A set of giant posters located in Madrid, London, Berlin, Brussels & Milan that monitor the noise level on a high-traffic roads. ambient noise levels are displayed via decibel meters connected to LED screens embedded in billboards, in homage to Noise Awareness Day (April 16). The posters were part of AEG-Electrolux’s advertising campaign supporting its new silent washing machine. The accompanying Web site also compares decibel levels of the major urban areas on line graphs to learn more about the detriments of noise pollution.

“Local school kids are taking it a step further and are deliberately shouting at the sign in unison in order to make the numbers change. The Manager of the night club is finding the poster helpful too – he is taking photos of the sign in the early hours of the morning to show the local council that he is not making too much noise.” [From information aesthetics]

Resonating Bodies-Bumble Domicile :: Conceived by Sarah Peebles, others :: A Co-Presentation between InterAccess and New Adventures in Sound Art :: through July 27, 2008 :: *new* Gallery, 906 Queen West, Toronto, Canada.

Resonating Bodies is a series of mixed media installations and community outreach projects, which focus on the biodiversity of pollinators indigenous to the ecosystems of the Greater Toronto Area. Conceived by Sarah Peebles with Rob King, Rob Cruickshank and Anne Barros, the installations illuminate aspects of local biodiversity, such as bumblebee colonies and their foraging activities, ultraviolet bee vision, and pollinator / plant co-evolution. Some of these projects feature colour-coded DNA barcodes, a new technique for species identification pioneered by Canadian researchers. Continue reading

Join us, and nations all over the world for International Noise Awareness Day - Hear for the Future :: April 16, 2008 :: Twisted Village 12b Eliot St., Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Beginning at 2:00 pm there will be in-store hearing tests administered on an audiometer :: 2:15 – 2:16 (EDT) International Minute of Silence :: 8:00 pm Concert – Brendan Murray, Asher, Jed Speare.

The concert will feature an investigation into the earliest known recording, from 1860, predating Edison’s by 28 years. A recent article in the NY Times on Edourard-Leon Scott de Martinville’s phonautogram included the sound file of this recently played-back recording. Continue reading

[From the site…] aka “AI to the People” :: Current Transmission: 8 June 2007 to 9 September 2007… Whitney Museum, New York….

By Amy Alexander, Wojciech Kosma, Vincent Rabaud with Nikhil Rasiwasia and Jesse Gilbert. Production Assistants: Marilia Maschion, Annina Rüst, Cristyn Magnus. The project that asks the question: If computer vision technology can be used to detect when you look like a terrorist, criminal, or other “undesirable” - why not when you look like a rock star? Continue reading

Networks, Mobility, Interventions

The projects in Glowlab 09 examine urban architecture by investigating the social spaces enabled by public networks, mobile communication devices and direct intervention. In viewing the work, one might re-imagine the city as space which is defined through the nature of the interactions that take place within it.

Public Broadcast Cart by Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga: Transforms a shopping cart into a mobile radio station, transmitting via miniFM and the Internet. The Public Broadcast Cart is designed to enable any pedestrian to become an active producer of a radio broadcast by reversing the usual role of the public from audience to producer.

Hundekopf by Brian House and Sue Huang (Knifeandfork): A location-based narrative project utilizing SMS text-messaging to explore the experience of riding the Berlin Ringbahn.
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Mobile Lab for On-Air Experimentation

Trans-Siberian Radio is a low-power FM station that will operate on the train from Moscow to Beijing via Novosibirsk, during the conference Capturing the Moving Mind: Management and Movement in the Age of Temporary War, September 11:20.

The station will be a mobile lab for on-air experimentation, featuring music and ideas created collaboratively by passengers on the train and accessible to everyone along the Trans-Siberian route. As curator Natilee Harren writes, the ever-moving symbol of the train fits the conference’s theme: “The spirit of the conference is to cross fixed boundaries and to create an environment that is open to the ‘contaminating influences’ of the communities through which the train will pass. In fact, the point of having the conference on a train is to escape any restrictions relating to a particular time or place.” Visit the project’s site when the train is rolling to contribute with audio works or hear-and manipulate-audio clips from the ride. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not]
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Turning a Deaf Ear

A Measure of Anacoustic Reason–by Raqs Media Collective–is an installation that registers a process of thinking about forms of reasoning that insulate themselves from listening. The installation sees the act of ‘turning a deaf ear’, as the unwillingness or inability to listen to the voices that refuse to be accommodated into the master narratives of progress, of instrumental reason and the domestication of space through the geomancy of corporations and nation-states. The visitor is invited to undertake his/her own audit of anacoustic reasoning through a meditation on a series of dialogues and rebuses that encrypt a set of paradoxes about the grandiose follies of seeking to rule the world by not listening to it.
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Adaptation, Access, Regulation, Open Source

HINGES ON is an interactive film installation on the informal and formal economies of India’s “ICT capital”, Bangalore. Visitors enter through a sparsly lit sound tunnel, where they are exposed to an audio experience of failed efforts to retrieve information. (The sound works can be downloaded from the site.) Finally, one is released into the room hosting the video installation. Multiple door-shaped screens in the centre of the space serve as projection surfaces for the four simultanous projections. The screens are on hinges and invite the visitors to turn them into the angel required to catch the projection they wish to watch. (You can find information on the themes and issues in the backdrop section). A switch board provides the interface to the speakers featured on video. (In depth documentation of the process including a list of interviewees and the ‘making of switch board, doors and software patches is accessible here!’
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radiophonic graffiti

Autonomous Radiobodies is a public art performance/installation that involves people wearing or carrying units equipped with a Radio Graffiti Device for creating localized radiophonic art/graffiti spaces. As the technology of traditional radio hangs on the edge of artistic obsolescence and state-financed broadcasters use the medium to construct and enforce a national voice, newer mobile technologies are springing up and grabbing the public attention for commercial communication and artistic expression. This technological hype for the new presents an opportunity to exploit and reinvestigate the older wireless medium of radio and it’s renewed use as an art-space. Read more>>