| Archives | 08 | 07 | 06 | 05 | 04 | 03 | 02 | 01 | 00 | 99 | 98 | 97 | 96 | | Commissions | | Spotlight | | Guest Curators | | Events | | |
| Commissions | |
 | More of the Same More of the Same extends LoVid's investigation of electrical irregularities and human interactions. After it loads copies of a single sound sample, fissures in the digital veneer are explored as the spoken communication is played back repeatedly. Though each instantiation of the speech is identical, physical constraints affect the timing. This allows the nature of the medium to peek through the cracks in the voices. [Needs: start slowly with 1; close each popup window before launching the next] |
 | You're Not My Father |
 | MYPOCKET by Burak Arikan with funds from the Jerome Foundation MYPOCKET discloses the artist's personal financial records to the world by exploring and revealing essential patterns in the daily transactions of his bank account. These are the records that we usually keep secret, whereas financial institutions intensively analyze them to score our credibility. Archived on the site, the artist's two years of spending history is analyzed by the custom software to predict future spending; these predictions sometimes determine his future choices, creating a system in which both the software and the artist adapt to one another. Influenced by today's techno-cultural milieu, MYPOCKET presents a hybrid interface to a living physical/digital process. [Needs a Java and Flash enabled browser; best on Firefox or Safari; optional RSS reader for Transaction Feed] |
 | Flou by Jason Freeman, with Andrew Beck, Xiang Cao, Mark Godfrey, Jagadeeswaran Jayaprakash, Al Matthews, Rachel Ponder, Alex Rae, and Sriram Viswanathan with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Flou (pronounced "flew") is not exactly a game; you do fly a ship through space, but you cannot shoot anything, score points, or win or lose. The focus, rather, is on the soundtrack: as you navigate through a 3D world and zoom through objects in space, you add loops and apply effects to an ever-evolving musical mix. You can also design your own worlds to fly through and share them with other Flou users. [Needs Java 1.5+; Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux; Minimum 768 MB RAM and 1.5 GHz processor; Fast graphics card; Speakers or headphones] |
 | Remote by Neill Donaldson, Usman Haque, Ai Hasegawa, Georg Tremmel with funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Remote connects together two spaces, one in Boston the other in Second Life, and treats them as a single contiguous environment, bound together by the Internet so that things that occur in one space affect things that happen in the other and vice versa — remotely controlling each other. Communication between the two halves of this extended environment is a complex choreography coupling the environmental phenomena of humidity, temperature, light, speech, mist, wind, sound and proximity across the two. The object in Boston appears to be a seat; but, experientially, the Second Life space appears to be inside the seat. A similar alteration of scale occurs in the other direction. Visitors to the Boston space and the Second Life space must negotiate to achieve goals: e.g. by sitting down, breathing, touching, knocking, colliding. The environmental data of both spaces is publicly available in realtime via the EnvironmentXML repository enabling others to build devices and spaces that connect directly to both Boston and Second Life. The intention is to explore an architecture that is resolutely "human" (in the sense of being inhabited, configured and determined by its occupants) yet context-free (because it does not privilege geographical location). |
 | Imaging Beijing by John (Craig) Freeman with funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Imaging Beijing is the latest installment of Imaging Place, a place-based, virtual reality project that combines panoramic photography, digital video, and virtual worlds to investigate and document situations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. When a denizen of Second Life first arrives at Imaging Beijing, he, she or it can walk over a satellite image of central Beijing where they will find a networks of nodes constructed of primitive spherical geometry with panoramic photographs texture mapped to the interior. The avatar can walk to the center of one of these nodes and use a first person perspective to view the image, giving the user the sensation of being immersed in the location. A web-cam captures live video of the user and transmits it to the head of an exhibition avatar. Dated links in the virtual space launch a browser, which opens a web journal of the Imaging Beijing field research. [Needs Quicktime plugin] |
 | NO MATTER by Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott with funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts NO MATTER is an interactive installation that activates the transformation of imaginary objects through the Second Life virtual economy into physical space. Second Life builders construct replicas of famous buildings, luxury goods and custom-designed objects, first reproducing, then inverting the notion of value itself. With zero cost for gathering resources, production of goods and transport of finished product, these items proliferate widely and quickly. In the real world, consumer items and imaginary objects serve as forms of emotional attachment — projection screens for desire, fear and love. A 3D-simulated space, combined with a virtual currency and social interaction, Second Life is a fully functioning economy of the immaterial. |
