In This Place Of Safety (ITPOS) uses a building as a projection screen to explore intersections between temporary video interventions, architecture and art. It combines images of empty playgrounds projected across NOVAS gallery building facade and sound of children’s voices on a playground. It aims to add an extraordinary element to the cityscape of LB Southwark, but also more quietly start a conversation about how safe do we feel and why.

As a logical progression from large-scale outdoor video installation 205A Morning Lane, ITPOS looks into new forms of displays on buildings with knowledge of recent technical developments addressing the chances and risks of this development. The project looks into relation between the content and the display structure on the one hand and the building structure and it tries to find its specific correspondence.

Artist talk, private view and lovely Japanese DJs on 17th July 2008, 7.00 - 10.30 pm

Novas Contemporary Urban Centre
73-81 Southwark Bridge Road
London, SE1 0NQ

Supported by the University of Westminster and Arts Council England.

Part of London Festival of Architecture 2008.

Editors notes:

Larisa Blazic’s work is focused on interactive site-specific installation exploring audience participation, real-time audio distribution and networked audio-video installation. It explores location as main carrier of meaning, aesthetics of everyday urban experience, creative use of surveillance technologies, real-time video stream and moving image in the context of temporary public art interventions and its communication to wider audience.

Novas CUC - London Bridge Bankside: Novas is at the cutting edge of tackling social disadvantage through creating inclusive employment in social enterprises, providing flexible community based support services to vulnerable people and offering quality art and cultural programmes, which involve the wider community in understanding complex social issues.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

The Coda

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http://www.e-w-n-s.net
http://www.ex-centric.net

Please join us as we host an international group of scholars and practitioners who are gathering to explore the roles of narrative and mediation in art practices that engage sound as a material. The symposium will consist of three panel discussions as well as an exhibition of audio-works for portable music players made expressly for the geography, architecture, and social spaces of the Princeton University campus.

The exhibition will begin the festival on the morning of Friday, March 28th. Thirty iPods and corresponding maps will be made available for check-out from the Mendel Music Library Circulation desk in the Woolworth Center for Musical Studies. After participants have had time to explore the audio-works, opening comments and a panel comprised of artists and musicians will start the symposium. The first panel will consist of musician and sound artist William Basinski, whose melancholy minimal electronic music has achieved critical acclaim; artist Jon Brumit, whose Neighborhood Public Radio project is featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial; multimedia artist Brenda Hutchinson, who will lead sunrise and sunset bell-ringings throughout the festival; as well as sound artist Michael J. Schumacher, founder of New York’s Diapason Gallery for Sound Art.

After more time Saturday to explore the site-specific audio-works, the second panel will take up the notion of narrative as it relates to sound practices. Kristin Oppenheim’s spare and hypnotic sound installations invoke layers of personal memory, while Stephen Vitiello’s work transforms incidental atmospheric noises into mesmerizing soundscapes that alter our perception of the surrounding environment. Mendi + Keith Obadike collaborate on interdisciplinary projects investigating race, history and identity, and Thomas Levin, a curator and cultural theorist, focuses on sound technologies and issues of surveillance in media practices.

The symposium’s third and final panel will address issues of mediation in sound art. Ruben Gallo will talk about Mexican sound artist Taniel Morales’s Pirate Radio. Ed Osborn will present his kinetic and audible sound installations, while Camille Norment will discuss her artistic practice, which extends the fine arts into extra-disciplinary realms such as scientific research, city planning, and interaction design. Tianna Kennedy, program director of Brooklyn’s free103point9 transmission arts network and a participating artist in the festival, will discuss issues related to transmission, participatory practice and social sculpture.

Sonic Fragments is sponsored by the Princeton University Department of Music, The Peter B. Lewis Center for the Performing Arts, The Graduate School, The Sound Lab research group in the Department of Computer Science, The Aesthetics and Media Track in the Department of German, The Program in Media and Modernity, The Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Lise Autogena’s Sound Mirrors was inspired by the derelict acousic mirrors at Denge, England. It aims to create two new sound mirrors on the coasts of England and France to enable people on either side of the English Channel to speak to each other.

“This project … thematically twists the mirrors by 180 degrees, turning what was to be a shield of defence and surveillance into a tool for communicating with the continent. A new sound mirror will be built on Dungeness and a second facing it near Boulogne, probably at Wimereux (appropriately, where Marconi’s first radio broadcast was received).” - Tom Dyckhoff, Guardian, 2001.

Announced by Arts Council England in 2000 with an end date of 2004, the project has yet to be completed.

There is a lengthly text accompanying a YouTube video about other Sound Mirror artworks that preceded Autogena’s. And there’s Troika’s Sonic Marshmallows which I posted on NMR a while ago. For much more on the subject, see Andrew Grantham’s page.

UPDATE: I have removed the YouTube video and the excerpted text from the original post because it has come to my attention (see the comments section below) that the person behind them has been slandering Lise Autogena and Tacita Dean (whom he also mentions).

“‘Mix House’ expands the modernist notion of visual transparency afforded by the ubiquitous picture window to include aural transparency as well.

Situated on a generic suburban plot, the dwelling is composed of two sound-gathering volumes outfitted with three audiovisual windows. The curved profile of each of these sonic windows is composed of two elements: a louvered glass window wall that regulates the sound of the air-borne ambient environment, and a parabolic dish that electronically targets domestic sounds and transmits them to an interior audio system controlled from the kitchen island. From this sound command center of the house, occupants are free to design original domestic soundscapes by mixing media sponsored sounds with the ambient noises of the neighborhood.

