The Marfa Sessions is a series of sound projects embedded within the public spaces and private corners of Marfa to create a sonic portrait of this unusual West Texas town. Ballroom Marfa, the exhibition’s headquarters, will feature a visitors center sound hub, hosting artworks and providing information and maps that point to the sound projects throughout the town. The eleven works in the exhibition include already extant pieces adapted for installation in public spaces throughout Marfa, and five new site-specific works specially commissioned by Ballroom Marfa and created by: KAFFE MATTHEWS; NINA KATCHADOURIAN; CHRISTINA KUBISCH; DEBORAH STRATMAN & STEVEN BADGETT; STEVE RODEN & STEPHEN VITIELLO; and STEVE ROWELL WITH SIMPARCH. In some cases artworks will occupy frequented public venues such as Marfa Book Company, the local grocery store and Marfa Public Radio airwaves; others will be discovered in natural settings near the outskirts of town.

Marfa, as a desert town, is a remote place by any standard. It is also a uniquely central destination and an historical confluence of various phenomena that include one of the world’s largest astronomical observatories – The McDonald Observatory, Big Bend National Park, The Marfa Lights, a U.S. border patrol station, The Chinati Foundation (also formerly a WWII military base), the Judd Foundation, as well as the filming locations for Giant, There Will Be Blood, and No Country for Old Men.

With site-specific works activating various locations across the town, and with the collaboration of the community, The Marfa Sessions aims to amplify the varied set of physical and metaphoric characteristics that define “Marfa” – its geopolitical position, local identity, myths, as well as its significant relationship to 20th Century Minimalism and Land Art. The Marfa Sessions seeks to call the ear to Marfa and its environs, noting the aural and conceptual depth and breadth of this complex setting.

The Marfa Sessions has been made possible through the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Brown Foundation, Cowles Charitable Trust, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art, Marfa Chamber of Commerce, National Endowment of the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, Cynthia Toles, Suzanne Deal Booth, Meredith Dreiss & Anna Bryan and Ballroom Marfa Members with in-kind donations from Tito’s Vodka.

Ballroom Marfa is a dynamic, contemporary cultural arts space that provides a lively intellectual environment where varied perspectives and issues are explored through visual arts, film, music and performance. As an advocate for the freedom of artistic expression, Ballroom Marfa’s mission is to serve international, national, regional and local communities and support the work of both emerging and recognized artists working in all media. Ballroom Marfa is particularly interested in helping artists and curators achieve projects that have significant cultural impact but would be impossible to realize in a traditional gallery or museum setting. Ballroom Marfa is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.

ME’D1.ATE NETWORK is excited to announce the most daring and ambitious Soundwave>Series ever. A record 11 extraordinary events will start June 27, 2008 through to August 17, 2008 at leading San Francisco art and music institutions The Lab, Community Music Center, and Intersection for the Arts…as well as on a moving bus venue hosted by New Langton Arts, Queen’s Nails Annex, Art Engine and the spectacular de Young Museum.

The acclaimed series is launching its third season with a theme of MOVE>SOUND. An eclectic group of sound artists and musicians will create sonic performances around the theme of “Movement”. They will explore how movement intersects with sound, in its composition or performance, or in collaboration or interaction with artists, technologies and mediums involved in movement.

MOVE>SOUND’s performances include live amplified skateboarding, sound drawings, audience-activated sounds, lo-fi and high-tech motion sensors, weather-data sonifications, moving 3D holographic imagery, deep listening soundwalks and “AudioBus”, a ME’D1.ATE-initiated program featuring live sound and music performances on a moving double-decker bus.

“The amazing experiences in MOVE>SOUND will present dynamic new ideas for people to interact with sound and music,” says Soundwave’s Producer and Artistic Director Alan So. “These performances will be inspired jaw-dropping shows that will move you (some literally) like never before.”

