“Local school kids are taking it a step further and are deliberately shouting at the sign in unison in order to make the numbers change. The Manager of the night club is finding the poster helpful too – he is taking photos of the sign in the early hours of the morning to show the local council that he is not making too much noise.” [From information aesthetics]

Resonating Bodies is a series of mixed media installations and community outreach projects, which focus on the biodiversity of pollinators indigenous to the ecosystems of the Greater Toronto Area. Conceived by Sarah Peebles with Rob King, Rob Cruickshank and Anne Barros, the installations illuminate aspects of local biodiversity, such as bumblebee colonies and their foraging activities, ultraviolet bee vision, and pollinator / plant co-evolution. Some of these projects feature colour-coded DNA barcodes, a new technique for species identification pioneered by Canadian researchers.

Resonating Bodies coincides with the release of Toronto’s first guide to native bees, A Guide to Toronto’s Pollinators, by Laurence Packer, Professor of Biology at York University and published by the David Suzuki Foundation. Free copies of this booklet will also be available throughout July at several locations. The topic of the booklet - some 23 genera of bees found in Toronto - is the focus of our exhibition. Collaborating researchers Laurence Packer, Jessamyn Manson, Peter Hallett and Stephen Buchmann will be giving talks throughout the period of the exhibition.

Bumble Domicile, the first installment of the Resonating Bodies project, uses an on-site bumblebee hive at *new* Gallery (906 Queen street West) and displays video and audio of its internal activity. Headphones that “plug” into the actual hive give the viewer opportunity to hear the bees in real time. Ultraviolet video of flowering plants in the building’s communal garden is projected onto the North wall of the gallery to provide live tracking of the bees pollination.

Continuous audio transformations of pre-recorded bees and shoh (the Japanese mouth-organ, an instrument which has utilized beeswax since ancient times) fill the gallery space. Visitors are invited to place aromatic offerings into a heated copper tray, which resembles the interior of the hive. This copper tray was created through a unique process involving the remnants of a discarded bumblebee hive.

Viewers are also invited to take free bee trading cards, featuring macro photography of bee anatomy, life facts and colour-coded DNA barcodes of some local bumble bee species. These cards are the first in a series of trading cards of pollinators featured in Resonating Bodies at both *new* gallery and at the bee-wasp condo at the Franklin Children’s Garden on Toronto Island.

Speakers Series: Indigenous Pollinators, Habitat and Co-evolution
Researchers and artists speak about pollinator and bee biodiversity, habitat and related topics throughout the month of July at various venues. Co-presented by Seeds of Diversity and InterAccess, Dorkbot and Franklin Children’s Garden.

Thursday July 17, 7:00 p.m: “Barcodes and Bees?”
Featuring Professor Laurence Packer (York University) and Resonating Bodies artists. A Dorkbot event at InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre Studio, 9 Ossington Ave at Queen W. (http://dorkbot.org/dorkbottoronto)
Dr. Laurence Packer, Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at York University, author of “Bees of Toronto” will discuss pollinator diversity and pollinator-habitat relationships, emphasizing recent research regarding DNA barcode data in understanding the bees of Canada. Artists Sarah Peebles, Rob King, Anne Barros and Robert Cruickshank will be present to discuss their interdisciplinary work, “Resonating Bodies - Bumble Domicile” in this context. Topics include visualization of pollen gathering data, ultraviolet video, the electroforming process, and audio transformations of bee sounds.

Sunday July 20th at 4pm: “Plants affecting pollinators: How plants lure bumblebees into making plant babies”
Featuring Jessamyn Manson (University of Toronto)
Location: Garden at 900 Queen W next to *new* gallery (enter by the blue gate), NW corner of Crawford and Queen W. Rain location at *new* gallery (visitors will be directed to the appropriate room in the building).
Jessamyn Manson, a PhD candidate from the University of Toronto’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, will speak about the interaction between plants and their pollinators, focusing on how plant traits like their flower’s colour and scent convinces the bumble bees to act as pollen vectors.

Sarah Peebles will perform solo shoh improvisations at *new* gallery on Saturday, July 26th, 1:20 p.m. as part of MUSIC(in)GALLERIES - an afternoon of Live Creative Music in Twenty Queen Street West Art Galleries (1-5pm). Details at http://www.somewherethere.org.

The featured artists in Resonating Bodies-Bumble Domicile are:
Sarah Peebles: audio material, audio programming; overall concept, facilitation
Rob King: visual programming, data gathering and projection
Anne Barros: electroformed copper offering plate with micro-controlled heating elements (collaboration) and silver bowl;
Rob Cruickshank: technical assistance, live video, ultraviolet video/tech development, technical and artistic consultant

Collaborating researchers: Laurence Packer (York University), Jessamyn Manson (University of Toronto), Peter Hallett (University of Toronto), and Stephen Buchmann (University of Arizona, Tucson).

