Several Silences – with Lewis Baltz, Manon de Boer, Troy Brauntuch, Paul Dickinson, Ryan Gander, Geissler and Sann, Gran Fury, CM von Hausswolff, Harold Mendez, Jonty Semper, Harry Shearer :: April 26 - June 7, 2009 :: Opening Reception: April 26; 4:00–7:00 pm :: Talk: 5:00 -6:00 pm — Hamza Walker and Thomas Trummer :: The Renaissance Society, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.

Titled after an essay by the late philosopher and literary theoretician Jean-Francois Lyotard, Several Silences is a group exhibition exploring various kinds of silence. As a discourse, the aesthetic of silence has been thoroughly domesticated within the visual arts. Although silence as a discourse in art arose out of conditions calling for the negation of art, it has subsequently become familiar subject matter no longer operating as the avant-garde ideal it once was. Continue reading

Field Recording Workshop — with Clay Chaplin :: April 5, 2009; 2:00 - 5:00 pm and April 11, 2009; 2:00 - 5:00 pm :: Machine Project, 1200 D North Alvarado, Los Angeles, CA.

This two-part workshop will discuss the aesthetics and practice of field recording. The first session will cover the possibilities and history of the genre through listening examples and discussion. We’ll also cover how to make field recordings with information on microphones, field recorders, and techniques for improving your sound. You will have access to a field recorder which you can use to create a recording of your own. Session two will be a listening and discussion session where everyone presents their field recording. Continue reading

PdCon09 — Third International Puredata Convention :: July 19 - 26, 2009 :: Sao Paulo, Brazil :: Call for Submissions — Deadline: March 15, 2009.

Puredata, or just Pd, is an open source tool for multimedia programming. Because of its open source nature, much of its development result from a community effort of developers worldwide. Some centers do have more people engaged, like the places that held the two previous conventions. The first convention took place in Graz, Austria, in 2004. The second happened in Montreal, Canada, in 2007. It is a great satisfaction that we continue this event by bringing it to yet another continent, with the intent to promote the formation of an important group of developers locally. Continue reading

Music, Language, Thought :: February 28, 2009; 10:00 am -5:00 pm :: New York University, Silver Center of Arts and Science, 100 Washington Square East, Department of Music, Room 220, 2nd Floor (Enter at Washington Place Doors).

Music, Language, Thought is a new interdisciplinary event series organized by graduate students within New York University’s Music and Comparative Literature Departments. Broadly speaking, the series focuses on the relationship between music and language, and our speakers will examine its theoretical ramifications for politics, aesthetics and historiography. The project stems from ongoing conversation and collaboration between graduate students within these two departments, and will continue on an annual basis. Continue reading

In case you missed it, Radiohead have gone all data-aesthetic with their latest video, House of Cards. What’s more, it’s fully zeitgeist-compliant, with open access and a call for re-visualisations of a quite massive dataset: hundreds of megabytes of spatial data gathered with various 3d laser-scanning rigs. If the download stats and early signs are anything to go on, we will be seeing much more of this dataset. Continue reading

[Image: Artford and Yau “Infrasounds” from Sound Art and Public Auditory Awareness] Hz #12 presents:

Spectral Memories: the Aesthetics of the Phonographic Recording by Dugal McKinnon — Sonic artist / Composer Dugal McKinnon examines the aesthetics of the phonographic recording: “how is the record, as a technology with a well-documented history, also a signifying medium that has generated certain meanings, and modes of aesthetic production and reception?”

Sound Art and Public Auditory Awareness by Ariel Bustamante — Ariel Bustamante explores the connection between Sound Art and public auditory sensibilities by reviewing works by Max Neuhaus, Sam Auinger and Bruce Odland, Christina Kubisch, and Scout Arford and Randy Yau.

SoundWalk2008 - Call for Artists: Artists who utilize, in any manner, sound in their work are invited to submit to the Fifth Annual SoundWalk event to be held in Long Beach CA on September 20, 2008. Please go here for submission requirements and further information. Deadline: July 1, 2008.

Soundwok Artiject - Call for Participants: Take part immediately in a cutting-edge “artiject” in which the aesthetic consciousness of upstream sonifiers is mapped utilizing GIS technology. Continue reading

“If relational aesthetics and open source were always commercial, can the musical score provide a way of thinking through different relationships between creativity and code? The return to improvisation in ‘livecoding’ draws parallels with experimental practices developed by maverick musicians, programmers and educators from Sun Ra, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Scratch Orchestra to Seymour Papert. Simon Yuill argues that these ‘distributive practices’ are worth extending today.

In recent years the foregrounding of ‘collaboration’ in artistic practice has acquired an aura of inherent benevolence and emancipation, as though the very act of working with others in itself ensures some form of resistance or alternative to conventions of cultural production, and confers positive moral value. Continue reading

Art Now: Seb Patane - So this song kills fascists :: until January 13, 2008 :: Tate Britain, Millbank, London.

So this song kills fascists, explores ideas of performance as a means of protest. The sound work, from which the installation takes its title, questions the revolutionary potential of music while new drawings, reminiscent of Surrealist or psychographic automatic writing, suggest a non-visible dimension implicit in the music. The central installation, Last Dance of the Nodding Folk, resembles an expressionist stage set, a theme echoed in the theatrical images leaning, placard-like against it. Footage of a fire juggler introduces an element of ritualised and controlled movement, which links to the energy of the drawings and the viewer’s choreographed passage around the installation. Patane identifies an aesthetics of subculture where protest has been exchanged for stylised performance, a husk detached from belief.

Living Electronic Music by Simon Emmerson - Drawing on recent ideas that explore new environments and the changing situations of composition and performance, Simon Emmerson provides a significant contribution to the study of contemporary music, bridging history, aesthetics and the ideas behind evolving performance practices. Whether created in a studio or performed on stage, how does electronic music reflect what is live and living? What is it to perform ‘live’ in the age of the laptop?

Many performer-composers draw upon a ‘library’ of materials, some created beforehand in a studio, some coded ‘on the fly’, others ‘plundered’ from the widest possible range of sources. But others refuse to abandon traditionally ‘created and structured’ electroacoustic work. Continue reading