadest sense, are the artistic medium of this century. Simulation and modeling will be of enormous importance to society and we will learn a lot from artists and practitioners of games and virtual worlds, and vice versa. The distinction between real world and virtual world will cease to be meaningful. We’ll see a convergence of networked experience via 3D, something like a 3D web but much deeper and more enjoyable than that phrase suggests. I definitely think we’ll see a move beyond the use of 3D space as just for representing physical spaces. The multiple points of perception and presence that we’ve already talked about will grow in acceptance and utility, along with an expectation that art will manipulate this.

Helen: Thank you, Adam, for this great interview.

Visit the following URLs for more information on Adam’s work:

seventeen unsung songs: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/unsung_songs.html
a rose heard at dusk: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/rose_heard_at_dusk.html
anemochord: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/anemochord.html
eudemonia stellata http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/eudemonia_stellata.html
infra assemblage: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/infra_assemblage.html

For information on Adam’s other projects, go to: http://yamanakanash.net/projects.html

Videos of some of his works are available for viewing at: http://www.waystowave.com/adam/secondlife/movies/

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:

* Locustream Map: a dynamic world map which allows access to the streams online. At one point it seemed necessary to provide the streamers (as we have come to call the musicians and artists who’ve responded to our call) with the possibility to access the streams themselves, not only to hear their own stream but also those provided by other people. Our website now offers an animated map which shows the location of all the streams and indicates those which are currently active with a blinking light. By clicking on a chosen location one can directly listen to the OGG Vorbis stream in a browser.

* Locustream Tuner: an installation where visitors are invited to traverse the different audio streams by sliding a ball along a 150-ft wire : the position of the ball can be altered by the public acting like a tuner, an audio promenade where users slide their way through a series of remote audio locations. Multiple loudspeakers enable us to spatialise the sound of the streams creating so that each different audio stream selected on the wire emanates from a new position in the local space. In order to make the installation function efficiently we were obliged to incorporate a system allowing us to interrogate our server and update the list of current streams (people go away or use their streaming computer for a concert or a machine crashes…) we use the list to provide visual feedback by projecting names of the places the streams are coming from).

* various performances and concerts (suitable interpretations of the remote streams in local environments) . After setting a first permanent stream (outside Cap15 a artists studio complex in Marseille) we started by using the streams in a performance / improvisation type mode using the, now standard, laptop and MIDI controller with homemade patches to reinterprate the streams in real time - even if nothing in particular would be happening on the stream at a given time when we were intending to work with it.

Other developments are including:

* an activity developed by one member of the group (Nicolas Bralet) which he calls mémoires de stream . It consists of listening to the streams on a regular basis from wherever he happens to be at the time and producing a short composition using a mixture of sounds gleaned from the stream and those of the local environment, simultaneously a idealised projection of the remote site and a reflection on the schizophonic aspects of the whole project.

* at the same time another member of the group (Esther Salmona) conducted a similar activity but in this time in a literary mode, listening to and describing the streams as she switches from location to location, a sort of laptop tardis with which she could make instantaneous hops (without stumbling around every time she lands).

* a real practice of sound remote recordings (as field recordings, phonographies, soundwalks) from our system of open-mikes network as a basis or structure to elaborate sound fictions close to radiophonic works and live performances with laptops (to play live with the streams as material for improvisations and for specific sound spatialisations - Max/MSP, Pd -). Fictions are coming from the variable perceptions within comprovisation and composition and from the embodiment and reconstruction of ghosts soundscapes and (no-)events, in the follow-up of electroacoustic music and in combining concert, live performance, podcasting, streaming and networks (Jérôme Joy) - Sound spatialisation developments are conducted with the help of GMEM Marseille.

* the development of a sensor instrument (wifi parabolic mike with midi controlers) which permits in the same time to play with local sound recordings with specific treatments (LiSa, Pd) and to interact with the reception of the streams (ex. with the Locustream Tuner). From this point, we begin some explorations towards mobility and wireless systems (Lydwine Van Der Hulst, Peter Sinclair, with the help of STEIM Amsterdam).

* LS in SL: most recently we created an interface allowing access to the streams in Second Life (developed in partnership with SAIC Chicago) (Brett Ian Balogh, Robb Drinkwater, Peter Sinclair, Jérôme Joy). Locus Sonus, has set up an extension to its physical world lab in second life, with an aim to experiment with permutations between the physical and the virtual world using audio as the main vector. We are currently developing physical modeling techniques as a way of making virtual spaces acoustically resonant and using streaming techniques to port audio from the virtual to the physical world and visa versa. Although a virtual world can respond to the physical world by simple imitation it is also possible to construct from abstract or impossible conditions. One of the things which we wish to verify is the way that physically impossible resonant spaces will influence and mix with the local acoustic space leading to a paradoxical hybridization possibly placing the user in both places simultaneously since the synthetic acoustic space will exist as sound waves in three dimensions within the installation.

