TINA B - The Prague Contemporary Art Festival presents Stefano Cagol: Un-Secret Signals :: October 9-13, 2008 :: Janovského 23, Prague 7, Czech Republic.

Mass communication and Babilonia. Fragmented communication and freedom of expression. Secrecy and disclosure. Locked and open. Black and white. Morse Code and Light. Hallucinatory flashes of light from the top of the Petrin Tower in Prague illuminate and disorient the nocturnal cityscape of this historical and fascinating place. Sound sequences play intermittently night and day, concurrently accompanying light signals that simultaneously spell out cryptic messages in Morse Code. 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.

You are invited to participate in http://thevoa.net, a participatory Internet radio project that reflects on the media spectacle of the 2008 US Presidential Election through the lens of the Voice of America Radio Network, the US government broadcasting service intended for an international audience.

Between now and November 4, you can: RECORD audio of election coverage on a Voices of America station; UPLOAD your recordings and tag them according to language and content; DOWNLOAD from the searchable pool of available recordings; REMIX the broadcasts and UPLOAD them back to the website; LISTEN to the recordings and remixes online anytime or to the radio broadcast at Audacity of Desperation in Los Angeles on Election Day. Continue reading

Another Protest Song :: CALLING ALL ARTISTS, SONGWRITERS, MUSICIANS… What does a 21st Century Protest Song sound like? Given the continuing political climate, we feel it is time for another protest song to be sung. Upload and share your jam today!

Politically engaged music is not only a consequence of history or nostalgia, but can be timely and pertinent commentary on our contemporary world. Another Protest Song is a collaborative project which uses the social networking space of the internet to archive and debate contemporary protest music. The project went public in late May and has become a daily/weekly growing archive with a number of original protest songs uploaded and shared by you the user, and other ideological persuaders. Fine tune your power chords, generate new lyrics and poetry, and set your protest to song. To upload, listen, and comment, check out >> Continue reading

The Olympics are not simply a matter of fun and games. They are a multi-national media spectacle that–as we’ve seen in recent protests–can arouse and galvanize political action. The event’s organizers pitch it as a zone outside of politics, but of course issues of national identity, human rights, autonomy, economic might, and foreign policy all coalesce around the Olympics. While much of the current attention to these matters is directed at Beijing, groups in Montreal and London are already forming to address the impact that the arrival of the famous torch (ceremoniously relayed in a model invented by the Nazis to promote a strong image of the Third Reich around the 1936 Berlin games) will have upon local communities. Continue reading

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla: Never Mind That Noise You Heard :: February 8 - May 4, 2008 :: Stedelijk Museum CS, Oosterdokskade 5, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The exhibition Never Mind That Noise You Heard provides an opportunity to see (and hear!) recent videos and installations by the collaborative artist team of Jennifer Allora (b.1974, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (b.1971, Cuba). In the exhibition, the Stedelijk Museum CS is presenting two large installations: Wake Up and Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech), alongside four video works. The production and usage of sound is central to all of these works, which were created between 2004 and 2007. Continue reading

Art Now: Seb Patane - So this song kills fascists :: until January 13, 2008 :: Tate Britain, Millbank, London.

So this song kills fascists, explores ideas of performance as a means of protest. The sound work, from which the installation takes its title, questions the revolutionary potential of music while new drawings, reminiscent of Surrealist or psychographic automatic writing, suggest a non-visible dimension implicit in the music. The central installation, Last Dance of the Nodding Folk, resembles an expressionist stage set, a theme echoed in the theatrical images leaning, placard-like against it. Footage of a fire juggler introduces an element of ritualised and controlled movement, which links to the energy of the drawings and the viewer’s choreographed passage around the installation. Patane identifies an aesthetics of subculture where protest has been exchanged for stylised performance, a husk detached from belief.

Some open-ended thoughts on sound in relation to environment (from Yolande Harris on YASMIN): After attending and presenting at the Mutamorphosis conference in Prague in the eco-sonification panel, and being tantalized by the beginnings of a discussion on sound, I would like to respond to the topics being raised in what’s become the ‘lovely sound’ section of the lovely weather thread (any intentional connection to the ‘lovely music’ label?).

As often, the coherence of discussions around sound can be somewhat unfocused, but I believe we’re slowly building up a ‘way of talking’ about sound through an increasing body of work that’s emerging from beneath the visual. Continue reading

Peter Cusack :: Sounds from Dangerous Places :: Enter3-3rd International Festival for Arts, Sciences and Technologies :: STONE BELL HOUSE (cellar) :: Staroměstské náměstí 13, Praha 1 :: November 8 - 11, 2007; 10:00 - 21:00.

Sounds from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone asks the following questions: What elements of the soundscape of a dangerous place are effected, changed, created or destroyed as a result of its ‘dangerousness’? What insights can sound offer into the environmental, social and political contexts of a ‘dangerous place’? The project presents the field recordings as they are, in the belief that such recordings offer insights into the locations and issues that are different from, and complimentary to, those of visual images and texts. Supplementary questions are: What information about place can field recordings give that is special to sound? And, conversely, what information is given by the other media that sound cannot? Continue reading

Making Noise :: November 28, 2007 – January 2, 2008 :: Reception: November 29, 6-8 pm :: Melville Gallery, South Street Seaport Museum, 123 Water Street, New York City.

Making Noise features work by visual artists who utilize the many different modes by which sound is produced and received. Exploring the possibilities that lie within the relationship between producer and receiver, these artists demonstrate how the manipulation of sound can become a tool for the organization of power and, in turn, the subversion of it. Artists: Kabir Carter, Kate Gilmore, Tom Kotik, neuroTransmitter (Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere), Nadine Robinson, Douglas Ross, Stephen Vitiello. Curators: Andrew Cappetta and Jeff Pash.