The print journal, Acoustic Space is a forum for net.radio, sound art and creative explorations in the networked electro-acoustic environments. Now in its 7th edition, Acoustic Space - SPECTROPIA issue investigates the rapid transformation of the usage of the radio frequency spectrum that we are witnessing in the 21st century. It doesn’t refer only to a quantitative increase in mobile, satellite and wireless networks, locative and pervasive media, but also to a qualitative shift in the way people communicate and the way spectrum is used in arts, education, science and commerce. The recent scientific research and artistic explorations of electromagnetic (EM) spectrum will be published in this issue, in order to introduce which chances and risks this tranformation process bears for artists and the populations at large.

For the first time, Acoustic Space journal will come out as ‘peer review’ (refereeing) publication. It will be published by the MPLab (Art Research Lab) of Liepaja University in collaboration with the RIXC, The Center for New Media Culture in Riga, Latvia.

Therefore, the publication will contain 2 main sections:

Section 1 - RESEARCH texts (’academic style’ writings with references, etc.)
Section 2 - ARTISTIC abstracts: ideas, concepts, pictures (this part will include mainly artists’ proposals for upcoming Spectropia festival exhibition - open-call is announced, deadline: April 21, 2008)

DEADLINES:

Deadline for submissions: May 19, 2008 - for completed research texts.
(For abstracts - April 21, 2007)

We encourage you to submit abstracts first. Proposals and inquiries regarding submissions should be made to Rasa Smite: rasa [at] rixc.lv

The RESEARCH texts should consist of 12000 - 15000 characters (i.e. 8 pages A4, 12 pt) + references.
(the ARTISTIC abstracts/texts - 2000-4000 characters)

Language: English (all texts will be also translated in to Latvian).

TOPICS:

The publication will cover wide range of topics under 4 main sections:

ELECTROMAGNETIC COSMOLOGY, SPECTRAL ECOLOGY AND EMF (ELECTRO-MAGNETIC FIELDS) RESEARCH: Modern cosmology constitutes the world we live in and our understanding about it by reducing ” the physical reality - galaxies, starts, planets, atoms - to electrical or electromagnetic configurations” - as stated by Bureau d’etudes (in their “Industrial dogma”). Could it be that “understanding the electromagnetic field is the only way to understand ourselves and our surroundings”? In such context the issue of “spectral ecology” will be investigated in the broadest sense possible. This section provides a critique of the industrial dogma and propaganda of electromagnetism, health and ‘green’ issues stemming from electrosmog and meriting more research, as well as sustainability and energy usage and other aspects in relation to communication and information technologies.

CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE: FROM IDEOLOGY AND CULTURE OF SPYING (AND SECURITY) TO CONVERSION OF MILITARY TECHNOLOGIES: This topic studies secret past of communication technologies of military origin. Espionage phenomenon is explored, tracing back to its origins in military history of ancient culture. This part also brings up an issue of “cultural intelligence” - contemporary conversion and culturalisation process of military technologies by exploring how former military facilities have been conversed to become important social and cultural centers and objects.

FREE SPECTRUM: WAVES AND ELECTROMAGNETIC POLITICS: This field looks at electromagnetic spectrum as a socio-political space, investigating political practices in spectrum and bringing up debate on “free waves” and “open spectrum”. The spectrum is regulated and divided: for commercial use, military, radio amateurs, etc., yet wireless community networks continue to explore the exempt part of the spectrum, making small parts of the spectrum available for all.

TECHNOLOGY MYTH, ARTISTIC INTERPRETATIONS AND CONTEMPORARY GHOST STORIES: Electromagnetic fields have become the ghosts of today - invisible and surrounding us, opening up the boundaries of our imagination and bringing technology myths to life. This topic explores the place of those myths and stories in the life of modern society.

Scientific editorial board:

Armin Medosch - PhD., Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.
Rasa Smite - PhD., Riga Stradina University; researcher at MPLab of Liepaja University; director of the RIXC, The Center for New Media Culture, Riga, Latvia.
Inke Arns - Dr. phil., artistic director of the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV), Dortmund, Germany.
Douglas Kahn - Prof. and Head of Technocultural Studies at University of California at Davis, USA.
Andrey Smirnov - Head of the Theremin Center for Electroacoustic Music at Moscow State Conservatory, Russia.
Florian Dombois - Prof. and Head of the Institute for Transdisciplinarity (Y) at Berne University of the Arts, Switzerland.
Atau Tanaka - Prof., Culture Lab of Newcastle University, UK.

