The Avatar Orchestra will be performing at the Deep Listening Institute Women and Identity Festival Concert :: April 17, 2008; 7:30 PM :: Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway (at Spring Street), New York, New York.

Avatar Orchestra Metaverse is a group of composers, performers, and media artists living in Europe, East Asia and North America who explore together the interactive possibilities of the Second Life online virtual reality platform to create works with open, interactive and possibly “infinite” elements. The Orchestra works with ideas that challenge conventional practices of creating and performing music, and finds new ways to conceive of and erase notions of identity, place, social, cultural and sexual identity, and the roles of composer, performer and listener. Continue reading

Synapse: Collaboration between the arts and sciences has the potential to create new knowledge, ideas and processes beneficial to both fields. Artists and scientists approach creativity, exploration and research in different ways and from different perspectives; when working together they open up new ways of seeing, experiencing and interpreting the world around us. For the past decade, the Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT) has provided opportunities for artists and scientists to work together. Through Synapse, and in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts, ANAT offers residencies, the Synapse Database and now ANAT is pleased to announce its latest initiative: a moderated elist discussion on contemporary art and science collaborations in fields including bioart, artificial intelligence, robotics, climate change and space, amongst others. You can subscribe here. Continue reading

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Adam Nash is a new media artist, composer, programmer, performer and writer. He works primarily in networked real-time 3D spaces, exploring them as live audiovisual performance spaces. His sound/composition and performance background strongly informs his approach to creating works for virtual environments, embracing sound, time and the user as elements equal in importance to vision. Adam’s work has been presented in galleries, festivals and online in Australia, Europe, Asia and the Americas, including SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and the Venice Biennale. He also works as composer and sound artist with “Company in Space” (AU) and “Igloo” (UK), exploring the integration of motion capture into real-time 3D audiovisual spaces. He is currently undertaking a Master of Arts by Research at the “Centre for Animation and Interactive Media” at RMIT University, Melbourne, researching multi-user 3D cyberspace as a live performance medium; and he’s a Lecturer in “Computer Games and Digital Art” in the School of Creative Media at RMIT University.

Adam will be answering reader’s questions in the comments section below until January 31, 2008. Continue reading

Over the last 18 months the Locus Sonus Lab has been focusing on a process which revolves around a network of live audio streams. The audio source for each stream is simply an open microphone which continually uploads to a server - and from there available from anywhere via the WWW - chosen (or given) soundscapes or sound environments, as playable material.

Our intention being to provide a permanent (and somewhat emblematic) resource to tap into as raw material for our artistic experimentation. We have now established a worldwide community of streamers each person being responsible for the installation and maintenance of his mike. Several different art forms have developed from this project: Continue reading

Frotzophone by Adam Parrish [at the ITP Winter Show and NIME @ Exit Art on December 13, 2007] - Maps, games, music: what do they have in common? Interactive fiction has its roots in maps: Will Crowther’s original Adventure was a faithful simulation of an actual cave in the Colossal Cave system. Some say that the entire genre consists of “interactive maps,” and mapping as a process often serves as the foundation for both designing and playing interactive fiction.

The Frotzophone hijacks a Z-Machine interpreter (a virtual machine originally designed in the 1980s for running interactive fiction on many platforms, and still used today) and extracts information relating to the map that the game is simulating. Continue reading

The VIDA 10.0 AWARDS were announced recently. Francisco López (Spain) won an award for Sonic Alter Ego in the Incentives for Ibero-American Production category that helps finance art projects exploring Artificial Life (and related disciplines) that still have not been produced. Applicants must be from South America, Spain or Portugal.

The hybrid forms of the artistic proposals submitted to VIDA and the transformation of the discipline of A-Life itself have prompted the jury to consider new issues, such as the rising importance of simulation in both social life (for example, in the concept of virtual personality) and organic life (evident in the concept of “neo-organisms”). Continue reading

stationary æmotion by æther9 in the frame of Tremor_ 4: Live.doc :: Online :: November 9, 2007; 7:00 pm Columbia time (UTC/GMT -5) Performance duration: 15:00 min [Check your local time here]

The æther9 group presents stationary æmotion: 4 remote performers from 4 different locations united in a real-time broadcast. Remote performers: N3krozoft Group Brussels (BE), Paula Vélez (CO), N3krozoft HQ Geneva (CH) :: Live audio: Christiaan Cruz (California) :: Original screenplay: Nicola Unger & Audrey Samson Continue reading

stationary æmotion by æther9 :: Online :: Or @ WORM, Achterhaven 148, Rotterdam :: Performance: 22:00 Central European Time (UTC+2 - Bravo Time Zone) Performance duration: 15:00 min [Check your local time here]

The æther9 group presents stationary æmotion: 4 remote performers from 4 different locations reunited in a real-time broadcast. This performance is part of an evening presenting several works focusing on the theme of streaming, brought to you by the Labouretum Lumbrici, tonight at WORM (Rotterdam, NL). The æther9 group is interested in exploring the performative aspect of the infosphere. They make use of existing ‘lo-fi’ communication tools to experiment with the integration of dramaturgical elements linked to the constraints of working with a delocalised group to develop an audiovisual performance. Continue reading

Dene Grigar’s Virtual DJ Networked Performance has been developed to allow two geographically-removed performers to interact simultaneously with Steve Gibson’s piece, Virtual DJ. With the help of the programmers from APR, Inc. a version of the tracking software has been developed to allow positional information to be delivered over a high-speed network, thus allowing the users at each site to hear and see the results of the remote person’s motions. The network performance between Gibson and Grigar was tested in the summer 2005 between Gibson’s studio at the University of Victoria and Grigar’s lab at Texas Woman’s University. Continue reading