Experiments on the Notation of Shapes by Portuguese artist and Hong Kong resident, Joao Vasco Paiva, is a generative multi-channel video installation where Hong Kong cityscapes are used as coordinates for sound synthesis. Computational translation, footage of urban planning and architectural elements are used as a musical score. In this work, a post-apocalyptic aura consumes the concrete form of the metropolis. Two wall-based projections present Hong Kong cityscapes. The city, its emptiness and its structure are kept in “time images” that solicit contemplation. These images show an architectonic, sculptural place; a place in constant mutation. A floor based LCD screen shows images from the warrens of back-alleys of Hong Kong. In opposition to the projections, motion is obvious here. The buildings skyline shifts rapidly, showing not just its major architectonic features, but individual intervention as well, such as the ubiquitous plastic roofs and air conditioners. The author performs a drift through these hidden streets, trying to capture the space in between the buildings.

By presenting a computerized, cityscape-based orchestra, Paiva puts forward a visual experiment in which the core concept of the work is to congregate ephemeral randomness with pre-established composition rules, creating an audio-visual piece that explores the idea of organized chaos. The city presented as a sculptural playground. There is an obvious contrast between the projected sanguine, landscapes and the frenetic back-alley images. While the walk through back alleys operates as the conductor of the musical score, generating a dynamic frequency modulation, the meditative Hong Kong cityscapes play as servos, and constantly shift from one single frequency to another. Here architecture and perspective are being used as the composition tools. The blockage between the city and the inhabitants diminishes as the city is re-presented minimally, visually and audibly.

Joao Vasco Paiva is a Portuguese artist currently living in Hong Kong. Paiva graduated from a Fine Arts Degree in Porto Art School with a special focus in painting. In 2006 he was awarded with a 2 years scholarship from Fundacao Oriente a Portuguese Foundation that supports young artists in Asia. He obtained a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Media in the School of Creative Media City University of Hong Kong where he currently teaches. His work has been showed in festivals such as: FILE Hypersonica International Festival of Electronic Language, London Exploratory Music Festival, Athens Video Art Festival, City Transit, 2pi Festival, Hong Kong and Shenzen Architecture and Urbanism Biennial and other venues and locations in Beijing Hong Kong, London, Porto, Hangzhou, Sao Paulo and Vienna.

SONICACTSTRAILER0608 from Sonic Acts on Vimeo.

Deep Spaces - 25 February 2010 :: The opening event Deep Spaces presents a selection of audiovisual adventures in spaces defined by sound, light, smoke and lasers. Immerse yourself in Thomas Köner’s mesmerizing spatial sound tapestries, while his colleague, Jürgen Reble, takes you on a visual journey through the darker side of his alchemical chemograms :: Haswell & Hecker will perform their radical UPIC Diffusion Session, an infinity of extreme sound and engulfing lasers :: And Monolake and Tarik Barri will transport you through their spatial audiovisual universe.

Expanded Space - 26 February 2010 :: The Expanded Space programme revisits the heyday of Expanded Cinema. The magnificent film Color Sound Frames by Paul Sharits is dusted off for the big screen :: Bruce McClure will show us a new performance he made with beautiful 16mm recordings of pelicans, from a 1950s nature documentary :: and Greg Pope en Gert-Jan Prins will join forces to bring an homage to the 70s solid light film Line Describing A Cone by Anthony McCall.

Acoustic Spaces - 27 February 2010 :: This more than four-hour-long programme is devoted to various approaches to soundscape composition and features works produced by several generations of composers and musicians. From acoustic ecology to extreme field recordings: BJ Nilsen will present his latest thunderstorm recordings :: Booming dunes from the Oman deserts by Jacob Kirkegaard :: and Gilles Aubry will take us on a sonic journey across european airports.

Beyond Space - 28 February 2010 ::An extraordinary programme in a remarkable location: the Beyond Space event in the Artis Planetarium includes the international premiere of a composition by the recently deceased innovative composer Maryanne Amacher :: a new audiovisual work by the Italian multi-talent TeZ :: Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand will explore the space with laser and soap bubbles, accompanied by live audio by Francisco López :: and the British designer Paul Prudence brings a visual spectacle specially designed for
the Planetarium dome.

New festival website with complete programme online :: As of this week the new festival website is online with the complete programme, background information, a timetable and much more.

