imposition emerges from translation, a series of pieces which were developed, in turn, from overboard, our first essay in ambient poetics. imposition uses the same texts and procedures as translation. It continues an investigation of iterative, procedural removal from one text or language to another. During the performance, four passages from the source texts of imposition will be presented in any one of three shifting states: surfacing, floating or sinking. A passage will also be in one of three changing language states: German, French or English. If a passage sinks in one language it may, for example, surface in another.

imposition now distributes these states over the internet in order to enable a networked transliteral and musical performance. imposition’s main display shows the four transliterating passages on a large projection and broadcasts their states via a server on the internet. Anyone with access to a set of twelve distinct QuickTime ‘listener’ movies may download and play them on their computer. While the main movie is running, listener movies will track one of the four passages, but will do so in a single language (as selected at download time by the participant who plays the ‘listener’) while reflecting the ‘buoyancy’ of the passage to which it listens. These movies also play looping musical samples of human vocalizations which harmonize both with the main display and with other linked and listening movies. The selection and triggering of samples also reflect their linked passage’s buoyancy. For performance or installation renditions of imposition, a number of participants with laptop computers may be distributed amongst the audience. These laptops will each play their listening movie networked with the main display by wireless connection over the internet. - John Cayley

The music for imposition is ultimately generated by events arising out of the transformations that occur within the text. These are the chance operations - themselves composed through John’s programmed impositions - which govern how various predetermined features of the audio will ultimately play themselves out. More >>

Credits: John Caley (writing, concepts, text-generation, programming); Giles Perring (composition, sound design, recording, post-production); Melanie Pappenheim (vocals); and Douglas Cape (advice on visual media, additional recording)

Soundwok Artiject - Call for Participants: Take part immediately in a cutting-edge “artiject” in which the aesthetic consciousness of upstream sonifiers is mapped utilizing GIS technology. If you are a Southern California based or linked sound artist, experimental musician and / or composer, you are invited to participate in the first part of a unique sound art and music research artiject and study, conducted by Dr. Chung Shih Hoh and Marco Schindelmann that will involve the mapping of the dynamic social networks and aesthetic consciousness of Southern California artists involved in sound art and/or experimental music. The results of this study will also serve as material for a sound installation for SoundWalk2008. Your participation in this project is not contingent on your submitting to or taking part in SoundWalk2008.

…Electromagnetic fields are biologically active. Emitting from every electronic device, electromagnetic fields affect our body and the living nature. They interact with the natural emissions and intersect the boundaries of our planet. Invisible and omnipresent, electromagnetic fields have become ghosts of the modern world…

Entitled SPECTROPIA, this year’s festival - organised by RIXC - continues artistic explorations within the invisible space of electromagnetic spectrum surrounding us. The festival programme will feature 3-day SPECTROPIA exhibition with live events, workshops and artists presentations. It will be accompanied by international conference, performances, film and video screenings.

CALL for Proposals (for 3-day exhibition with live events): There are no restrictions, however, we would prefer work which is in process/ performative/ in action, requires artist’s assistance and possibly visitor’s participation/ action though the work can be demonstrated as well. Artists who think that their work fits the main theme of “spectropia”, are invited send a brief description of the work plus Links, and other relevant information,to: rixc [at] @rixc.lv and/or to Rasa Smite rasa [at] rixc.lv.

DEADLINE: April 21, 2008

RIXC, Centre for New Media Culture
11. Novembra krastmala 35-201
Riga, LV 1050
LATVIA

Netrooms: The Long Feedback is a participatory network piece which invites the public to contribute to an extended feedback loop and delay line across the internet. The work explores the juxtaposition of multiple spaces as the acoustic, the social and the personal environment becomes permanently networked. The performance consists of live manipulation of multiple real-time streams from different locations which receive a common sound source. Netrooms celebrates the private acoustic environment as defined by the space between one audio input (microphone) and output (loudspeaker). The performance of the piece consists of live mixing a feedback loop with the signals from each stream.

To participate email Pedro at P.Rebelo [at] qub.ac.uk by the 1st of April and we will send you a PD patch. You can participate from anywhere in the world with a broadband connection. All you need to do is load the patch during the performance times and listen… You can make a sound, be silent, play music, talk to others and listen… but remember it’s a long feedback loop!

Technical Requirements:

- 1 laptop with Microphone (internal or external) and Loudspeaker (internal or external)
- Pure data-extended 0.39.3-extended
- Patch provided when you email us
- Broadband Connection with UDP and TCP ports 8100 open

Performances:

April 2, 2008 Berkeley, California - CNMAT, University of California Berkeley :: The performance of Netrooms: The Long Feedback is integrated in a concert of music from the Sonic Arts Research Centre. The piece will begin at 8:30pm (PDT)

April 4, 2008 Stanford, California - CCRMA, Stanford University :: The performance of Netrooms: The Long Feedback is integrated in a concert of music from the Sonic Arts Research Centre. The piece will begin at 8:30pm (PDT)

Creative innovation has always relied, to some extent, on the logic of call-and-response, a phrase that Breitz borrows from musicologists, who use it to describe the interactive quality that is key to musical experience in various oral cultures. Mudam warmly invites you to share your ideas with a group of artists and thinkers as they explore the logic of call-and-response and reflect on strategies of artistic appropriation and creative recycling during a three-day line-up of performances, panels and discussions.