The living/dining wing, oriented horizontally on the site, frames the driveway at one end and the rear yard at the other, while the den/bedroom wing is oriented vertically to capture audio-visual views of the sky. In the living area, the sonic picture window aimed at the backyard swivels like a camera to extend its range of motion. At the entry, the front window wall doubles as a sliding glass door that allows the occupant to hear the sounds of the streetscape. Located above the bed, the skylight captures sky-borne sounds, as well as signals transmitted through TV and Internet connections.”

animation of “Mix House” in action.

“I try to make people think about their surroundings with my work, to slow them down”. And last month he staged - in the heart of London at Broadgate Arena - an environment of sound built on field recordings of bird and moth wings from locations including the Amazon, upstate New York and Virginia.

Stereo composite mix of Smallest of Wings (excerpt) as presented at Broadgate Arena, London, May 2007 (4.5 mb) and stereo mix of Night Chatter, installation at the Weatherspoon Museum, 2007 (9.1 mb) at stephenvitiello.com.

Vitiello is also interested in connecting sound experience to the concepts of surveillance and chatter, a term which, since 9-11, often refers to communications picked up by U.S. government surveillance to track potential terrorist threats. [posted by Ilari Valbonesi on EcoPolis]

Are tracking systems like for example GPS dangerous for our society? How will the development of biometry influence civil rights? Who is why interested in collecting data of patients within the health system? These and other questions, which reflect the relationship between computer technology and society are discussed by the monthly program Chaosradio. This broadcast has existed since 1995 and has become a real classic. It is one of Germany’s oldest radio programs on new technologies and communication. It can be listened to every last Wednesday in a month between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. on Radio Fritz/Radio Berlin Brandenburg. For those, who have no access to the on air programs, there is a website, where all programs since the first one from 1995, is available as download or podcast.

If you’re interested in radio and sound art, you should check http://www.swr.de/swr2/audiohyperspace/engl_version/. There’s a German version as well.

Please call 1.800.749.0632. You will be asked the channel number, which is 12260 and the channel password, which is 12345. Then, just follow instructions! It’s very easy. “If you have questions, concerns, want to know more about the project, etc, feel free to email me at feldman.jm[at]gmail.com. Thank you!”

Overheard seeks to break down the boundaries of private and public sound and information by examining the way that amplification and recording and broadcast technologies can facilitate or destroy these boundaries. The work turns private sounds into public property, secret information into common knowledge, makes obvious the hidden and hides the obvious, seeking to invert the intentions of surveillance and increase our individual and collective awareness of our community’s habits of listening, listening in and being listened to. For the piece, Feldman has collected hundreds of individual recordings of people from the area whispering their secrets (with the promise that the recordings will be broadcast in such a way that the person becomes indistinguishable from these secrets.) The voices are then slightly manipulated in time/pitch and the recordings are played back, layered and sculpted, many at a time, in the extremely resonant, extremely public space of the arched passageway. The resultant sounds fill the arch with a rich chorus of the echoes and ghosts of these voices, each of which is just on the verge of audibility/distinguishability in relation to the others. The piece poses the possibility of removing the danger of sharing information by bringing voices together, in public.

Part of Roulette’s THE PUBLIC SOUNDS: A Festival of Sound Art in Public Space.

By Amy Alexander, Wojciech Kosma, Vincent Rabaud with Nikhil Rasiwasia and Jesse Gilbert. Production Assistants: Marilia Maschion, Annina Rüst, Cristyn Magnus. The project that asks the question: If computer vision technology can be used to detect when you look like a terrorist, criminal, or other “undesirable” - why not when you look like a rock star?SVEN (Surveillance Video Entertainment Network) is a system comprised of a camera, monitor, and two computers that can be set up in public places - especially in situations where a CCTV monitor might be expected. The software consists of a custom computer vision application that tracks pedestrians and detects their characteristics, and a real-time video processing application that receives this information and uses it to generate music-video like visuals from the live camera feed. The resulting video and audio are displayed on a monitor in the public space, interrupting the standard security camera type display each time a potential rock star is detected. The idea is to humorously examine and demystify concerns about surveillance and computer systems not in terms of being watched, but in terms of how the watching is being done - and how else it might be done if other people were at the wheel.

Auto Confessional 1 (video below) or Automatic Confessional Machine “…was designed and built in 1997 in Swindon UK and exhibited in specific public spaces around the East End of London, and various rural locations in Wiltshire between 1997-1998.

The ACM is made from recycled electronic hardware and custom built electronics. A CCTV Camera, A printer, A Computer, DC Halogen and UV Lighting, An LED Relaxation Device, and scrolling banner, Two mini Lasers, LCD Display, and a Photocopier. It has been placed in nightclubs, bars, and Techno Dance Parties.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3CPWoFamZc

Auto Confessional 2 (video below) is a secular computerized networked icon employing an Apple Power Macintosh G3, CCTV camera and image analysis software.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoQjQx13BtA

Auto Confessional 3 (video below):

“is a network of 10 Apple Mac computers that search the internet for online confessions, and sings them as a canon using the Apple text-to-speech software MacInTalk 3.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vpHLAmb1Pc
[blogged by Garrett Lynch on Network Research]