Artists!

The US Congress is about to pass an internet censorship bill written by the copyright and corporate music and film lobbies, claiming that this bill is written in your name to “protect creativity.” The law would allow the government or corporations to censor entire sites — they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

In fact, PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are backed and largely written by the Hollywood film industry, namely the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which is trying to sell goods and ideas that are already free. Continue reading

World X Diagnostics by Megan Michalak and Stephanie Rothenberg :: August 13-27, 2009 :: Opening: August 13; 6:00 - midnight :: Harvestworks, NYC :: Public Launch: August 15, 2009; noon - 3:00 pm :: Finland.

World X Diagnostics is a revolutionary system that evaluates and diagnoses citizen responses to socio-economic conditions resulting from the global economic meltdown. Public data measuring gross national well being is collected from participating users and translated into real time sound frequencies through programmed algorithms. Through the system’s network, users are able to access the compiled data from their geographical region, as well as from any location on the globe. Continue reading

URGENT– The European open internet is in danger. The EU PARLIAMENT is voting on new rules on the 5th of MAY 2009 that will let broadband providers limit your access. Don’t let the them lock up the Internet! There will be no way back! [image from Visual Dictionary online]

Internet access is not conditional. Everyone who owns a website has an interest in defending the free use of the Internet… so has everyone who uses Google or Skype… everyone who expresses their opinions freely, does research of any kind, whether for personal health problems or academic study … everyone who shops online…who dates online…socialises online… listens to music…watches video… Continue reading

ULTRA-RED: Raven Row Sessions in Spitalfields, London seeks applicants for Sessions: Saturdays 4, 18 April, 2, 16 and 30 May 2009; and a Concluding Public Event: 11 June 2009, 18:00PM.

What is the sound of community organising? A five-session practice-based workshop on activism and sound art open to UK-based artists, social movement activists, community organisers, and students. The artist activist collective Ultra-red will present a workshop in five daylong sessions at Raven Row, a new contemporary art exhibition centre in Spitalfields, London. The workshop introduces participants to the art of sound and learning from what we hear in the methods and politics of community organising. Continue reading

Neural 15th Anniversary: Issue #31: Neural magazine celebrates 15 years of publishing with Issue #31 and joining S.W.A.M.P. group (Doug Easterly and Matt Kenyon) for a collective micro-printing action.

Subscribers will receive a numbered / limited edition of S.W.A.M.P.’s “Notepad” sheet of paper with an envelope. It looks like an everyday yellow legal paper, but each line is constructed of micro-printed text and contains the personal details of Iraqi civilian casualties. Subscribers are triggered to write a letter or memo or draw a picture on it and send it to the White House, then signing up for a free replacement sheet on the S.W.A.M.P. website, if they want. Once in circulation each sheet then acts as a “Trojan horse” - slipping the unwanted and unacknowledged civilian body count data into official governmental archives. This is a joint action that proves how paper and pixel together can make the difference.

Radio Free Banff presents Kelly Andres’ Songbike :: September 20, 2008; 10 am - 7 pm :: Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff New Media Institute, Canada.

Become a tour guide and take artist Kelly Andres on a one-hour bicycle ride of your Banff. Andres will accompany you with her mobile sound lab, Songbike, transforming your narrated ride into a unique soundscape composition broadcast live to the world on www.radio90.fm.

In August 2006, Songbike was presented as a concept for the Interactive Screen 06 competitive pitch session at the Banff New Media Institute. It was awarded a co-production residency to develop the project. Continue reading

Shinichi Takemura is a designer who uses technology in an attempt to enable creativity. He believes technology should not be used to stop people thinking, but rather to enable potential in humanity. Aqua Scape is one such example. This website invites the viewer into another world, where they can be involved in situations across the globe. The viewer can listen to various sounds of water from around the world, in real time. Takemura believes that listening to sounds in real time can change peoples emotional responses, and that the Internet is a platform to unite global citizens. This website becomes a unique dynamic experience, that can never be the same, rather than a static source of information. Takemura has transformed the function of a website and is working at using the internet to facilitate change.

Just Play - Musik as Social Praxis :: Artists: Cory Arcangel / Beige, Johanna Billing, Jeremy Deller, Iain Forsyth + Jane Pollard, Kristin Lucas, Hadley + Maxwell, Elke Marhöfer / Anne-Marie Schleiner, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Abe Linkoln / Marisa Olson :: March 8 – May 18, 2008 :: Opening: March 7, 2008; 7 pm :: Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Katharinenstra_e 23, D-26121 Oldenburg.

Music plays a pivotal role in many people’s lives as part of everyday popular culture because it is so unmediated. At times as a real world, at others as a reflecting surface for one’s own and others’ projections, music provides scope for manifold liberating, activist or subversive strategies at a far remove from consumption or glamour. Continue reading

Art Now: Seb Patane - So this song kills fascists :: until January 13, 2008 :: Tate Britain, Millbank, London.

So this song kills fascists, explores ideas of performance as a means of protest. The sound work, from which the installation takes its title, questions the revolutionary potential of music while new drawings, reminiscent of Surrealist or psychographic automatic writing, suggest a non-visible dimension implicit in the music. The central installation, Last Dance of the Nodding Folk, resembles an expressionist stage set, a theme echoed in the theatrical images leaning, placard-like against it. Footage of a fire juggler introduces an element of ritualised and controlled movement, which links to the energy of the drawings and the viewer’s choreographed passage around the installation. Patane identifies an aesthetics of subculture where protest has been exchanged for stylised performance, a husk detached from belief.