As part of Metal’s Village Green, The MediaShed presents The Eco-Media Open Day featuring: The Internet vs. Pigeons Race; Human Telephone Lines; A Requiem for Cod; an Olympics of Lobbing, Shouting and Whistling :: September 27, 2008; 12 – 4 pm :: Chalkwell Park, Chalkwell Avenue, Southend-on-Sea.

An afternoon of fun experiments to see how we can combine “natural media” with “man made media”. We will be linking together ecology, human bodies and other gadgets to devise ingenious methods of communication inspired by natures own systems of signals, warnings and imprints. Taking inspiration from early media like shouting, carrier pigeons, throwing and the message-in-a-bottle, we will try to turn the ecology of Chalkwell Park into a living switchboard! Continue reading

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS - Ecology: Water, Air, Sound :: Deadline: September 30, 2008 - Full submission form here.

New Adventures in Sound Art invites artists of all ages and nationalities to submit works on the theme Ecology: Water, Air, and/or Sound for consideration in 2009 future programming for the annual Deep Wireless, Sound Travels, and SOUNDplay festivals, produced by New Adventures in Sound Art in Toronto, Canada. Artists may submit works in one or all of the following four categories: 1) Radio Art, 2) Electroacoustic Music, 3) Videomusic and 4) Installation Art. Individual interpretations or variations on the theme - Ecology: Water, Air, Sound - are encouraged.

All submitted works must respond in some way to the theme Ecology: Water, Air, Sound in order to be considered for 2009 NAISA programming.

Resonating Bodies-Bumble Domicile :: Conceived by Sarah Peebles, others :: A Co-Presentation between InterAccess and New Adventures in Sound Art :: through July 27, 2008 :: *new* Gallery, 906 Queen West, Toronto, Canada.

Resonating Bodies is a series of mixed media installations and community outreach projects, which focus on the biodiversity of pollinators indigenous to the ecosystems of the Greater Toronto Area. Conceived by Sarah Peebles with Rob King, Rob Cruickshank and Anne Barros, the installations illuminate aspects of local biodiversity, such as bumblebee colonies and their foraging activities, ultraviolet bee vision, and pollinator / plant co-evolution. Some of these projects feature colour-coded DNA barcodes, a new technique for species identification pioneered by Canadian researchers. Continue reading

This past spring at the University of Virginia, a first-time joint class was offered that brought graduate students from the Virginia Center for Computer Music (VCCM) together with undergraduates in the School of Architecture.The undergraduate Robotic Ecologies class merged with the Emergent Systems in Music graduate class, and was co-taught by professors Jason Johnson (architecture) and Matthew Burtner (music), with assistance from music graduate student Troy Rogers. I had the opportunity to participate in this exciting new venture between our departments. The goal of this year’s class was for students to create and fabricate “performative spatial and acoustic instruments that sense, compute and interact to/with emergent atmospheric inputs.” The class’s group collaborations resulted in three new robotic sonic-spatial instruments. Movies and descriptions of the instruments are provided below. Descriptions were provided by the groups and video footage was provided by Jason Johnson. Continue reading

Transmitting live from the Ocean below the Antarctic Ice: “Providing an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape is a formidable challange. After all, more than 15000 km lie between Antarctica and our institute in Germany. Underwater sound is recorded by means of two hydrophones by PALAOA (Perennial Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean), an autonomous, wind and solar powered observatory located on the Ekström ice shelf (Boebel et al., 2006).

The data stream is transmitted via wireless LAN from PALAOA to the German Neumayer Base. From there, a permanent satellite link transmits the data to the AWI in Germany. Continue reading

[Image: David Dunn] Navigating the Space of the Future - Seminar with presentations by: Yolande Harris, David Dunn and Atau Tanaka:: April 15, 2008; 8:30 pm :: Netherlands Media Art Institute, Keizersgracht 264, 1016 EV Amsterdam :: LIVE STREAM.

What does it mean to navigate? What is the importance of location specificity? What does it mean to get lost? The increasing accuracy of satellite navigation strives to eliminate the possibility of human error, but it also produces a sense of dislocation from one’s immediate environment by abstracting location as the coordinates of longitude and latitude. What place is there for one’s body, one’s senses, one’s conscious and unconscious awareness of space, if this knowledge is so apparently made redundant by GPS? Continue reading

Acoustic Space Issue # 7: SPECTROPIA - On Spectral Ecology and Art :: CALL FOR PAPERS - Deadline for abstracts - April 21, 2007 :: We are seeking manuscripts for the upcoming Acoustic Space journal to be published for the next Art+Communication Festival. Entitled SPECTROPIA, this year festival edition will take place in Riga, October 16 - 19, 2008.

The print journal, Acoustic Space is a forum for net.radio, sound art and creative explorations in the networked electro-acoustic environments. Now in its 7th edition, Acoustic Space - SPECTROPIA issue investigates the rapid transformation of the usage of the radio frequency spectrum that we are witnessing in the 21st century. Continue reading

Stephen Vitiello creates sound installations that often feature pristine recordings of natural environments and phenomena – the Amazon rain forest or flapping moth wings for example– sonically magnified to expose their internal detail and beauty. His installation work also focuses heavily on the use and implications of space as a compositional parameter. Vitiello has released several CDs and his work has been performed at The Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Kitchen, NYC. His work was also featured in the 2006 Biennale of Sydney and the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He is currently Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.

On September 21, 2007, Vitiello visited the University of Virginia. We sat and discussed his work for an hour in the university’s Jefferson Rotunda. The recording and transcript of that interview is presented below. Continue reading

Sound and the City: Interdisciplinary Perspectives :: February 22, 2008 :: CRASSH, University of Cambridge.

Over the past year, the Cambridge University City Seminar at CRASSH has explored diverse and enlivening topics in the study of cities, urban space, architecture, and visual and material culture. These topics have ranged widely in time and space, from predictions for the age of the supermetropolis to the use of digital technology in architectural space to an analysis of Mussolini’s use of Rome’s imperial past in the construction of its present.

Out of these encounters emerged an aspiration to allow for a more intense investigation of a particular area within this field. This will find its preliminaryculmination in a one-day conference to be hosted by the City Seminar organisers at CRASSH in Lent term 2008. Continue reading

Air Detritus is derived from sounds that were collected from the air and water detritus of Central Park, New York. Sounds were collected via a 2-way radio submerged in a pond, and on land. The act of recycling materials into a new piece, and re-using objects and sound fragments seems a way to re-imagine the world, a symbolic treatment that enacts the idea of sustainability as an elusive but critical goal of consuming fewer materials. As a consumer working with digital tools, I have accumulated many old monitors, hard drives, cords, and interfaces that are quickly obsolete. The molded plastic and metal have a perverse dialectical relationship to the data of ones and zeros that are transported and stored. This piece is a moment of reflection upon these relationships, and our relationship to the world. - Miya Masaoka Continue reading