The Solent Centre for Architecture + Design, in partnership with London-based media art innovators Hive Networks and artist Armin Medosch, have been working with Southampton City Council’s Oral History Unit on Hidden Histories, a unique project that turns the city itself into a giant outdoor gallery.

Hidden Histories makes accessible some of the highs and lows of Southampton’s 20th Century history, the glory of great ships and journeys as well as the disasters and long forgotten tales.

Hidden Histories will uncover those treasures through a revolutionary new concept of Street Radio. This is a totally new way of experiencing the city. The system utilises wireless communication technologies such as WIFI and Bluetooth in combination with FM radio to create a public interface to the city’s heritage. A selection of stories from the Oral History Unit will be broadcast from 10 nodal points linked together to form a media rich walk that transports people through the changing life of the city. Following the success of the pilot scheme it is hoped that the project can be extended further not only in Southampton but to other towns and cities as well.

The walk begins in and around the proposed ‘Cultural Quarter’ on Above Bar Street and the Civic Centre complex. You can experience the walk 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through any FM radio receiver or mobile phone with radio capacity. Route maps and radio units can be hired from Southampton’s Tourist Information Centre from Monday 17th March. A limited number of or radios will be available for borrowing. Please bring a portable radio or an FM enabled mobile phone.

You can read research notes by Armin Medosch here; sample some of his other writing here; and find out more about HiveNetworks here.

__________________

Freewaves’ HollyWould… festival will take place in October 2008, in the perceived world capital of media on Hollywood Boulevard. They are looking for INTERESTING WORKS THAT REPRESENT AN ALTERNATIVE TO MAINSTREAM MEDIA or directly relate to Hollywood.

Selected festival works will be installed in this urban hall of mirrors in screening rooms, art centers, stores, vacant walls intersecting with audiences where they live, recreate and shop. Media art works include experimental videos and films (narrative, documentary, art, animation, etc.), cell phone videos, DVDs, websites, simple installations, wifi events, images for moving signs and silent video billboards. Works from the festival will also appear on television and video-streamed on the Internet with artists’ permission.

Competitive selection process will be conducted online by a group of international and local curators with a range of specialties and backgrounds.

- Work must be completed since January 1, 2005.
- Notification of acceptance is in July 2008.
- Artists will be paid $100-$200 for selected works.

For submission details, online entry form and Hollywood Boulevard photogallery, see:
http://freewavesopencall.org/

Or: contact: anne [at] freewaves.org

Anne Bray
Freewaves
6522 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90028 USA

Postal address:
2151 Lake Shore Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90039
United States

Moving Forest of the PEOPLE’S FRONT is conspiring with KEIN.ORG and INURA (International Network for Urban Research and Action) in a call for an INSURGENCY act. The Russians took Moltke bridge. The prisoners took JVA Moabit. We take the prisoners. We are all 129a. The walls are blasted. The data are mined. The phones are tapped. The lives of others. We listen through walls. The cities of others. We walk through walls.

Moving Forest, conceived by Shu Lea Cheang (Plenum, nodeLondon06) and Martin Howse (xxxxx, nodeLondon06), is a 12 hour 5 act sonic performance operating with public wifi and mobile technology - an expandable citywide operatic manoeuvre / intervention. Derived from Kurosawa’s film version of Macbeth, Spider Web Castle, Moving Forest renders the film’s final sequences (12 minutes in length) into a 12-hour ’sonica’ of grand scale. Moving Forest reinvents a modern edition of a Castle Central (here: the House of World Cultures) and a city in revolt. Inside the castle, the downfall of the assumed power; outside in the city, the mobilised urbanites march with generated sounds of insurgence towards the imaginary Centre. Moving Forest collaborates with sound artists to compose acts and scores, at the same time, drafts a PD (pure data) conspiracy scheme, performing live with citywide performance transmitted by wifi.

[AKA the castle] is a temporal performance troop bringing together visual artists, writers, soundists, silk threaders, codedecoders,
macromikro, boombox mass, mobile agents, wifi fielders and urbanites to realize the 12 hour Moving Forest.

CALL for DS Revolt: go northwest 20 Allied Clearing House :: CALL for Radio Gun Revolt: Symphony of noise :: CALL for AIR: GAMEoverTAKEoverOVER :: CALL for transmission: autonomous transmitting units :: CALL for netstreams: Conspire and take remote control

CONSPIRE Transmediale08, Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
KEIN.TV is a virtual, adhoc video production unit with a mobile internet connection via satellite
INURA a network of people in action and research in urban environments.

