Shifting Technologies and Economies

Step + Repeat: Pittsburgh Cycle–by Carlos Rosas and Robert Dansby–Call for Participation: Submit your images of Pittsburgh. Your images will be entered into the image database and be included in the participatory tile sequence projected in the Palmer Museum and viewable on the Internet via live webcast. For more information on this project, to submit images and to view the live broadcast visit the project web site.

Abstract: A live audio and video based piece using networked media. Based on digital “step and repeat” cycles: a loose metaphor, the Pittsburgh iteration uses video and audio samples recorded in Pittsburgh, PA, and the surrounding western Pennsylvania area –with touchpoints including Primanti’s, the Strip, the Southside, East Liberty, the Northside, Beaver Falls, Jones & McLaughlin, the Monongahela Incline and Pittsburgh’s three rivers.
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Jam this Wednesday

PitchWeb jam this Wednesday, June 29, from 6-8 pm EDT. The occasion is a book release party Routledge is giving for William Duckworth’s “Virtual Music: How the Web Got Wired for Sound.” They’ll be playing as DJ Tamara and the Laptops. The plan is to make the party a “virtual” experience: the party goers have been invited to bring their laptops, and Nora will be weaving the online band into Tamara’s house mix and a webcast.

Hope you can join them online at http://www.pitchweb.net/. All you have to do is click, sign on, join a group, and play along. As with the 12-hour May-Day PitchWeb jam, Wednesday’s session will also become source material for the yearlong Deep Time: Songs for Servers project that we’re beginning later this year.
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Multi Sensorial Radio

Tune Me is an immersive conceptual radio based upon tactile features. The sound and the visual are triggered by “touchy” interfaces. The visitors enter the ellipse-shaped space, immersing themselves in a new world where to listen to the radio waves.

As well as the sound, each channel provides light features as well as vibrating and pulsing experience. When choosing the different FM stations, the overall space changes, defining different moods upon the nature of the different content. News, sport, classical music and international pop. Each of them triggers a different visual experiences, the space vibrates, pulses and interacts with the visitors.

Developed by Line Ulrika Christiansen, Stefano Mirti and Stefano Testa (with Daniele Mancini and Francesca Sassaroli). More pictures by Stefano and Simone. Also part of Touch Me at The Victoria & Albert Museum (London) till August 29th 2005. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not]

Mechanical Orchestra with you as Conductor

In Sale Away, passers-by can conduct an “orchestra” of household devices via their mobile phones on a display window. The mechanical orchestra consists of flute, organ and brass playing vacuum cleaners, rattling kitchen mixers, buzzing ventilators, radio playing toy trains, wobbling jigsaws, dancing tumble dryers, humming refrigerators and other misused household utilities.

The conductor is a big refrigerator. This fridge is also the explanatory interface. To start the orchestra and wake up the shopping windows you have to dial the number and follow the commands displayed on the window. This call opens the door of the fridge, giving free the image of its explanatory interface, the “mobile phone robot person”. The robot will explain and invite you to act. By pressing keys on the phone you can let all different instruments play along with the melody. You can set some single voices or the whole orchestra tutti.

Video. By Geert-Jan Hobijn (NL) and Carsten Stabenow (GER) Olaf Matthes (GER) from Staalplaat. Via the excellent Culture Base Open List. [blogged by Regine on near near future]

Captured Layers of Energy

Using live audio feeds from Leeds City Station and the River Aire, US artist Bill Fontana will craft a giant sculpture of sound turning the historic Dark Arches into an immense musical instrument. For two months a loudspeaker system installed within the arches will fill the space with an ever changing combination of live sounds relayed directly from specialist listening devices installed in the surrounding area.

A series of microphones high up in the structure of the station will pick up the bustle of platform activity, whilst sensors fixed directly onto the track buffers will listen to the distant vibrations of incoming trains as they approach, slow down, and come to a stop. Beneath the station, underwater microphones will be plunged deep into the course of the River Aire as the flow of water is redirected through the arches. Sound Lines attempts to capture these continually changing layers of energy as they arrive, depart, and flow through the city.
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Invisible Architectures

“For the second consecutive summer, Janet Cardiff’s celebrated audio tour Her Long Black Hair is being presented by the Public Art Fund in Central Park. But this isn’t Cardiff’s only summer engagement on the East Coast. The percussive sound installation Pandemonium, made collaboratively with her partner George Bures Miller, is at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia until November 1. Here, art critic and historian Megan Heuer discusses Cardiff’s use of sound to examine the phenomenology of social settings.

Since the 1980s, Janet Cardiff has made art that employs sound as a physical material. In the elaborate installation The Dark Pool, (1995) sounds are located within an enigmatic, cluttered study and shift according to where one stands. Her binaural audio walks use her own recorded whispering to direct the participant’s movement through a landscape. Much of Cardiff’s work explores the nature of subjectivity within the highly mediated universe of contemporary culture, questioning the boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and memory or fantasy…” Continue reading Invisible Architectures by Megan Heuer, NYFA Current.

Technological Aspects and their Interactive Performance Issues

“ABSTRACT: I have been creating various Gestural Interfaces (*1) for use of my compositions in the project of Virtual Musical Instruments (*2). These Virtual Musical Instruments do not merely refer to the physical instruments, but also involves Sound Synthesis (*3) programming and Interactive Video (*4) to a great extent. Using the Virtual Musical Instruments, numerous compositions and performances were experimented. This paper is intended to report my experiences, as well as their development, instead of being merely abstract theory. This also contains the issues of performance and the problem of the notion of interactivity.” Read Virtual Musical Instruments: Technological Aspects and their Interactive Performance Issues by Suguru Goto at HZ Journal.

Translocal Exchanges

Interfacing/Radiotopia/KeyWorx consists of one space that has no images and has only sound, and one space that has no sound and only images. They are connected both physically and via the Internet.

SPACE 1: [Radiotopia] Walk into a theatre and enter an audio space with no images. Artists from all over the world are asked to send in audio material to fill up a database. Behind every sound is an idea, a world of words and definitions. The one big experience with Radiotopia is the peaceful confrontation of all the world’s sounds, audio artists, concepts, sights and sometimes ideologies. In the Scapino theatre, the sound is mixed live by musicians and resent as an audio stream.

SPACE 2: [KeyWorx] Walk out of the theatre, down a narrow hallway and enter a space filled with images. Three artists sitting in the space, are connected with three artists in New York City. Three translocally linked pairs, three simultaneous and connected performances.
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Musical Ribcage

Ange, designed by Danielle Wilde, is a body mounted series of “ribs” with electronic sensors that enable a user to play different sounds, including breathy notes, a gong, rushing water, drums and an oboe. The notes respond differently to pressures. The idea is to use the body as an interface and allow the user to metaphorically touch and “play” the body of the wearer. The design is inspired by an 18th century engraving, Ange Anatomic by Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty. [via near near future]

Open Call to Net Audio Players

–< 48 Players on Dual Play >–< 24h Continuous Net Audio Festival >–< Audio Live Performing only via Internet >–< Creative Commons Audio License - No Archivz >–< Stream Live Audio/Low & High >–

Stream Start: October 12 (00h00/00:00am); Stream End: October 12, 2005 (23h59/11:59pm) [GMT+0 Greenwich Time]. Join Now the ( ( ( N O M U S I C ) ) ) Deadline: September 21; Final playlist: September 28, 2005

(((NOMUSIC))) is a free platform for audio diffusion via Internet dedicated to Players. Interventions come from two simultaneous countries and follow each other in a regular manner at the rate of two peoples per hour. The development of this Network is aimed at promoting experimentation and creation.
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