Welcome to the March 2008 issue of Networked Music Review Newsletter, a monthly review of some of the many events archived on Networked_Music_Review [to receive this via email, subscribe here].

Sound art continued to fill many of the March blog entries, but of equal importance this month were the sound and light, or sound and video entries. Tunnel Vision and Filling Vessel are two of particular interest. Tunnel Vision is an interactive sound and light sculpture. Created by Dutch art engineer Paul Klotz, and inspired by Nikola Tesla — the famous Serbian inventor, physicist, and electrical engineer — the shape of the installation is based on an abstraction of the 100Hz tone made by electrical generators. You can put your hands inside the sculpture changes the appearance and the sound produced by it. Five meters long, it changes its appearance and the sound produced by it whenever you put your hands inside it.

Filling Vessel is a multi-channel sound and light installation / performance by Paula Matthusen (composition, processing, and programming) and Tom O’Doherty (photography and visuals, technical assistance, and documentation). As an installation, dependent on interaction with audio feedback generated in an installation space itself, it functions in two ways: as an audience-navigable space, in which people can explore the effect they have on the sonic and visual events that take place within it; and as a performance environment, within which musicians use their instruments to interact with and influence the resultant combinations of sound and light.

“The practice of audiovisual performance is intriguing”, as Carrie Gates remarks in Vague Terrain 09: Rise of the VJ. A practice that is not rooted in any one particular mindset, but instead, emerges from a wide range of trajectories currently converging within media based performance art, it seems to address a hunger for immersive sensory experiences where aural and visual elements work together to create a whole that is something well beyond the sum of its parts.

In March, The Mapping Festival, a ten-day festival in Geneva was announced, that is devoted entirely to promoting Vjing. Toby Harris (aka *spark) was the subject of a brief interview. Harris has been building strong live video performances since the turn of the century, exploring his real-time video skills at countless festivals, in sophisticated audiovisual performances and most recently on giant touchscreen plasmas within motor shows. He also founded AVIT, the real world spin-off of vjforums.com that prompted festivals around the world.

Last but not least, March saw the announcement of our upcoming symposium — Programmable Media II: Networked Music — at Pace University in April, and the launch of three Networked_Music_Review commissions. Funded by the New York State Music Fund, they are: John Hudak’s Voices from the Paradise Network – a search for voices of deceased spirits; Haeyoung Kim’s I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On – an interactive art piece inspired by Samuel Beckett’s short novel, “Molloy”; and Zach Layton’s Net Sonification – a program written in java that crawls across the Internet, grabbing as many related URLs as possible and analyzing their contents. Here Layton gives us a range of sonic portraits, from Boing Boing to the New York Times, enabling us to experience them as networked sonic entities rather than discrete visual/semantic pages. You can see and hear all three on the blog.