Valve / Membrance - Naoyuki Arashi (jp), Keisuke Oki (jp), Minoru Sato (jp) :: January 31, 2008; 9 pm :: House of World Cultures, Auditorium Nominee for the transmediale Award 2008 - Valve / Membrance is a series of electronic and non-electronic music pieces with traditional Japanese and Chinese valve instruments. The music bridges historical and regional differences of technological and musical forms. It focuses on cultural and technological elements from ancient Asia, the industrial revolution and the electronic age.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e30xL1yiqoI

hystere - Satoshi Shiraishi (jp), Alo Allik (ee), Yota Morimoto (jp), ibitsu (pp/ee) :: February 3, 2008; 8 pm :: House of World Cultures, Auditorium - hystere is an experiment in improvisation within premeditated boundaries in which the ‘e-Clambone’, a custom-made electronic wind instrument, provides the sole source for the ensuing multimodal environment. The visual aspect seeks moments of convergence and divergence with live video feed from the performance and is implemented as a library of OpenGL classes that listen to Open Sound Control messages over the ethernet.

10,000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid - Evelina Domnitch (by), Dmitry Gelfand (us), Andrey Smirnov (ru) :: January 30, 2008; 10:00 pm :: Zeiss-Planetarium, Prenzlauer Allee 80 - The performance 10,000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid visualises the fascinating surface structures of soap bubbles by using laser light. Dmitry Gelfand and his partner Evelina Domnitch create sensual immersive environments that bring together physics, chemistry and computer technology. The audio part of the performance is contributed by Andrey Smirnov, the director of the Theremin-Center in Moscow.

d.v.d. - Itoken (jp), Jimanica (jp), Takashi Yamaguchi (jp) :: January 29, 2008; 9:00 pm :: House of World Cultures, Cafe Global - The drums duo Itoken and Jimanica together with visual artist Yamaguchi Takashi are presenting their ‘interactive live installation’. With their drumsets the musicians are controlling game-like animations which are generating additional sounds. In turn their drum-play is dependent on the structure of the animation. The show at transmediale.08 is the kick-off event for d.v.d’s first europe tour.

DIGIT - Julien Maire (fr/de) :: January 31 and February 2, 2008; 1:00 pm :: House of World Cultures, Cafe Global - DIGIT is a living work of art – a writer sits at a table writing a text. The printed text appears through the mere gliding of his finger across a blank sheet of paper. Spectators can come very close to the writer and follow the emerging text. DIGIT is located between cinematographic process and the process of writing, while also making reference to the surrealist tradition of cutting and rearranging texts. His work DIGIT received an Honorary Mention in Ars Electronica 2007.

If we are not to be played and lost like Pawns scrabbling on the surface of a chessboard we need to understand the rules of the game we are engaged in. As developers buy up our city centres for regeneration into desirable properties for the market, a similar appropriation is taking place within the spectrum that lies above. The air we breathe is itself becoming digital real estate, an intangible landscape carried on radio waves, filling the voids of our cities like Dark Matter.

The new city is coming a city whose spaces are connected by hidden electronic passages and data crawl-throughs, spaces where our movements are traceable, recordable and identifiable by the litter of data we carelessly drop and the Web 2.0 we unwittingly spin in the chatter of our networks.

Trampoline celebrates over 10 years in new media art in November with a look at how artists are teaching themselves the game plan for this wireless, super conductive urban landscape that is emerging around us.

Trampoline is calling for submissions in 2 areas of interest:

1. SURVEILLANCE CITY - From video, animation, installation, sculpture, performance, live music, and web streaming Trampoline welcomes all forms of artistic expression with a critique of digital culture.

2. NEW MEDIA PERFORMANCE - In addition to this, Trampoline will curate a programme of new media performance celebrating the diversity of 10 years in this area. Of particular interest are performance video, live streaming, audio tours and participatory, mobile projects.

“The Warbike, a project that sonifies computer wireless networks to a bicycle rider, is presented within the framework of psychogeography, its contemporary counterpart of locative media, wardriving, and the bicycle as symbol and political platform. An account and analysis is presented of the methods and choices for the construction of the device, and the applied sonification techniques. The central consideration is how sonification can be used to communicate to a participant his movement through the invisible infrastructure of wireless networks. Data from wireless networks, including network activity and encryption status, are sonified to a cyclist through a speaker-enabled backpack powered by a PDA. Exhibitions of the Warbike showed that participants reacted favourably, and that the chosen methods of sonification properly conveyed their movement through the wireless communications infrastructure.” Read his thesis here [PDF]. [via Network Research]

Baby Love is art that moves you and your imagination…. Climb aboard a giant teacup and glide into a futuristic fantasy with a dummy-sucking baby doll clone to your favourite love song at Sydney’s new home for contemporary arts, CarriageWorks. Its cathedral-scale foyer will play home to 6 giant teacups, each with a larger-than-life baby doll clone. Baby Love is a wi-fi mobile installation by New York based Taiwanese artist, Shu Lea Cheang, who calls cyber-space ‘home’. Shu Lea is a multi-media artist working in the field of net-based installation, social interface and film production.