Bios
Anne Barros, RCA, specializes in small functional hollowware and flatware. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Seymour Rabinovitch, and the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre. She has received numerous awards, including the Canada Council’s Paris Studio.

Sarah Peebles is an internationally renowned artist who “has an ear for contrasting density and inventive transformation”(The Wire Magazine). She has performed and exhibited worldwide, and has collaborated with a wide range of musicians and artists, Her music is available on a number of audio and video publications.

Robert Cruickshank is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist. He works in various media includes electronic, kinetic and robotic installations, sound art, electroacoustic music and lo-fi and stereo photography. He has exhibited in Toronto and internationally.

Rob King is currently finishing a MA degree in the Communications and Culture joint graduate program at Ryerson and York Universities. He is a New Media artist based in Toronto, Ontario. His work explores the social dynamics of networked spaces, the potentials of mobile and ubiquitous computing, and system theory.

Dr. Stephen Buchmann will present his lecture “The Forgotten Pollinators” at 7pm after the opening at *new* Gallery. He has authored and co-authored 8 books, along with 150 scientific publications, and is an adjunct professor of entomology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He is the International Coordinator for the tri-national (Canada, USA, Mexico) North American Pollinator Protection Campaign and its Pollinator Partnership.

Laurence Packer is a melittologist - in other words, his research specialty is wild bees. At York University he teaches entomology and biodiversity. He is a member of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada and is as active as he can be in promoting an understanding of the importance of bees.

Resonating Bodies is generously supported through the Drylands Institute, the City of Toronto Parks and Recreation and InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre and New Adventures in Sound Art and is co-produced by Sarah Peebles and InterAccess.

Trading Cards, colour-coded DNA barcodes and more! http://resonatingbodies.wordpress.com/.

http://pollinator.org and http://pollinationcanada.ca.
Pollinator Partnership provides information on pollinator - habitat conservation, pollinator gardens, co-evolution and more.

www.drylandsinstitute.org/.

Related: Honeybee Ballet Planting.

Beginning at 2:00 pm there will be in-store hearing tests administered on an audiometer :: 2:15 – 2:16 (EDT) International Minute of Silence :: 8:00 pm Concert – Brendan Murray, Asher, Jed Speare.

The concert will feature an investigation into the earliest known recording, from 1860, predating Edison’s by 28 years. A recent article in the NY Times on Edourard-Leon Scott de Martinville’s phonautogram included the sound file of this recently played-back recording. (To read the article and listen to the sound file, go here.) Brendan Murray, Asher, and Jed Speare will exclusively source this recording as the form-building basis for their concert, signaling a clear intent to transform. While juxtaposed within the confines of Twisted Village’s aeons and multitudes of recorded sound, this pause for reflection, of 148 years, beckons new sonic awareness, here for the future.

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.

Networks, Mobility, Interventions

The projects in Glowlab 09 examine urban architecture by investigating the social spaces enabled by public networks, mobile communication devices and direct intervention. In viewing the work, one might re-imagine the city as space which is defined through the nature of the interactions that take place within it.

Public Broadcast Cart by Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga: Transforms a shopping cart into a mobile radio station, transmitting via miniFM and the Internet. The Public Broadcast Cart is designed to enable any pedestrian to become an active producer of a radio broadcast by reversing the usual role of the public from audience to producer.

Hundekopf by Brian House and Sue Huang (Knifeandfork): A location-based narrative project utilizing SMS text-messaging to explore the experience of riding the Berlin Ringbahn.

Relay: Toronto by Germaine Koh: An architectural intervention that turns a building into a sort of urban lighthouse, relaying text messages received on a mobile phone by flashing the building lights in Morse code.

Lee Walton’s Western Shift by Allard van Hoorn: An open-environment collaboration between researchers, architects, designers, artist, curators and all kind of cultural producers. Its aim is to stimulate fresh ways of looking at urban living and discover alternative solutions.

SpeedWave by Otino Corsano: A photographic based performance piece inspired by the established location of a regularly monitored Toronto speed trap. A camera on a tripod replaces the laser gun to document waves of local traffic.

Talking Cities [magazine review] by Krista Jenkins: A review of the recently published Talking Cities magazine, the print accompaniment to the exhibition of the same name, taking place at Zeche Zollverein in Essen, Germany.

Glowlab is an artist-run production and publishing lab engaging urban public space as the medium for contemporary art and technology projects. We track emerging approaches to psychogeography, the exploration of the physical and psychological landscape of cities. Our annual Conflux festival, exhibitions, events and our bi-monthly web-based magazine support a network of artists, researchers and technologists around the world.