ME’D1.ATE has invited the most intriguing local, national and international artists and musicians to create riveting performances for Bay Area audiences. Set to perform include celebrated electro avant-cellist Zoe Keating, underground orchestra Moe!Kestra!, New York-based sonifier Andrea Polli, acclaimed local singer-songwriter Odessa Chen, Canadian sound artist Diana Burgoyne, Indiana-based media artist N_DREW (Andrew Bucksbarg), amongst many other leading sound and music artists.

Artists will also connect with audiences with presentations and demonstrations of their incredible works, experience, technologies and awe-inspiring performances.

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? What, if any, role can historical skills of navigation at sea, of observation, choice, intuition and improvisation play in navigating the spaces of the future? The symposium Navigating the Space of the Future will take these questions as its starting point to see if we can find our way within the dense environment of global positioning technologies. The field is open but the practice is just starting to form itself by looking at ways to counter locative media strategies where geographical walks are organised that use the city and the street as a playing field negating the relation between space, architecture, time, body and mind. The presentations will focus on new ways of interpreting data of location and navigation by relating these directly to the physical (space) through the use of sound.

Yolande Harris - Sun Run Sun (Artist in Residence NIMk): Sun Run Sun explores the individual experience of current location technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to (re)establish a sense of personal connectedness to one’s environment, and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future and animal navigation using sound. Sun Run Sun investigates the split between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position. A series of portable personal instruments ?satellite sounders? developed for the residency, transform satellite data directly into a sonic composition. This composition constantly varies in response to the changing location of the player as they move through their physical environment. ‘The experience of sound is internal, as a process that influences the relationship between the self and the environment. True navigation consists of a continuously coherent relationship between the two.’

David Dunn takes his research into the bioacoustics of bark beetles and entomogenic climate change, and on ultrasonic audio phenomena in both human and non-human environment as starting points to talk about Acoustic Ecologies. He wants to bring forth the sonic presence of these worlds for human contemplation of their inherent aesthetic beauty and to show the amazing continuity of life, with its capacity for infinite variation in audible communication. “Given the superabundance of how music as a human activity has been used, I believe that music has simultaneously been a strategy to evolve our capacity to structurally-couple with our environment through our aural perception, and a significant force for defining the boundaries of group affiliation and for the affirmation of cultural status, giving voice to an evolutionary heritage of an abundance of other coupling modes that are greater than the rational mind alone.” [From Acoustic Ecology and the Experimental Music Tradition by By David Dunn]

Atau Tanaka bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. He creates music for sensor instruments, wireless network infrastructures, and democratized digital forms. Tanaka is best known for his performances where he uses physical gestures to articulate music and sound synthesis and real-time image transformation. For the past years, inspired by the ever-changing social, geographic, ecological, emotional context of using mobile technology for creative ends Tanaka focusses his attention towards mobile media projects. He is exploring the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. “My interest is to take interactive music practice off the stage and outside the concert hall into the urban sphere. Mobile communications devices are meant to connect groups of people. Musical concerts, similarly, are situations that bring people together for a common purpose. Can we elicit commonalities to make a community-based musical process, creating a! shared experience among users?” In his presentation he will pay attention to the description of the architecture of an audio-visual hard- and software framework that was developed for the realization of a series of locative media artworks, and eliciting from this, he brings afore fundamental issues and questions that can be generalized and applicable to the growing practice of locative media.

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. If you are a Southern California based or linked sound artist, experimental musician and / or composer, you are invited to participate in the first part of a unique sound art and music research artiject and study, conducted by Dr. Chung Shih Hoh and Marco Schindelmann that will involve the mapping of the dynamic social networks and aesthetic consciousness of Southern California artists involved in sound art and/or experimental music. The results of this study will also serve as material for a sound installation for SoundWalk2008. Your participation in this project is not contingent on your submitting to or taking part in SoundWalk2008.

“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.”

March 20, 2008 7 -10 pm :: lecture at symposium on Eco-Visualisation organised by at Mediamatic in Amsterdam.

