Baby Love by Shu Lea Cheang :: October 1 - November 2, 2007 | Mon - Sat | 10am - 12pm & 2pm - 5pm :: Free :: Carriageworks, Sydney.

Baby Love is art that moves you and your imagination…. Climb aboard a giant teacup and glide into a futuristic fantasy with a dummy-sucking baby doll clone to your favourite love song at Sydney’s new home for contemporary arts, CarriageWorks. Its cathedral-scale foyer will play home to 6 giant teacups, each with a larger-than-life baby doll clone. Baby Love is a wi-fi mobile installation by New York based Taiwanese artist, Shu Lea Cheang, who calls cyber-space ‘home’. Shu Lea is a multi-media artist working in the field of net-based installation, social interface and film production. Continue reading

The disappearance of wires and the growing wireless technology industry is the subject of a David Pogue article in the New York Times’ Circuits: As Pogue writes, wires are disappearing at an alarming clip. The cord between your home phone handset and the phone body is gone. The wire between your cellphone and clip-on earpiece, also gone. The cable from your laptop to the network router. Yes, it too is gone.

Gone, gone, gone. Bluetooth was, of course, specifically invented to eliminate cables. It’s range is about 30 feet and it draws very little battery power. Continue reading

“The Pool” by Jen Lewin - The Pool is an environment of giant concentric circles created from interactive circular pads. By entering the pool, you enter a world where movement and direction trigger light and sound effects that bounce, collide and grow against and within the directions of others.

Each Pad, is an individual interactive glowing platform filled with controllable RBG leds and a small mp3 sound controller capable of playing up to 240 different samples. Based on a simple set of generative rules trigged by human movement, the pads can communicate with their neighbors creating dynamic patterns, colors and sounds that grow and evolve on their own. Continue reading

The Netherlands Media Art Institute presents in collaboration with the 5 days off festival the exhibition (in)visible sounds :: open until July 14 - Tuesday through Saturday from 1:00 ­ 6:00 p.m.; also open on the first Sunday of the month. Entry: € 2,50 (1,50 with discount.) :: Performances: July 4-8 in Paradiso, Melkweg and the Netherlands Media Art Institute :: Reservations: info [at] montevideo.nl.

Semiconductor (UK) :: July 4, Time: 8.30 p.m. For Brilliant Noise the most beautiful satellite images of the sun have been selected from an open access archive. The radiation intensity is translated into audio fragments so as to focus attention on the hidden forces of the solar system. A computer that ‘listens’ to audio files and is able to translate these into digital images, depending on the amount of resonance, is at the heart of the performance Sonic Inc: Where has the Future Gone? Continue reading

The matrix…net of all nets

“…Indeed, radio — and therefore the beginning of all electronic mass media — is invented by receivers, not by broadcasters. One might modify Duchamp’s famous quote that the onlookers make the pictures: “Ce sont les récepteurs, qui font les médias.” And even though today it seems as if the broadcasters alone possessed all power over the mass media, there is an almost anarchical criterion, on which all is based and in which the power of the receivers has been preserved: In TV ratings are everything.

How could the power of the receivers be great enough to turn the entire media machine upside down and change it from a strategic into a distributive system? What fascination initiated all that constitutes our present-day electronicized worldview?…” From Sending and Receiving by Dieter Daniels, tout-fait, issue 2. [via]

Mattias Esbjörnsson and his colleagues at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm are designing wireless software for mobile music “socials.” But the dance parties they envision take place at 55 miles per hour. SoundPryer is a wireless peer-to-peer system for joint music listening in automobiles. Each driver becomes a mobile radio station, transmitting their digital music stream to other cars within Wi-Fi range.

SoundPryer has similarities to tUNA, a handheld ad-hoc networking radio device demonstrated last year by Media Lab Europe that enables users to tune in to other nearby digital music players, on a school bus for example. And while the PDA-based SoundPryer system can also be used in more stationary face-to-face situations, Esbjörnsson purposely kept his eyes on the road when designing the system. First of all, he writes in a scientific paper (PDF), it’s a tougher challenge than more stationary systems. The potential duration of interactions between drivers may be extremely short as the cars zip down the highway or, in the event of gridlock, painfully long. The freeway is also a decidedly anonymous zone, perfect for studying how people might react to a new social technology.

From “Wireless Music’s New Social Sound,” by David Pescovitz, theFeature.

Interconnection has always been a fundamental principle of music, prompting experimental artists to explore the implications of linking their computers together long before the Internet reached the public consciousness. As the Internet achieved critical mass over the past decade, networking technology took centre stage as the key to a vast new territory of possibility, facilitating remote participation, distributed processing, and redefinition of musical space and time. The Web emerged as a virtual venue for countless musical purposes, and as analog acoustics transformed to digital representations, packets of data carried by IP from one address to another became a modern metaphor for air molecules transmitting the tone of vibrating body to eardrum.
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tunA is a handheld ad-hoc radio device for local music sharing created by Arianna Bassoli, Julian Moore, Stefan Agamanolis at the Media Lab Europe.

tunA is a mobile wireless application that allows users to share their music locally through handheld devices. Users can “tune in” to other nearby tunA music players and listen to what someone else is listening to. Developed on iPaqs and connected via 802.11b in ad-hoc mode, the application displays a list of people using tunA that are in range, gives access to their profile and playlist information, and enables synchronized peer-to-peer audio streaming. The idea is to use music to connect people at a local level and engender the sense of a shared experience.