[Image: Craig Leonard, Adventures on the Wheels of Steel, 2009] Sometimes Always: Listening in on Audio Art :: June 5- August 30, 2009 :: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 1723 Hollis Street
Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Obsolete technologies and anachronistic electronic devices are cleverly resuscitated by 10 international artists in Sometimes Always. Co-organized with the Centre for Art Tapes and presented in tandem with Sound Bytes, Halifax’s month-long audio art festival, the show harnesses the nostalgia associated with outmoded media to reflect on our shifting emotional connections to technology.

Several projects reinvest antiquated technologies such as eight-track players and audio cassettes with new artistic potential. Local artist Craig Leonard modifies bicycle wheels into low-fi musical instruments by adding duct-tape patterns to the spokes. Continue reading

‘The Piano Etudes Project’ A Space for Play — Review by Les Loncharich, furtherfield.org: The Piano Etudes project by Jason Freeman, with Akito Van Troyer and Jenny Lin, is a move towards opening the forbidden city of musical composition. The project is based on piano etudes, musical compositions in which the pianist can rearrange connections between some open form pieces. Site visitors are invited to create their own etudes from four short compositions by Jason Freeman. Each etude is transcribed graphically into something that resembles an organizational chart. Each visual component of the chart has a corresponding audio note pattern. The pitch of a note pattern is roughly indicated by the height of a horizontal bar that is part of the graphic. A site user can select graphic elements and arrange them on a time-line to hear the resulting sound piece. Pieces created on the site can be saved and transcribed into musical notation so that pianists can perform pieces created by site visitors. More >>

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SonarMàtica 2009: Mecànics :: June 18-20, 2009 :: Barcelona.

Mecànics (the exhibition): Over the past decade, the spread of new digital production tools has led to a democratisation of the artistic process, ranging from the music industry to multimedia art. Home-made recording studios, audiovisual editing programs and online record labels have made projects that used to require major investments easily accessible. Today, the spirit of punk is standard cultural currency.

Becoming the conductor of Roland Olbeter’s robot orchestra, or creating your own musical compositions – simply by moving counters on a board – with the famous interactive table Reactable (Rolling Stone magazine’s Instrument of the Year in 2007), Continue reading

Sensory Threads @ Surface Tension :: June 23, 2009; 10:30 am – 4:30 pm :: The Science Museum’s Dana Centre, 165 Queen’s Gate, South Kensington, London.

Sensory Threads — by Proboscis — is a work-in-progress to develop an instrument enabling a group of people to create a soundscape reflecting their collaborative experiences in the environment. For this interactive sensory experience, we are designing sensors for detecting environmental phenomena at the periphery of human perception as well as the movement and proximity of the wearers themselves. Possible targets for the sensors may be electro-magnetic radiation, hi/lo sound frequencies, heart rate etc). The sensors’ datastreams will feed into generative audio software, creating a multi-layered and multi-dimensional soundscape feeding back the players’ journey through their environment. Variations in the soundscape reflect changes in the wearers interactions with each other and the environment around them.

MAKE ART 2009 – What The Fork?! distributed and open practices in FLOSS art :: December 7-13, 2009 :: Poitiers, France :: Call for Projects — Deadline: July 15, 2009.

Make Art is an international festival dedicated to the integration of Free/ Libre/ Open Source Software (FLOSS) in digital art. Make Art offers performances, presentations, workshops and an exhibition, focused on the encounter between digital art and free software. Make Art is currently seeking new, innovative FLOSS works and projects: music and audiovisual performances, presentations, software demos, and installations. This year Make Art focuses on distributed and open practices in FLOSS art. Continue reading

RiP: A Remix Manifesto (Filmmakers in attendance for Q&A) :: June 19-30, 2009; 10:00 pm :: 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson Street, New York, NY (Tickets).

In RiP: A Remix Manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers. The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. Continue reading

social [net.work music] — by Jason Sloan — is a new improvised network sound project and performance which utilizes the MySpace Music social network as its core sound library. Sloan will webcast a live set from his studio in Baltimore on June 25, 2009; 8:00 pm [EST].

“Recently, I’ve been interested in the the connections created through the MySpace Music social network. By navigating the “Friends Space” link section on each member’s page, reminiscent of web 1.0 webrings, the user can access an interconnected network of that artists influences, friends and label mates, allowing them to discover new artists and different genres of music. Most of the pages feature a jukebox with samples of the musicians work which automatically begin to play once the page has finished loading. Continue reading

A10lab, Area10, Apo33, Noise=Noise, Beyond Signal, Fibrr Records & Sound Research Practice, Goldsmiths presents: Rainforest IV – David Tudor — “a collaborative environmental work, spatially mixing the live sounds of suspended sculptures and found objects, with their transformed reflections in an audio system” :: July 3-4, 2009; 2:00 – 11:00 pm :: AREA10 PROJECT SPACE, Eagle Wharf, Peckham Hill Street, London.

“In 1973 I made Rainforest IV where the objects that the sounds are sent through are very large so that they have their own presence in space. I mean, they actually sound locally in the space where they are hanging as well as being supplemented by a loudspeaker system. Continue reading

Subtle Technologies Festival presents An Evening of Networked Performance curated by Willy Le Maitre :: June 12, 2009; 8:00 pm :: Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave., University of Toronto, Toronto.

In this World 2.0, the distant and out of time are those not on the network. Those not connected by the myriad of standards, protocols, interfaces and soft spots are from World 1.0. Seemingly, with more degrees removed from our mutual separation, we are unified by a network that, paradoxically, joins us and separates us. There is a quality of transparency to World 2.0 that make a users criticism difficult to recognize online. Continue reading

Rite Ways (work in progress) :: Angie Eng — Concept /Video, Thierry Madiot — Tubes, trombone,and Satoshi Takeishi — percussion :: June 9, 2009; 8:30 pm :: Roulette Intermedium @ Location One , 20 Greene St, NYC (between Canal and Grand), NYC.

Experimental video artist, Angie Eng revives cinepoetry with a new work in progress, Rite Ways with Thierry Madiot, master of breath and wind, inventor of instruments, trombonist who fuses improvised and contemporary music and special guest Satoshi Takeishi on percussion.

Rite Ways is a series of cinepoems based on the theme of rites of passage including pieces: Book of Light, Liminal, Passage and Ancestors. In these works Eng returns to methods of the early experimentalists, who approached cinema as a tool for magic. Continue reading