This paper reflects on the creation and perception of an interactive spatial ChoreoSonic1 performance environment. The term ‘Transonic Perception’ is introduced to describe the intimate bodily experience of the dancer who creates the 3D spatial sonic environment within the technologically enhanced environment. I will discuss conceptual issues that outline a synchronicity between the spatial elements of dance movement and 3D spatial sound perception that can be used artistically in the creative process. The discussion focuses specifically on the human perception of the visual, tactical and auditory space in the digitally enhanced performance environment.

Mountain Ghosts is a site-specific sound art installation that infuses the entire University of Colorado / Colorado Springs campus with a location-based layer of audio created collectively by the artist and participants. Building on Burgund’s interest in systems, collected voices, and participation, Mountain Ghosts explores sound as fundamental to our experiences of space, place and history. Participants use a custom smartphone app to make audio recordings that the Mountain Ghosts system then codes by location and immediately assimilates into a collective databank for other visitors to access.

As participants walk through the UCCS campus listening to location-based music and participant commentary, they can respond to prompts on the Mountain Ghosts interface that invite them to reflect on their surroundings and contribute recordings of their thoughts and experiences. Participants are, in effect, creating “ghosts” from the past that are permanently attached to specific locations. For the duration of the project from September 8th to mid-November, 2011, Mountain Ghosts folds individual voices into a collective archive that creatively documents a unique sonic record of actions within the landscape.

The noise factor is the ratio of signal to noise of an input signal to that of the output signal. Noise can block or interfere with the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication. But in Information Theory, noise is still considered to be information.

By refining the definition of noise as that which addresses us outside of our preferred comfort zone, Joseph Nechvatal’s Immersion Into Noise investigates multiple aspects of cultural noise by applying the audio understanding of noise to the visual, architectural and cognitive domains. Nechvatal expands and extends our understanding of the function of cultural noise by taking the reader through the immersive and phenomenal aspects of noise into algorithmic and network contexts, beginning with his experience in the Abside of the Grotte de Lascaux.

Immersion Into Noise is intended as a conceptual handbook useful for the development of a personal-political-visionary art of noise. On a planet that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how might noises break and re-connect in distinctive and productive ways within practices located in the world of art and thought? That is the question Joseph Nechvatal explores in Immersion Into Noise.

BIOGRAPHY

Since 1986, Joseph Nechvatal has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information, computers and computer-robotics. His computer-robotic assisted paintings and computer software animations are shown regularly in galleries and museums throughout the world. From 1991-1993 he worked as artist-in-resident at the Louis Pasteur Atelier and the Saline Royale / Ledoux Foundation’s computer lab in Arbois, France on The Computer Virus Project: an experiment with computer viruses as a creative stratagem. In 2002, he extended that artistic research into the field of viral artificial life through his collaboration with the programmer Stéphane Sikora. Joseph Nechvatal earned his Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and new technology at The Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA) University of Wales College, Newport, UK. Dr. Nechvatal presently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (SVA). His book of essays Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006) was published by Edgewise Press in 2009.

You are not always who other people think you are; you even hear your own voice in a different way. By recording and manipulating a recording of your voice with You Don’t Know Me, you will be able to restore your real voice and share with people how you hear yourself. This is a unique task that nobody else in the world can do. You Don’t Know Me provides a toolset and an online voice gallery. We are looking forward to hearing your true voice.

You Don’t Know Me is a 2010 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence web site. It was supported by the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHY

Liangjie Xia is a media artist and programmer presently based in New York City. He experiments with alternative forms of communication through innovative applications of technology, and he looks for the humanity behind the digital interface. He loves and contributes to open source projects, and hacks whatever is handy. Liangjie earned his Master of Professional Studies degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU in 2010.

George Bixby wrote: These Walls Could Talk is an attempt to reinterpret the historical narratives found in our history museums, through alternative audio-tours of the the American Museum of Natural History. These original audio-pieces are inspired by specific dioramas in the Culture Halls of the museum. These halls contain depictions of people throughout history and from around the world. However, as the “cultures” which they purport to represent continue to change, the dioramas remain static. These Walls Could Talk is a collaboration in which contributors from diverse backgrounds give new voices to these characters through approaches including fiction, auto-biography and archival sound.

