The Netherlands Media Art Institute presents in collaboration with the 5 days off festival the exhibition (in)visible sounds :: open until July 14 - Tuesday through Saturday from 1:00 ­ 6:00 p.m.; also open on the first Sunday of the month. Entry: € 2,50 (1,50 with discount.) :: Performances: July 4-8 in Paradiso, Melkweg and the Netherlands Media Art Institute :: Reservations: info [at] montevideo.nl.

Semiconductor (UK) :: July 4, Time: 8.30 p.m. For Brilliant Noise the most beautiful satellite images of the sun have been selected from an open access archive. The radiation intensity is translated into audio fragments so as to focus attention on the hidden forces of the solar system. A computer that ‘listens’ to audio files and is able to translate these into digital images, depending on the amount of resonance, is at the heart of the performance Sonic Inc: Where has the Future Gone? Continue reading

Perceptual Evaluation of Spatial Audio for “Audio Nomad” Augmented Reality Artworks [PDF] by Nick Mariette: Audio Nomad is a three-year art / science research collaboration on the creative and technological potentials of location-sensitive, mobile spatial audio. The first Audio Nomad productions were two versions of Syren – a ship-based multi-speaker installation using the ship’s position from a GPS receiver to render a two dimensional soundscape. New work including Virtual Wall (Berlin) will create a personal location-sensitive spatial soundscape on headphones using a portable computer, GPS receiver and digital compass. The technological intent is to enable the artist to augment real world objects and spaces with sounds perceived to emanate from them. It is important to know the maximum perceivable accuracy of the intended augmented reality effect, given human and technology limitations, even if soundscape design doesn’t always require maximum precision. Continue reading

Bio-tracking is a mobile phone based exhibition using GPS (Global Positioning System) and a leading edge new smart phone software (suitable for Nokia Series 60) called Socialight downloadable via www.socialight.com which enabled the placement of virtual sticky notes around various locations in Brighton. The exhibition was part of Brighton Photo Biennial Fringe in 2007. Visitors could download the software and wander around the sites receiving text messages, sound files and images straight to their phones, in fact due to the nature of Socialight the exhibition is still live and can be viewed now.

Anna Dumitriu sampled and cultured various locations in the city of Brighton for normal flora bacteria and moulds, revealing this incredible, unseen and sublime world to us through a series of beautifully enhanced digital micrographs. Luciana Haill, Ian Helliwell, Ollie Glass and Juliet Kac created a series of sound works to accompany the images. Microbiologist John Paul wrote scientific text descriptions of the microbes. Continue reading

Silence of the Lands enables participants to map and annotate the soundscape of urban and natural environments. Participants can record and collect ambient sounds, create and share acoustic cartographies, and use them as conversation pieces of a social dialogue on the sonic environment. The result is an ecomuseum in which personal acoustic ecologies are translated into an affective geography that changes over time according to participants’ perceptions and interpretations of their environmental setting.

A Community of Soundscapes in Boulder, Colorado: Applications for participating in the Boulder program will close on May 21st, 2007. Participants in the project will be involved in activities of sound mapping from July 23 to August 10, 2007. Continue reading

Artist Jaygo Bloom has been commissioned by folly, a media arts organisation based in Lancaster, to develop the sound work BUMP! for this year’s Futuresonic festival, in partnership with Manchester based digital signage organisation Pixel Inspiration. Futuresonic is the UK’s leading electronic and media arts festival, and takes place in Manchester in July 2006. According to Jaygo Bloom, the commissioned artist, “As computer technology becomes more sophisticated, the technology itself will fade into the background of human activities, becoming far less intrusive than is the case today.”

Jaygo Bloom suspects the invisible, therefore he seeks to reverse the need for this technological transparency. BUMP! reinstates the virtual world with an offline voice. BUMP! is an online project that translates an online keystroke into an actual real time and physical event. BUMP! will reinstate the presence of this technological intervention over its environment via the quick shot, rapidfire, 8bit sounds emanating out of its location based folly sound modules located throughout participating venues of Futuresonic 2006. BUMP! presents an interesting view of networked interaction and social performance. Continue reading

SWM05: Distributed Bodies of Musical-Visual Form [SWM05] — by Troy Innocent and Ollie Olsen with the Shaolin Wooden Men and Harry Lee — features the distributed bodies of musical-visual form that are inhabited by the Shaolin Wooden Men (SWM), a virtual band, a ‘gang of numbers’ — me(a)tacodeflesh. SWM require your assistance to manifest as media creatures. They invite you to send them images of your local environment in which they can appear. Sending images unlocks access to the SWM05 mobile site which consists of downloadable micromusic ringtones and small screen machinima performances. The SWM are everywhere. In a meshwork of wireless entities, they are media creatures seeking a fragmented existence to be consumed in the nanoseconds of play-time in the emerging wireless net. SWM05 will transfigure the SWM by embodying them in a new materiality.

SWM05: Distributed Bodies of Musical-Visual Form is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
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What’s New in Books

Data Sonification

Data sonification has been viewed as a tool with great potential for studying complex sets of scientific data. Sonification can provide the researcher with the ability to perceive variations and trends that are invisible to more established data analysis techniques. However, few have explored the potential artistic applications of sonification. In 1996, Jarrell Pair worked with Alec Robinson to se Matlab and Csound to prototype software to transduce data from various sources such as images, temperature, and light intensity into aesthetically pleasing audio. We used this work to develop the audio effects for StarChild. Using Csound and a custom C program, astronomical data from the Shoemaker Levy-9 comet collision was used as input to create audio for portions of StarChild. Additionally, images of the collisions with Jupiter were transduced into audio effects using Hyperupic, an application running on a NeXT computer. 440k MP3 file (low sample rate) taken from the sample files created from the comet collision.
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The Walking Experience

lifeClipper is an open air art project. It offers an audiovisual walking experience in a virtually enhanced reality. Technically it is based on portable computer equipment worn by an individual. When walking around in a chosen culturally interesting area or impressive landscape the visitor’s position and viewing direction is measured by means of GPS and the found situation augmented according to defined presets. Image and sound are displayed on an HMD (Head Mounted Display). Live captured image and sound are treated in real time by altering parameters as well as by adding music (composition, spoken text and sampling of documetary material), photo and video material (documentary and fictively arranged).
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Shaping Networked Realities

ABSTRACT: The paper introduces a networked multi-user installation and interactive mixed reality environment that combines the fields of interactive art, telecommunication and streaming technologies. Phonic Frequencies is an audiovisual data space whose appearance can be altered via networked communication devices. Visitors are active agents and participate in shaping spaces as they control audiovisual data with their telephones.

Linking the physical space to the digital network space, Phonic Frequencies opens a hybrid reality for distributed sound exchange and visual communication, blurring the boundaries between verbal communication and digital information. The work attempts to break the conventional communication cycle of bidirectional dialogue and to consider the meaning of in- and output from a different perspective.” From Phonic Frequencies: Shaping Networked Realities by Tamas Szakal, Christoph Groenegress, Wolfgang Strauss, Predrag Peranovic (c) 2003