Leonardo Electronic Almanac has inherited a large archive of papers, articles and information. This material was held in the archive as historical documentation and as part of the revamp of LEA we have decided to revisit this history and compare it with contemporary developments.

LEA rekindled 1 is the first historical comparative issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac on the history and contemporary developments at the intersection of art, science and technology. For this first issue of LEA rekindled, our editorial intention is to re-open a dialogue with those who participated and contributed towards building the history of contemporary art interactions with science and technology as well as with the new generations of artists, critical commentators, scientists and technology experts. You can find out more information on: http://ow.ly/3pA9D Continue reading

TELLUS The Audio Cassette Magazine Marathon :: Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 3:00 p.m. – November 13 at 12:00 a.m. :: at Harvestworks, 596 Broadway, #602, New York, NY :: Created By Joseph Nechvatal ::

Harvestworks/TELLUS can be viewed at the Alternative Histories Exhibition at Exit Art. (exitart.org) and tellusmedia.org

The presentation will take place in the Harvestworks audio gallery starting with TELLUS #1 through TELLUS #27 played in one hour segments starting at 3 pm until midnite on the following days: Thursday, November 11 – Issues #1 – #9 :: Friday November 12 – Issues #10 – #18 :: Saturday November 13 – Issues #19 – #27. Continue reading

Online course: A History of SoundArt at Mass Art :: a 6 week (June 7 – July 23, 2010) intensive course for three credits in Art History. Massachusetts College of Art (Mass Art) is a highly reputable, fully-accredited state university that is part of the University of Massachusetts system :: Credits should be easily transferable to any other college or university program.

Image: from the frozen-sound-art-exhibition

Topics to be discussed include sound sculpture, sound installation, electronic music, environmental sound, sound poetry, John Cage, the early work of Nam June Paik, experimental music, the early minimalists, detournement in sampling, and alternative vocal techniques. Continue reading

Network Musical Performance (NMP): Technical and Artistic Strategies to Perform Around the Globe — Workshop led by Juan Pablo Caceres :: July 19-23, 2010 :: Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Department of Music, Stanford University, 660 Lomita Dr., Stanford, California :: CALL FOR PARTICIPATION — Registration Deadline: June 30, 2010.

This workshop is intended as a practical introduction to network music performance. Both technical and musical topics will be discussed, including: history of the field, Internet technologies for streaming, control messages and laptop performances, transcontinental high-quality network performance, performance issues like delay and presence, installations and synthesis in the network, future and potential as a compositional medium, programming techniques and software survey, virtual worlds in musical network performance. Continue reading

The Anarchy of Silence – John Cage :: until May 30, 2010 :: Henie Onstad Art Centre, 1311 Høvikodden, Norway.

John Cage (1912-1992) defined a radical practice of “experimental” composition that not only changed the course of modern music and dance but defined a new conceptual horizon for artistic practice in the late-20th century. Illuminating the relevance of Cage’s contribution to contemporary art, Henie Onstad Art Centre presents the most extensive exhibition to be devoted to the artist since his death, and the first to focus on the historicization of the composer’s oeuvre and its impact.

The Anarchy of Silence – John Cage tracks systematically the critical developments in Cage’s career: from his work with percussion (1930s), to the prepared piano (1940s), to chance and indeterminacy (1950s), to new media (1960s onward), through to the political focus that ever more explicitly informed the work in the last decades of his life. Cage ushered in formal, structural, temporal, and media innovations that now form cornerstones of contemporary consciousness. Continue reading

Time Lapse Live — laptop poetics to pop beat performances featuring Tim Loosli, Art Clay, Danier Werder, & Valentina Vuksic :: March 27, 2010; 5:00 – 10:30 pm :: Centre PasquArt, Lokal-int, Seevorstadt 71-75, Aarbergstrasse 84, Biel, Switzerland.

Le Mariage, Art Clay :: A performance for two Swiss music boxes and six meter punch cards :: Performers: Art Clay & Valentina Vuksic– A performative work for two music boxes and two performers inspired by musically by “La Mariee mise a nu par ses celibataires meme” from Marcel Duchamp. The long cards that are fed into the music boxes are six-meter long punch cards. They meet at the center of the table and entwine together over time to form a sculptural metaphor of a „marriage“ between two. Continue reading

Call for papers for Sound as Art – Sound in History. Sound as Culture – Sound in Theory Conference :: organized by Ansa Lønstrup, Morten Michelsen and others :: September 23–25, 2010 :: University of Aarhus, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark :: Call for Papers — Deadline: April 1, 2010.

Today, sound studies provide an important framework for furthering cultural research related to a broad range of historical and contemporary issues. Also, sound studies contribute to the understanding of currents in social and global activity increasingly determined by auditory, sonic, and communicative materiality. At the same time, the exploration of auditivity and auditory cultures raises a series of significant aesthetic, medial, historical, cultural, and theoretical questions. Continue reading

Sync/Lost: an Immersive, Multi-User Visualization of Music History :: Sync/Lost [3bits.net] is a multi-user data visualization installation that allows users to become immersed in the history of electronic music. Starting from a complex timeline, user interactivity allows rhythms and sub-rhythms to merge into new sounds. The user interaction is accomplished with wiimote controls, wireless handheld pointers which are relatively easy to use and learn. The audible feedback is provided via wireless headphones.

The project’s objective is to create an interface where people can explore all the connections between the main styles of electronic music through both visual and audible feedback. The interaction with the resulting network graph leads to “a collective consequence in the spatial visualization of information”. [From infosthetics.com.

Listen to your eyes :: a twofold exhibition shown simultaneously at 49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine and at the École Supérieure d’Art in Metropolitan Métropole (ÉSAMM) :: February 26, 2010 to April 18, 2010 :: Free admission ::
[image: Su-Mei Tse, Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, 2001, Collection Frac Lorraine, © D.R.]
The exhibition Listen to your eyes is the first event in the series. Diagonales : son, vibration et musique (Diagonals: sound, vibration, and music). Originated by Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), it combines visits to exhibitions in ten regions in France, as well as in Benelux, and brings together nineteen contemporary art centers around a common issue: the place of sound and music in contemporary creation from the 1960s to the present, as seen through a selection of works from the Centre national des arts plastiques. Continue reading

How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from Stalin to Frampton to Bambaataa by Dave Tompkins:

This is the story of how a military device became the robot voice of hip-hop and pop music. Though the vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, was designed to guard phones from eavesdroppers, it expanded beyond its original purpose and has since become widely used as a voice-altering tool for musicians. It has served both the Pentagon and the roller rink, a double agent of pop and espionage.

In How to Wreck a Nice Beach — from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase “how to recognize speech” — music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin’s gulags, from the 1939 World’s Fair to Hiroshima, from Manhattan nightclubs to the Muppets. The result is an amazing chronicle of postwar music and culture, filled with unexpected and surprising encounters. Continue reading