 | The Vitruvian World by Michael Takeo Magruder, Drew Baker and David Steele with funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts In the 1st century BC, Roman writer, architect and engineer Vitruvius codified specific building formulae based on the guiding principles of strength, utility and beauty. He believed that architecture was intrinsically linked to nature and was a human imitation of cosmic order. The most well-known interpretation of this postulate is the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci in which the male form is depicted in unity with the square and circle - representing material and spiritual existence respectively. The Vitruvian World is a multi-nodal and recursive artwork that embodies the principles of Vitruvius within this context. Existing in three distinct yet interconnected spaces, the work simultaneously embraces the virtual, the physical, and the network connecting them. |
 | CATERWAUL by Pierre Proske, with technical assistance from Artem Baguinski and Brigit Lichtenegger with funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts When someone screams in real life, do they hear us in virtual reality? Do they want to? CATERWAUL is an interactive sound installation that operates as a one way “portal” to Second Life via the internet. A physical wall in Boston operates as a totemic locus of grief. People approach it with intent to wail and mourn. The mourners grieve their lost loved ones who spend more time in virtual and on-line worlds than they do communicating in real life. The cacophony of the lamentation is recorded by hidden microphones in the wall, transmitted across the Internet and piped out of an "identical" wall in the virtual world Second Life. A website displaying a simulation of the wall allows other people, on the threshold of "real" and "second" life, to vicariously eavesdrop the wailing. |
 | Air Detritus by Miya Masaoka with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Air Detritus is derived from sounds that were collected from the air and water detritus of Central Park, New York. Sounds were collected via a 2-way radio submerged in a pond, and on land. The act of recycling materials into a new piece, and re-using objects and sound fragments seems a way to re-imagine the world, a symbolic treatment that enacts the idea of sustainability as an elusive but critical goal of consuming fewer materials. As a consumer working with digital tools, I have accumulated many old monitors, hard drives, cords, and interfaces that are quickly obsolete. The molded plastic and metal have a perverse dialectical relationship to the data of ones and zeros that are transported and stored. This piece is a moment of reflection upon these relationships, and our relationship to the world. - Miya Masaoka [Needs mp3 or Real Audio Player, speakers on] |
 | Invisible Influenced by Will Pappenheimer and Chipp Jansen with funds from the Jerome Foundation Invisible Influenced is a Rorschach test for envisioning the US as the recipient rather than the cause of worldwide events. Contrary to the notion of impervious superpower, the artwork projects the emerging perception that the country is vulnerable to foreign conditions of climate, public opinion, economics and a variety of social institutions. Shape reads, in this case, as the confluence of intercontinental subconscious activity, which is in the process of becoming visible. Users select from foreign sources of news, weather conditions, health conditions, stock indexes, and blogs. Informational sources are chosen for their seeming distance from the US daily experience. Qualitative and quantitative indices found in global internet texts and databases are translated into up to four directional vector magnitude forces surrounding the continent. The US map silhouette then responds and distorts according to elastic physics properties programmed to its perimeter. The test mode allows the forces to act for a limited period of time; the drift mode allows the map to continue to transform until the program is reset. [Needs Flash plugin] |
 | AVAIR 2: Feed Lack Loop |
 | Voices from the Paradise Network by John Hudak, with Flash programming by erational.org with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors "My mother-in-law passed away recently, reminding me of a technique that a parapsychologist named Dr. Konstantin Raudive (1906-1974) used to record what he purported to be voices of deceased spirits. With the amount of information moving around on the Internet these days, and the passing of my mother-in-law, who I thought would want to get in touch (if possible), I thought I’d give Raudive’s technique a try within the digital realm." - John Hudak [Needs Flash Player and speakers on] |
 | iPak - 10,000 songs, 10,000 images, 10,000 abuses |
 | I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On by Haeyoung Kim (a.k.a Bubblyfish) with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On is an interactive art piece inspired by Samuel Beckett's short novel, "Molloy." The work is presented in two parts: a blog for you to contribute your thoughts about Beckett's writing; and the multimedia generated by your entries. "In 2007 I began to learn to ride a bicycle. This for me was a choice not so much determined by reasons of pleasure but as a way of manifesting my need to literally move on with my life. Around the same time, I began to read Beckett's famous Three Novels, and was moved in particular by "Molloy." Bicycles are a very important metaphor in this book." Haeyoung Kim [Needs Flash player and speakers on] |
 | No Time Machine by Daniel C. Howe and Aya Karpinska with funds from the Jerome Foundation Quiet time, dead time, free time — call it what you will,
there seems to be less and less of it. What do people give up in the race
to maximize every second of their waking life? What kinds of activities
are replaced by the panicked drive for efficiency? No Time Machine
explores these questions by mining the Internet for mentions of the phrase
I don't have time for and variations such as You can't find
the time for and We don't make time for. Based on a set
of procedures they’ve set up, a program analyzes the search results
and reconstructs them into a poetic conversation. Interwoven with this
"found poetry" generated by the program are sentences that they
re-contextualized themselves; a human-computer collaboration that expands
the field of creative writing to include networked and programmable media.
