The whole piece is based on field recordings from: Mamori Lake, Amazonia, Brazil; Alphios Bridge, Ancient Olympia, Greece; Vibrations from the bridge which connects Denmark with Sweden; A bottling plant in operation and hydrophone recordings from Mamori Lake. Also used were sounds and notes from a church organ. Output signals have been manipulated and electronically treated.

Dramazon is made in memory of a long rainy night in Amsterdam… In the era of 01110011000111010110, one thing remains stable and it will remain stable and non-mutated for eternity. The way people kiss, the way bodies are connected…
Listen >>

TouchRadio is internet audio broadcast streaming direct from the server. To listen you need a mp3 player app. that supports streaming such as Apple’s iTunes for Mac and PC. In the archive >>: Jana Winderen, Guðni Franzson, Lasse Marhaug, Chris Watson, Steve Roden, Leif Elggren, Scott Taylor, The Skull Defekts, Daniel Menche, Fennesz/Rehberg/Toral & Feliciano, Brandon LaBelle, Stephan Mathieu, Leif Inge, Jacob Kirkegaard, People Like Us, KK.Null, Peter Rehberg, Toshiya Tsunoda, Philip Jeck, z’ev, Christian Fennesz & Max Nagl, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, BJNilsen.

Multiplace 2008 invites artists and cultural workers to submit events / performances / installations / ideas of a networked character, such as online performances, streaming and radio projects, collaborative networked projects and workshops, or the works accessing the networks within a physical location, urban space or between remote venues. Use of digital technologies is not a crucial requirement.

Submitted projects will be proposed to participating venues and organisers. These will assist in providing the infrastructure (technical equipment, internet connection, material, staff, etc) for the project (if needed).

HOW TO SUBMIT: You are welcome to submit your proposal here. There you can also find the current list of submitted projects and ideas. Please note that your submission has to be posted by February 29, 2008.

ABOUT MULTIPLACE: Multiplace was formed as a result of collective efforts of various organisers and associations from the fields of art and technology in Slovakia and later in Czech Republic, Austria and Europe. Its first activity was Multiplace new media event in April 2002, and since then the festival is organised anually each spring focusing on networked art and culture. In 2004, a civic non-for-profit association Multiplace was founded, which operates on a basis of open organisation. Today, Multiplace plays a crucial role in communication, theory and promotion of media arts in central Europe.

ONLINE RESOURCES ON NETWORK ART

* Norie Neumark (2005) Relays, Delays, and Distance Art/Activism, (introduction to At a Distance - Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet)
* Overviews of network art projects, 1, 2
* Networked Performance Blog
* Networked Music Review
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-network_theory

For further information please write to admin at multiplace dot sk

Although technological innovation in art and media has greatly enhanced the ways in which artworks can stimulate our senses, this innovation predominantly concerns the same few sensory modalities, and only rarely aims at supporting the integration between them. Recent artistic Research and Development (aRt&D) has, however, made great progress in developing methods for multimodal art; enhancing the sensorial richness of art and media experiences in integrated ways.

Test_Lab: Multimodal will demonstrate and discuss new methods and technologies to stimulate senses that are not commonly incorporated in artistic concepts, and will introduce innovative ways to integrate sensory experiences in art and media. In doing so, Test_Lab: Multimodal reveals the obstacles faced, and achievements made, in contemporary aRt&D that aims to enhance the sensorial richness of art and media experiences in (technologically) integrated ways.

Test_Lab: Multimodal will feature the latest achievements in stimulating the senses; such as smelly art, live sensory-substitution, the sound of touching one another, sensory-enhanced film, and very loud visuals.

*Arjen Mulder* (NL) is a widely published essayist, and will open Test_Lab: Multimodal with a talk on multimodality from a media theoretical perspective.

*Sissel Tolaas* (N), founder of international Flavors and Fragrances re_search Lab Berlin, will present and demonstrate the smell of FEAR, bringing samples of body odors of men in fear, which she distilled for her project the FEAR of smell – the smell of FEAR exhibited at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

*Tom Froese* (UK), researcher at the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex, will demonstrate the Enactive Torch, a perceptual supplementation device that transforms visual into haptic information, and which has recently received funding for the development of a next generation of enactive torches.

*Graham Smith* (CDN), artist and inventor of robotic, virtual reality, photographic, and tele-presence installations and devices, will premiere one of his latest collaborate projects: *Alternative Sensory Information Display**, a.k.a. the* Emotional Chair, which enhances film with vibration, light, wind, and smell for the hearing-impaired.

*Ulf Langheinrich* (D) of artist duo Granular Synthesis, will introduce and demonstrate Granular Synthesis’ masterpiece “Modell 5″; a 10m by 3,5m (!) projection showing the face of Japanese performance artist Akemi Takeya being twisted and manipulated like a Francis Bacon painting supported by a wall of sublow sound.

*Sietske Klooster* (NL) and her students from the /Industrial Design/department of the Technical University Eindhoven will present an innovative social interaction project called TouchMeDare that motivates people to touch each other by creating sounds as a reward for physical interaction.

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).

