Video, Interview: ATOM by Robert Henke, Christoph Bauder – Musical Balloon Sculpture by Peter Kirn — Inside a computer, digital music is entirely unseen. But translate it into the tangible world, and it can be anything you imagine – not limited by acoustic reality or practicality, music can become three-dimensional sculpture.

For artist Christoph Bauder and composer Robert Henke, ATOM’s light and sound sculpture found a three-dimensional matrix of balloons as its medium. Flashing in hypnotic patterns and moving into different configurations, accompanied by live laptop music from Henke (aka Monolake), music and visuals become an inseparable fusion.

ATOM received its North American premiere at Montreal’s MUTEK in May. That turned out to be perfect programming, as it placed ATOM in a week that featured complementary work from artists Artificiel. Continue reading

Graeme Miller :: Bassline :: Thursday, July 9 - Sunday 26 July 2009 :: 11am–8pm daily; 11am–10pm Thu; 12pm–10pm Sat 25 & Sun 26 :: Closed 13,15, 20 & 22 July :: in the Barbican Centre’s Car Park, London :: Opening Thursday, July 9

A series of projections reveal the landscape of the City as seen by 15 Londoners. See and hear the recorded testimonies of an hour- long walk made by the 15 participants accompanied by a double-bassist. The piece reveals participants’ memories, associations and perceptions of the area, capturing its unseen characteristics. Underscoring the work is a solo bass line mapping out the territory, based on a piece by Henry Purcell, to mark the 350th anniversary of this London-born composer.

Co-commissioned by barbicanbite09. Part of CREATE 09, part of the Barbican’s Do Something Different Weekend, part of Open Weekend. Continue reading

Tweak Festival :: September 21-26, 2009 :: Limerick City :: Call for Proposals — Deadline July 20, 2009.

Tweak is two! Currently in its second edition, Tweak is an interactive art and live electronic music festival. Its aim is to promote understanding of the use of technology within our culture and to explore contemporary issues (social, economic, psychological, aesthetic and functional).

The festival will consist of a 5-day exhibition, (interactive artworks, robots and installations) comprising of artworks from international and local artists, 3 days of workshops and many evenings of live electronic performance. Continue reading

Issue Project Room premieres a live performance of R. Luke Dublois’ Hard Data and presents works by Tony Conrad, David Soldier, and Brad Garton — performed by the Mivos String Quartet :: June 25, 2009; 8:00 - 11:00 pm :: Issue Project Room, At the Old American Can Factory, 232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY.

Turbulence Commission: Hard Data by R. Luke DuBois [Needs Flash plugin and speakers; wait for data to load] Hard Data 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. Continue reading

‘The Piano Etudes Project’ A Space for Play — Review by Les Loncharich, furtherfield.org: The Piano Etudes project by Jason Freeman, with Akito Van Troyer and Jenny Lin, is a move towards opening the forbidden city of musical composition. The project is based on piano etudes, musical compositions in which the pianist can rearrange connections between some open form pieces. Site visitors are invited to create their own etudes from four short compositions by Jason Freeman. Each etude is transcribed graphically into something that resembles an organizational chart. Each visual component of the chart has a corresponding audio note pattern. The pitch of a note pattern is roughly indicated by the height of a horizontal bar that is part of the graphic. A site user can select graphic elements and arrange them on a time-line to hear the resulting sound piece. Pieces created on the site can be saved and transcribed into musical notation so that pianists can perform pieces created by site visitors. More >>

More reviews on furtherfield.org or follow them on Twitter.

SonarMàtica 2009: Mecànics :: June 18-20, 2009 :: Barcelona.

Mecànics (the exhibition): Over the past decade, the spread of new digital production tools has led to a democratisation of the artistic process, ranging from the music industry to multimedia art. Home-made recording studios, audiovisual editing programs and online record labels have made projects that used to require major investments easily accessible. Today, the spirit of punk is standard cultural currency.

Becoming the conductor of Roland Olbeter’s robot orchestra, or creating your own musical compositions - simply by moving counters on a board - with the famous interactive table Reactable (Rolling Stone magazine’s Instrument of the Year in 2007), Continue reading

RiP: A Remix Manifesto (Filmmakers in attendance for Q&A) :: June 19-30, 2009; 10:00 pm :: 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson Street, New York, NY (Tickets).

In RiP: A Remix Manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers. The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. Continue reading

social [net.work music] — by Jason Sloan — is a new improvised network sound project and performance which utilizes the MySpace Music social network as its core sound library. Sloan will webcast a live set from his studio in Baltimore on June 25, 2009; 8:00 pm [EST].

“Recently, I’ve been interested in the the connections created through the MySpace Music social network. By navigating the “Friends Space” link section on each member’s page, reminiscent of web 1.0 webrings, the user can access an interconnected network of that artists influences, friends and label mates, allowing them to discover new artists and different genres of music. Most of the pages feature a jukebox with samples of the musicians work which automatically begin to play once the page has finished loading. Continue reading

Subtle Technologies Festival presents An Evening of Networked Performance curated by Willy Le Maitre :: June 12, 2009; 8:00 pm :: Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave., University of Toronto, Toronto.

In this World 2.0, the distant and out of time are those not on the network. Those not connected by the myriad of standards, protocols, interfaces and soft spots are from World 1.0. Seemingly, with more degrees removed from our mutual separation, we are unified by a network that, paradoxically, joins us and separates us. There is a quality of transparency to World 2.0 that make a users criticism difficult to recognize online. Continue reading

Rite Ways (work in progress) :: Angie Eng — Concept /Video, Thierry Madiot — Tubes, trombone,and Satoshi Takeishi — percussion :: June 9, 2009; 8:30 pm :: Roulette Intermedium @ Location One , 20 Greene St, NYC (between Canal and Grand), NYC.

Experimental video artist, Angie Eng revives cinepoetry with a new work in progress, Rite Ways with Thierry Madiot, master of breath and wind, inventor of instruments, trombonist who fuses improvised and contemporary music and special guest Satoshi Takeishi on percussion.

Rite Ways is a series of cinepoems based on the theme of rites of passage including pieces: Book of Light, Liminal, Passage and Ancestors. In these works Eng returns to methods of the early experimentalists, who approached cinema as a tool for magic. Continue reading