urban sound stories, curated by Gruenrekorder; online at kunstradio and Gruenrekorder :: on air @ Ö1 Kunstradio, Sundays 11:03 - 11:45 pm (CET).

urban sound stories is a five-part series of sounds and photographs as soundscapes of European cities. The artists participating in this “curated by”project were selected by Gruenrekorder, a German based organization and label for phonography, field recording and soundscape.

Five sound artists — Simon Whetham, Tobias Bolt, Eric Cordier, Lasse-Marc Riek and Roland Etzin — explore eight places each, in five different cities, using the means of phonography and photography. The exploration of artificial and natural space within the city takes place within the same space of time. Continue reading

6th Annual Conflux Festival :: Submissions Deadline: August 15.

Conflux, the art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space, is pleased to announce the 6th annual Conflux Festival will take place from September 17-20, 2009. The festival, produced by Glowlab, will be headquartered in Manhattan with partner and host, NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Conflux will organize a user-generated open format event on Sunday September 20th, 2009 from 10am-6pm. Through an open submissions process, ConfluxCity will provide a platform for artists, urban geographers, technologists and others to organize and produce innovative activities dedicated to the examination, celebration and (re)construction of everyday urban life.

Audio Tunnel by Cobi van Tonder :: part of Stanford MFA Art Practice Thesis Show, May 12 - June 15, 2009, Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford University.

Conceptually, this work challenges ideas of territory, control, transmission, tranception and how we listen to the world. Ultimately it is about a very complex and delicate sonic texture. We access the constructed space via our auditory perception. Through listening we perceive a landscape that in turn triggers the imagination to construct a picture of what this space looks like. It becomes a partly imaginary space yet it is a shared space. It is live and interactive: the participant becomes the transmitter and is transmitted/ displaced (in sound) in many actual places in fractions of milliseconds. A recursive eavesdropping becomes possible in this unseen territory. Continue reading

Locustream Audio Tardis — performance by Jérôme Joy :: Around Sound Festival :: April 30, 2009; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: On the rooftop (14/F) of the Foo Tak Building, Wan Shai Hong Kong.

Locustream audio Tardis is an imaginary journey between various open mikes of the Locustream project, initiated by the Locus Sonus lab. All the sounds that are heard are transmitted live from the distant locations where volunteers taking part in the project have set up microphones which permanently stream their chosen soundscape via the web. By switching from stream to stream the audience hear the cyclical sequence which are successively played. A simple video-image showing the name of the location and of the streamer is projected during each sequence. Streams from: Marseille, Dakar, Boston, Amsterdam, Reykjavik, Solleftea, Paris, Les Lilas, Vesinet, Nice, Qu bec, Chicago, Lagos etc. Continue reading

“BronxRhymes (a Turbulence Commission) is an attempt to raise awareness of the history of hip-hop in the Bronx, the northwestern borough of New York City where the musical style is thought to have originated. The history of hip-hop is illustrated through rhymes and plotted on an online map.

The creators specifically set out to create a connection between the physical, digital and mobile planes. The website features a map of the Bronx and an archive of contributed rhymes. They then put up posters near the physical locations marked on the online map, describing the location’s relevance to hip-hip history in a rhyme. The posters also challenged passersby to respond via SMS with their own rhymes about the location, the people who made it famous, or hip-hop in general. The project captures the battle tradition of hip-hop, while informing the community through multiple mediums…” Continue reading BronxRhymes Uses Locality, Maps to Track History of Hip-Hop by Megan Taylor, PBS-MediaShift.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle nikamon ohci askiy (songs because of the land) :: until February 2009 :: Vancouver, B.C.

This project explores the relationship between sound, space and identity as experienced through a cree worldview. By creating a “performative audio map”, L’Hirondelle will negotiate a journey through new territory, developing a nomadic relationship with the land. Her actions/singing will be in direct response to her encounters within the territory - the physical environment she finds herself in and its inhabitants.

During the month of December, the artist will make daily journeys throughout Vancouver and “sing” the landscape she encounters. These encounters will be captured by mobile phone by the artist and whatever other technologies are made available by participating viewers/audience (video, photo, audio). Continue reading

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s Listening to places is a series of place-based soundscapes, incorporating field recordings, electro-acoustics and digital media. Landscape in Metamorphoses is the second album of this series.

“Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is drawing attention to the rapid social and geocultural transformation of his native India on his latest album. Landscape in Metamorphoses, a 26-minute collection of field recordings on German label Gruenrekorder, documents the stormy environmental changes taking place in Tumbani, ‘one of the busiest industrial belts at the Bengal-Bihar border’. Recorded between February and April of last year with little more than a simple MD recorder and a binaural microphone, ‘Landscape in Metamorphoses’ aims at delivering both a vivid sonic snapshot and a strong political statement.” - Tobias Fisher at Tokafi.

Suzan Sherman: In the past your work has focused on the natural world, and toying with the intricate and seemingly set systems within that world. But for this project, The Marfa Jingles, you’ve honed in on Marfa, Texas — the systems of shops and business and organizations that are this tiny town’s glue. Like some of your other work, your jingles seem to be an attempt at organizing and arranging (you’re literally arranged the music and the lyrics for them). At the same time, I would have never expected you to come up with a project of writing and producing a series of audio advertisements. How did this idea come about for you?

Nina Katchadourian: I’m often looking at the natural world, but just as often I’m looking at the human and social world. The Marfa Jingles looks at the town as a social structure — as a place where people live, work, and run businesses and organizations. I’ve kind of collected Marfa, and used the project as a vehicle to get to know the town. Continue reading

“Grey zones are spaces or places of alterity. They could be Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’, or Marc Augé’s ‘non-places’, or Edward Soja’s ‘thirdspace’ (just to name a few) [1]. They exist as real spaces and places we know and are also new spaces created by the use of technology. As artists begin to explore these spaces with locative media, what are some effects of locating and properties of these spaces and what might be their correlates in other discourses around space?

The field of research and practice of locative media is abuzz with new work and ideas, especially with work that deals with specifics of a data- or narratively-described place implied in ‘locating’. With much focus on the specific, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that there do exist ruptures in locating and its related technologies. In the process of locating, boundaries shift, errors occur, things are read as something else, signals get lost. These are some of the effects or properties of ‘locating’ that make evident the slippery boundaries in locating, revealing spaces that can be defined in some way as ‘other’ and that shift over time to occasionally blur the pinpointing of a locative ‘moment’…” From Swimming In The Grey Zones - Locating The Other Spaces In Mobile Art by Leslie Sharpe, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2006.

Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman will exhibit Are We there Yet? — a sound work, video installation and public work — at gallery Souzoukukan9001, ZAIM gallery and in public space in Yokohama Japan for Dislocate 08 the International Festival for Art, Technology and Locality, Yokohama/Tokyo. Are We there Yet? is a sound map of stories collected from passengers on Yokohama’s blue line, mapping travelers’ internal states in real space. Visitors can download MP3 sound files and travel the subway inhabiting riders’ stories at the exact physical location they took place. In the gallery exhibition the sound map is extended into an interactive video and sound installation, which layers public and private perceptions of the subway. Exploring space and place as what we hear as well as what we see. Continue reading