Baby Love is an embracing interactive, kinetic and sonic experience, alluding to both past and future as the teacups evoke the nostalgia of amusement park rides and clash with the futuristic vision of cloned babies. The public can contribute to the joyride soundtrack by uploading songs via the web which go directly to the installation. The songs are transmitted wirelessly via Memory-Emotion data to the babies. When the rider selects their love song of choice to begin their teacup ride, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashes.

The cloned babies of Baby Love are an updated version of the central figures in Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies. In the novel, twins born from lockers at a Yokohama Station spend their lives haunted by the sound of their mother’s heartbeat. Cheang’s clones were inspired by scientific research into the development of biobots and artificial life forms. It is an installation which fuses nostalgia for a seemingly simpler age without boggling interactive technology and our contemporary obsessive immersion in the virtual life of the internet. Cheang seems to be asking where will the ever new frontiers of the web take us?

Presented by CarriageWorks, Experimenta and Awesome Arts Baby Love is an umbrella event of Art and About 2007, presented by City of Sydney.

Gone, gone, gone. Bluetooth was, of course, specifically invented to eliminate cables. It’s range is about 30 feet and it draws very little battery power.

Pogue goes on to talk about Bluetooth audio gateways, like the Motorola and the Kyocera, which exploit one of the most interesting Bluetooth profiles. It’s called A2DP, short for Audio Distribution Profile … It means wireless stereo and wireless audio. In a two-way Bluetooth audio gateway, it makes possible some intriguing possibilities.

Read on >>

Each Pad, is an individual interactive glowing platform filled with controllable RBG leds and a small mp3 sound controller capable of playing up to 240 different samples. Based on a simple set of generative rules trigged by human movement, the pads can communicate with their neighbors creating dynamic patterns, colors and sounds that grow and evolve on their own.

The Pads are entirely wireless (they communicate with each other over a small wireless network), and they are 100% solar.

The Pool is composed of roughly 100 pads. Spaced in concentric rings, the pool will span approximately 120 feet x 120 feet.

Each pad glows blue. By stepping on the Pad it will brighten to white and will emit a simple sound. Based on how you are standing on the pad (with your weight more in clockwise or in the counter clockwise direction) the pad will then send a message to its neighbors in your direction to begin to glow white. The Sound from your pad will also travel, lowering or increasing in pitch along the ring.

If your weight is in the clockwise direction, light will travel clockwise,
If your weight is in the counter clockwise direction, light will travel counter clockwise,

Once your light path had traveled the full circle, the light and sound will jump to your neighboring circles.

In this way, by keeping your weight in one direction, eventually you will fill the entire Pool with light and sound.. Once full, the light will wrap back on itself in a new color with a new sound.

If another user steps on a pad, and places their weight in the same direction as your path, the paths will mix by adding color and changing the sound pallet.

Each additional person leaning in the same direction will add additional colors and sounds.

If another user steps on a pad with their weight in the opposite direction of your light path, your paths will collide, and colors and sound will be subtracted.

With time, or with the addition of new users, colors and sound will be subtracted entirely.

This addition and subtraction will allow users to mix colors in a kaleidoscopic interplay.

Each pad’s sound will be a subtle and fairly quiet sample, created from different recordings from nature. For example, stepping on a pad may emit a hushed sound that resembles a drop of water…. As this drop sound travels along your “path”, it will change slightly in pitch…. You will then hear it as it travels away from you, and then returns.

Because the sounds themselves will be fairly quiet, each user will most likely hear only the sounds in their vicinity. As more users interact, the Pool will have a very natural and ambient sound quality, similar to standing in a forest or near a rushing creek…… where you can hear the tide swelling or pebbles in a waterfall.
Definitions:

“The Pool”
A collection of wireless interactive pads, each with an identical set of generative rules triggered through interaction. The pool will span roughly 120 feet x 120 feet and is viewable only in low light (evening or night).

“Pads”
A 3 foot x 6” tall semi transparent wireless pad with a platform meant for standing. Each pad has a small microprocessor, several bright RGB controlled LEDS, movement sensors, and a sound controller. Each pad is 100% wireless and contains an identical set of generative rules based on user interaction. Although each pad is identical in all ways, this programmatic rule set, when combined with interaction, will create diverse and complicated behavior.