The Killing Machine and other Stories :: Since the early nineties Janet Cardiff (Brussels, Ontario, Canada, 1957) and George Bures Miller (Vegreville, Canada, 1960) have been working together on works in which they use sound and voice as raw material and main subject. Through techniques of edition and reproduction of binaural sound and the use of earphones and loudspeaker systems these works can be characterised as authentic sound sculptures.

These installations become temporal units of experience, in narrations that combine fictional stories and sound effects and question the visitor’s sensory experience, opposing the sense of hearing with the sense of sight. The sculptural space is therefore transformed into a phantasmagorical or hallucinatory one where apparently contradictory cultural traditions coincide at a specific place and time. The spectator is looking at works that are difficult to classify, since they propose a collage that brings together forms of high culture such as opera, art films or literature with popular culture, B-movies, rock-n-roll or radio broadcasts. Continue reading

Net_Dérive, by Atau Tanaka and Petra Gemeinboeck with the collaboration of Ali Momeni, is a location sensitive mobile media art piece that calls for an exchange between participants in the gallery and participants in the streets. Deployed on advanced mobile phones, the work seeks to create a kind of musical instrument, thinking of the city-as-instrument.

Participants are given a kind of scarf with a mobile phone in each end and off they go to explore the neighborhood. One of the phones takes pictures every 20 secs and collects sounds, the other talks to the GPS (also in the scarf) and to the server inside the gallery space. Continue reading

Emotion Vending Machine 2006

Also at Transmediale 06: Maurice Benayoun’s Emotion Vending Machine–The mechanics of the world’s emotions evolve in the zone where economics and politics converge, in the world of product placement. Through its concept of artistic merchandizing, the Emotion Vending Machine deals with the production of emotions in an ironic way. The Machine takes Internet data as a global pool of emotions. Users can select up to three emotions from a list of nine emotional states, including hate, desire, or despair. The emotions are represented by 3D-maps of word clusters, extracted from the web and generated in realtime.

These maps show the emotions of the world as they are present on the web at that moment, mapped onto the actual position of major cities on the globe, a mix which can also be read like a music score. The musical interpretation deciphers the cities and their emotional polarity to produce a specific musical result by adapting rhythm, coloration and evolution to the selection of the emotional states made by the user. After listening to the personal result through the integrated speakers, users can plug in their USB stick or MP3 player to load their emotional sound remix.
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A Site-Specific Sound Installation in Boston Common

Itinerant–by Teri Rueb–is a site-specific sound installation in Boston, Massachusetts. It invites people to take a walk through Boston Common and surrounding neighborhoods to experience an interactive sound work that re-frames Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the classic tale of conflict between techno-scientific hubris and the human spirit. The project engages a search for an elusive character who is doppleganger to both the doctor and the creature. Sounds, ‘played’ by visitors as they move through the city, create a series of frames within which to reflect upon our highly mobile, technologically saturated society and issues of identity, place, and displacement. Mobile and locational media (GPS) formally underscore themes in the work. The sonic overlay is also presented as an interactive map on the web, creating a formal re-framing and displacement of this site-specific work (needs Flash Player, headphones and broadband connection).

Equipment may be picked up through May 7, 2005 at the Judi Rotenberg Gallery, 130 Newbury Street, Boston. “Itinerant” is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore). It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation and the LEF Foundation.

Envisioning Post iPodalyptic Mobile Music

Location33 investigates the potential for new types of music made possible by location tracking and wireless technologies. Listeners, with a GPS enabled PDA or mobile phone, walk around downtown Culver City, California and create a musical album that merges the traditional model of the song cycle with interactive narrative, location awareness, and game play.

Twenty nodes throughout the Culver City area act as portals into the world of the album. Each node is linked with a fragment of a song and when a player approaches one of the portals the music file is streamed to their device.
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Footstep Hack

“A virtual discovery of Copenhagen in the footsteps of the famous author Hans Christian Andersen has been hacked, possibly by ‘gay-activists’. Footsteps of Hans Christian Andersen – A Sound-Walk through the author’s Copenhagen is a part of the Danish celebration of the 2005 HC Andersen bicentenary. The project invites people to follow in his footsteps and listen to audio narratives via their mobile phones at selected locations.

The route is marked with 2000 footsteps painted on the sidewalks – however, by adding a few extra footsteps it was diverted to the doorstep of local gay-clubs. The small hack might be a statement, rather than a prank. The HC Andersen anniversary has been criticized by the gay community for ignoring the author’s homosexuality. E.g., a papercut by HC Andersen portraying two men holding hands inside a heart was used as a motif in a Christmas decoration by the fashionable department store Magasin du Nord – but instead of two men holding hands, the original artwork was ‘corrected’ to a woman and a man.” See article (Danish) [blogged on guerrilla-innovation]

Interactive, Location-based Narrative Distributed in Space and Time

“As computing and communications technologies evolve, there is the potential for new forms of digitally orchestrated interactive narratives to emerge. In this process, balanced attention has to be paid to audience experience, creative constraints, and presence and role of the enabling technology. This paper describes the implementation of HopStory, an interactive, location-based narrative distributed in space and time, which was designed with this balance in mind. In HopStory, cinematic media is housed within wireless sculptures distributed throughout a building. The audience, through physical contact with a sculpture, collects scenes for later viewing. Inspired by the history of the installation space the narrative relates a day in the life of four characters. By binding the story to local time and space and inviting the audience to wander, we amplify the meaning and impact of the HopStory content and introduce an innovative approach to a day-in-the-life story structure.” Abstract for Hopstory: an Interactive, Location-based Narrative Distributed in Space and Time by Valentina Nisi, Alison Wood, Glorianna Davenport and Ian Oakley [PDF]

Simultaneous Translation

John Roach is working on a multilocation networked audio performance called Simultaneous Translation which will involve players from USA, Spain, France, Italy and Germany. The first performance is slated for November 2004 in Madrid Spain. Other manifestations are planned for NYC and Trondheim Norway.

“In my first foray into networked performance entitled Negative Space it was the limitations of the streaming media which made the project difficult and exciting. This lag and flux is the starting point of Simultaneous Translation in which the idea of flux and slippage is put in the forefront and is compared to the slippages and mutations of language as it evolves. Another point of comparison is to the delays that occur on the web as data passes from router hop to router hop. In fact traceroute data will be used to manipulate audio streams from the remote participants, making the delay of the internet itself an active player in the project.”