Test_Lab: Live_Coding – Code as an interface for improvisation and networked performances :: Featuring: Powerbooks_Unplugged (D/NL), Florian Cramer (Piet Zwart Institute, D/NL), Carla Mulder (Lange Poten Theatre Group, NL), Susie Jae (aka. Jean Van Sloan, US/NL), and V2_Lab :: December 13, 2007; 8:00 pm :: V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, Eendrachtsstraat 10, 3012XL, Rotterdam :: This event will be streamed live.

A relatively new programming paradigm called Live Coding is redefining the way in which software can be applied in live performances. While improvisation has a long history in the arts, the traditional edit compile run programming model limits software use to predetermined procedures running alongside a performance; Continue reading

Jo’s post on CyberTracker got me to thinking again about geotagging and its aesthetic implications. Without stepping into the cultural/economic/sociopolitical ramifications of the CyberTracker story, it is interesting to note that what the Kalahari Bushmen are doing is, at least technologically, not that different from what Chia Ying Lee’s ‘Sonic Graffiti’ intends for its participants to do, which is to create a location-specific record of an activity at a particular time and place, and have that record persist indefinitely, tied to the location of its creation. This data can then be accessed again via wireless technologies when one is in the location of the original ‘recording’. Continue reading

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

: The MagicBook explores seamless transition between reality and virtual reality. When users look at the pages of a real book through a hand held display, they are able to see virtual content superimposed over the real pages, that is augmented reality. When they see an augmented reality scene they like, users can fly into the scene and experience it as an immersive virtual environment. Currently the user can transition smoothly between these two fixed viewing modes: the augmented-reality view and the virtual-reality view. Continue reading

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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