ItSpace, by Peter Traub, creates a network of pages within the social networking site MySpace. Instead of people, the pages feature everyday household objects from the artist’s house. Each page has a photo of the object, a description, and most importantly, a 1-minute piece composed of samples of the object being struck, resonated, and so forth. All the pages, or objects, are ‘friends’ with each other, so that visitors who discover one object may jump to the others to see their profiles and hear their sounds. Visitors to the site are invited to create new ItSpace pages with pieces made from their own household objects and link those in as ‘friends’ of the original set. Listen to an Interview >> Continue reading

My Space Sound by Sawako Kato [Requires Mac OSX, Flash Player, and a fast Internet connection] - My Space Sound is an audio popup book about the village called MySpace. The story starts like this: “Once upon a time … there was a village called MySpace. It is the era when so-called ‘Web 2.0′ is still a novelty…” Users can participate in the story by entering their MySpace URL, as well as by just browsing the story. In a world composed of both facts and fictions extracted from the database, the audience gets a chance to rethink the chaotic social network space. Continue reading

I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On by Haeyoung Kim (a.k.a Bubblyfish) [Needs Flash Player and Speakers On] - I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On is an interactive art piece inspired by Samuel Beckett’s short novel, “Molloy.” The work is presented in two parts: a blog for you to contribute your thoughts about Beckett’s writing; and the multimedia generated by your entries.

“In 2007 I began to learn to ride a bicycle. This for me was a choice not so much determined by reasons of pleasure but as a way of manifesting my need to literally move on with my life. Around the same time, I began to read Beckett’s famous Three Novels, and was moved in particular by “Molloy.” Bicycles are a very important metaphor in this book.” Haeyoung Kim Continue reading

Storm King by Amit Pitaru - The Sonic Wire Sculptor project was originally created by Pitaru as a personal instrument to compose, record and perform music. During concerts, audience members often inquired whether they could experience the tool first hand. This encouraged Pitaru to transform the software into a public installation. The installation included enhancements to the original work, allowing a wider range of users to intuitively interact with the instrument. Continue reading

Trace Aureity by Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona) [Needs Second Life account and client (free)] - Trace Aureity is an interactive, immersive, audiovisual sculpture located in the 3-D synthetic world Second Life. There are eighty-eight manipulated field recordings — from city streets, birdsong, to talkback radio — and ninety-six nested rotating objects densely arranged in a three dimensional grid. Avatars, either solo or in groups, generate sounds by moving through the installation. Some of the innermost nested objects, colored red, also spawn glowing spheres which fly out and bounce around inside the work, triggering sounds as they pass through other objects. Because the playable space is so dense, players are rewarded by slowing down their movements as much as possible, since even miniscule movements create differences in sonic output. Continue reading

The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is an exploration of a real-time collaborative composition local network. All of the performers have identical performance/composition programs — a custom flexible step-sequencer — that invite play with rhythmic cycles of various lengths and timbres. The real fun starts, however, when the players begin spying on their neighbors, secretly, via the network, and stealing their ideas with the click of the mouse. Unplanned structures begin to emerge, like oil on water, as riffs propagate and evolve, sometimes returning unrecognizable to their creators. Continue reading

Rust Belt / Bayou by Julia Christensen [Needs Flash Player and Speakers] - Rust Belt / Bayou is an aural exploration of two cities: Cleveland, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. For the past several years, Christensen’s artistic practice has been based in extensive travel throughout the United States, surveying the ways in which communities are changing in the shadow of corporate real estate development.

During these travels, she has often been struck by the similarities between Cleveland, a city of the Rust Belt, and New Orleans, a city of the bayou. Both cities dwell on the shores of bodies of water with global reach: Cleveland on Lake Erie, New Orleans on the Mississippi River. Continue reading

[’til death do us a part] by Tobias c. van Veen (aka saibotuk) - Dead media unwinds time from its spools. Two electromagnetic machines capture the unfolding of an era in which memory encodes the loving caress of electron imprinted tape. Time out of joint falls in & out of tape sync; more inhuman than human loops the frequency. “I wanted my human experience with machinic love to have the intensity of a hands-on relationship.”

Thus, van Veen turned to reel-to-reel (RTR) tape machines and Konstantin Raudive’s experiments with blank media in which he attempted to record the ‘voices of the dead’. (Little did van Veen know that John Hudak was exploring similar terrain in Voices from the Paradise Network.) Continue reading

Network Sonification by Zach Layton [Needs Quicktime Player] - In Network Sonification, a program written in java crawls across the Internet, grabbing as many related URLs as possible and analyzing their contents. Using Max/MSP, the data coming from the webcrawler program is translated into sound. The frequency and range of words, images and links on these pages create a kind of aural snapshot, giving each page a unique sonic character that is written in real time. Layton offers us a range of sonic portraits, from Boing Boing to the New York Times, enabling us to experience them as networked sonic entities rather than discrete visual/semantic pages. Continue reading

Voices from the Paradise Network by John Hudak, with Flash programming by erational.org [Needs Flash Player and speakers on] - John writes: My mother-in-law passed away recently, reminding me of a technique that a parapsychologist named Dr. Konstantin Raudive (1906-1974) used to record what he purported to be voices of deceased spirits. With the amount of information moving around on the internet these days, and the passing of my mother-in-law, who I thought would want to get in touch (if possible), I thought I’d give Raudive’s technique a try within the digital realm. Continue reading