Joshua Light Show :: May 28-31, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Issue Project Room, (oa) can factory, 3rd Floor, 232 Third Street at 3rd Ave, Brooklyn, NY.

ISSUE Project Room is thrilled to host pioneering multimedia artist Joshua White and his legendary Joshua Light Show for a week of unique audiovisual collaborations. The residency will involve White’s iconic projections alongside an incredible roster of musicians, with a different musical genre represented on each night of the residency. The Joshua Light Show involves a team of video and light artists, led by White and his senior collaborator, Bec Stupak (Honeygun Labs) to improvise live synesthetic visuals behind a giant rear projection screen, involving the “liquid light” techniques he developed at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East during the late 1960s. Continue reading

MAO evenings :: Brian Mackern - Soundtoys Remixed [1996-2008] :: April 11, 2008; 6 - 8 pm :: Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Via Settembrini, 79 Naples.

Soundtoys Remixed, the title of the performance that Mackern will offer to the MADRE audience, will deal with Net surfing and (real-time) remix of 40 of his soundtoys developed between 1997 and 2007. Mackernian visions will flow through the (real-time) projection on three different screens, while the surrounding sounds will hold the audience in a synesthetic embrace that will shake new reflections about the increasingly more hybrid nature of the reality we face everyday. Continue reading

“The energy behind the growing practice of audiovisual performance is intriguing; what is it that sparks the passions for creators and theorists working within this art form? The diversity of the concepts, techniques, and aesthetic qualities is remarkable, suggesting that this practice is not rooted in any one particular mindset, but instead, emerges from a wide range of trajectories that are converging within a contemporary form of media based performance art. However, live video mixing performances certainly address a hunger for immersive and synaesthetic sensory experiences where aural and visual elements work together to create a whole that is something beyond the sum of the parts. Continue reading

“In the late 1940s, radio engineer-turned-composer Pierre Schaeffer celebrated a defining property of audio recording and radio transmission: the ability to separate sounds from their visible sources. This affirmation cut against the grain of modern thought, for no lesser cultural critics than Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer had assailed these technologies for dulling our auditory sensibility. Schaeffer, however, argued that records and radio triumphantly subvert the hegemony of vision to make possible the experience of “sound as such.” In doing so, Schaeffer continued, they revive a neglected form of listening he termed “acousmatic,” in deference to the ancient akousmatikoi, disciples of Pythagoras who were made to listen to their master’s voice while he was hidden behind a curtain…” Continue reading Lost in Translation: Sound in the Discourse of Synaesthesia by Christoph Cox, Artforum, October 2005.

Sometimes a keyboard for control is not enough, you require a tangible interface to communicate with your parameters. Recently the importance of the midi controller with generative systems has been proven, but a new kid on the block is the Wii controller (Wiimote). Designed for gaming but easily hackable to control your favourite software – be it Processing, Max/Msp or VVVV. Its motion sensing capability in 3D space is perfect for mapping into your X, Y and Z’s resulting in a fun and novel way of controlling your animations

Bringing together 3 Software’s - VVVV, Max/MSP and Reason the WiiWiiWiiWii thesis project provides a system allowing for a set of Wiimotes to become a syneasthetic musical instruments. Continue reading

Vague Terrain 08: Rise of the VJ :: Call for Work - There has been a distinct upswing of activity in the realm of audiovisual culture over the last few years. Specifically, the role of the VJ has become noticeably more prominent in audiovisual collaboration, whether it takes place in galleries, electronic music festivals, nightclubs, noise shows, academic institutions, public intervention art, online, or other places altogether. This growing focus on the live mixed projected image begs the question of the relationships between moving image, sound, body, environment, economics, and technology. Since this field is relatively new, and moving along at such a brisk pace, it is wise and exciting for us to critically consider the role of the VJ in audiovisual culture. For this issue of vague terrain: Rise of the VJ, we are seeking three types of submissions: audiovisual collaborations (in the form of a video to be streamed on the vague terrain site), critical writing, and interviews. Continue reading

SCREEN MUSIC 2: Mechanical cinema-veritè, circuit bending, electric / electronic audio-video :: Festival della Creatività :: 25 - 28 October 2007 :: Fortezza da Basso - Teatrino Lorenese, Florence :: Free entrance - Screen Music is a project born from an idea of Gianni De Simone and curated by Marco Mancuso founder and director of Digicult and Andrea Mi, director of Videominuto.

Screen Music is part of the program of the Creativity Festival, an event promoted by the Tuscan Region and organized by Fondazione Sistema Toscana. With an exhibition space of approximately 40,000 square meters, 400 events, 1,600 artists and speakers from over 40 countries around the world, the Festival program includes meetings and debates with great representatives of modern culture, the world of art and design, and the Italian and international music scenes. Continue reading

By Nikolaus Jantsch (Music: Stefan Löwenstein); 2007; 3:50; 8 mm / Colour 2D. The structure is given through the rhythm of the colour fields, which define the musical part. Continue reading

PED (2001-2006) by Millie Chen, Andrew Johnson, Paul Vanouse, - PED is simultaneously a pseudo service bureau and an info/excer-tainment outlet from which viewer/participants may embark on free, talking-bicycle lecture tours. Each site-specific instance of PED provides many different thematic tours, each with a specific route to follow. Each bicycle is outfitted with a pedal-activated audio system. As the viewers pedal they hear the lecture, and when they stop the lecture ceases. Each ‘lecture’ is heard via small speakers mounted to the handlebars of each bicycle. Each tour begins and returns to the PED service bureau. Each route is marked with either temporary chalk-based paint or, alternatively, signage. Continue reading

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks will be published in October. In this new book by ‘one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century’ (NYT), Sacks subject is music: “our relationship with it, our facility for it, and what this most universal of passions says about us. In chapters examining savants and synaesthetics, depressives and musical dreamers, Sacks… locates the musical experience in the human brain. He shows that music is not simply about sound, but also movement, visualization, and silence. He follows the experiences of patients suddenly drawn to or suddenly divorced from music. And in so doing he shows, as only he can, both the extraordinary spectrum of human expression and the capacity of music to heal. Wise, compassionate and compellingly readable, Musicophilia promises, like all the best writing, to alter our conception of who we are and how we function, to lend a fascinating insight into the mysteries of the mind, and to show us what it is to be human.” (from Amazon’s review).