Tribute to Phill Niblock – An Evening in Celebration of Phill Niblock’s 75th Birthday :: October 1, 2008; 7:30 pm :: Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, New York.

Anthology presents an evening in celebration of intermedia composer, artist and pillar of the downtown arts community Phill Niblock, on the night before he turns 75. A multitude of artists from among the hundreds Niblock has worked with, produced or befriended over his forty-plus-year career in the art and contemporary music world will present brief interventions in tribute to his life and oeuvre. Ranging from live performances in dance, poetry and music, to film and video works, to recorded music or performance, this promises to be a truly one-of-a-kind intermedia night. Continue reading

Upgrade! Brussels/Ghent: Performance: October 14, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Talk: October 15, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Vooruit Arts Centre, Ghent – Belgium :: These evenings are part of Almost Cinema, a collaboration between Vooruit and Filmfestival Ghent.

PERFORMANCE NIGHT: October 14, 2008; 8:00 pm :: with BROK & HALMANS – SHIFT, MOMENI & BITHEL – THE LIMINAL SURFACE EN HOLZER – TONEWHEELS :: Record players, lights, cameras, synthesizers… These are the ingredients Rikkert Brok and Maarten Halmans use to create their own equipment. For the performance Shift they also manufactured the required material themselves. In an intimate face-to-face with his colleague Ali Momeni, David Bithell blends elements of live performance, video, music technology and improvisation into a playful game that hovers between tragedy and comedy. Derek Holzer’s performance Tonewheels is an experiment that turns graphic images into sound with the help of tonewheels. Continue reading

Ars Telefonica :: until October 30, 2008 :: Centre for Visual Introspection, 16 Biserica Enei, Bucharest, District 1, Romania.

Scheduled to take place with regularity in Bucharest, involving with each edition new curatorial formats, Ars Telefonica is conceived as a temporary platform for exhibition display which proposes a re-reading of the connections settled in a specific context between art, its venue and audience. The decision of the curators to appropriate for this edition a temporary space for exhibition display – the phone booth – responds to the actual request of the local art scene to search for new contexts of dissemination of contemporary art and to establish a community of interest for this cultural sector.

The question dropped by the project is to which extend a temporary platform of this kind can disturb the behavior of the art public, the accidental public or of the partners participating directly to contemporary art production? Do these spaces have a potential in facilitating or in speeding up the process of social and cultural exchange? Continue reading

Sprawl presents an autumnal evening of string sound experiences with THOMAS GARDNER, BELA EMERSON + MANUELA BARCZEWSKI :: October 16, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Cafe Oto, 18 – 22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London.

BELA EMERSON: Bela Emerson’s performances using electric cello & analogue effects are spontaneous, intense, and exhilarating. Sounds are looped, take on lives of their own, bounce off each other… the effect, as anyone who’s heard her will testify, is mesmeric. She has performed solo at Supersonic, EXPO, & worldwide Ladyfests, been broadcast on Resonance FM & BBC Radio 3, plus collaborated live with the likes of Tim Exile & Sten Sandell plus film-makers SchMovies & Tereza Buskova. This performance marks the London launch of her new album on BiP_HoP. Also on myspace. Continue reading

Suzan Sherman: In the past your work has focused on the natural world, and toying with the intricate and seemingly set systems within that world. But for this project, The Marfa Jingles, you’ve honed in on Marfa, Texas — the systems of shops and business and organizations that are this tiny town’s glue. Like some of your other work, your jingles seem to be an attempt at organizing and arranging (you’re literally arranged the music and the lyrics for them). At the same time, I would have never expected you to come up with a project of writing and producing a series of audio advertisements. How did this idea come about for you?

Nina Katchadourian: I’m often looking at the natural world, but just as often I’m looking at the human and social world. The Marfa Jingles looks at the town as a social structure — as a place where people live, work, and run businesses and organizations. I’ve kind of collected Marfa, and used the project as a vehicle to get to know the town. Continue reading

Le Petit Versailles presents MUSIC For (F)ALL SEASONS with Joshua Fried and The New York Oratorio with Richard Kostelanetz :: September 27, 2008; 3 – 11 pm :: Le Petit Versailles Garden, 346 East Houston Street, NYC.

RADIO WONDERLAND is Joshua Fried, performing solo live sound processing controlled by old shoes (he drums) or with sticks and a steering wheel (He’s a, er, wheel player). RADIO WONDERLAND turns live commercial FM radio into recombinant funk. All the sounds originate from an old boombox, playing radio LIVE. Nothing is pre-recorded; anything picked up during the performance is fair game until the end. All the processing is live custom DSP programmed by Joshua in the MaxMSP programming environment. But he hardly touches the laptop. Continue reading

free103point9 is pleased to announce the 2009 Distribution Grant for New York State Artists providing support for the distribution of new works in film, video, sound, new-media, and media-installation. This grant is for completed works only.

Funding is available from free103point9 through a regrant from New York State Council on the Arts’ Electronic Media and Film Program. Grant awards will assist artists in making works available to public audiences and may include, but are not limited to: duplication of previews, screening, and exhibition copies of moving image and sound works; promotional materials including documentation and schematics of media-installation and new-media works. Continue reading

As part of Metal’s Village Green, The MediaShed presents The Eco-Media Open Day featuring: The Internet vs. Pigeons Race; Human Telephone Lines; A Requiem for Cod; an Olympics of Lobbing, Shouting and Whistling :: September 27, 2008; 12 – 4 pm :: Chalkwell Park, Chalkwell Avenue, Southend-on-Sea.

An afternoon of fun experiments to see how we can combine “natural media” with “man made media”. We will be linking together ecology, human bodies and other gadgets to devise ingenious methods of communication inspired by natures own systems of signals, warnings and imprints. Taking inspiration from early media like shouting, carrier pigeons, throwing and the message-in-a-bottle, we will try to turn the ecology of Chalkwell Park into a living switchboard! Continue reading

“Grey zones are spaces or places of alterity. They could be Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’, or Marc Augé’s ‘non-places’, or Edward Soja’s ‘thirdspace’ (just to name a few) [1]. They exist as real spaces and places we know and are also new spaces created by the use of technology. As artists begin to explore these spaces with locative media, what are some effects of locating and properties of these spaces and what might be their correlates in other discourses around space?

The field of research and practice of locative media is abuzz with new work and ideas, especially with work that deals with specifics of a data- or narratively-described place implied in ‘locating’. With much focus on the specific, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that there do exist ruptures in locating and its related technologies. In the process of locating, boundaries shift, errors occur, things are read as something else, signals get lost. These are some of the effects or properties of ‘locating’ that make evident the slippery boundaries in locating, revealing spaces that can be defined in some way as ‘other’ and that shift over time to occasionally blur the pinpointing of a locative ‘moment’…” From Swimming In The Grey Zones – Locating The Other Spaces In Mobile Art by Leslie Sharpe, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2006.

“Sonic City is a wearable system that turns the city into an interface for real time electronic music making. It enables its user to create a personal soundscape of live electronic music by walking through and interacting with urban environments. The prototype consists of a small laptop computer, a microphone, headphones, a micro-controller, a MIDI interface, and a number of sensors (sensing light, metal, movement, proximity, sound level, etc). The system gathers information about the user’s actions and surrounding context with sensors worn on the body and a layer of context and action recognition. This data controls the audio processing of live urban sounds collected by the microphone. Resulting music is output through headphones in real time and in the context in which it is created, as the user is walking. Mobility through shifting urban context becomes a large-scale musical gesture… Continue reading