March 22 - April 28, 2008 :: Opening: March 22, 5 pm - Navigating by Circles: video and sound installation in the Eco-Visualisation exhibition curated by Tiffany Holmes and Hicham Khalidi at Gallery in Den Haag

March 29 - May 12, 2008 :: Opening March 28, 5 pm - Satelllite Sounders and Dead Reckoning: sonic walk and sound installation in the Territorial Phantom exhibition at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam.

April 2, 2008; 8:30 - Sun Running: performance at STEIM in Amsterdam
April 2, 2008 - Sun Run Sun: presentation at Test_Lab Topologies, V2_Insitute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam.

April 15, 2008 - Navigating the Space of the Future: symposium around the project Sun Run Sun, including presentation by David Dunn, at Netherlands Media Art Institute (montevideo) in Amsterdam.

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.

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. The mono recording I made could not capture the dense field of sound but it could capture its frequency content.

White Noise is the equal probability of all sound frequencies occurring at equal amplitude, but this was a permeation of downward motions, an immersive, cascading White Sound both figuratively and literally. Analysis of the snowfall sounds identified primary frequencies, much like an aural DNA of the event. Using digital filters I freed those primary frequencies, amplified them and then created a multi-channel sound field. The installation hopefully expresses a passion for perception, as it comments on the interpretation of perceptual data via the snow sounds we hear. We all know the sound of snow falling. Embedded in this sound are richly evocative, intuitively-enabled springs to meaning and association. Here they are the plastic art material of White Sound Down.

Kubisch is one of the first of what one might call “fine artists” to use sound as her primary medium. Night Flights, as documented by these two segments, includes sound rich with field recordings of animal life sewn into a studio-created environment (”The Cats Dream,” MP3) and an electro-acoustic expanse of familiar instrumentation played to meditative, droney effect (”Circles III,” MP3).

The album’s rerelease has provided Kubisch an opportunity to reflect:

We tried to make multichannel recordings and mixes by ourselves, we invented long tape loops going through the whole room, echo effects and reverb. We became specialists in cutting and manipulating tapes.

Her first-hand recollections of that pre-digital era of experimentation are just as welcome as the music that resulted.

Night Flights’s reappearance coincides with the release of a new album by Kubisch, Invisible/Inaudible: 5 Electrical Walks, which Important is promoting with a freely downloadable 36-minute excerpt. The piece is an extended series of swaths of lowercase quietude, followed by a maudlin drone that sounds like a morose robot (”Homage With Minimal Disinformation,” MP3). As with much sound art (and in no way to its detriment), the sound comes into focus when its construction, its conceptual birth, is explained by the artist:

Electrical Walks is a public walk with custom-made sensitive wireless headphones by which aboveground and underground electromagnetic fields are detected, amplified and made audible. The transmission of sound is accomplished by a built-in set of induction coils which respond to the electromagnetic waves in our environment. The palette of these noises, their timbre and volume vary from site to site and from country to country. They have one thing in common: they are ubiquitous, even where one would not expect them. Light systems, wireless communication systems, radar systems, anti-theft security devices, surveillance cameras, cell phones, computers, streetcar cables, antennae, navigation systems, automated teller machines, wireless internet, neon advertising, public transportation networks, etc. create electrical fields that are as if hidden under cloaks of invisibility, but of incredible presence. … The sounds have not been altered electronically or by other means.

Additional information at importantrecords.com. [posted by Marc Weidenbaum on Disquiet]

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.

Sources include illuminated retail displays, cash machines, communication antennae, and security devices. The palette of sounds, their timbre and volume vary enormously but they have one thing in common - they are ubiquitous.

Headphones and map can be collected from the HCMF Hub at the Lawrence Batley Theatre.

Commissioned by Ultrasound and produced by State Decay Ltd.

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. As the contemporary art practices step beyond the realm of art to meet with the public, relationship building based on dialogue and communication is surfacing as the major process of artists’ work. Dialogue, in this sense, can be understood as speech act–sophisticated and purposeful political act carried out in a format of everyday conversation. Those who featured in this project include a wide spectrum of professionals such as artists, activists, poets, performance artists, and curators engaged in the experiment of various speech act formats including conversation, speech, lecture, public reading, recital, theatrical reading and performance.

