Net_Dérive, by Atau Tanaka and Petra Gemeinboeck with the collaboration of Ali Momeni, is a location sensitive mobile media art piece that calls for an exchange between participants in the gallery and participants in the streets. Deployed on advanced mobile phones, the work seeks to create a kind of musical instrument, thinking of the city-as-instrument.

Participants are given a kind of scarf with a mobile phone in each end and off they go to explore the neighborhood. One of the phones takes pictures every 20 secs and collects sounds, the other talks to the GPS (also in the scarf) and to the server inside the gallery space. Continue reading

While driving through Africa, Michael Sheridan and his film crew met two men crouching in the sand and listening to handheld shortwave radios. The sounds from their radios reconnected the artist with the world after days of isolation and disorientation.

This experience inspired the sound installation Culture Catcher. Shortwave radios, digital recorders and players, motion detectors, micro computers, antennae… all the equipment required to search for and broadcast multiple shortwave radio signals is hung by suction-cups on a giant transparent wall. Continue reading

Last week, audience members enjoyed a unique experience in maverick choreographer Merce Cunningham’s newest piece, eyeSpace. Using iPod Shuffles, each member of the audience heard different pieces of composer Mikel Rouse’s score, International Cloud Atlas. The audience was provided with iPod shuffles, set to play the score’s tracks in a random order, giving each viewer a distinct viewing experience.

Audience members were requested to bring their own iPods, loaded with the score they downloaded from this page, to play during the performance of eyeSpace. For those who didn’t have their own iPods, iPod Shuffles were available for use on loan (at no cost) at The Joyce Theater.

With your ticket purchase, audience members were also entitled to receive a free download of select tracks from Mikel Rouse’s score. [via Great Dance]

undersound is an interface that allows you to listen to, distribute and affect the flow of music on your mobile phone while you’re travelling in the underground.

The project imagines that you will be able to add music to the system at upload points in the ticket halls, and download tracks on the platforms. Because of the architectural configuration of the stations undersound users would have to congregate at certain locations for the purpose of interacting with the system. Continue reading

What is fear? Why should you be afraid? What, who is to fear? Where does your fear come from? Participate in creating a collective voice about “fear”. Help reveal its actual tendencies.

FearingS is a part of the project Oppera Internettikka – Protection et Securite by Annie Abrahams & Igor Stromajer.

Oppera Internettikka – Protection et Securite explores the poetics of a contemporary sound form — live opera as a sound event for the audience in the form of a live internet audio broadcasting. In that way it combines the notion of the world wide web communication protocols and classical artspace — an opera house. Opera is a very strictly coded form of art with a lot of passion, and internet is a lonely place of solitude and intimate communication which is becoming more and more fragile, dangerous and suspicious.

The theme of the project is security and protection, which refers both to private and personal safety issues in the present post-WTC world of high and intense but questionable security measures and to the internet as a global and therefore extremely vulnerable and unstable communication tool.
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Simon Elvins, a graduate from MA Communication Art & Design at the RCA, has created a number of interesting works dealing with print as an interactive interface for sound.

Notation: This is part of an ongoing exploration into sound, print and notation, and looks at ways of linking sound to the printed page. Using a simple sounder, the project aims to directly relate tonal values of pattern and drawing, into a tonal scales of sound and music. Continue reading

Our sonic environment has a far more direct impact on daily actions than just suggestive image production. Soundscapes define economic, social, and cultural territories. In response to the question “How does sound influence our society?”, eleven artists deal in site-specific works with two issues: control and the production of space. Ear Appeal is not a sound-art exhibition: instead, it approaches sound as conceptual and analytic material, examining the ways sound defines space and exerts control.

Every day, we are surrounded by sound waves in the city, functional music in shopping malls, elevator music, telephone please-hold-the-line loops, and the comforting tinkles in hotel lobbies, restaurants, and doctors’ waiting rooms. Audio-branding confronts us through radio and television, but also in the slam of a car door or the crunch of a cookie. We perceive noises not only with our ears: sound waves are also absorbed by the skin, nose, mouth, and bones. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Graph Theory by Jason Freeman, with Patricia Reed and Maja Cerar :: [needs Macromedia Flash Player plugin; Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0+, or Safari 1.0+]

Graph Theory seeks to connect composition, listening, and concert performance by coupling an acoustic work for solo violin or solo cello to an interactive web site. On the web site, users navigate among sixty-one short, looping musical fragments to create their own unique path through the composition. The navigation choices which users make affect future concert performances of the work. Before each performance, the soloist prints out a new copy of the score from the web site. That score presents her with a fixed path through the piece; the order of the fragments is influenced by the decisions that recent web site visitors have made. Continue reading