Adam Nash is a new media artist, composer, programmer, performer and writer. He works primarily in networked real-time 3D spaces, exploring them as live audiovisual performance spaces. His sound/composition and performance background strongly informs his approach to creating works for virtual environments, embracing sound, time and the user as elements equal in importance to vision. Adam’s work has been presented in galleries, festivals and online in Australia, Europe, Asia and the Americas, including SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and the Venice Biennale. He also works as composer and sound artist with “Company in Space” (AU) and “Igloo” (UK), exploring the integration of motion capture into real-time 3D audiovisual spaces. He is currently undertaking a Master of Arts by Research at the “Centre for Animation and Interactive Media” at RMIT University, Melbourne, researching multi-user 3D cyberspace as a live performance medium; and he’s a Lecturer in “Computer Games and Digital Art” in the School of Creative Media at RMIT University. Continue reading

Bagatelle Concrete by Martin Pichlmair (AT) at CODED CULTURES - Exploring Creative Emergences:

Bagatelle Concrete is a pinball machine turned musical instrument. It is played for making music rather than achieving a high score. Consequently, the score board was replaced with customized speakers. The more successfully the player interacts with the machine, the more intense the accompanying soundtrack gets. The piece maintains the roughness of the electromechanical original game, mixing physical sounds happening on the playing field with manipulations of their recordings. All you hear originates in your style of play. Listen here. Continue reading

The Institute of Unnecessary Research presents e-MobLArt — Exhibition of the European Mobile Lab for Interactive Media Artists following a one year collaboration :: May 20 - June 10, 2009 :: Opening: May 20; 8:00 pm :: Center for Contemporary Art - Warehouse B1, Thessaloníki, Greece.

The exhibition includes two projects involving Anna Dumitriu: KryoLab is an installation that brings together bioart, ice sculpture and sound, in an investigation of delicate relationships in the Arctic ecosystem. This work is about our journey, the experience of participating in the E-MobiLArt project, working with artists from other backgrounds and travelling to new locations. Initial discussions about the nature of arctic, the sound of cracking ice, the disintegration of ice with sound, and the bacterial flora of the Arctic, discussed under the hot Athens sun at the first workshop gained momentum during long nights of conversation illuminated by the cool midnight sun at the edge of the Arctic Circle. Continue reading

Mendi + Keith Obadike: Four Electric Ghosts :: May 14-16, 2009; 8:00 pm :: The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, NYC + Streamed Live.

Performance duo Mendi + Keith Obadike premiere Four Electric Ghosts, a new multimedia opera that extends their experiments with layered narratives, online performance, and popular culture. Drawing from Amos Tutuola’s novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and the arcade game Pac-Man®, the work creates a composite world at the intersection of game culture, the folktale, and pop songs. Told from the perspective of ghosts, the narrative evolves through masquerade, movement, live music, and video interviews.

With text by Mendi, Keith on laptop, choreography and dancers from Angela’s Pulse Performance Projects, and new music created in collaboration with bassist/producer Melvin Gibbs and musician Guillermo E. Brown.

Abstract — Chiptune refers to a collection of related music production and performance practices sharing a history with video game soundtracks. The evolution of early chiptune music tells an alternate narrative about the hardware, software, and social practices of personal computing in the 1980s and 1990s. By digging into the interviews, text files, and dispersed ephemera that have made their way to the Web, we identify some of the common folk-historical threads among the commercial, noncommercial, and ambiguously commercial producers of chiptunes with an eye toward the present-day confusion surrounding the term chiptune. Using the language of affordances and constraints, we hope to avoid a technocratic view of the inventive and creative but nevertheless highly technical process of creating music on computer game hardware. Continue reading

Pace Digital Gallery is pleased to present Turbulence@ PaceDigitalGallery, an exhibition premiering 3 works commissioned by Turbulence.org :: April 7 - May 1, 2009 :: Reception: April 7, 5:00 - 7:00 pm :: 163 William Street, New York City.

Hard Data — by R. Luke DuBois — is a data-mining, sonification, and visualization project that uses statistics from the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as source material for an interactive audiovisual composition based around an open-source “score” of events. Using Xenakis’ understanding of formalized music as a starting point, DuBois will use a variety of statistical data ranging from the visceral (civilian deaths, geospatial renderings of military actions) to the mundane (fiscal year budgets for the war) to generate a dataset that can be used for any number of audiovisual compositions. Continue reading

Floating Points 6: Games of Culture | Art of Games — A Film Screening, Symposium and Workshops with Asi Burak, Anita Fontaine, Jesper Juul, Friedrich Kirschner, Marcin Ramocki, Jason Rohrer, Adriana de Souza Silva, Mushon Zer-Aviv :: March 20-21, 2009 :: Emerson College, Boston + streamed live on the web and in Second Life.

Video games extend beyond the gaming console into nearly every aspect of contemporary life. They are fun. They drive innovation, consumer engagement and employee productivity. Is our culture turning everything into a game? Video Games have had a greater impact on narrative form than any medium since film. Continue reading

Playable Media: A New Research Focus at UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA Program; under the direction of Noah Wardrip-Fruin :: Applications Due February 15 for Fall 2009 Admission.

UC Santa Cruz is pleased to announce an MFA for artists working with computer games, software toys, interactive fictions, rhetorical simulations, and related playable forms. The university’s Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program has added Playable Media as a research focus for its collaborative faculty-student projects. Applications to the DANM MFA program for Fall 2009 are being accepted through February 15, and are encouraged from the broad diversity of artists who create work that invites and structures play. Continue reading

Performances Night / Festival multimedia GAMERZ 04: Confipop - 4 bits Gameboy Live :: February 6, 2009; 9:00 pm to midnight :: Aix-en-Provence, France.

Confipop - 4 bits Gameboy live: Confipop is a chipmusic Marseille based artist who makes music with a Gameboy and some modified sound toys. Native from the techno free party, he has been making music under different pseudonyme since 1996. As the best dancefloor’s friend, Confipop makes a happy and groovy dancing music, which goes from reggaeblip to technoblop, with the specific 4 bits sound of the gameboy: a modern music with old forgotten gamesound, very appropriated to have fun. Building his own toys/instruments, Confipop is an adept and a teacher of “circuitbending”, which consists in modifying toys in order to make music rather than buying expensive instruments. Continue reading

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