With invited guests Cory Arcangel, Martin Arnold, Pierre Bismuth, Claude Closky, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Iain Forsyth + Jane Pollard, Surasi Kusolwong, Matthieu Laurette, Lawrence Lessig, Gabriel Lester, Bjørn Melhus, Momus, Jonathan Monk, Kaz Oshiro, Guillaume Paris, Paul Pfeiffer and James Webb.

Friday, 25 April 2008 Evening
OPENING EVENTS
Forsyth + Pollard

London-based artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard met and began working collaboratively in 1993. An interdisciplinary approach to art, music, mediation and ‘liveness’ has led to their continued engagement with the soundtrack underpinning contemporary life. Their universal yet highly personal strategies play out ideas of memory, performance and the mediated image in a challenging but highly accessible body of work.

Saturday, 26 April 2008 10am-6pm
Mondo Youtube

This day-long session brings together several artists who have explored the participatory potential of mainstream media such as advertising, the Internet, reality television, video games, MySpace and YouTube. Given the increasingly profit-driven nature of most of these formats, is it possible for a challenging culture of call-and-response to exist within these nascent public spheres, or inevitable that all criticism and innovative thought introduced into these new formats will immediately be instrumentalized towards commercial ends? Invited artists will supplement discussions of their own work with examples of mainstream media that have interested them, influenced them, or into which they have actively intervened. With:

Cory Arcangel, New York
Matthieu Laurette, Paris
Bjørn Melhus, Berlin
Guillaume Paris, Paris
Gabriel Lester, Amsterdam/Brussels

Sunday, 27 April 2008 10am-6pm
After Images

This day-long session brings together several artists who have engaged in explicit call-and-response relationships with other artists or works of art, addressing the crucial exchange and dialogue that motivates artistic practice. Each artist will talk about their own work in relation to those artists or works of art that they respond to or dialogue with in their work. With:

Surasi Kusolwong, Bangkok
Jonathan Monk, Berlin
Claude Closky, Paris
Kaz Oshiro, Los Angeles
James Webb, Cape Town
Keynote Speaker: Lawrence Lessig, San Francisco

Monday, 28 April 2008 9am-8pm
Art Goes To The Movies

Martin Arnold has written that, “The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.” This premise can be seen to inform the work of many contemporary artists who work in video today. This day-long session brings together several artists who have responded to and cannibalized mainstream cinema in their work, addressing the complex call-and-response relationship that exists between commercial cinema and contemporary art. Each artist will have the opportunity to talk about their use of found footage and their relationship to the cinematic images that they recycle in their work. With:

Paul Pfeiffer, New York
Pierre Bismuth, Brussels
Martin Arnold, Vienna
Candice Breitz, Berlin
Keynote Speaker: Diedrich Diederichsen, Berlin

Evening
Momus Live

“Ultraconformist, voyager, timelord, tennis and ping pong champion, tender pervert, poison boyfriend, hippopotamus, philosopher, folk singer, star forever.” Nick Currie, more popularly known under the artist name Momus (after the Greek god of mockery), is a songwriter, blogger and a journalist for Wired. Most of his songs are self-referential or postmodern.

Mudam can provide assistance with accommodation, food, local transport and other details for students. Call+Response will take place in the Mudam auditorium and will be open only to registered participants. All talks will be held in English. Program subject to modification.

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.

An icon on the balustrade instructs participants to adopt a contemplative position - one must lay ones elbows onto the balustrade, cover ones ears, and look at the Old Town. While in this position, they hear the sounds of bombers and explosions, which travel through their arms directly into their inner ears via bone conduction.

People who attempted to block out the noise during the bombing are memorialized by Touched Echo. By striking the very same pose — blocking ones ears — visitors to the installation hear rather than obscure the terrible sounds.

Does hearing via bone conduction produce a more empathic response? Or is it the element of surprise, the lack of audio queues — speakers, headphones, amplifiers — that proves powerful?

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

Close your eyes and listen. It is the Age of Noise: hums, buzzes, whines, traffic, ventilation systems, disc drives, cell phones, sirens, aircraft, muzak, televisions, radios, car alarms, leaf blowers, jack hammers, compressors — biproducts of an overheated visual culture bombard us endlessly. It’s no surprise that many people withdraw from our public hearing space and retreat into iPods or buildings with windows that don’t open. Harmony in the Age of Noise intends to empower the sense of hearing and deconstruct this sea of noise. In transforming this barrage of sounds into information about the way we live, the piece attempts to restore harmony and balance to the senses.

Anthropologist and poet David Guss invited sound artist, Bruce Odland — sonic thinker, composer, and sound artist known for his large scale, public space sound installations — to create Harmony in the Age of Noise. Along with sculptor Mark McNamara and media artist Michael Luck Schneider, they will collaborate with over 80 undergraduates and grad students as well as professors and staff at Tufts University. Together they are designing and building a sonic observation post that will allow visitors to navigate through sound maps of the campus and surrounding community. Harmony in the Age of Noise will be a parabolic gazebo where the hub of students and traffic are harmonized through a mix of a real time feed, a collection of stored psychoacoustic maps, and visitors’ sounds programmed to play like hourly chimes.

