“A new smartpen could change the way people practice mobile computing by bringing processing power to traditional pen and paper. Made by Livescribe, of Oakland, CA, the smartpen is designed to digitize the words and drawings that a user puts down on paper and bring them to life.

So long as the user writes on paper printed with a special pattern, the smartpen transforms what is written into interactive text. For example, the pen has a recording function, called paper replay, that can record sound and connect it to what the user writes while the sounds are being recorded. Later, the user can tap the pen over what she wrote and replay the associated sounds. “We’re starting to make the whole world of printable surfaces accessible and functional,” says Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff.” Continue reading Computing on Paper - Livescribe’s smartpen turns a sheet of paper into a computer by Erica Naone, Technology Review.

INVITATION TO JOIN KUNSTRADIO’S CELEBRATION OF ART’S BIRTHDAY 2008! Celebrating Art’s Birthday is a tradition started by French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou who declared, on January 17th 1963, that Art had been born exactly 1,000,000 years ago when somebody dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water.

Throughout the last decades artists have continued organising annual celebrations in the spirit of Filliou’s “Eternal Network” or “La Fête permanente”. In 2008 people all over the world will again be preparing numerous networked birthday parties for art, several of these under the motto “Forever Young”. Continue reading

MIT students compose literary texts on Dymo label makers. [blogged by Nick on Grand Text Auto]

smSage, by Tim Redfern + Ralph Borland, is a device to plant a murmur in the city. Mimicking a piece of faceless urban infrastructure, it murmurs to itself and to passersby, and seems to come from nowhere, a blank spot on an ordinary wall… Or which ubiquitous urban object is producing the sound? Which alarm-box, conduit, or… security camera?

smSage receives SMS text messages, which are converted to audible speech, using a text-to-speech engine with a synthesized voice. It speaks these messages coherently at first, but which each repetition, starts to mix them with previous messages it has received, producing a concrete poem. The voice becomes quieter … A new message wakes it up again, for brief lucidity, before sense begins to dissolve again. Continue reading

Kenji Siratori - Federico Barabino (Agua I)

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Roulette: Zach Layton :: June 26, 2007; 8:30 pm :: 20 Greene St. (between Canal and Grand) 2 blocks west of Broadway :: $15 at the Door :: Harvestworks, DTW members, students, seniors: $10 :: Roulette & Location One, members free :: Reservations: 212.219.8242.

Dense layers of low frequency oscillations, intersecting with synchronized abstract visualizations. Live interactions between electric guitar and laptop and a new work for multiple voices, winds, percussion and electronics by Ray Sweeten (synthesizer) and Bruce Tovsky (laptop) with text written and narrated by Vito Acconci. Continue reading

Avatar.Digitale.Poesie :: du 24 juin au 22 juillet 2007 :: du mardi au dimanche, de 17 h à 22 h :: vernissage et performance le 24 juin à 17 h :: Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, Knaackstraße 97 (Kulturbrauerei), 10435 Berlin :: fon: +49.30.48 52 45 0 :: mail(at)literaturwerkstatt.org

[English description] Le 18 juin, Avatar, association de création et de diffusion sonores et électroniques de Québec, s’envolera pour l’Allemagne afin d’y présenter, dans le cadre de la 8e édition du Festival de poésie de Berlin, quatre installations et une performance. Voir le site d’Avatar spécialement créé pour l’événement ici. Continue reading

Let Them Sing it For You, by Erik Bunger, takes your words and sings it out by piecing together snippets taken from hundreds of song lyrics.

Through pop lyrics you learn to identify your own personal feelings of love, loneliness and joy with those of famous stars. Behind these public feelings there are often the desires of commercial powers such as record and film companies. Through Let them sing it for you, you get the possibility of doing it the other way around. Instead of letting your vocabulary of feelings be dictated by famous voices, let the famous voices express your innermost thoughts. Continue reading

Non-Event: Laetitia Sonami & Joel Ryan w/ Inventmusic :: April 21, 2007 @ 9:00 pm :: Killian Hall at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

LAETITIA SONAMI was born in France and settled in the United States in 1975 to pursue her interest in the emerging field of electronic music. Her work combines text, music and “found sound” from the world, in compositions which have been described as “performance novels”. She is creating and utilizing some of the most sophisticated technologies in order to create an intimate, spontaneous art form which transcends technology. Since 1991 she has developed and adapted new gestural controllers to musical performance and composed works with these materials. Her unique instrument, the lady’s glove, is made out of black lycra and is embedded with sensors which track the slightest motion of each finger, the hand, and the arm. The performance thus becomes a small dance where the movements shape the music. She lives in Oakland, California and is currently guest lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute, and Milton Avery Summer program at Bard college. Continue reading

ATH-LDN presents a wide panorama of contemporary audio production emerging from Greece across various platforms & venues in London: an aural journey through sound installations, experimental live art performances, independent record label showcases, art-rock performances & actions, audio-visual experiences and radio sessions. An eclectic mix of established and emergent art practitioners who focus on the creative use of both digital and analogue sound, multi-media and other current technologies, while finding inventive ways to perform, communicate and distribute their work. Creative direction & project coordination: Chloe Vaitsou.

One of the events in ATH-LDN is Statistical Harp, an interactive audiovisual installation by Coti & Dimitris Charitos which opens next Monday at E:vent Gallery and will be open from 16 till 29 April. Statistical Harp takes its name from the ancient Aeolic Harp, which was probably the first ever sound installation (6th century B.C.) that was usually located on hilltops and produced sound by the wind vibrating its strings. Continue reading