[Image: David Dunn] Navigating the Space of the Future - Seminar with presentations by: Yolande Harris, David Dunn and Atau Tanaka:: April 15, 2008; 8:30 pm :: Netherlands Media Art Institute, Keizersgracht 264, 1016 EV Amsterdam :: LIVE STREAM.

What does it mean to navigate? What is the importance of location specificity? What does it mean to get lost? The increasing accuracy of satellite navigation strives to eliminate the possibility of human error, but it also produces a sense of dislocation from one’s immediate environment by abstracting location as the coordinates of longitude and latitude. What place is there for one’s body, one’s senses, one’s conscious and unconscious awareness of space, if this knowledge is so apparently made redundant by GPS? Continue reading

SoundWalk2008 - Call for Artists: Artists who utilize, in any manner, sound in their work are invited to submit to the Fifth Annual SoundWalk event to be held in Long Beach CA on September 20, 2008. Please go here for submission requirements and further information. Deadline: July 1, 2008.

Soundwok Artiject - Call for Participants: Take part immediately in a cutting-edge “artiject” in which the aesthetic consciousness of upstream sonifiers is mapped utilizing GIS technology. Continue reading

Yolande Harris invites you to the events that mark the culmination of her artist residence project Sun Run Sun: Sonic Navigations at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in collaboration with STEIM in Amsterdam.

“The project development over the last four months has been intense and varied, and the months of March and April hold the exhibitions and performances of five related works on the theme of navigation technologies, environment and sound. The central work is the Satellite Sounders, small portable instruments for hearing the live data from the GPS satellite network. These can be tried out by walking along the canals around NIMk and are part of the upcoming Territorial Phantom exhibition there. The two installation pieces, Dead Reckoning and Navigating by Circles present spaces of intuitive navigation in sound and video, in Amsterdam and Den Haag.” Continue reading

Sound Walks explores some of the possibilities of Stanza’s Soundcities. It uses the Soundcities database through the openly distributed XML-file. Choose the city you want to visit: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bergen, Bilbao, Bristol, Cork, Dresden, Ljubljana, London, Los Angeles, Napoli, Paris, Rotterdam, Salzburg, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, or Tokyo.

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.

White Sound Down by Jeff Talman :: Gibacht, Loipen Zentrum, Waldmnchen, Germany :: until January 6, 2008 - The sound of snow falling is the sole sound source for this installation, which is available to cross-country skiers in the Bavarian Forest, Germany. The freedom, abandonment and physical exertion of cross-country skiing open the mind to experience that cannot be realized otherwise. White Sound Down seeks to engage this open mental state, which is perhaps comparable to aspects of the “art-aesthetic.”

During a Bavarian snowfall in December 2006 I was amazed at the complexity of the hushed sound events that were occurring. The density of the sound field was impressive, but the three-dimensional, vector-like sense of the hundreds of thousands of infinitesimally small sound trajectories was truly astonishing. Continue reading

There is underselling, the art of lowering expectations so as to assure an audience’s satisfaction. Then there is the qualifying text that the record label Important has placed alongside two MP3s it posted for Christina Kubisch’s album Night Flights, which is being brought back into print 20 years after its initial release and for the first time on CD. This text reads: “These mp3’s are incapable of giving you any real understanding of the perfect assemblies of sound Kubisch is able to achieve.”

Kubisch is one of the first of what one might call “fine artists” to use sound as her primary medium. Continue reading

ELECTRICAL WALKS by Christina Kubisch :: Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival :: Huddersfield, UK :: November 17 - 25, 2007.

Ultrasound has commissioned renowned German sound artist, musician and composer Christina Kubisch to create a new ‘Electrical Walk’ specifically for Huddersfield. Christina has explored the hidden electromagnetic acoustic landscapes of Huddersfield and created a fascinating guided walk for audiences to experience. Continue reading

2007 Issue Fighters: Tongue, Liberated! :: November 23 - December 23, 2007 :: Insa Art Space of the Arts Council Korea, 90 Wonseo-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea.

Issue Fighters is an annual project that Insa Art Space (IAS) designs as an agenda-specific program. Tongue, Liberated!, the project for the year 2007 focuses on ’speech act’ as it intends to be in tandem with “sound,” which is this year’s IAS curatorial theme. This project illuminates speech as a performance and examines the ways in which speeches are constructed and conveyed as public utterance in the interface with the public. Continue reading

Teri Rueb’s Core Sample, like many Land Art works, is dependent on weather conditions, has limited access, and demands physical exertion. Two subways and a ferry boat later, we arrived at Spectacle Island - one of the eleven islands in Boston Harbor Islands national park - and headed for the Visitor’s Center. Outfitted with a GPS enabled PDA and a set of Seinnheiser headphones, I stepped into the bright sunlight and waited - as per instructions - for the signal to activate the device. After about 4 or 5 minutes, the headphones came to life, and I began my walk. Continue reading

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller create multimedia pieces that combine aspects of sculpture, cinema, sound installation, and short-story fiction. Installations such as ‘The Paradise Institute’ (2001) use forced perspective and a three-dimensional sound track to create the illusion that one is sitting in a large theater. Their ‘sound walks’ and ‘video walks’ are immersive pieces that use common consumer technologies, such as iPods and video cameras, to create experiences that blur the line between experienced reality and narrative fiction. Their works are exhibited internationally and they currently have a solo exhibit ‘The Killing Machine and other stories’ that will arrive at the Miami Art Museum on Oct. 15, 2007.

Due to Janet and George’s busy schedule, they will not be able to answer reader’s questions in the comments section following the interview. Continue reading