The course takes place in Sofia from 11th to 16th of August this year. It combines both a conceptual approach related to web 2.0, distribution of rich media content on internet, e-marketing, the potential of open source tools, and practical issues linked to production of audiovisual content for the web. During this course, trainees will learn the benefits of using open source software to deliver media content on the web. Trainees will work in teams to produce their own media rich sites as a means to learning powerful content management software and web 2.0 site design. Approaches to audio and video streaming will also be introduced. The course aims participation of artists looking to develop their own live and content rich site.

For more information on the training programme and conditions for participation, please visit www.tosmi.org

–
Margarita Dorovska
Research and Development
InterSpace Association
http://i-space.org

Julie Freeman’s work spans visual, audio and digital artforms and explores the relationship between science, nature and how humans interact with it. For the past 12 years her work has focused on using electronic technologies to ‘translate nature’ whether it’s the sound of torrential rain dripping on a giant rhubarb leaf; a pair of concrete speakers that lurk in galleries haranguing passersby with fractured sonic samples; or by providing an interactive platform to chat with dogs in numerous international languages. She is currently Artist in Residence at the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Centre at Cranfield University. For more about the artist see www.juliefreeman.co.uk or click through to see the micro-site for The Lake - which was awarded £96,000 for development by NESTA, where Freeman electronically tagged various freshwater fish species to create animation and soundtrack.

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.

In recent years the foregrounding of ‘collaboration’ in artistic practice has acquired an aura of inherent benevolence and emancipation, as though the very act of working with others in itself ensures some form of resistance or alternative to conventions of cultural production, and confers positive moral value. The recent valorisation of collaboration within the arts, however, merely elides the basic condition of collaboration that all forms of production ultimately rely on in various degrees and arrangements. This can be seen as one part of the larger growth in service and communications industries whose ‘labour’ and ‘produce’ are primarily invested in the structuring and intensification of various collaborative exchanges, often minute and ephemeral, yet, when harvested on a vast scale, capable of generating seemingly endless amounts of surplus value.[1] Collaboration in the production of this ’surplus’ now extends beyond the contracted employees into the consumers themselves, who help define and create the products they themselves consume. This is exemplified in the proliferation of highly ‘personalised’ products and services, reality entertainment, and the social networks of Web 2.0, with the virtual world of Second Life notably combining all three factors.[2] Those artforms which most consciously valorise collaboration, as described in Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, merely echo this situation.[3] The social relations constructed by the artist in gestures of collaboration with audiences and others become spectacularised and commodified in forms that often do not return to those who created them but rather become tokens within the circulation of the art market.[4] In a funding system that prioritises social inclusion within the arts, like that of the UK, collaborative projects can tick the box that unlocks the piggy-bank of state patronage. In such contexts collaboration quickly becomes little more than a revenue stream.[5] Similarly, the rise of Relational Aesthetics accompanied the embrace of artistic practice by the commercial sector, often drawing upon the strategies of such art to enhance collaboration and ‘creativity’ within the workplace.[6]…” Continue reading All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses by Simon Yuill, Mute Magazine.

The goal of the Handbook is to be a signpost, a source of practical information and content that bridges the gap between new users and the platforms and resources that are available, but not always very accessible. The Handbook will be slowly filled with articles written by invited artists and specialists, talking about their tools and ways of working. Some articles are introductions to tools, others are descriptions of methodologies, concepts and technologies.

When discussing software, the focus of this Handbook is on Free / Libre Open Source Software. The Handbook aims to give artists information about the available tools but also about the practicalities related to Free Software and Open Content, such as collaborative development and licenses. All this to facilitate exchange between artists, to take away some of the fears when it comes to open content licenses, sharing code, and to give a perspective on various ways of working and collaborating.

The digital artist handbook is brought to you by folly and has developed out of ongoing consultation with artists working with technology, which has shown a need for removing the barriers for artists to use digital tools. The project is supported by Arts Council England.

From August 2007 until January 2008, the editors of the Handbook were Marloes de Valk and Aymeric Mansoux of GOTO10.

“My Space Sound is the result of my fieldwork about MySpace, with some help from my friends. It is just a tiny point or node in a huge social network, and it is a starting point rather than an accomplishment. This is just my story, and I am curious to know your story. My Space Sound is the artistic observations and everyday sketches of the imperfect processor named sawako about the state of networks and individuals.”