[Needs a Java-Enabled Browser] |
 | Network Sonification by Zach Layton with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors In Network Sonification, a program written in java crawls across the Internet, grabbing as many related URLs as possible and analyzing their contents. Using Max/MSP, the data coming from the webcrawler program is translated into sound. The frequency and range of words, images and links on these pages create a kind of aural snapshot, giving each page a unique sonic character that is written in real time. Layton offers us a range of sonic portraits, from Boing Boing to the New York Times, enabling us to experience them as networked sonic entities rather than discrete visual/semantic pages. [Needs Quicktime Player] |
 | ['til death do us a part] by Tobias c. van Veen (aka saibotuk) with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Experiments in Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) using two reel-to-reel machines in an attempt after Konstantin Raudive & William Burroughs to establish contact with the dead. In the 21C electromagnetic tape is an anachronism. Dead media unwinds time from its spools. The dead are no longer human; and when the inhuman expire, do the inhuman become more human than human, at the moment of death? Two electromagnetic machines capture the unfolding of an era in which memory encodes the loving caress of electron imprinted tape. Two tape machines in tandem share their memories, silent at first but slowly amplified through continuous re-recording & simultaneous playback. Time out of joint falls in & out of tape sync; more inhuman than human loops the frequency. |
 | Rust Belt / Bayou by Julia Christensen with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Rust Belt / Bayou is an aural exploration of two cities: Cleveland, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. For the past several years, Christensen’s artistic practice has been based in extensive travel throughout the United States, surveying the ways in which communities are changing in the shadow of corporate real estate development. During these travels, she has often been struck by the similarities between Cleveland, a city of the Rust Belt, and New Orleans, a city of the bayou. Both cities dwell on the shores of bodies of water with global reach: Cleveland on Lake Erie, New Orleans on the Mississippi River. Both cities have seen the boom and bust of industry and population throughout their histories — past and present. Cleveland and New Orleans look remarkably different, but Christensen has often noticed that they have sounds in common: industry, birds, water, tourists. Rust Belt / Bayou offers an interactive document of aural snapshots from recent trips to both New Orleans and Cleveland. [Needs Flash Player and audio] |
 | The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether is an exploration of a real-time collaborative composition local network. All of the performers have identical performance / composition programs -- a custom flexible step-sequencer -- that invite play with rhythmic cycles of various lengths and timbres. The real fun starts, however, when the players begin spying on their neighbors, secretly, via the network, and stealing their ideas with the click of the mouse. Unplanned structures begin to emerge, like oil on water, as riffs propagate and evolve, sometimes returning unrecognizable to their creators. |
 | Trace Aureity by Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona) with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Trace Aureity is an interactive, immersive, audiovisual sculpture located in the 3-D synthetic world Second Life. There are eighty-eight manipulated field recordings — from city streets, birdsong, to talkback radio — and ninety-six nested rotating objects densely arranged in a three dimensional grid. Avatars, either solo or in groups, generate sounds by moving through the installation. Some of the innermost nested objects, colored red, also spawn glowing spheres which fly out and bounce around inside the work, triggering sounds as they pass through other objects. Because the playable space is so dense, players are rewarded by slowing down their movements as much as possible, since even miniscule movements create differences in sonic output. The contingencies of time-based interaction by people-as-avatars creates a dynamic audiovisual composition, always unique to that moment and those interactors. This may be seen to represent an evolution of the aleatoric composition techniques of John Cage and Brian Eno, as well as an enactment of the objets sonore of Pierre Schaeffer. [Needs Second Life account and client (free)] |
 | Storm King by Amit Pitaru with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Storm King was composed and performed with "The Sonic Wire Sculptor," originally a personal instrument created by Pitaru to compose, record and perform music. Pitaru later transformed the software into a public installation to allow a wider range of users to intuitively interact with the instrument. Gallery visitors would enter a dark room with a surround-sound system, a projection and a unique drawing station. Participants were encouraged to add their work to a steadily growing collection of beautiful and surprising sonic-sculptures. Today, this collection includes work from professional illustrators, poets, 9 year-olds and their parents, and musicians of various genres. |
