Minitek is a new concept and combines the best of electronic music (featuring international top headliners as well as emerging talent) as well as innovation projects in the areas of art, design and technology.

Over three days and two different locations, one outdoor and one indoor, the event will feature two music stages and experimental art and technology installations in the innovation pavillion throughout the day while visual artists will take advantage the night to showcase the latest in projection art on 360 degree screens around the performing stage and dance floor.

Featured innovation projects are by Daito (Japan), Marius Watz (Norway), Paul Prudence (UK), Burak Arikan (Turkey), Owen Vallis & Jordan Hochenbaum (US), C-TRL (US) and Abert Hwang (US). More to be announced.

The festival will also introduce progressive technologies such as RFID wristbands for participants and partnerships with Rock & WrapItUp (left-over food distribution to NYC’s homeless) and the EPA’s WasteWise program show the festival’s effort to be socially responsible.

Minitek will take place at two different locations, one outdoor day venue and one indoor night venue. to shish the skeptics and to counter silly rumours that we don’t even have a venue yet, we’re releasing some info regarding minitek’s night venue: it’s going to be in… midtown manhattan!

Penn Plaza - 401 7th avenue (between 33rd and 34th st)

we recommend to stay around the night venue, and more towards the lower side of manhattan if you want to be in between both venues. either way, new york city’s public transport network will get you around easily and we’ll add means of transport where needed. we will inform you of updates in our newsletter, so make sure you’re signed up!

Check www.minitekfestival.com for more information and ticketing!

So long as the user writes on paper printed with a special pattern, the smartpen transforms what is written into interactive text. For example, the pen has a recording function, called paper replay, that can record sound and connect it to what the user writes while the sounds are being recorded. Later, the user can tap the pen over what she wrote and replay the associated sounds. “We’re starting to make the whole world of printable surfaces accessible and functional,” says Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff.” Continue reading Computing on Paper - Livescribe’s smartpen turns a sheet of paper into a computer by Erica Naone, Technology Review.

Fixed between two electrodes, the vibrating tube successfully performed the four critical roles of a radio–antenna, tunable filter, amplifier and demodulator–to tune in a radio signal generated in the room and play it back through an attached speaker. Functional across a bandwidth widely used for commercial radio, the tiny device could have applications far beyond novelty, from radio- controlled devices that could flow in the human bloodstream to highly efficient, miniscule, cell phone devices.

Developed at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems, a research team led by Alex Zettl of the University of California at Berkeley announced the findings online on Oct. 31, 2007. The findings are scheduled to be printed in Nano Letters in November.

“This breakthrough is a perfect example of how the unique behavior of matter in the nanoworld enables startling new technologies,” says Bruce Kramer, a senior advisor for engineering at NSF and the officer overseeing the center’s work. “The key functions of a radio, the quintessential device that heralded the electronic age, have now been radically miniaturized using the mechanical vibration of a single carbon nanotube.”

The source content for the first laboratory test of the radio was “Layla,” by Derek and the Dominos, followed soon after by “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys.

One of the primary goals for the center is to develop minuscule sensors that can communicate wirelessly, says Settle. “A key issue is how to integrate individual molecular-scale components together into a system that maintains the nanometer scale. The nanoradio achieves this by having one molecular structure, the nanotube, simultaneously perform all critical functions,” he adds.

The new device works in a manner more similar to the vacuum tubes from the 1930s than the transistors found in modern radios. In the new radio, a single carbon fiber a few hundred nanometers (billionths of a meter) long, and only a few molecules thick, stands glued to a negatively charged base of tungsten that acts as a cathode. Roughly one millionth of a meter directly across from the base lies a positively charged piece of copper that acts as an anode.

Power in the form of streaming electrons travels from an attached battery through the cathode, into the nanotube, and across a vacuum to the anode via a field-emission tunneling process.

“The field emission process could be likened to a runner jumping across a ditch; you only make it across if you have enough speed, i.e. energy, to begin with,” says Zettl. “So electrons jump the physical gap from cathode to anode when you supply enough energy to the device from the battery.”

The stream of electrons along the nanotube changes when a radio wave encoded with information–simply a wave of photons that travels in a controlled manner–washes across the tube and causes it to resonate.This mechanical action is what amplifies and demodulates, or decodes, the radio signal.

Returning to Zettl’s runner analogy, the vibrating nanotube is akin to a ditch with a constantly changing width. Just as the runner’s chances of making the leap depend on how far the gap is, the chances of electrons making the leap depend on the distance of the nanotube tip from the anode.

“This coupling of the mechanical waving motion of the nanotube to the success rate of electrons jumping the gap is key to the functioning of the radio,” says Zettl. “What emerges from the anode is then the information signal, which can be transferred to additional amplifiers and a speaker to reveal the originally encoded music or any other data.”

By permanently lengthening or shortening the nanotube, a modification resulting from sending a short-lived larger-than-normal electrical current through the device, the researchers were able to control the frequency of the radio signal that the device could receive.

The researchers believe it would be easy to produce such nanotube radios for receiving signals in the 40-400 megahertz range, a range within which most FM radio broadcasts fall. The researchers fine tune the nanoradio to a frequency, akin to a channel, by using the electrostatic field between the cathode and anode to tighten or loosen the nanotube, a process the researchers relate to the tightening or loosening of a string on a guitar. According to Zettl, the sensitivity of the nanotube radio can be enhanced by attaching an external antenna or by using an array of nanotubes that maintain the extremely small size. While the concept of a miniaturized receiver for picking up broadcast music signals has appeal, the technology has the potential to assist in a range of interesting uses.

