Faster Than Sound :: Bentwaters Airbase :: June 9, 2007 :: 6 pm - midnight.

Faster Than Sound is a sound experiment joining the dots between musical genres and digital art forms. Following its launch in June 2006, FTS returns to the cold war environment of Bentwaters airbase for more sonic exploration. Artists from a wide variety of backgrounds will collaborate and explore the worlds of electronic music genres, contemporary classical practice and interactive visual arts. A range of immersive installations, musical collaborations, a wireless walk in the woods, illuminated cold war military buildings and a large dome filled with inspiring sounds will make this a day you won’t forget. Allow yourself to be transported and experience the unexpected. Continue reading

Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio (BEAMS) at Spingold Theater Center present Puzzle Master. This is multimedia opera, a retelling of the Daedalus and Icarus myth, is set on an imaginary Caribbean island. Five singers perform in counterpoint with layers of computer-manipulated 5.0 channel surround sound and multiple video projections. Music by Eric Chasalow; libretto by F.D. Reeve; video by Denise Marika. Featuring performances by Jennifer Ashe, Donald Wilkinson, Pamela Dellal, Matthew Anderson, and Paul Guttry. Eric Hewitt conducts. Staging by Barbara Cassidy.

May 5, and 6, 8pm :: Admission: $20 general admission; student/senior discounts available :: The Laurie Theater Spingold Theater Center campus of Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02453 :: phone: 781.736.3400 :: email: music at brandeis.edu

Performance de S.S.S. Atau Tanaka, Cécile Babiole, Laurent Dailleau avec le “Dimi H” dÈrkki Kurenniemi. Video by Christina Kral http://malaupixel.org http://pixelache.ac.

Roman Stolyar, Susan Allen, Nicholas Chase and friends - Mutli-Media and Music at REDCAT :: April 27, 2007, 8:30PM :: Corner of 2nd and Hope Streets in the Walt Disney Concert Hall Complex 637 W. 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 (213-237-2800) :: Tickets $18 (students $14, CalArts $10)

The Russian free jazz innovator and members of the CalArts Improvisation Ensemble weave together a series of new collaborative multimedia works developed using Stolyar’s unique “Improvising Orchestra” methodology. In a continuance of their ongoing collaboration, Chase and Allen join Stolyar, forging ahead into uncharted aesthetic territory. This project was first begun in
Siberia between Allen and Stolyar following an arts conference that touched on improvised music as a means for transnational communication. Chase’s interactive visual work with the improvising trio NIRUSU III (Chase, Allen, Pearson) has been acclaimed by the LA Weekly as “pushing the edge of audio/visual improv”, and his animated/projected composition 2UIQ was featured last October at the Illuminated Corridor (San Francisco/Oakland) exhibition Mobility. In this appearance at REDCAT, Chase explores the possibility of a dynamic, spontaneously composed visual narrative that includes animated film, vector generated graphics, and electro-acoustic musical improvisation, performed by Chase and Stolyar together. Continue reading

Ondulation, by Thomas McIntosh, is a composition for water, sound and light. It employs a two ton pool of water which is set into motion using sound. Beams of light are projected onto the surface of the water and reflect onto a projection screen. The pool becomes a “liquid mirror” that is slowly sculpted into perfect three-dimensional expressions of a musical composition. In turn, the light on the screen is modulated by the movement of the water into complex visual forms which maintain perfect congruity with their musical source. The resulting fusion of sensory experiences is a temporal sculpture: a construction of water, sound and light which evolves as a composition in time.

“We enter a room and are plunged into semi-darkness. The room is dominated by an immense basin of water, ripples radiating across its surface in concentric rings. Intuitively we know that the sounds around us are closely related to the ripples, a fact reinforced by the water’s reflected movements on the surrounding walls through a sophisticated play of light. As we get closer, it becomes clear that the sounds are emanating from speakers concealed under the basin, the source of the ripples on the water’s surface. Continue reading

You Bring the Secret Location to Life

REMOTE is an interactive environmental installation containing a range of sound and visual effects. Installed in an outdoor space, the installation is activated, controlled, and navigated using a common household remote control which may be supplied by the viewer. The piece takes the form of an intervention in an outdoor space, along a street or in a small park. There’s an “insider” element to the installation since, when not activated, its location may not be immediately apparent to a passerby. Additionally, the viewer needs to know to bring a remote to the location to bring the secret to life. Continue reading

An Evolving Opera

OPERA.tion LIFE NEXUS: Jorge Orta began this mixed media work in 1996 and it will evolve and grow in length until 2006. Based on interdisciplinary collaborations, 3 generations of artists are invited to create a module for the open-ended composition: music scores, dance sequences, sculpture, light and video projections. The federating theme is the heart = Life, the creative idiom from both a symbolic and Human perspective. Its complex mythology renders the symbol poetic.

The Babylonians designated the heart the center of intelligence and memory. For the Egyptians it represented the terrestrial support for the soul. Hypocrite refer to the heart as the intelligence organ. Plato believed the heart was the center of feelings and passion. For Aristotle the heart transformed food into blood and was the emotional centre. Its universal nature helps to converge cultural, social, religious differences and from a scientific angle it exposes a new vision of a medical problem.
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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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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

Glimpses of Unseen Places

A landscape from beyond the edges of the browser window that gives glimpses of unseen places. dotdotdot is constructed using several different motion capture systems and improvised performances creating abstract digital portraits. These animated avatars move and react to players inputs within an online virtual environment.

“dotdotdot provides a good example of the ways in which practitioners using old media and new media can collaborate to produce an ongoing body of work challenging the canons from which each component of the work orginates. Using motion capture, web tools, animation, games engines, sound and movement dotdotdot presents a series of animated interactive vignettes. These can be manipulated in terms of speed, sound, rotation and movement so that the basis of the range of visuals on offer stays the same but also so that the viewer/player can change them to accommodate their own preferences. [via Rhizome]
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