 | Lumens |
| Spotlight | wa-kow! collective | | |
 | Tulsita by the Wa-KOW! Collective The Wa-KOW! Collective was founded on the idea that the distinctions between artistic media are problematic and productive rather than essential. Their primary goal is to find ways to blur those boundaries. The group--made up of poets, musicians, and photographers--works in and around the borders between text, sound, and image, exploring the relations between the three media and the nature of each type of media. Their artistic process evolved through organic collaboration. They visited specific sites in Tulsa and collected raw materials through writing, audio recording, and photography. The group then altered, edited, and arranged these materials, meanwhile incorporating samples from songs, films, texts and images related to Tulsa. The result of this collaboration is Tulsita, an online flash-based environment that explores the cultural, ethical, and aesthetic experiences they have had living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. [Needs Flash plugin] |
| Guest Curators | matthew belanger | j.r. carpenter | | |
 | Turbulent Works by Matthew Belanger for Greylock Arts Turbulent Works is a group exhibition of net art commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence web site. It features a selection of Turbulence commissions which represent the broad spectrum that is net art. In these works you will experience new interfaces for sound expression, art created within virtual worlds, art which is politically and socially motivated, video performances, photographic explorations, and websites re-interpreted through painting. |
 | Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading |
| Events | |
 | Upgrade! Boston Upgrade! Boston is a monthly gathering of new media artists and curators that fosters dialogue and creates opportunities for collaboration within the media art community. At each meeting one or two artists/curators present work in progress and participate in a discussion. Upgrade! Boston is hosted by the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is a node in the Upgrade! International network. |
 | Floating Points 5: Mixed Realities with funds from Emerson College and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Floating Points 5: Mixed Realities was a symposium and workshop at Emerson College and in Second Life. It took place on February 8 and 9, 2008. Participants included: Burak Arikan, Drew Baker, John (Craig) Freeman, Usman Haque, Drew Harry, Scott Kildall, Gene Koo, Pierre Proske, Michael Takeo Magruder, Victoria Scott, and David Steele. Mixed Realities explored the convergence — through cyberspace — of real and synthetic places made possible by computers and networks. The Mixed Realities exhibition connected and overlayed the Huret & Spector Gallery (Boston), Turbulence.org, and Ars Virtua (Second Life) [Second Life is a shared, synthetic, 3-D environment through which people can interact in real-time by means of a virtual self or avatar.] Mixed Realities enabled people distributed across multiple physical and virtual spaces to communicate with one another and share experiences in real time. |
 | Mixed Realities: An International Networked Art Exhibition Curated by Jo-Anne Green with funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Emerson College Mixed Realities explored the convergence — through cyberspace — of real and synthetic places made possible by computers and networks. The Mixed Realities exhibition connected and overlayed the Huret & Spector Gallery (Boston), Turbulence.org, and Ars Virtua (Second Life). Mixed Realities enabled people distributed across multiple physical and virtual spaces to communicate with one another and share experiences in real time. Works/Artists: CATERWAUL by Pierre Proske, with technical assistance from Artem Baguinski and Brigit Lichtenegger; Imaging Beijing by John (Craig) Freeman; NO MATTER by Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott; Remote by Neill Donaldson, Usman Haque, Ai Hasegawa, Georg Tremmel; The Vitruvian World by Michael Takeo Magruder, Drew Baker and David Steele. |
 | Programmable Media II: Networked Music with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; and Pace Digital Gallery. Programmable Media II: Networked Music, a one-day symposium examining the current and future possibilities of network-enabled music, was held on April 11, 2008 at Pace University, NYC and in Second Life. The symposium included artist presentations and live performances. Based on the rapidly expanding archive of music / sound experiments to be found on Networked Music Review and the fifteen short works recently commissioned for it, the symposium aimed to stimulate critical and far-ranging discussion on emerging music and sound art practice. With Jason Freeman, Dan Trueman, Peter Traub, Zach Layton, Sawako Kato, Helen Thorington, LoVid, Tobias c. van Veen, Adam Nash, Andrew Beck, and Mark T. Godfrey. |