Also now available for download the programme booklet as PDF.

Tickets for all Sonic Acts events available now ::Ticket pre-sale for all Sonic Acts events has started via de Balie, Paradiso, Ticket Service, and other regular pre-sale addresses.
For an overview of all available tickets visit the ticket page: http://2010.sonicacts.com/ticket-information/

The Gallery is currently organising their exhibition and events calendar and are welcoming interested parties to tender for exhibition, starting mid 2010. Deadline: March 31, 2010.

Please email SoundFjord for further information on the space, if you would like to sign up to our mailing list, or need an application form. Helen: helen [at] soundfjord.org.uk Andy: andy [at] soundfjord.org.uk

Lemurs Over Laptopia: Will new performance interfaces rejuvenate live electronic music? asks Thomas Bey William Bailey on Vague Terrain:

For roughly 160 years since Richard Wagner published his Artwork of the Future, Western audio culture has been forced to take sides on the issue of music and its relation to the other arts: should music be just one element in a fully-integrated artistic program, or should ‘absolute music’ unfettered by lyrics (let alone other sensory effects) run the show? … the ‘total artwork vs. absolute music’ debate has only accelerated in recent years, in which multi-functional and compact (yet visually bland) tools like laptops and digital samplers have muscled in on the territory previously commanded by ensembles of ‘mono-functional,’ yet visually arresting, acoustic instruments. Following Wagner’s suggestion for architecture to be built with music performance in mind, all the plastic arts have been mobilized to enhance the concert stage. More recently, electronic instruments or control interfaces have also been designed to that end, rather than just working as efficient sound generators.

Read on as this article describes the JazzMutant Lemur, a multitouch and modular controller that musicians can use to to design or download customized GUIs that match the color schemes and ‘mood’ of any given performance program; and Toshio Awai’s Tenori-On, which can
communicate to audiences using synesthetic ‘translations’ of light signals into audio data — both of which seem designed to deal with the perceived problems of acousmatic music.

David Linton’s interactive analogue audio video feedback system provides the vibrational foundation for an evening length extended time audio visual improvisation with David Linton - interactive sound and live video and invited guests David First on guitar & electronics and Satoshi Takeishi on percussion.

David Linton (born Newburgh NY in 1956) is a Time based multiple media artist traveling the vectors of sound, subculture, and signal flow. He has been active in the downtown NYC experimental arts community for 30 years. Originally a percussionist, David has created sound, music, and something in between, for many collaborative dance, theater, & performance settings since his arrival in NY at the end of 1970’s. By the later 80’s - after a good deal of percussion work along side other musicians: Lee Ranaldo, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Elliott Sharp among others - he was equally known for his live wired solo electro-acoustic drumkit performances as well as his soundscore productions for the Wooster Group & choreographers Karole Armitage & Steven Petronio among many others. His 1986 solo Lp “Orchesography” was an unlikely collusion of street beats, early sampling tek, and theatrical post modernism.

By the early 90’s he had retired from performing in the live electro-acoustic vein to concentrate on the vocabulary of entirely electronic music and the resultant paradigm shift in performance priorities this new ‘compressed’ format suggested. Throughout the 90’s Linton became a dedicated advocate for the expansion and appreciation of realtime performance in electronic media through the design and/or production of event/environments such as ‘SoundLab’ (1996) and eventually ‘UnityGain’ (1997-present). In the later 90’s David was a key participant in Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods multimedia improvisation project “Crash Landing”.

From 2001 Linton’s fascination with instantaneous collaborative audio visual communication among select units of electronic sound and visual artists assumed the form of a live experimental television Manhattan cable/webcast project - UGTV - Unitygain Television (2001-2004) - for which he was producer/director - and occasional performer. In 2004 David embarked upon his present course with the launch of his solo audio-visual project: the Bicameral Research Sound & Projection System - With his “Bicameral Research Sound & Projection System” (2004) Linton aims to make vibrational wave induced perceptual energy states manifest by deploying interconnected measures of electric sound & pulsing light in live action with hand manipulated objects in physical (live camera) space. He employs an integrated recursive audio & video feedback system of his own perversely simple design modulated by freehand intervention to deliver vigorous eye, ear, and - sometimes - body shaking realtime audio visual performances from which a kind of retro-tech animist ritual “medicine show” emerges where subject and object blur. Thematically David likes to consider that within the 20th Century 60 Hz alternating electrical current gradually came to function as a primary subliminal Prana in the mass bio-energetic body/culture of human life in North America.

