The Society of Composers, Incorporated is looking for technology-based works for the 2008 student conference at Ball State University, Muncie, IN on October 10 – 11. The official call for works still lists the deadline as May 30, but it has been extended to July 8 according to Tom Wells, president of SCI. They are hoping to program solo or ensemble laptop performances as well as network improvisations. You do not need to be an SCI member to submit a piece. However, accepted composers will need to join SCI (student fee: $27.50). The official call is below Continue reading

“For nearly ten years, trash has been the focus of a massive project, an audiovisual work called The Appearance Machine, by artists Willy Le Maitre & Eric Rosenzveig. This is a project that deals firsthand with an overabundance of material that won’t go away, and about seeing the beautiful possibilities of trash, giving the act of recycling a new context. The result is conflicting, producing in the viewer a sense of alienation and comfort, disbelief and wonder.

The once aimless material waste becomes the nexus of a unique art project that celebrates waste and the odd notion of an enjoyable wasteland through a complex means of processing and image making. The Appearance Machine’s permanent residence is in New York City, the unofficial center of the detritus crisis as home of the largest landfill in the world. The machine itself is housed in a warehouse space that doubles as a factory or lab for audiovisual ‘performances’ set to an orchestra of digitally produced sound. Continue reading

FIGMENT :: Governor’s Island :: June 27, 28, 29, 2008 :: Ferries run from The Battery Maritime Building located adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry in Lower Manhattan. Admission and ferry to the island are free. Find a schedule here.

There will be a fundraiser on Saturday night, 6 pm to midnight, at Castle Clinton in Battery Park ($10 donation). Everyone is invited!

FIGMENT is a celebration of creative culture from June 27-29, 2008 on Governors Island in New York Harbor. It provides an open forum for artists, helps build a creative community, and fosters participatory and public art. Continue reading

AXIOM presents: A Live Experimental Sound and Video Performance :: June 26, 2008; 8:00 pm :: AXIOM, Green Street Subway (“T”) station on the Orange line, at the corner of Amory and Green Streets, Boston.

Brian Dudak, Frank W. Carroccino and WiiWhorld – presented by Chris Korda, Jeff Mission, and Jen Rosselli: WiiWhorld translates human movement into digital art – using the Nintendo Wiimote as a real-time controller for the visual software synth Whorld. The WiiWhorld project, which is built upon the principles of free, open-source software and low-cost, readily available technologies, empowers people to explore modern technology as a means of personal expression.

THE TRANSBORDER BRIDGE FESTIVAL is a 2 days festival which takes place in Ruse (Bulgaria) and Giurgiu (Romania), on the 18th and 19th of July. The festival is part of European Sound Delta, a pan European project focused on sound-art, field recording and live performances.

Just a few hundreds miles away from the Danube delta two major cities Giurgiu (Ghiurghiu)-RO and Ruse (Ruse) – BG are facing each other. They face each other stonily even though they are linked by one of the rare bridges on the eastern part of the Danube. The Festival has been designed as a dialogue between both cities since it will associate Rumanian and Bulgarian artists but also students taking part in a workshop entitled sonic landmarks of the territory in collaboration with EU Space 21 (Ruse-BG), Banlieues d’Europ’Est (Bucarest) and the Elias Canetti House (Ruse-BG). Continue reading

Piksel08: code dreams:: December 4-7 2008 :: Bergen, Norway.

How does code dream? What are the dreams of code? Piksel08 examines the other side of code, an alternative side to a hard-coded reality of work and play. Open hardware and free software project a utopic vision, yet exist within economies of capital, the dream factory of mainstream technology. Within the chance meeting of sewing machine and umbrella on the dissecting table, hardware and software are flattened.

Piksel08: code dreams explores the dreams of this soft machine; bachelors coding for pleasure, reverse engineering paranoiac constructs of the real, automatic coding practice, soft hardware, and everyday magic.Open Call: Continue reading

[Image: Graphic Music Sequencer – Caleb Coppock (top) & Untitled #06 – André Gonçalves] Algomantra recently posted on a project by Caleb Coppock, which allows the composition of music by directly drawing onto paper discs. Since the kind of graphite marks made by ordinary pencils conduct electricity it provides a system for drafting a visual score in sectored patterns on paper discs. The Graphic Music Sequencer uses wire brushes that contact a paper disc as it spins on a standard record player. When the wire sensors move across the conductive graphite a tone is generated, the pitch of the tone is further regulated by the thickness of the pencil line. It’s interesting that in nearly all musical scores, including those of experimental layout, there needs to be some system of decoding and mediation to translate mark into sound. Continue reading

Neurotic :: July 3 – 5, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London.

For three nights, big pogo-ing robots will come to punk gigs in the ICA theatre, and we will question how learning develops through the empathetic responses of the brain. Artist Fiddian Warman has played the punk records he collected as a young man to his robots, ‘programming’ them to become punks just like he was. Each night they will be tested – will the mechanical moshpit react with pleasure to the live music they’ve been brought up to love? How is taste embodied in human neurons and artificial neural networks? Fiddian fronts the band Neurotic and the PVCs with tracks written especially for the robots. Continue reading

The 8th Annual Third Coast Festival Conference:: October 9 – 11, 2008 :: Evanston, IL (just north of Chicago, along Lake Michigan).

Join us at the elegant Hotel Orrington for two and a half days of listening, discussion and an open sharing of expertise about the art and craft of audio production. This year’s conference includes top-notch presenters offering a bounty of insight into radiomaking, like: – Noah Adams, on ‘the classics’ – Adam Davidson, on ‘how to make good radio when short on time and tape’ – Sara Parker, on the ground-breaking BBC documentaries from the 50’s, the Radio Ballads Continue reading

A witty and subversive take on the video chat room, Dogs’ Ears — commissioned by the ICA (UK) — explores the beauty and language of the dog ear and the future of arts patronage in the digital era. Presented as a video chat website, visitors can log-in and browse dogs for free. But if users want to ‘chat’ with a dog, then they will need to make a small donation – either to the charity Hearing Dogs for Deaf People – or direct to the artist to fund the next stage of the project, when Freeman will write software that analyses the ear movements to produce a sonic piece. Continue reading