All students and the public are invited to participate and attend.

Read more here.

The majority of cinema as a form seeks to: 1. capture ideas and impressions of the spaces and places we inhabit or 2. visualise those we can’t. The former of these, representation, has been more dominant throughout cinema’s history. The lens has in effect become a means of capturing our ‘reality’, allowing us to store and later reproduce sights and sounds to be replayed as a substitute for personal memories.

With the arrival of computing and it’s now widespread use within cinema we see the latter begin to take dominance. Cinema as representation is changing to cinema as simulation, creating an era more important than the transition from silent to sound or from black and white to colour. Cinema has the possibility to become a form without any necessarily inferred referent, it is known, quantifiable (pixels) and so can be modified, abstracted, constructed in numerous ways. It’s method of production can be improved, changed or even reconceived allowing it’s authors to work as never before. Cinema arrives at the end of an era with promise of a new one enabling it to become immersive, live, participative, interactive, navigable, recombinatory, distributed, networked, coded etc.

Cinema presents performances and screenings on this theme. Works will address the future of cinema and explore a diverse set of possible directions. The line-up for the evening will be as follows:

- Semiconductor (http://www.semiconductorfilms.com)
- Paul Adams (http://www.myspace.com/mrpauladams)
- Mick Grierson (http://www.mickgrierson.co.uk
- Frédérique Santune (http://www.saturne-feerique.net/LABO/
- John Kannenberg (http://www.stasisfield.com)
- Adam Chapman (http://www.adamchapmanart.com)
- 33dB (http://www.myspace.com/letageramegot)
- And more

Open Ear, audio-visual events and performances 2007 – 2008 are supported by Canterbury Christ Church University. For all further information, up to date details on events as they happen and videos of previous events please see the Open Ear website.

Canterbury Christ Church Broadstairs Campus, situated on the east coast of Kent, England approximately 30 minutes from Canterbury, opened in 2000 with a wide selection of higher education courses. The campus is committed to the arts and cultural regeneration of the area and regularly host’s events, exhibitions and performances on site. Detailed information on how to get here can be found on the university website.

The best projects will be eligible for prizes and will be co-developed as physical exhibits at The Tech Museum in conjunction with its upcoming Art, Film and Music exhibition that will open June 4, 2008. Here is a list of all of the projects already underway, and two musical ones:

Wikisonic — by Jon Brouchoud (aka Keystone Bouchard) — consists of a round room, in both the virtual and real museum (see Second Life prototype here). The interior wall contains a musical staff, with rows of notes in the key of C. Each note ‘bulb’ can be turned on or off. A trigger revolves constantly around the space, playing only those notes which have been activated. An identical installation in Second Life mirrors the real installation, such that avatars can also turn notes on and off. The result is a collaborative musical composition, made up of asynchronous decisions made by visitors to the museum. In this way, visitors are engaged as an active and dynamic part of the composition, instead of passive and static, as is most often the case in musical experience. Additionally, if viable, proximity sensors also trigger translucent wall panels, indicating the location of each Wikisonic composer. Visitors both real and virtual will have a visual indication of a presence on ‘the other side’ - further bridging the perceived gap between the real and the virtual.

Wikisonic, Experiment #1 Machinima
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJJSdjyOMDg
Interactive music composition. Architecture Island, November 2007 - Concept by Keystone Bouchard, Scripted by Dirty McLean. Wikitune composed by Bettina Tizzy, Theory Shaw and Keystone Bouchard. Also see Musical Architecture

Music Orbits - by Ron Blechner — will explore how 3-D space can act as a medium for users to interact and create music. This interaction is being prototyped in Second Life using its internal building and scripting system. The musical arrangement will physically take up virtual space; the objects will be arrayed as either a constellation, galaxy, solar system, or atomic compound. Thus, as the user interacts with the objects, it would change their position and relative location within this structure. Not only would the position change the music element, but the positions of elements relative to one another could affect each other. See the wiki pages for this project for daily details. Also, see Ron’s blog for summary updates.

Here’s an introduction to the The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop:

There are a number of events planned, including Intro to Exhibit Building in SL, February 14 at 5 pm.

The Tech Museum of Innovation engages people of all ages and backgrounds in exploring and experiencing the technologies affecting their lives, and aims to inspire the innovator in everyone. An expansive variety of interactive exhibits and unique floor programs showcase not just how technology works, but how it affects who we are and how we live, work, play and learn. The Tech’s 132,000 square feet are divided among themed galleries focused on innovation, the internet, the human body, and exploration. In addition, The Tech also features the Hackworth IMAX Dome Theater (Northern California’s only domed IMAX screen), an educational center for workshops and labs, an up scale cafe, and a retail store featuring books, gifts, and only-in-Silicon Valley items. [Thanks to Michael DiTullio for the tip.]