Two Way Radios [2WR]

“Each receiver a potential transmitter”. It was not only Hans-Magnus Enzensberger who imagined radio as a two way medium: Brecht’s dictum of “radio as an apparatus for communication” is more than famous. Freeing radio from its centralized and mono-directional broadcast structure has been a strong claim since radio’s early days. And it has been especially the Internet, which made two way radio-structures become a serious possibility.

Based on the thoughts and utopies of Brecht, Enzensberger, but also on “La Radia” by F.T. Marinetti and Pino Masnata, the Belgian sound and media artist Guy van Belle created his series of performances Two Way Radios [2WR]. Premiered in Prague on April 14, 2005 this set-up of sound and communication architecture was performed in a new version on “Radio_Copernicus”, a German-Polish artist radio on July 28, 2005. Several bi-directional audiostreams, generated by four performers (Guy van Belle and Barbara Huber in Stralsund, Akihiro Kubota in Tokyo, Code 31/Okno Brussels) were mutually altered within this group. [more]
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Sound in the Work of LAURIE ANDERSON

Laurie Anderson: The Record of the Time is a 30 year retrospective of Laurie Anderson’s works that opened last week at the NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC], Tokyo. It will run through October 2, 2005.

Laurie Anderson (born 1947) rose to acclaim on the New York art scene of the early 1980s with her distinctive electronic performances, and continues to be a major globally active artist, one the very few truly international stars of performance art today. Utilizing synthesizers, video and computer graphics as well as various electronic devices of her own design, she blends diverse elements – music, moving images, language, action – into eclectic cocktails of experimental ideas and avant garde modes of expression that appeal to a broad popular audience. She is, in a word, the very embodiment of colorful postmodern performance.
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Sonic Wanders

The content on Radio Forest is made up of music and sound donated from the people of Neerpelt and surrounding areas, including; LP’s from personal collections, stories, lore, and sound produced during workshops at Musica. Portable radio’s will be available to check out at the Radio Forest cabin so that visitors can have a sonic wander through the forest.” The project is commissioned by Musica in Neerpelt, Belgium and a collaboration between artists Stijn Schiffeleers and Amy Franceschini as a sound project in reaction to this space.”Upon their first visit to Music in December 2004, Amy and Stijn’s first impression was the roaring sound coming from the freeway passing through the forest. It was such a dominant sound factor, that they proposed to broadcast forest sounds from within the forest to the cars passing by on the freeway.” So driving by the forest will let you tune into forest sounds and avoid the technological distraction of your engine’s hum. [blogged by Jonah on coin-op]

Whispering Trees

KODAMA (echo in English)–by Hisako Kroiden Yamakawa–aims at demonstrating the existence of voice as a physical object and how it floats through space. KODAMA are tree fairies that hide in the forest and listen quietly to your voice. They collect the voices and trap them in a bubble of air. When KODAMA don’t sense the presence of humans they start playing with the voices that have been left in the forest. But as soon as they do notice someone they hide themselves with the “voice” and wait to collect new “voices”. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not]

with Red Symbol

Golden Numbers–by Park Lee Chang Shik–is a sound installation that uses the gigantic speakers that were formerly used at the DMZ (demilitarized zone on the border between North and South Korea) for broadcasting propaganda. In this installation, the numbers from 0 to 36525 are read out. This number represents the number of days in the hundred years from August 15, 1945 to August 15, 2045. Further, recordings of old radio broadcasts and sounds produced in real-time from encoded signals are heard intermittently, and the audience can also use a microphone to broadcast their own voices through the speakers.

All these sounds mingle slowly around a circle, resembling the movement of a clock’s hand or the orbit of a celestial body, and allude to the passage of time and history. The voices recorded into the microphone show that everyone lives within the flow of time, and contributes to history in some way. [via]

NAKI, TSUKUBA, and EDELWEISS

Maywa Denki is performing at Quartier d’ete Festival in Paris on July 21,22 and 23. This art unit, which is produced by Nobumichi Tosa, has been inventing a number of hard-to-describe electric devices by transforming the history and culture of small electrics manufacturers in Japan’s high-growth period (about 40 years ago) into three product lines of interactive art objects: NAKI, TSUKUBA, and EDELWEISS.

They’ve “manufactured” various kinds of musical instruments including Pachimoku, which Nobumichi Tosa wears in the photo, and Koi-Beat, which could be interpreted as “love beat” as well as “carp beat.”
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Frequency Flipping

Vinat Venkatraman and Pei Yu’s Book Radio takes the mental model of a physical book where user can browse by flipping pages, read by keeping a page open, and create a reminder of a specific page by placing a bookmark.

Each page of the Book Radio represents a frequency. You flip pages to scan the frequency spectrum; open to a specific page to listen to a station; place the bookmark on a desired page to listen and store the station; and slide the bookmark up or down to control the volume. Besides you can scribble in it, place stickers or take notes while listening. Videos. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not]

Audience Participation in Musical Creation

RGB is an interactive musical installation for 2-9 users made by Tomas Dvorak (CZ), Alessandro Capozzo (IT) and Matous Godik (CZ). The main purpose of RGB is the idea of audience participation in the musical creation on the live performance. Communication between musicians and audience is made through specially designed flashlights. Each of them can emit 3 basic colours of the spectrum: red, green or blue. Other colours can be made by combining primary colours together.

The art content are the algorithms and schemes of the communication. Each algorithm is unique musical scheme. Every new step of the project is release of new concepts and algorithms. While first package called “Rgb 1” focused on the harmonical and tonal aspects of the musical communication, the new version “Rgb 2” focuses on more advanced sound and tembre aspects. Videos. [via]

Perspectives in Musical Ontology after Deleuze and Guattari

“…In a recording, even more so than in a performance, the intensities of a performance requires more deterritorializing impetus. In a performance, our expectational intensities are more and more transformed by intensities of performance simply by the musical space in which we find ourselves, insofar as there is fullness-to-explosion. In a recording, however, intensities, even expectational ones, are increasingly rooted, as we have suggested, as we come to ‘learn’ the recording. In a performance, we are inevitably deterritorialized, at least initially, at whatever gradation our intensities of expectation at the onset. In a recording, however, we are inevitably handed a reterritorializing card. Recording is a recoding.
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Live Fish Performance

The Lake is a sound and animation work by Julie Freeman based on the movement of fish that are bio-acoustically tagged in a lake. The fish movements are continually monitored as it moves in the lake to compose enveloping soundscapes and transient visuals.

On the screenshot [left] of the animation, each fish is represented by a core colour and two auras all of which change colour and rate of display depending on certain behaviours. The large shapes link species together, and the debris (trails and rotation marks) show each fish’s movement history over the last 5 minutes or so.
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