For her performance on WKCR, Parkins will be playing amplified objects, electronic accordion, and laptop electronics/live processing. Andrea Parkins is a New York-based composer, sound/installation artist and interactive electronics performer internationally acclaimed for her uniquely gestural and textural approach to her electronically-processed accordion and inventive use of customized live sound processing. Together, her laptop electronics and Fender-amped accordion create a sonic language of lush harmonics, noisy concretized disruption, and soaring electronic feedback.

Parkins’ work has been presented in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art (“Bitstreams” exhibition), The Kitchen (“New Sound/New York”), Diapason, Roulette and Experimental Intermedia; and at contemporary music, sound, and intermedia festivals/venues throughout the US and Europe, and in Latin America and Asia. Throughout 2010, Parkins will tour in Europe and the US in support of her new CD on Important Records, FAULTY (BROKEN ORBIT) - a through-composed work for amplified objects, accordion feedback, and processed instruments.

You can listen to selections from Andrea Parkins’ music here, tune in to WKCR 89.9 in New York City, or listen online.

This is the story of how a military device became the robot voice of hip-hop and pop music. Though the vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, was designed to guard phones from eavesdroppers, it expanded beyond its original purpose and has since become widely used as a voice-altering tool for musicians. It has served both the Pentagon and the roller rink, a double agent of pop and espionage.

In How to Wreck a Nice Beach — from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase “how to recognize speech” — music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin’s gulags, from the 1939 World’s Fair to Hiroshima, from Manhattan nightclubs to the Muppets. The result is an amazing chronicle of postwar music and culture, filled with unexpected and surprising encounters. We see the vocoder brush up against FDR, Solzhenitsyn, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, JFK, Eisenhower, Neil Young, Kanye West, the Cylons, Walt Disney, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on V-E Day, “We must go off!” And now the device is a cell phone standard, allowing your voice to sound human.

From T-Mobile to T-Pain, How to Wreck a Nice Beach is a riveting saga of technology and culture, illuminating the work of some of music’s most provocative innovators.

We invite proposals of papers, posters and workshops for Soft Borders - the 4th Upgrade! International Conference & Festival on New Media Art, that will take place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from Oct 18th to 21st.

All the information about submitting proposals and the event can be also found online at the conference official website.

A brief summary only is required for the selection process. This should be submitted electronically via the online submission system, by 30/April/2010. You will be asked to create an account with the system before uploading your summary.

We require a summary proposal of 500 words maximum. The title, authors’ name, affiliation and contact details including email address must be provided as well. You don’t need to upload the full paper now. The selected works must upload the full paper file after the notification of acceptance.

In case of problems, please email program-chair [at] softborders.art.br.

Subject coverage

Soft Borders embraces a wide variety of topics, cross-disciplinary approaches and presentations of cutting edge technologies. Within the overall theme of soft borders, the subject areas may include but are not limited to the concepts and practice of:

• Authorship
• Body / Machine
• Reality / Thought
• Collaborative Actions
• Displacements: global & local transactions
• Nomadic spaces
• Ways of interaction and Interfaces
• Digital Narratives
• Art & Code
• Visualising ideas and concepts
• Digital performance
• Immersive environments
• Web 2.0 technologies in art and culture
• Sound, music, film and animation
• Technologies of digitisation, 2D and 3D imaging
• Virtual and augmented worlds
• Case studies may be accepted, provided that they include discussions of wider principles or applications using the case study as an example.

Publication

Papers / posters / workshops are peer refereed and may be edited. Publication is in hard copy as conference preprints and also online. Full papers are up 2.000 words in length and may include images. Publication is not essential: if you do not wish to submit a paper for publication we can publish an abstract.

Acceptance and deadlines

• The deadline for submitting abstract is 30 April 2010.
• We aim to send notifications of acceptance of proposals by 19 July 2010.
• The deadline for uploading full papers of the accepted proposals will be 19 August 2010.

Registration

There is no registration fee for the accepted speakers. However, each presenter must cover his/her costs for participating of the conference.