Audio capabilities in Second Life are relatively limited, beyond spatialization and file playback there is little else, certainly no possibility for sound synthesis or serious audio manipulation. We are currently working in collaboration with SAIC (School of Arts Institute Chicago) to develop an audio server using Super Collider which, when given the dimensions and other descriptive details (surfaces etc) of a given virtual space, will generate, the corresponding resonance using physical modeling techniques. The resulting audio signal will then be “streamed” into Second Life.

* New developments are concerning the exploration of sympathy, resonances and sonification between different places (Nicolas Maigret, Sabrina Issa) and the approaches of the back and forwards between virtual and physical spaces (Extranautes with the collaboration with LAMES/CNRS).

* Around the concepts of listening systems, we’re previewing during next months to set up a stream installation over a longer time period (1 year) at Musée de Gap (France), Locustream Promenade. The plan is to hang parabolic loudspeakers at different locations in and around the museum, each with a different stream so that visitors will experience the sound environment from the microphones either by stumbling on them as they visit the museum or by deliberately returning at different seasons, times of day, etc.

* Other developments will be able to be approached with the different projects led by the streamers. Some streamers have been using the streams for art works of their own, we’re very open to these initiatives and would like to hear about any which you might be involved in.

Unadulterated physical world sound pierces the virtual world creating an almost John Cageian perception where the act of listening is modified by the cumulated real and virtual distance. Increasingly interested by these notions of space and distance we now wish to pursue this research by increasing the porosity between the physical and virtual world.

Last month, Pavig Lok summoned me mid-performance into the opera house of Intempesta Nox (direct SLURL teleport), to attend a live music performance. Not Residents playing real instruments streamed as audio into Second Life, as usually happens — here, instead, the avatars themselves were the musical instruments, spinning like digital tornadoes around the audience. This is the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, a loose collaboration of numerous artists-their blog is here, tracking an impressive number of mixed reality performances around the world. This video is an excerpt from their hypnotic October show, and hopefully the stereophonics are good enough to convey the sensation of being amid these flying ripples of sound.

“[W]e upload samples and trigger them using HUDs on the screen,” AOM member Bingo Onomatopoeia tells me. “In most songs we use a visualization-device worn on the back to make it seen who is playing a note. Using this technique, every orchestra-member becomes a moving instrument. In the instrument I call ‘Onomatophone’, there are six flying spheres that are filled with samples, that fly through the audience, creating a ever-changing mix that is unique for each listener.”

As with most avant garde efforts, the results are an acquired taste, but there’s no disputing their ambition to reshape the boundaries of what’s considered music in Second Life and the wider metaverse. That in mind, I’ve included some excerpts [after the break] from a text written to accompany a recent AOM performance in Vienna.

Update, 11/30: Caterin Semyorka was also on-hand, and posted an evocative, illustrated report on her blog, Girl Meets Second Life.

Excerpts from “New Directions in Music by Avatars” written by Leif Inge

The way one approaches a virtual world like Second Life will inevitably influence the way one acts within it. Approaching it as a cooperative networking society rather than a construction ground, the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse opens up a new field for new experiments in music.

There is a sort of surreal irony in doing art in an artificial world, it is so obvious that it can only be distinguished in definition. It is only terminology, what you name the thing, that makes the canvas different from the wall it hangs on. In here more than out side, both are mere representations, and it is hard to maintain an art versus everything else discourse because the daily routine in Second Life is always already a surreal vision created by humans. Everything is by default interactive, audiovisual and ever changing. Avatars takes shape after Marcel Duchamp’s nude descending the stairs, blood pours from the sky and the world can at any time turn into a painting by Rene Magritte.

The emerging art scene in Second Life have received their attention too, though rarely has it managed to anything but looking for the artwork as we already have it defined. It has failed but to generalize and simplify; if it looks like paintings, then it is art. If its looks like sculpture, then it’s art… This desire to reach a new audience and new ways of promotion has lead to an influx of bands, but all the famous bands having played here simply stream their playing from a studio into Second Life and have their avatar representations play on a prop looking like a proper instrument but really have nothing to add to it…

Originally the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse arose to the needs to perform two projects rather simultaneous, one by Harold Schellinx and the other by Shintaro Miyazaki, or in this world they are better known as Hars Hefferman and Maximillian Nakamura… It is an ever-changing mix of backgrounds and generations shaping the orchestra at any time. What it does have at present is a dedicated core of about 15 members, to which they also add guest performers and guest sound installations occasionally. To approach the idea of an orchestra in such an elastic manner makes the logistics easier as the performers are based in both Europe, North America, and East Asia, potentially adding the rest of the world too.

Many of the performers are also traveling artists, and performs from whatever place they’re in. The orchestra’s membership constitution, or lack of such, contribute to the aesthetics as another aspect of the indeterminate process of playing in Second Life. In addition to the changing body of the orchestra, there is the ever-present time delays affecting all use of broadband cooperation. Simply put, it takes time from playing the sound to hearing the sound. Even if the orchestra perform composed pieces and do follow a score and a conductor, all the factors in live performances are dependent on both the performers and the environment. It will never achieve the same piece sound exactly the same each time. [Avatar Avant Garde: Metaverse Orchestra Turns Avatars Into Musical Instruments blogged by Hamlet on New World Notes]