With Joseph Beuys, Nicoline van Harskamp, Keiko Sei, Kiwan Seong, Su-hwan Choi, Bo-jun Shim & 20 Other Poets,
voiceoverhead (Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal): featuring Romuald Karmakar, Akin Fernandez, Holly Ward, C. M. von Hausswolff / Friedrich Jürgenson.

The Art of Listening :: November 5 - December 15, 2007 - IAS further expands its activities on sound, performances and text works by carrying out case studies on creative collaborations of visual art with other art genres. The workshop explores sound that is available in our everyday lives but has not been truly recognized. It induces participants to hear subtle sound that comes from human body, buildings and the earth, and suggests them to find the cultural, political and social significances of such sound.

The Art of Listening

How ’sound art’ differ from ’music’, and where is the thin borderline between them? The definition of sound art has been constantly questioned ever since sound art has entered the realm of contemporary art; but, there is no agreed definition on this matter. Actually, sound art has explored its own definition, implicitly denying classifications and is expanding its domain to the genre of contemporary art, music and literature.

Wikipedia defines Sound art as: “Sound art is a loosely associated group of art practices that concern sound and listening as their focus.” The former is a sound-making work for the purpose of playing, and the latter is a plain sound-listening. According to this definition, the sound workshop of Insa Art Space is focused to ‘listening’ as the title the art of listening implies. In other words, this workshop aims to perceive the surrounding world and communicate with it through auditory senses.

Insa Art Space will further expand its activities to sound, performances and text works by carrying out case studies on creative collaborations of visual art with other art genres. This workshop will explore current visual-oriented culture by investigating sound.

We are surrounded by all sorts of sound that constantly bursts into our auditory system. Many times a day, fruit and vegetable vendors wander around residential areas shouting their sale items. During election time, candidates’ promotion vehicles take turns with the fruit/vegetable vendors. When you want to take a nap on a lazy afternoon, the maintenance office kindly announces things of no importance. Our ears are constantly harassed by all sorts of sound as long as you live in a metropolitan city.

Actually, this sound portrays and conveys the culture and the landscape of the world that we are now living in. However, we block all these sound with electric devices such as portable MP3 players. The mobile phones and CDMA detach our auditory system from surrounding environment. The advanced technology and cutting edge communication devices accelerated development in the sound-media, but at the same time, blocked our ears from the soundscape.

In the workshop, the art of listening, we will introduce sound that is available in our everyday lives but has not been truly recognized. At the same time, we propose you hear very subtle sound that comes from your body, buildings and the earth. We want you to find the cultural, political and social significances from such sound with your keen ears.

Workshop, “A Little Bit”
Byungjun Kwon
Nov. 5 - 17, 2007
Performance : 5 PM, Nov. 17
Register.

Workshop, “Sound, Architecture, and Environment,”
Mark Bain
Nov. 12 - 17, 2007
Artist’s Talk : 4 PM, Nov.10
Register.

Workshop, “Hearing Perspective: Think with Your Ears”
O+A (Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger)
Dec.10 - 15, 2007
Artists’ Talk : 2 PM, Dec.15, 2007
Register.

“Dongducheon : A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision”
Dec. 1, 2007 - Feb. 24, 2008
Public Panel Discussion : 3 PM, Dec. 1, 2007
Register.

IAS also presents a project, “Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision” in New Museum of Contemporary Art as one of four partner institutions invited to a program, “Museum as HUB,” which is an inter-institutional collaborative project conceived by New Museum. In the inaugural two-year cycle, Hub partner organizations address the topic of “neighborhood” as it relates to specific aspects of the local region in which they are located, culminating in two presentations. IAS selects Dongducheon as a representative Korean neighborhood that implicates particular contextual memories and stories of modern and contemporary condition of Korea, as well as common concerns of some local cities in other parts of the world. New works by four artists, KOH Seung Wook, Sangdon KIM, RHO Jae Oon and siren eun young jung are introduced in the opening presentation, and further development of which will be presented in next May at the same venue.