Mobile Lab for On-Air Experimentation

Trans-Siberian Radio is a low-power FM station that will operate on the train from Moscow to Beijing via Novosibirsk, during the conference Capturing the Moving Mind: Management and Movement in the Age of Temporary War, September 11:20.

The station will be a mobile lab for on-air experimentation, featuring music and ideas created collaboratively by passengers on the train and accessible to everyone along the Trans-Siberian route. As curator Natilee Harren writes, the ever-moving symbol of the train fits the conference’s theme: “The spirit of the conference is to cross fixed boundaries and to create an environment that is open to the ‘contaminating influences’ of the communities through which the train will pass. In fact, the point of having the conference on a train is to escape any restrictions relating to a particular time or place.” Visit the project’s site when the train is rolling to contribute with audio works or hear-and manipulate-audio clips from the ride. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not]

Related: “Last year, artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla used micro-radio transmitters to create a re-volt. That is, by helping community members build nearly 500 micro-radio transmitters, they initiated a process by which power was redirected from the corporations who most profit from the publicly owned airwaves to individuals who can express a diversity of commercial-free viewpoints. Their project Radio Re-volt , created during a residency at the Walker Art Center, culminated in October with a narrowcast the length of University Avenue in Minneapolis. More than 50 micro-radio stations aired from homes and businesses along the route for the benefit of their neighbors or anyone driving the avenue with their radio on.” …More on Radio Re-volt at WiredNews. Click here to read an interview I did with Allora and Calzadilla last spring. [posted by Paul Schmelzer on Eyeteeth: A journal of incisive ideas]

Turning a Deaf Ear

A Measure of Anacoustic Reason–by Raqs Media Collective–is an installation that registers a process of thinking about forms of reasoning that insulate themselves from listening. The installation sees the act of ‘turning a deaf ear’, as the unwillingness or inability to listen to the voices that refuse to be accommodated into the master narratives of progress, of instrumental reason and the domestication of space through the geomancy of corporations and nation-states. The visitor is invited to undertake his/her own audit of anacoustic reasoning through a meditation on a series of dialogues and rebuses that encrypt a set of paradoxes about the grandiose follies of seeking to rule the world by not listening to it.

A Measure of Anacoustic Reason is an installation consisitng of 1 projector, 4 screens, 4 dialogues, 4 lecterns and a lightbox. It was shown at ICon: India Contemporary at Venice Biennale 2005 (14 June-31 July, 2005)

Raqs Media Collective is produced at the Sarai Media Lab, Delhi and
at Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga.

Additional Credits
Sound Editing: Iram Ghufran
Print Design: Mrityunjay Chatterjee
Production: Ashish Mahajan

For images of the installation please see
http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/anacoustic.html
http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/venezia/bien51/eng/ind/img-
02.htm

Adaptation, Access, Regulation, Open Source

HINGES ON is an interactive film installation on the informal and formal economies of India’s “ICT capital”, Bangalore. Visitors enter through a sparsly lit sound tunnel, where they are exposed to an audio experience of failed efforts to retrieve information. (The sound works can be downloaded from the site.) Finally, one is released into the room hosting the video installation. Multiple door-shaped screens in the centre of the space serve as projection surfaces for the four simultanous projections. The screens are on hinges and invite the visitors to turn them into the angel required to catch the projection they wish to watch. (You can find information on the themes and issues in the backdrop section). A switch board provides the interface to the speakers featured on video. (In depth documentation of the process including a list of interviewees and the ‘making of switch board, doors and software patches is accessible here!’

HINGES ON at Ars Electronica, opening September 1, 2005, 15:30, Campus / Kunstuniversit�t Linz. The work was realized by ambientTV.NET during the Tactical Media Lab at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India; with Thomas Abraham, Salam Hidish Singh, Ishan Ghosh, Nishita Kavadia, Siddharth Muthyala, K.T.Thomas, Pratima Kalmadi, Divya Viswanathan, Umang Razdan Bhattacharrya, Ramyah Gowrishankar, and Priyanka Dilip. Lab led by Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel.

radiophonic graffiti

Autonomous Radiobodies is a public art performance/installation that involves people wearing or carrying units equipped with a Radio Graffiti Device for creating localized radiophonic art/graffiti spaces. As the technology of traditional radio hangs on the edge of artistic obsolescence and state-financed broadcasters use the medium to construct and enforce a national voice, newer mobile technologies are springing up and grabbing the public attention for commercial communication and artistic expression. This technological hype for the new presents an opportunity to exploit and reinvestigate the older wireless medium of radio and it’s renewed use as an art-space. Read more>>