[’til death do us a part] by Tobias c. van Veen (aka saibotuk) - Dead media unwinds time from its spools. Two electromagnetic machines capture the unfolding of an era in which memory encodes the loving caress of electron imprinted tape. Time out of joint falls in & out of tape sync; more inhuman than human loops the frequency. “I wanted my human experience with machinic love to have the intensity of a hands-on relationship.”

Thus, van Veen turned to reel-to-reel (RTR) tape machines and Konstantin Raudive’s experiments with blank media in which he attempted to record the ‘voices of the dead’. (Little did van Veen know that John Hudak was exploring similar terrain in Voices from the Paradise Network.) Continue reading

Stephen Vitiello creates sound installations that often feature pristine recordings of natural environments and phenomena – the Amazon rain forest or flapping moth wings for example– sonically magnified to expose their internal detail and beauty. His installation work also focuses heavily on the use and implications of space as a compositional parameter. Vitiello has released several CDs and his work has been performed at The Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Kitchen, NYC. His work was also featured in the 2006 Biennale of Sydney and the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He is currently Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.

On September 21, 2007, Vitiello visited the University of Virginia. We sat and discussed his work for an hour in the university’s Jefferson Rotunda. The recording and transcript of that interview is presented below. Continue reading

[From a photo by Robert Scoble who also took the tour] Erica Naone visited Microsoft’s anechoic chamber while touring their new research building in Redmond, WA. The chamber “a room… built to suppress echoes” is used in microphone and loudspeaker research. She writes about her visit in Technology Review.

From Naone’s article: “This is a room that simulates the absence of a room,’ said Ivan Tashev, a software architect in the speech technology group at Microsoft Research. I walked in through two sets of doors, walking precariously in heels over a mesh suspended above the floor, which is covered by the same alabaster-colored triangular cushions that fill the wall and ceiling. Tashev’s voice seemed to come from far away as he went on explaining that the triangular shapes trap and dampen echoes before they can reflect from one of the surfaces in the room.” Continue reading

Vertigo, by Daan Brinkmann :: Opening February 8, 2008; 5:00 p.m.:: Open February 12 through 16 from 1:00 to 6:00 pm :: Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, Keizersgracht 264 1016 EV Amsterdam.

Vertigo: Our brains make one tone of 16 pulses per second, but what happens to our perception when a sound revolves around us 16 times per second? How many rotating rhythms can someone distinguish at the same time? Such questions are the compositional points of departure for ‘Vertigo’, an audio installation investigating the spatial experience of sound. Surrounded by a circle of 32 loudspeakers, the visitor is challenged to explore the boundaries of his or her auditive perception. Continue reading

Multichannel Audio & Video Spatialization in MAX/MSP/JITTER :: Teacher: Zachary Seldess :: Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center :: 596 Broadway, Suite 602 (at Houston St), New York, NY 10012 :: Tel: 212-431-1130 :: Thursday, Jan 31, 6:30 to 9:30pm :: $110/$170.

Multichannel audio is well-known in the digital arts community, but multichannel video became more and more prominent in recent years. While it is easy to just project multiple videos that are not connected, using all videos as part of a connected space requires that you apply some mathematical concepts to your programming. Some of the same calculations are used in multichannel and surround sound audio spatialization as well. The following class will review spatialization for video and audio. Continue reading

Microclimates III-VI is a sound installation and concert. The installation plays in almost complete blackout so that the ears focus on the tiny details in the sound. A 3-D sound-space is created using 3rd-order ambisonics spatialisation projected over 16 loudspeakers. The playing duration and arrangement is designed for each exhibition context. The concert version combines spatialisation performance with pre-programmed spatial information.

Natasha Barrett uses a recording technique following the acousmatic composition heritage. Here composing begins at the sound recording stage, improvising with less conventional recording techniques and capturing a spatial and spectral microphone ‘performance’. Continue reading

Andrea Polli is a digital media artist living in New York City. Her current works are hybrid (art/science) collaborations with atmospheric scientists to develop systems for understanding storm and climate data through sound - a process called sonification. Recent collaborations include: Atmospherics/Weather Works, a spatialized sonification of highly detailed models of storms that devastated the New York area; Heat and the Heartbeat of the City, a series of sonifications of actual and projected climate in Central Park, the heart of New York City and one of the world’s first locations for climate monitoring (a Turbulence Commission); and N., a real-time multi-channel sonification and visualization of weather in the Arctic. Continue reading

Michel Chion describes the term synchresis as… “the forging between something one sees and something one hears - it is the mental fusion between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time. Synchresis is an acronym formed by telescoping together the two words synchronism and synthesis”. (excerpt from: http://filmsound.org/chion/sync.htm)

ANAT, the Australian Network for Art and Technology has just launched its latest copy of Filter magazine (issue 66, [southern] summer 2007) with Synchresis the theme, with a special release DVD, and the launch (and xmas party) tonight at the Chauvel cinema in Paddington… 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

Landscape Denatured: Digitizing the Wild by Eric Alan Kabisch [PDF]: ABSTRACT: This paper presents motivation and documentation of four technologically enabled artworks. These artworks explore ways in which digital technologies impact society and culture, focusing particularly on the impacts of information technologies on physical and cultural geography. A framework is provided for analyzing these works of art. This framework addresses the impacts of technology as a three-part cyclical process that includes (1) sensing elements of the environment, (2) analyzing and creating narratives from the captured data, and (3) the propagation of these methods and representations back into the world. Continue reading