My Space Sound is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

As a musician, Sawako Kato has recently made a name for herself with her own unique combination of field recordings and DSP combined with a noticeably feminine touch. As a new media artist, she created “2.4GHz Scape,” which explores the urban WiFi signal scape; “ishi ~ listening stone,” a sound art piece that uses a crystal radio and stones, and an ephemeral timeline drawing with Max/MSP/Jitter.

Sawako has solo releases from 12k, and/OAR and Anticipate, She has collaborated with a wide range of musicians such as Taylor Deupree, Andrew Deutsch, Kenneth Kirschner, Taku Sugimoto, Toshimaru Nakamura, asuna, Ryan Francesconi and Jacob Kirkegaard; and has performed in Tonic, Diapason, Roulette, Issue Project Room, Monkey Town (NYC); MUTEK Festival (Canada), Corcoran Gallery (Washington DC), UCLA Hammer Museum (LA), Batofar (Paris), Kunstraum Walcheturm (Zurich), offsite, Apple Store Sinsaibashi (Japan); m12 (Berlin), Glade Festival, Resonance FM, ICA (UK); and other venues in the US, Europe and Japan.

At present, BliK can only be heard in real time at LEMURplex. Online users may download each of the sounds and play with them before writing a score. They must then email the score to blik at zdomain dot net. Once uploaded, each score becomes part of the BliK repertoire.

The BliK algorithms are based in Cycling 74’s Max / MSP software, some of the external tools made by Ali Momeni at the University of Minnesota, and a JavaScript parser written by the author.

League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) is a Brooklyn-based group of artists and technologists who create robotic musical instruments. Founded in 2000 by musician and engineer Eric Singer, LEMUR creates exotic, sculptural musical instruments which integrate robotic technology. LEMUR’s philosophy is to build robots that are new types of musical instruments, as opposed to animatronic robots that play existing instruments.

BliK is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

Roberto Osorio-Goenaga is a music technologist and sound artist. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music from the University of Puerto Rico (2003) and a Master of Music Technology degree from NYU (2005). His work has traditionally been based around the framework of digital audio, including the development of VST plug-ins, Max/MSP externals, and stand-alone software development in C/C++. He has experience in physical computing and PIC programming, and also plays guitar and bass.

The principal objective is to investigate questions concerning the local, social and collective aspects of interaction between physical and digital space (Internet, telephone etc), expressed through experimentation in current digital audio practices. Audio Extranautes, new perspectives on acoustic space via electronic networks, opens several axes of research developed jointly by the two laboratories:

- Occurrences within physical space of networked projects, (extenuates, virtual environments, new forms of productions, atmospheres).
- The signification of the appearance of flux as forms of expression (streaming, pod-casting and in general web 2).
- The impact of mobile technologies on artistic expression

Participants: Alejandro Duque, Atau Tanaka, Angus Carlyle, Bastien Gallet, Christian Licoppe, Jean Cristofol, Jean-Paul Thibaud, Jérôme Joy, Julien Clauss, Julien Morel, Nicolas Maigret, Roger Malina, Martin Howse, Peter Sinclair, Philippe Franck, Samuel Bordreuil, Scott Fitzgerald.

This symposium is organised by Locus Sonus and the sociology laboratory LAMES of Aix en Provence, directed by Samuel Bordreuil. This collaboration is part of the research program Audio Extranautes, funded by a contract “accord-cadre” between the CNRS & the French Ministry for Culture (Centre National de La Recherche Scientifique and Ministere de la Culture).

The artists that Sonic()bject has selected for devising new sounds and ringtone compositions are professionals from all over the world who are involved in creating with sound: audio designers, audio artists, contemporary composers, classic or electro, jazz, pop … real “sonic objects” that have their roots in the history of auditory art. Tones or melodies, instrumental, noise or pure vibrations, recorded or synthetic, these sounds all have a strong auditory character and are make for ‘calling’. The ringtones can easily be downloaded from the website. Sonic()bject was set up by Antoine Schmitt and Adrian Johnson. It will be shown at Video Vortex.2.