Playlist: Playing Games, Music, Art curated by Domenico Quaranta (Brescia, Italia) :: December 18, 2009 - May 17, 2010 :: Mediateca Expandida de LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Los Prados, 121, 33394 Gijón - Asturias.

Along the Twentieth Century, music has often been the driving force behind crucial innovations in visual arts, and the starting point for many artists. Without forgetting the role played by music in the development of abstract art, it was mainly during the Sixties that music provided a fertile ground for new approaches, new theories, new art forms, new aesthetics. John Cage was a musician working with artists and engineers. The very first performance (the Untitled Event at Black Mountain College in 1952) was a musical event, such as many Fluxus events during the Sixties. Furthermore, Fluxus adopted music notation for its peculiar “scores”. Continue reading

Swedish musicians Daniel Larsson (music) and Thomas Redigh (animation) succeed in creating the world’s trippiest 8-Bit experience. The video description reads, 1500 hours of moving legobricks and take photos of them. To put that into perspective 1500 hours = 62.5 sleepless days. Raccoon-tailed Mario, Megaman, Puyo Pop, Tetris, Pong, and Karate masters (possibly from Karate Champ?), all make celebrity guest appearances.

Thanks to: Stelios Phili on Flavorwire.com.

Thursday Club: Artemis Papageorgiou: Wii/nd Chime + Ryan Jordan: Sensory Response Systems :: January 15, 2009; 6 -8 pm :: Seminar Rooms, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, South East London.

Artemis Papageorgiou will discuss Wii/nd Chime’s collaborative development as an instrument of reminiscence. Wii/nd Chime signifies a shift from the physical realm to the virtual and the simulated. The sonic languages of both wind chimes and the 8-bit video-game sounds are combined into a system of interaction, which invites people to discover the potential of this new, hybrid object. Continue reading

Smart Project Space presents: Bliep - An excursion into the experimental 8-Bit spectrum with BAHK (Korg Electribe SX); Gameboys a Gogo (Gameboy - FX - Synths); Peter Quistgard (Toys - Laptop - FX); Hakki Takki (Laptop - Midi - FX); VJ - Ronnie Rakete :: October 30, 2008; 9:00 pm :: Auditorium- Level 1.

The proliferation and user friendliness of gameboys and other game controllers has spawned a culture of music and video production quite separate from it’s intended use. Several distinct styles of the wide range of sounds encompassing noise and atmospherics will be explored and created on consoles, circuit-bent phones, toys and other devices. In collaboration with the Plattegrond Label. Continue reading

Bubblyfish + Playboy’s Bend :: October 17, 2008; 9:00 - 11:00 pm :: MediaRuimte, 104 Lakensestraat, B-1000 Brussels.

Bubblyfish: A sound artist, composer, and audio engineer, Haeyoung Kim explores the territory of sounds in electronic music. Currently, under the name Bubblyfish, she has been creating 8-bit and experimental sound works. Haeyoung has collaborated with many respected sound and visual artists such as Malcolm McLaren, the founder of Sex Pistols, Hans Jochim Rodelius, and the Brussels based media art group, Lab[au]. Her work has been presented in art venues, clubs, festivals, and galleries internationally including The American Museum of the Moving Image, Pompidou Center, Kunsthalle Wien, MUTEK, LABoral, Lincoln Center Walter Reed Theater, and The New Museum. Continue reading

From Peter Kirn at createdigitalmusic.com: “8-bit and robots and odd Max and Reaktor patches and custom visual software and visualizations of data packets and sound made from plants and mutant trumpets and gloves for DJing and laptop music – we’ve got quite a lineup here in New York this week.

Friday night, a live audiovisual lineup from the worlds of createdigitalmusic.com / createdigitalmotion.com invades the HOPE conference, aka Hackers on Planet Earth, the three day-long convergence of tech hacking. $10, open to all, 11-2a Friday July 18 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. It’s a live digital, technological variety show in a doomed NYC landmark hotel with an audience of famous and infamous hackers. (Think Kevin Mitnick and MythBusters’ Adam Savage and Steven Levy, all in one place.)

Facebook event page; also on Going.com”

More media and preview videos can be seen at Create Digital Music. 

David Morneau will bring his composition-a-day project, 60×365, to an end on June 30th. You can hear the conclusion by visiting http://60×365.com

Every day for the past year, Morneau has composed and posted a new sixty-second composition. That’s just over six hours of new music in sixty-second installments. For this project, Morneau explored a wide variety of musical styles and techniques, including musique concrète, sine wave synthesis, digital sampling, 8-bit constructions, process music, acousmatic composition, and post-techno beat manipulations. He found the requirement to make a new, complete piece every day an exhilarating challenge, and reveled in the constant variety of ideas the project embraced. This project began as a challenge to compose more, and ended up as an audio diary of the past year. Continue reading

At the gallery and performance space Galapagos in Brooklyn last summer, I was fortunate to catch a show of electronically mediated music, art, installations, and short films. Among the participants was a musician and tinkerer named Jamie Allen whose set-up was a revelation in its simplicity.

His instrument was a wooden wine crate filled with custom-made circuitry and six joystick-like levers. Allen called his tool circuitMusic, and it emitted a throbbing, old-school sound — the sort of sound that’s often called “feedback laden” when in fact it was more like he was exploring the feedback, simultaneously navigating and lending shape to the noise. (There is additional coverage of the event, including photos, in an August 2007 disquiet.com entry.) Continue reading

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From: Associated Press via Technology Review, December 6, 2007: ‘Chiptune’ artists use vintage computers and video games to craft a new musical genre - NEW YORK (AP) - Haeyoung Kim, a classical pianist, took the stage at a hip Manhattan art space before a crowd of twenty- and thirty-somethings, many shaggy-haired and wearing T-shirts and glasses.

As her performance began, the room filled with electronic beeps and buzzes of a 1980’s video game pulsing to a danceable beat, as if Mario were hosting a rave. As heads bopped in the audience, Kim proudly held up her instrument: a Nintendo Game Boy. Continue reading