Alex Carpenter (Guitar, Laser, Live Video & Audio Delay Systems) :: James Ross (Guitar, Live Audio Delay System) :: Richard Lainhart (Guitar, Electronics, Film):: An Evening of New Immersive Audio Visual Work :: June 26, 2010; 8:30 – 11:00 pm :: Youth Group Gallery, 19 Hope St. (Basement), Brooklyn, NY.

image: Alex Carpenter’s live video delay system – Photo by Laura Coady

ALEX CARPENTER is an Australian-born musician, video artist and researcher based in New York City. He has performed extensively as a soloist playing guitar, keyboard and electric zither through a self-designed multi-amp and delay network he calls the Live Audio Delay System, and has also independently produced and coordinated over twenty large-scale ensemble performance and multi-media events under the moniker Music of Transparent Means.
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Curve by composer Peter Traub is an installation for four speakers and a long curved wall. It was also the final work of his five-piece dissertation series exploring physical, virtual, and hybrid spaces as compositional tools. The balcony walkway at the rear of University of Virginia’s Old Cabell Hall is bounded by a curved wall creating an intense, prolonged, and stunning echo that varies dramatically as one moves along the space. Curve played with this pronounced artifact along the wall’s 150 foot length.

Using four speakers placed along the wall, the piece created an enveloping sound environment that varied as listeners walked from one end of the balcony to the other. In combining the unique sonic properties of the space with precisely tuned pitches, timbres, and rhythms, the installation made audible both the dramatic ricocheting echo and the effect of sound taking 135 milliseconds to travel from one end to the other–a perceptible and musically useful delay. The installation’s swells, drones, pops, pitches, and silences transformed the less-visited rear of the hall into a large immersive instrument.

See a slide show of Curve here.

Trace Aureity by Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona) [Needs Second Life account and client (free)] – Trace Aureity is an interactive, immersive, audiovisual sculpture located in the 3-D synthetic world Second Life. There are eighty-eight manipulated field recordings — from city streets, birdsong, to talkback radio — and ninety-six nested rotating objects densely arranged in a three dimensional grid. Avatars, either solo or in groups, generate sounds by moving through the installation. Some of the innermost nested objects, colored red, also spawn glowing spheres which fly out and bounce around inside the work, triggering sounds as they pass through other objects. Because the playable space is so dense, players are rewarded by slowing down their movements as much as possible, since even miniscule movements create differences in sonic output. Continue reading

[Image: “The Carnie”. Photo by Luhring Augustine] Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller :: until May 21, 2010 :: Luhring Augustine , 531 West 24th Street, New York, NY.

Luhring Augustine presents an exhibition of new work by the collaborative team Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. This marks Cardiff and Miller’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are internationally recognized for their immersive multimedia works. Incorporating dramatic audio tracks into their visually striking installations, the artists create engaging and transcendent multisensory experiences which draw the viewer into ambiguous and unsettling narratives. Their works address grand themes such as time, voyeurism, dreams, and mystery. Providing only fragments of information, the completion of the storylines, images and thoughts are left to be formed in the minds of the individual viewers.

No Images, a performance in the dark :: April 6, 2010; 7:00 – 8:00 pm :: Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue, Toronto, ON.

Developed by curators Pablo de Ocampo, Jacob Korczynski and Christof Migone, No Images features the work of Ryan Driver, Annie MacDonell, Alexis O’Hara & Mary Margaret O’Hara and Alex Snukal. Imagine a pitch-black space. Immersed in absolute darkness, you cannot see your own hand, you have no idea of the size of the space that you are in, and your sense of time is completely lost. One’s typical dependence upon an encounter anchored by eyesight is replaced by an amorphous and immersive environment. This presentation strategy is not only ideally suited for sound art, it is also a radical engagement of the senses by way of complete deprivation of the visual. Continue reading

In his first solo exhibition in New England, sound artist and electronic musician Stephen Vitiello creates Something Like Fireworks, a new installation at the Davis Museum in Wellesley. The installation, done in collaboration with lighting designer Jeremy Choate, features Vitiello’s field recordings from the Australian outback, the Canadian wilderness, a Virginia marsh, and New York City’s streets. Vitiello’s soundtrack moves between the abstract and the recognizable, attuning us to the subtleties of ambient sound. In this piece, sound is connected with light and color, creating an immersive synaesthetic experience. The lighting has been designed in sympathy with the audio, and the resulting combination surrounds the visitor, altering our spatial perception. The installation is on view through June 6 at the Davis Museum on the campus of Wellesley College. Continue reading

Epic Doom: Black Metal City — a work-in-progress performance by Nick Lesley, debuting at the 2009 Play With Fire Festival :: November 15, 2009; 4:00 pm :: 1717 Troutman Street, Queens, NY (L to Jefferson) .

Analogous Projects is pleased to announce Epic Doom: Black Metal City, a generative sound- and video-installation illustrating societal ills as emergent phenomena. It utilizes the familiar and extreme black-metal aesthetic to allude to modern society’s shared sense of panic. This immersive installation processes the physical actions of visitors and passersby and re-presents those actions in real time, providing illustrations of human agency and diffusion of responsibility.

Admission will be free and open to the public.

Jeff Tallman: Mouth To Mouth, Immersed in the Resonance of a Kiss :: September 9, 2009 :: Lecture: 6:00 p.m. :: Opening Reception: 7:30 p.m. :: School of Architecture, Art and Historic Preservation, Exhibition Gallery, Roger Williams University, Bristol, 1 Old Ferry Road, RI.

The sound source for this work is the resonance of a single kiss, 28 channel audio, 38 speakers, diffusion plates, steel connecting rods, hardware, cable, 1-channel video, 17 scenes for two actors. The work features Amanda Stark and Javier Garcera.

Talman will present a lecture on the impact of natural spatial resonance in architecture for the school’s Fall 2009 Public Events Series.

For Talman’s Statement, go here. Also see interview.

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

In the Dark (Belgian premiere) by
Armando Menicacci and Christian Delécluse at City Sonics :: Ateliers des FUCAM, Rue des soeurs noires 2 – 7000 MONS.

In the dark is an immersive sound experience that draws the solitary spectator into a totally obscured room. Without visual reference mark and under the influence of mysterious sound environment, the visitor is tempted to create new references in order to get a hold of the space he hears. Stories, voices, indications suggest the situations taking place in the places he cannot see. In this installation by Armando Meniacci and Christian Delécluse, he can but only imagine them and respond with gestures and movements. He is free to take action, but the sounds hunt him, avoid or invite him… In the dark… thus develops a different perception of the body and offers an intense time, the experience to be another.