Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller create multimedia pieces that combine aspects of sculpture, cinema, sound installation, and short-story fiction. Installations such as ‘The Paradise Institute’ (2001) use forced perspective and a three-dimensional sound track to create the illusion that one is sitting in a large theater. Their ‘sound walks’ and ‘video walks’ are immersive pieces that use common consumer technologies, such as iPods and video cameras, to create experiences that blur the line between experienced reality and narrative fiction. Their works are exhibited internationally and they currently have a solo exhibit ‘The Killing Machine and other stories’ that will arrive at the Miami Art Museum on Oct. 15, 2007.

Due to Janet and George’s busy schedule, they will not be able to answer reader’s questions in the comments section following the interview. Continue reading

A mixed reality, typographical videoclip for “Cuarteto de Nos“, a rock band from Uruguay (in Spanish). A nice mix of typographical effects with traced black & white cartoon-like band members. Thanks to information aesthetics.

SoundScapes by Rachael Watts 10/7/07 :: An article on the 2007 Soundscape Contest for the Zurich Digital Arts Week (DAW).

The word SoundScape conjures notions of sounds that range from the passive wallpaper variety to that of something engaging, interactive and assertive. Here SoundScape could be seen as according to Brian Eno, ‘music for everyday living’ or, sounds for potential or future living. For the Zurich Digital Art Weeks (DAW), 2007 a SoundScape programme was developed. The works selected, according to the DAW website, display an ability to ‘evoke the presence of things or beings in space to the extent that each work ‘immerses the listener into a real or imaginary sonic environment’. Immersion and engagement are key characteristics of all works to be presented.

We become easily affected by sound. It permeates the body through the ear, which is essentially a hole in the head, a fact Kahn and Whitehead remind us in their text “Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde”. It is how we choose to consume and compute this phenomena in conjunction with specific production techniques that dictate how immersive sound can be. It is important to understand how individually, we come to listen and interact with the sounds and what perspective and associations we bring to the sounds that determine our opinion of the quality and ingenuity. Continue reading

Das Kleine Field Recordings Festival in Second Life :: On the 10th of August will Rinus van Alebeek’s … Das Kleine Field Recordings Festival take place on Odyssey Island on Second Life. This is in parallel with the ongoing Berlin festival happenings at RAUM. The audience at RAUM will be able to follow the Second Life program from video beamer and surround audio system. The festival is going on for all August on different dates and locations and the 10th August is a special radio and Second Life day. The program is not all set yet, but some of the artists that will be heard at RAUM (either on location or from remote audio streams) are these: Continue reading

Rider Spoke by Blast Theory / The Mixed Reality Lab :: October 11-21, 2007 :: Part of bite07.

Take a cycle ride in the streets around the Barbican. A games console mounted on your handlebars will guide you as you roll through the City of London. Slip down an alley and find yourself in a quiet corner. Make a recording then move on glimpsing traces of other players, eavesdropping under a bridge or from the top of a multi story car park. Rider Spoke mixes theatre and location-based games to create an interactive installation on the streets. It continues Blast Theory’s groundbreaking sequence of games where none of the usual rules apply.

Created by Blast Theory in collaboration with The Mixed Reality Lab at University of Nottingham and Sony Net Services as a part of IPerG (Integrate Project on Pervasive Games).

Open Call :: Laboratoire Locus Sonus is recruiting 3 research fellows for the academic year 2007/2008 - “Emerging Practices in Sound and Acoustics Linked to Network Technologies” :: Deadline: September 1, 2007 :: Candidates should be available for interview at the Art School in Aix-en-Provence, France on September 6, 2007.

Locus Sonus is a research group specialized in audio art (involving the participating schools: École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Nice Villa Arson and the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Marseille)
in collaboration with CNRS/MMSH/LAMES Laboratory of the University of Provence. Locus Sonus experiments and evaluates the innovative and transdisciplinary nature of audio art forms in a lab-type context. Continue reading

tree wave is a Dallas based band that makes shoegazy pop music and video using obsolete 70′d and 80’s computer and videogame gear, accompanied by female vocals. The code to drive the music and video is our own, and it’s all dirty assembly language. Music comes from Commodore 64s, an old PC FM sound card (OPL3), and a dot matrix printer, and video is all Atari 2600. Our music is noisy pop, often with unusual song structure, and the video ranges from abstract color noise to actual hacked and deconstructed Atari 2600 games.

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Synthecology combines the possibilities of tele-immersive collaboration with a new architecture for virtual reality sound immersion to create a environment where musicians from all locations can interactively perform and create sonic environments.

Compose, sculpt, and improvise with other musicians and artists in an ephemeral garden of sonic lifeforms. Synthecology invites visitors in this digitally fertile space to create a musical sculpture of sythesized tones and sound samples provided by web inhabitants. Upon entering the garden, each participant can pluck contributed sounds from the air and plant them, wander the garden playing their own improvisation or collaborate with other participants to create/author a new composition.

As each new ’seed’ is planted and grown, sculpted and played, this garden becomes both a musical instrument and a composition to be shared with the rest of the network. Every inhabitant creates, not just as an individual composer shaping their own themes, but as a collaborator in real time who is able to improvise new soundscapes in the garden by cooperating with other avatars from diverse geographical locations.
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Happy New Ears (festival for New Music), Kortrijk (be)

notovo at Happy New Ears (festival for New Music), Kortrijk (be) :: The No2Pho/notovo research project: investigates the behaviour of language in its many appearances: textual, sonic and visual, as well as gestural or body language. How do these disparate elements relate to each other and how do they organize within a system which includes human and computer as a sender and a receiver [and vice versa].

The notovo-installation [article (PDF)]: as a generative sound installation NoToVo (noise to voice) plays with a connected set of elements. It is composed of dissonant synthetic voices, changing in real time from speech to sound. A physical network and a virtual network. People and voices. Wireless headphones and spatialized soundsources. People walk their traject through space. Their localisation and orientation is tracked. These data modulate the behaviour of realtime generated synthetic voices. As such, a conversation can be physically crossed and experienced according to the visitors’ own position. Voices are layered and mixed by movements and trajects through space: the visitor becomes the performer.
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VIRTUAL MUSIC COMPOSITION: Unsatisfied with just creating virtual plant life, a provactive multiplayer game, and ambitious machinima, Robbie Dingo has also been hard at work creating virtual world musical instruments that actually play in-world in real time. He extensively documents the creation of his “Hyper-Instruments” on his blog here and here, and recently sent me word of a song-writing contest for music composed to be performed on his new SL cello.

ADVENTURES IN IMMERSION: Seasoned RL/SL architect Jauani Wu takes us on a personal tour of successfully immersive spaces in Second Life, accompanied by a 3D designer’s manifesto written e.e. cummings style: immersion requires depth. it’s not sufficient for one enclosed space to be finely constructed. it requires that the next space be so as well. and the space after that. immersion works better when the surface of one space frames the next. it reinforces the notion of world. By my lights, mandatory reading for builders looking to truly transform the world according to their vision. Read it all here. [posted on New World Notes]