Sponsorship and demonstrations

There are also attractive opportunities for organisations to support an aspect of the conference such as the publication or a reception or coffee breaks, or conference materials.

Please contact sponsorship [at] softborders.art.br if you are interested in sponsor the event in some way.

An exploration of electronic environmental and performance art. Interact, learn and network f2f (no voltage required) where AV geeks are vanward and hip. Sights and sounds will stretch the imagination. Performances, exhibits, and seminars will mark the event along with an e-drum circle and an open Personal Media Player jam. Bring your favorite music or visual apps and we’ll do our best to plug you in to an impromptu multi-media happening. Or simply come treat your senses in a space transformed by light paintings, video sculpture, ambient soundscapes and experimental music.

DIY Show and Tell - Bring your battery-operated personal light show, orbit show, circuit bending experiment, homemade electronic instruments or product modification. E-mail us if you plan to show everyone something you made or broke. Be safe. Works-in-progress are acceptible.

Model Railroading is Electronic Art - Make a creative N Scale futuristic, conceptual, abstract or surrealistic panorama with lights and trains and send us a picture of it. Entries will be accepted based on novelty and availability of space. Realism has a place but, no offense, not at this show. Use your imagination and lights, lights, lights. Each piece must be on a table or pedestal or have legs. Limit the size to 36″ wide x 36″ deep and please make it all-age appropriate. Let us know if you’re working on one that isn’t photo-ready yet. The deadline for an entry with a photo will be 2/15/10. Show us that model railroad art is not just for boys. Works-in-progress are acceptible as in DIY Show and Tell.

Robots as Electronic Art? - Any dancing droids out there? Nothing practical needed here but if you can make a fine art robot we want to know about it.

TAFEA TV Added - Do you make far out and funky video or digital photographs with light? Tell us if you would like to submit a slide show or clips on DVD. No guarantees, but if the content is appropriate and there is enough time in the day, we’ll add your digital art to the play list to show on a big TV. Don’t forget to add a credit slide so everybody knows whose stuff they’re seeing.

A programme of events timetabled by Edward Dorrian from both submitted and invited proposals made to Five Years, addressing the concept of the Field Recording. All events will be staged and recorded inside the gallery. Details of the event below.More info available from Five Years.

Friday 05/02/10
6-8pm Seth Guy: Various Artists
7-8pm Matthew Lee Knowles & Andy Ingamells: Sixty_Six_Events
8-9pm Cinzia Cremona: The Other Person

Saturday 06/02/10
12-2pm Duncan Whitley: Sound As Research As Art
2-4pm Madge: Learning To Breathe And To Sing Strauss, Here I Come!
4-6pm Alice Cooper: Stage 12

Sunday 07/02/10
12-2pm Gary Kempston: Sound
2-4pm David Berridge, Compulsive Holding, Marianne Holm Hansen, Tamarin Norwood, Matthew MacKisack:Art Writing Field Station
4-6pm Investigation Three: 34/71 Broadway Market

Saturday 13/02/10
12-2pm Patrick Loan: Observations/ Performance No. 1 (Hohe Warte Stadion, Vienna)
2-4pm Rob Flint & Christine Sullivan: Sound Proof
4-6pm Paul Buck: Gutting The Issue

Sunday 14/02/10
12-2pm Melissa Bliss: What Do We Want? Justice! When Do We Want It? Now!
2-4pm Kate Wiggs & Joanna Austin: The Conversation Continues
4-5pm Islington Mill Art Academy: Conversation With Pippa Koszerek
5-6pm Irina Danilova: 59 Orgasms
Asaki Kan: That

Saturday 20/02/10
12-4pm Deborah Ridley: Deconstructing Piano
2-4pm Matthew Lee Knowles & Andy Ingamells: Sixty_Six_Events
4-6pm Shelley Parker & Paul Purgas: Proximity

Sunday 21/02/10
12-2pm Michael Schuller: Navigational Notes
2-4pm Ana Cavic & Ren?e O?Drobinak: open conversation with Edward Dorrian
4-6pm Sebastian Craig: 3.29miles Public

Additional work available throughout

edward-dorrian@fiveyears.org.uk
www.fiveyears.org.uk

http://www.last.fm/music/Seth+Brignell
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Sars+Virus
http://www.last.fm/music/London+Concrete