While the project is meant to be an open platform for alternative interpretations, I’ve put together the following curatorial statement in an effort to give some cohesiveness to the pieces overall.

Nowhere/Now (on-going) is a group of original audio-pieces by diverse contributors, related in their aim to re-imagine how the Culture Halls of the American Museum of Natural History connect to the present day. Using the static representations of the dioramas as back drops for new interpretations, the contributors to Nowhere/Now offer us the opportunity to examine the multiplicity of meanings behind these exhibits.

The frozen representations of the dioramas, juxtaposed against the varied notions of history, serve as a reminder of how historical narratives are shaped–retrospectively by museums, and presently through mediated news sources and foreign intervention.

Currently I am working on a website for the project, which also functions as a mobile-friendly platform for sharing the audio. This can be found here. I hope to submit the overall body of work to some festivals once a representative sample of work has been contributed.

While I unfortunately can’t offer pay for this project, contributors retain rights to their work. For more information see the cc license associated with the site.

If you’d like to discuss further, please email me at gbixby21[at]yahoo.com

8 Silences (part of the Laps series) offers a sensible representation of Internet by broadcasting audio streams that travel and reverberate trough the web. Initially silents, the streams progressively incorporate an infinity of transformations or “errors” that modify the sound as it circulates on the network. These alterations are comparable to a form of erosion caused by the network space - they are a key to allow different mental representations of this digital topography. Presented as a live performance, 8 silences is a sound immersion in the heart of data flows.

Episode 04 presents a special mobile broadcast of 8 Silences from Urbana, IL, USA as part of the art exhibition Bricoleurs at the Independent Media Center in association with the 2011 Boneyard Arts Festival.

Art Of Failure is a duo of the French artists Nicolas Maigret and Nicolas Montgermont. Their work is fueled by avant-gardes movements and artistic and scientific experiments. Within their various projects, they operate shiftings or transpositions that highlight problems and aesthetics peculiar to contemporary technologies. Their work is presented under various forms: performances, installations, on-line projects or editions.

Radius is an experimental radio broadcast platform based in Chicago, IL, USA.The goal is to support work that engages the tonal and public spaces of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radius features a new project semi-monthly with statements by artists who use radio as a primary element in their work. Radius provides artists with live and experimental formats in radio programming.Radius is administered by Jeff Kolar.

In the sixth episode of this series of podcasts, we encounter the establishment of sound libraries, collections explicitly curated for further use: sound objects presented as authorless, unfinished ingredients. Though some libraries contain newly commissioned generic sounds, specifically designed for maximum flexibility, the most widely used sounds are often sourced from commercial recordings, freed from their original context to propagate across dozens to hundreds of songs. From presets for digital samplers to data CD ROMs to hip-hop battle records, sounds increasingly detach from their sources, used less as references to any original moment, and more as objects in a continuous public domain.

As hip-hop undergoes a conservative retrenchment in the wake of the early 90’s sampling lawsuits, a widening variety of composers and groups expand the practice of appropriative audio collage as a formal discipline. The aesthetic of the sound libraries gives rise to recombinant genres like drum and bass, the use of sampling as romanticized representation leads to the first quadruple platinum World Music collage, and we encounter a novelty single that quietly heralds a musical form that would soon become known as the Mash-up. More information here.

The Contemporary Art Centre and Goethe-Institut in Vilnius are happy to present the first comprehensive solo show of Carsten Nicolai to date. The show, pioneer, is titled after one of the most recent works by the artist — an ephemeral installation featuring a huge parachute, presented to the public for the first time. ‘pioneer’ marks the experimental nature of Nicolai’s work — his exhibitions resemble scientific laboratories where various calculations and tests with partly open results are performed.