Adds Bruce Kramer, “The application of a fully functioning radio receiver less than 50 millionths of an inch in length and one millionth of an inch in diameter potentially allows the radio control of almost anything, from a single receiver in a living cell to a vast array embedded in an airplane wing.”

N.Ramakrishnan

Director of Projects
Ideosync Media Combine
177, Ashoka Enclave III
Sector 35, Faridabad - 121003
Haryana - India
Tel: +91-0129-4131883/6510156/2254395/2254396 (Prefix 95129- from Delhi)
Telfax: +91-0129-2254395 (Prefix 95129- from Delhi)
Mobile: +91-9810273883
Email: nram[at]ideosyncmedia.org

YOU CAN SUPPORT THE COMMUNITY RADIO FORUM (India) BY JOINING AND TAKING AN ACTIVE PART IN ONE OF THESE NETWORKS

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crforum-awareness (Awareness building)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crforum-helpdesk (Offering help)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crforum-policy-advocacy (Policy advocacy)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crforum-techoptions (Technical options)

[Via sarai.net]

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).

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.

Read on about Extrapolator and how the new algorithms could usher in a whole new era of high-quality multichannel audio from low-cost tools — a trend a great many of us heartily applaud.

For my inaugural post to this blog, I’d like to write about something I’ve been thinking about lately, and hopefully begin a discussion on it. Namely, what to make of geotagged audio samples and recordings. In case you’re not familiar with the term, geotagging is the practice of assigning geographic coordinates to a piece of media like a recording or photo as a form of metadata. In one incarnation, such as on the Freesound project, geotagged samples are layered over Google maps, allowing one to zoom in on any spot on the planet and potentially find samples tagged to specific geographic locations. As numerous startups and one very large corporation (beginning with a ‘G’ and ending with ‘oogle’) have realized, the commercial potential of geotagging is huge. But we hear less about its scientific potential and, of importance here, its aesthetic potential.

Scientifically, geotagged audio has potential in areas such as the environmental sciences. As one example, imagine taking annual recordings of a section of forest over many years, studying the variations or declines in population of certain bird species via their prominence in the recordings. This has likely already been done, but then imagine putting those incremental recordings into the public sphere via an application like Google Earth.

Of course, as an artist, I am primarily interested in the aesthetic potential of this technology. Currently on Freesound (and hopefully soon on Google Earth too), one can navigate around a map of the world, looking for and listening to geotagged samples, downloading them if one is interested in using them further. However, once the geotagged sample is downloaded and separated from its coordinates, it becomes just another field recording without any accompanying data. For a geotagged sample or recording to be of value compositionally – as a geotagged sample tied to a specific place and not just an anonymous field recording – the metadata must be maintained for compositional use. This is where we apparently reach the edge of current development: tools for working compositionally with geotagged sounds off of a network have not really been developed. There is a multitude of approaches to using this type of material, from composers interested in ecoacoustics to installationists wanting to tap ‘global’ recordings in some improvisatory way. What I’m getting at here is the need for a discussion (hopefully to take place below), about the aesthetic and technical issues surrounding geotagged audio, and tools that composers/artists would like to see available for making the best of this material.

If you were to make use of geotagged audio, what would you use it for? What kind of interfaces into a geotagged audio database would interest you?

This year’s Summer School of Sound will be led by internationally-acclaimed sound artist collective goto10. Marloes de Valk and Aymeric Mansoux will lead a three-day course, exploring free open-source software available for home-studio purposes, such as audio and midi sequencers, sound editors and virtual effect-racks, as well as the creative possibilities of puredata in an audio-workstation setup.

The three-day summer school is aimed at musicians, designers, artists and those with an interest in multimedia technologies who want to explore how new digital technologies can help and inspire us when working with music and sound. Participants do not need a high level of technological or programming skills, although these would be beneficial. A strong interest in one or more of the following areas is essential: sound art, music, technology, open source software.

Booking fees and deadline: Organisational rate: #250; Individual rate: #150. Places are limited: to apply please email Jennifer Stoddart, Programme Co-ordinator at jennifer.stoddart ‘at’ folly.co.uk with brief details of your background, interest and experience in the areas listed above, and an indication of your level of computer literacy.

The closing date for applications is Thursday 31 May 2007. Applicants will be informed after this date if their application has been successful.

Please note: to apply for a place, you need to be able to attend all 3 days of the Summer School. This is an intensive course, but it will be fun, and you’ll benefit from some of the leading and most inspiring artists in their field!

folly is a leading digital arts organisation. Working in Lancashire, Cumbria and online, folly is committed to enabling new audiences to explore art through technology.

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I like to perform this work in small community venues, outdoor gatherings, art-spaces, and galleries where everyone is welcome and can sit on the floor, talk to one another, and drink green tea. However I will perform TRACEPLACESPACE approximately anywhere.

1. curse go back.mp3 - 5.4mb : a utopian template
2. uncanny situation.mp3 - 10.1mb : for Jean Baudrillard, 1929 - 2007
3. mary gone deep.mp3 - 6.4mb : because “we cannot fall out of the world”
4. unreasonable things.mp3 - 3.7mb : democracy containment
5. technics and time.mp3 - 7mb : let it take you as far as you can ride it
6. big.mp3 - 4.2mb : exciting times / exciting life
7. six years.mp3 - 7.8mb : …the dematerialization of… - Lucy Lippard

Arabic percussion on tracks 1,2,3,4,& 6 recorded live and Performed by Eric LaPerna
Sample on track 1, Dada Into Surrealism, Tristan Tzara, 1959 from Ubuweb
Sample on track 6, OlgaNR1.mp3, by Acclivity from The Freesound Project
All tracks Mastered by Bernhard Loibner
Music, words, samples, mix, and performance Cary Peppermint