In the idea of a mix between both festivals for a 24 hour period, there will be a double stream with distant musicians playing together as in the recent (((NOMUSIC))) festivals; one of these will be a local performance over headphones. The result will be available for both the audience with headphones in La Menagerie de Verre and online for distant listeners.
The new site is under development. Please feel free to choose a time distant or local, watch the program, find someone to play with. The site will eventually come up to placard like open inscription with incorporated stream tools. This first version is a bit hand made, more a first live test. The stream tools will be incorporated, used in your favorite browser, will include sound and video-conferencing.

Please join the chat here for streaming solutions or any questions.

Born from the fusion of works by two experimental electronic musicians — Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi — U.S.O.’s sound spans highly abstract digital music, to electroacoustic music. U.S.O. develops through the exploration of elementary particles arranged and organized in clouds of discrete and punctiform events, until they compose structures of extensive polymorphic and spatial complexity.

The Aural Streaming of the Performance defines a bi-directional vector where space and time become elastic variables subjected to generative and structural contingencies of every single “Event”, where every phenomenon re-arranges itself through a form of algorithmic interdependence “ab originem”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrzJNHfLtyY
U.S.O. Project @ Giardino Sonoro, Florence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm-ZiF5CSzg
U.S.O. Project - Prelude Of Noises

By exploring U.S.O., listeners will have the chance to submerge themselves in a real-time generative course, where the contingency of the experience will dynamically vary from infinitesimal to immense. Travelling through the reference Vector, they will observe both simple and complex phenomena, which consequently define wider portions of known and unknown perceptible universe. U.S.O. is undergoing a continuous evolution. More here [PDF]

Send + Receive is an annual audio art festival showcasing current and newly emerging areas of investigation in a variety of forms including live performance, radio, web-based projects, internet streaming projects, sound poetry, installations, film and video screenings, workshops, and panel discussions. For more information, and to download proposal form go here or contact sendandreceive[at]gmail.com.

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.

The principal objective is to investigate questions concerning the local, social and collective aspects of interaction between physical and digital space (Internet, telephone etc), expressed through experimentation in current digital audio practices. Audio Extranautes, new perspectives on acoustic space via electronic networks, opens several axes of research developed jointly by the two laboratories:

- Occurrences within physical space of networked projects, (extenuates, virtual environments, new forms of productions, atmospheres).
- The signification of the appearance of flux as forms of expression (streaming, pod-casting and in general web 2).
- The impact of mobile technologies on artistic expression

Participants: Alejandro Duque, Atau Tanaka, Angus Carlyle, Bastien Gallet, Christian Licoppe, Jean Cristofol, Jean-Paul Thibaud, Jérôme Joy, Julien Clauss, Julien Morel, Nicolas Maigret, Roger Malina, Martin Howse, Peter Sinclair, Philippe Franck, Samuel Bordreuil, Scott Fitzgerald.

This symposium is organised by Locus Sonus and the sociology laboratory LAMES of Aix en Provence, directed by Samuel Bordreuil. This collaboration is part of the research program Audio Extranautes, funded by a contract “accord-cadre” between the CNRS & the French Ministry for Culture (Centre National de La Recherche Scientifique and Ministere de la Culture).

Since its inception (1966), the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) has played a leading role in the development of electronic music practices in the US. It was the first publicly accessible electronic music studio on the West coast, and in the early 70s the first site where computers were used in musical performances, predating the laptop music era by over three decades.

Among its many accomplishments, it collaborated with Turbulence.org and Harvestworks on Loose Ends/ Connections (1998), a live, distributed performance that explored uses of sound in a networked collaboration with eight composer/musicians. Streamed live to the web, the performance originated from three locations: Mills College, Oakland, CA; and Harvestworks and the Morton Street Studio, New York City. A slide show of video stills from Mary Lucier’s 1998 Summer, or Grief with text from A Conversation by Allen Grossman accompanied the performance. Performances from Mills College and Harvestworks were streamed via RealAudio to the Morton Street Studio, where they were mixed with live music and sound from the performers there and streamed by RealAudio back to the web. The performers were: Pauline Oliveros, Maggi Payne, and Brenda Hutchinson - Mills College; Beth Coleman and Zeena Parkins - Harvestworks; and Scott Rosenberg, Helen Thorington, and Jesse Gilbert - Morton Street Studios. The group collaborated a second time on Feedback. [NMR blogger Peter Traub included both in Chapter III: The Aesthetics of Bits and Pieces and Other Web Based Art.]

Presented by Interpretations, 40+ year Celebration of The Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College will pay homage to the CCM’s legacy with performances by pioneers in electronic music as well as by a younger generation of composers currently working at the center. The program will feature five N.Y. premieres, including excerpts from David Behrman’s new solo work, Long Throw; Robert Ashley’s pre-recorded electro-acoustic piece, Hidden Similarities; John Bischoff’s Decay Trace (for laptop computer and small metal objects); Maggi Payne’s pre-recorded electro-acoustic piece, Distant Thunder; and a duet, Improvisation, by Pauline Oliveros (accordion) and Chris Brown (piano and electronics). The evening will also include James Fei’s The Nerve Meter (for microphones and frequency-shifted feedback).