Carsten Nicolai frequently uses geometrical, optical, ornamental structures, yet his works are not limited to explorations of form. He seeks to demonstrate the internal configuration of a form and reveal the physical processes and formulas that underlie different natural phenomena. In the exhibition pioneer, words uttered by Laurie Anderson are materialised as aluminium sculptures, burning gas in a transparent tube visualises the speed of acoustic waves, the usually unseen heat waves become visible with the help of light and shadow, while another video work demonstrates the phenomenon of stealth that resembles military technology to prevent detection of information.

Although the artist’s creative method is based on theories from mathematics, physics and natural science, he attributes equal importance to the concepts of chance and error. Many of his sound and visual works employ a mathematical rule or a module that enables self-generating creative processes. The same methods are common in his musical experiments, in which the artist creates live sound and visual structures that interact with each other (Carsten Nicolai is known in the world of electronic music as lava noto).

The presentation of Carsten Nicolai’s works in Lithuania is supported by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany.

*Image above: Photo: Carsten Nicolai. Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin and The Pace Gallery.

This and that thought. takes the form of a narrative. Visually, the project consists of the hex codes of the 216 web safe colors and a colorless box next to each, arranged in a grid. The arrangement is based on the van der Corput seqeunce which orders the colors from black to white through an unintuitive trajectory. The user is invited to click on any hex code which triggers an aural narration based on a fictional narrative of an episodic nature, jumping from subject to subject through connections sometimes obvious, sometimes oblique. Each segment of the narrative is visually associated to one of the colors by a reveal in sync with the narration. Furthermore, attached to each segment is its own unique introduction to the story. Depending on what color is activated, the user experiences a variable story in so far as the introduction and length of the narrative will change. If the user happens to click on black, then the narrative will be “whole” in the sense that the story will utilize all the segments created for the project, whereas any other color incorporates only every color between itself until the end color; white. All other elements remain the same, including the order of the colors and their associated phrase within the narrative.

This and that thought. is used to highlight the structure of the Internet and contemplate our experience within it. More and more our use of the medium becomes mediated by different factors, mostly in the service of corporate interest. We are directed towards what we are supposed to view and are given suggestions and recommendations based on prior knowledge of our interest. As we partake in surfing the web, we are unaware of this mediation, it is disguised, an unintuitive trajectory; a path from black to white. While in reality a filter like a mathematical formula, in this case the van der Corput sequence, is placed on our experience of this information and always precedes and concludes in a similar fashion; the analogy of the color white in our project. The formula proves appropriate because of its practical use in extracting individual data elements from audio and visual files and organizing this information so that the individual components of the whole may be recognized and analyzed. This and that thought. creates an arbitrary link between each phrase and its color, thereby placing hope in the context of the experience. The information, presented in consideration of what preceded and succeeded it, intends to trigger a thought process completely independent of the structure the user is unwittingly forced into. While we may be experiencing the Internet in a predetermined manner, we glean and interpret from it in a subjective way, creating a meaningful experience of the data.

This and that thought. is a 2011 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BFFA3AE (Daniel Chew, Micaela Durand, Maximiliano Ferro, Matthew Gaffney) was formed in 2007 as a net art collective. On their shared blog and website, an ongoing dialogue occurs that explores the implications of the Internet on culture and life. A particular focus is placed upon the way in which their generation is being socialized through this medium and its effects on mass culture. Using a syntax that transcends language, their website speaks through the use of a variety of formats available to the technology, including pictures, videos, sound, and code. Acknowledging the reach of the Internet into the physical world, the group has since expanded beyond its initial impulse to include work in a variety of mediums including film and performance. This has allowed them to tackle the same issues and further their conversation by viewing the medium from a different perspective.

SON[I]A talks to Goldsmith about the origins, ideas and operation of Ubuweb:

SON[I]A: Magnitude that expresses the level of sonorous sensation produced by an intense sound. The Radio Web MACBA emits SON[I]A, its first program, since May 2 2006. SON[I]A aims to be an alternative way to receive the information produced during Museum activities; audio information brought to us by characters who take part in activities in and around the MACBA. It allows us to experiment with the radio format as a space for synthesis, using audio recordings from past Museum activities that are still relevant and of interest to our listeners.