[Chris Salter working at his installation in the Exhibitions Gallery of the Art Centre. Photo:LABoral/Sergio Redruello] n-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis - A performance-installation by Chris Salter in collaboration with Sofian Audry, Marije Baalman, Adam Basanta, Elio Bidinost and Thomas Spier :: until September 10 :: LABoral, Los Prados, 121, 33394 Gijón, Spain.

n-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis is a contemporary re-imagining of the Greek composer and architect Iannis Xenakis’s radical architectural environments called Polytopes (from the Greek poli, ‘many’ and topos, ‘space’). Continue reading

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot: untitled + index :: until November 5, 2011 :: EMPAC, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY. Continue reading

Calabi Portal Project — a laboratory for ideas and the imagination :: Call for Proposals — No Deadline.

This competition is open to visionary designers, artists, architects, and scientists, and any collaborative combination. All designs will be theoretical. No background or experience in engineering, construction, or actual fabrication materials is required as the structure will be self-generating and assembling. The challenge is to conceive of the possibilities of an architectural visualization of 10 dimensional space incorporating the six dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold. The proposed structure is to take the form of what we loosely describe as a “Tower”, and is open to interpretation. It may also contain or emanate light and sound.

See website for more information. Sponsored by the Multiverse Research Institute.

Coincidence Engines by [The User]: The first two works in the Coincidence Engines series are subtitled One: Universal People’s Republic Time, and Two: Approximate demarcator of constellations in other cosmos. These two installations approach the idea of “co-incident” events from complementary perspectives. Coincidence Engine One (watch) assembles a large number of unsynchronized clocks whose combined ticking sounds produce an unusual and intriguingly organic sonic environment. Coincidence Engine Two (watch) develops a sophisticated synchronization control and amplification system around a group of specially-modified clocks that enables the artists to articulate audio-visual compositions by programming and sequencing the clocks’ ticking behaviour.

The notion of concrete sound, and the specificity of the listener’s relationship to sound sources in space are central to [The User]’s approach. Continue reading

Experiments on the Notation of Shapes by Joao Vasco Paiva :: February 12 - April 4, 2010 :: Opening Reception: February 12; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: Artist Talk: March 24; 7:00 pm :: Unmeasured Music: March 31; 7.30 pm :: I/O (Input/ Output), 31 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong.

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. Continue reading

Novi_sad’s North American Tour — Novi_sad (Thanasis Kaproulias, b. 1980) graduated from the Economic University of Piraues. He lives and works in Athens, Greece. Influenced by the pioneers of audio assault, he began generating sounds in 2005. Amplified environmental recordings, drone manipulations, structured ambient soundscapes, microtones vs overtones, all come together in a hyper structure of iconoclastic form.

Novi_sad’s artistic output displays a high level of technical ability, as well as a sensitivity to the nuances of location. The strength of his soundscapes works in the same elaborateness for the whole creation process, starting from a basis of very strong conceptualism, the intense examination of field recordings over the actual composition work, to the point of performing back the result onto location. Every sound that occurs is treated with a sculptural integrity and his sonic power operates on a level in which the audience participates as transcendental listeners. Continue reading

FILTER and ONOMATOPEE at P40 in Hamburg present Shotgun Architecture at P40 — A sound and light installation by Justin Bennett :: until 11th of January 2009 :: Alte Pathologie/P40, Friedrichsberger Strasse 32, D-Hamburg.

Can one make sound visible? What happens to our thought processes and emotional perception when sound and its movement is performed or even manipulated in space? Mapping urban space and its architecture through the sound of a gunshot, the method Justin Bennett is currently using, entails numerous domains of expression.

P40 is a turn of the century building with an ornamental red brick facade, a cupola roof and spaces with high ceilings. Built as pathology department for the Eilbek hospital until its privatization, the space has been used and redefined for different purposes over the last decade. Bennett analyzed this piece of architecture with a gunshot and recorded its echoes. Continue reading

Corpus, by Art of Failure (Nicolas Maigret and Nicolas Montgermont), uses the potential which has any object to be set in vibration, and to produce its own tone. Every presentation is based on a specific place and context, and aims to express an usually imperceptible potential of the various present elements (furniture, walls, objects). These various elements are set in vibration by low frequencies via an computer program which analyzes the resonances of the site. Every element then produces its own sound signature. The architectural space is discovered in the form of a complex volume but also through the resonant specificities of its various components.

This installation is based on a program which analyzes, in a given place, the frequencies that makes the objects and elements it contains entering in vibration. This first phase is realized by the broadcasting in the place of a test sound signal that is simultaneously recorded and analyzed. Continue reading

The concept of ‘Soundscape’ appeared in the sixties in the work of the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer- reaching a larger audience in 1973 through the World Soundscape Project and in the book The Soundscape - Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, published in 1977.

Even if one disregards his naturalistic approach to the idea of a landscape, there remains in Schafer’s work an obstinacy to make art out of what is perceived as sonic nuisance — an important step which laid the foundation of an attitude that is still alive among scholars and composers today.

More than 30 years on, the programme Soundscape Forever revisits the concept with an original series of sixteen pieces by international artists (Michael Batalla, Yannick Dauby, eRikm, Xavier Fassion, Zoe Irvine & Mark Vernon, Damien Magnette, Patrick McGinley aka Murmer, NG, Etienne Noiseau, Jean-Philippe Renoult, Kassian & Ulrich Troyer, Els Viaene, Chris Watson). Continue reading

Jeff Talman–A Play of Flows - The Mediterranean Sea “tuned” to a Genovese landmark :: October 23–November 4, 2008 :: Galleria Mazzini, Genoa, Italy.

Galleria Mazzini, the elegant 19th Century architectural gem in the heart of Genoa, Italy, serves as the framing space for international artist Jeff Talman’s newly commissioned installation A Play of Flows. The work’s sonic environment, based on site resonance and the nearby Mediterranean Sea, initiates a meditation on the contributing currents that enliven this spectacular urban site. Recorded at a nearby Genoese beach, crashing wave sounds provide the sonic source material for the installation. Talman filtered these sounds to align them with the resonant frequencies or “tuning” of the Galleria. The sea wave sounds, shaped into a series of spatial and site-harmonic progressions, engage the architecture as the “voice” of the sea sings in the Galleria, turning it into a vast resonating instrument. Continue reading