“Moving across two and a half decades from the windy north Atlantic coast of Canada to the center of Warsaw, the large-scale Aeolian instruments of Gordon Monahan form a temporal bridge between the Fluxus-propelled experimental music of the sixties and seventies and contemporary sound art production. Taking the former’s deconstruction of musical heritage and combining it with an approach closely related to land art, in 1984 Gordon Monahan made his first long string installation in the snow covered plains of New Brunswick. His Long Aeolian Piano had wires 20 to 50 meters long attached to its sounding board. The wires were strung across a field so that, when exited by the wind, they produced Aeolian tones that would travel across the landscape, placing a spell on the quiet Canadian countryside. In 2010 Gordon Monahan produced a new work for the old city center of Warsaw, A Piano Listening To Itself – Chopin Chord. Continue reading

Taming Technology - Addomesticare la Tecnologia :: April 22-23, 2011 — Associazione Culturale Nub in Montale (PT) + April 29-30, 2011 — Le Murate, via delle carceri, Italy (at the historical prison complex of Le Murate and at the club Cargo).

Switch - Creative Social Network in collaboration with Associazione Culturale Nub and Tempo Reale present Taming Technology, a two day program including performances, DJ sets, installations, lectures and workshops exploring the territory between music, art and new media. The focus will be on practices such as physical computing, interface and interaction design, hardware hacking and biological computation, framed as fields of research capable of providing new connections between the virtual domain and the physical world. Continue reading

Curve by composer Peter Traub is an installation for four speakers and a long curved wall. It was also the final work of his five-piece dissertation series exploring physical, virtual, and hybrid spaces as compositional tools. The balcony walkway at the rear of University of Virginia’s Old Cabell Hall is bounded by a curved wall creating an intense, prolonged, and stunning echo that varies dramatically as one moves along the space. Curve played with this pronounced artifact along the wall’s 150 foot length.

Using four speakers placed along the wall, the piece created an enveloping sound environment that varied as listeners walked from one end of the balcony to the other. In combining the unique sonic properties of the space with precisely tuned pitches, timbres, and rhythms, the installation made audible both the dramatic ricocheting echo and the effect of sound taking 135 milliseconds to travel from one end to the other–a perceptible and musically useful delay. The installation’s swells, drones, pops, pitches, and silences transformed the less-visited rear of the hall into a large immersive instrument.

See a slide show of Curve here.

Cornelius Cardew and the freedom of listening :: May 8 - June 25, 2010 :: Culturgest Porto Edifício da Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Avenida dos Aliados, 104, 4000-065 Porto, Portugal.

Culturgest is pleased to announce Cornelius Cardew and the freedom of listening, an exhibition and program of events curated by Dean Inkster, Jean-Jacques Palix, Lore Gablier, and Pierre Bal-Blanc.

The English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) is undoubtedly one of the major composers to have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. His radical approach to composition and his political reflection on the status of music making led him, in the late sixties, to instigate one of the most important attempts to establish the democratic claims of avant-garde culture. Continue reading

Videotage is proud to present Hong Kong-based Portuguese artist Joao Vasco Paiva as the first selected artist-in-residence of fuse:: residency program 2010. The objective of fuse:: residency program has always been encouraging individuals interested in the field of new media art, be it art & technology, art & science or art & anything, to create new works. With the support from Videotage, Joao Vasco Paiva will bring the audience a new sculptural sound installation Chirps, through which he creates a score by determining rules.

The prototype of the work (v1) was presented in the Microwave International New Media Art Festival 2009 in which a set of toy birds performed a sequence of calls and movement interfered by the passers-by at the lobby of Langham Hotel, while this time, Vasco has made the toy birds migrate to the raw space of Videotage where they would react to the motion and sound of a new player - a real mynah bird. Continue reading

Sonic Acts XIII — The Poetics of Space: Spatial explorations in art, science, music and technology :: February 25-28, 2010 :: Paradiso, de Balie, NIMk and STEIM, Amsterdam :: 20% Early Bird discount on the festival until January 15, 2010!

The thirteenth Sonic Acts Festival in Amsterdam is entirely dedicated to the exploration of space in performative and audiovisual art, film, music and architecture. Sonic Acts XIII - The Poetics of Space examines the importance of physical space in times of far-reaching technological developments, and the physical and psychological impact of spatial designs.

Researching spatiality in the arts forms the core of the festival. How is space defined by a work of art? What does a viewer or listener experience? How do technological artworks deal with the visual, auditory and psychological aspects of spatiality? Continue reading

in clean air we fly — a new outdoor electronic symphony for 8 channels, inspired by London’s air pollution by Kaffe Matthews :: Call for Participation: 200 cyclists needed to power sound installation! :: December 6; 12:00 - 9:00 pm :: Staged the weekend before the UN CLimate change conference in Copenhagen, in clean air we fly it continues indoors at the Vortex Jazz Club,Gillett Square, December 7-11; 12:00 - 6:00 pm.

World-renowned sound artist Kaffe Matthews has made a new eight-channel audio work which will be an electronic symphony surrounding Gillett Square. The artwork invites audiences, and cycling participants, to reflect on her clean air paths playing through the polluted London air. This one-day installation on Gillett Square is also the inaugural event of the Invisible Dust enquiry by artists and scientists into air pollution, health and climate change which is led by the Hackney-based curator Alice Sharp. Continue reading

If the earth could make music, what kind of songs would it sing? This crazy contraption, called the Terrafon, actually lets us find out the answer to that question! Designed as a huge turntable tone arm and transducer, this musical instrument plays the earth like a big gravelly vinyl record. — Moe Beitiks

Harvest (2009) is a new art piece for the terrafon, traditional ensemble and cropland, by Alunda Kyrkokör (Olle Cornéer and Martin Lübcke). In the performance the Alunda Church Choir, conducted by Cantor Jan Hällgren, played the soil of northern Uppland (in Sweden). Harvest was exhibited at the Volt Festival in Uppsala in June. There is more to come. There are still many croplands still untouched by terrafon. The only thing needed is a powerful local musical ensemble that can sweat it out. This is a demanding piece and sound — well, take a listen: Continue reading

tapTap is a construction toy capturing a fascination with rhythm and fidgeting. The system is built up of individual knock boxes. Each box has its own memory and is completely self-contained. As you tap on the top of a box, the box waits for a few seconds and then taps back what it has heard. If you want more you add another box, and another, and another, tap, tap, tap.

Stacking the boxes creates longer and more complex rhythm lines as the patterns tumble down the resulting pyramids. By tapping for longer than the delay period you play a duet with the box as it repeats your earlier rhythms. Audio delays are often only that, audible, tapTap renders them physical. The boxes themselves do not learn or loop, they only repeat. This keeps the system as simple as possible. Continue reading

LINES - an intermediary installation by Daan Brikmann (2008): An interactive work of art can not be autonomous, as it is shaped through a dialogue with its audience. This principle forms the explicit point of departure for this work, in which the physical relations between its participants form the parameters for a live audiovisual piece. — Daan Brinkmann