In collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum and STEIM, Sonic Acts will host a series of masterclasses as part of this year’s festival edition Travelling Time.

The masterclasses provide a unique opportunity for artists, musicians and other creative professionals to work with 5 internationally renowned artists whose work critically reflects on time and timing. In a concentrated and intimate setting, participants will gain insight into the artists‚ concepts, work processes, and methods of composition and production through hands-on workshops and seminars.

TO PARTICIPATE

Deadline for applications is 12 February 2012. Please send a biography and a short motivation outlining why you would like to take part in a specific masterclass to: masterclass at sonicacts.com.

Attending multiple classes is possible. Late or incomplete applications will not be considered. You will be informed about the result of your application by 14 February.

A detailed schedule as well as more information about the preparation for the masterclass will be sent to successful applicants with this notification.

FEE

There is a fee of 25 Euro to participate per masterclass. Catering will be provided.

DATES & LOCATIONS

The masterclasses take place at STEIM, SMART Project Space and De Balie, in Amsterdam
20 February: Olaf Nicolai
21 & 22 February: Catherine Christer Hennix
22 February: Peter Kubelka
23 February: Pauline Oliveros
23 February: Tino Sehgal

These masterclasses are made possible with the support of the Mondriaan Fund.

ABOUT THE MASTERS

CATHERINE CHRISTER HENNIX (US/SE) is a composer, philosopher, mathematician and visual artist. In the 1960s and 1970s she worked with illustrious figures such as La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath who were very important for her own work. She has frequently collaborated with the American anti-art philosopher, composer and violinist Henry Flynt. Hennix also drew inspiration from Japanese Gagaku music and the early vocal music of Perotinus and Leoninus. All her major compositions, including The Electric Harpsichord, are regarded as part of an ongoing, endless cycle.

PETER KUBELKA (AT) is a multifaceted artist and theoretician who has worked in film, cooking, music, architecture, speech and writing. He communicates through lectures, which also use non-verbal elements Œto free our world view from being the exclusive property of language‚. Kubelka‚s cinematographic work is short and highly condensed. His ŒMetric Films‚ preceded and laid the foundations for structural cinema. Kubelka will lead a masterclass on film & cooking.

OLAF NICOLAI (DE) is a German artist whose conceptual approach and use of diverse media question the way in which we view our everyday environment. He also translates theories from science and the arts into aesthetic-artistic idioms, rendering them accessible in a new context. His works deal with the perception of time in the reception of art. Nicolai has participated in international solo and group exhibitions. His works were shown at Documenta X, and at the 49th and 51st Venice Biennales. Several of his works can be found in public collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art / New York; Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary /Vienna; Friedrich Christian Flick Collection / Berlin and Migros Museum / Zürich.

PAULINE OLIVEROS (US), composer, performer and humanitarian, is an important pioneer in American music and electronic music. She has explored sound for five decades, breaking new ground for herself and others. Through improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation she has created a body of work with such breadth of vision that it profoundly affects those who experience it. Pauline Oliveros will lead a Deep Listening session.

TINO SEHGAL (DE/UK) is a British-German artist whose works, which he calls Œconstructed situations‚, involve one or more people carrying out instructions conceived by the artist. What all of Sehgal’s works have in common is that they reside only in the space and time they occupy, and in the memory of the work and its reception. The artist himself describes his works as ‘constructed situations’, whose materials are the human voice, language, movement, and interaction, without the production of physical objects. His pieces are choreographies that are regularly staged in museums or galleries, and continuously executed for the entire duration of a show. In 2012, he will present a newly commissioned work for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London.

The next {SØNiK} event will take place February 25, 2011. {SØNiK} takes place over two nights, and submissions are open to all works in sound, new media, performance, and video. Please email sonik@sonikfest.info if you would like to submit your work.

Submission Guidelines: Submissions are accepted via email, by linking to a website or an online audio/video account where the works can be viewed, if available.

To submit, send an email to sonik@sonikfest.info that includes the following information in the body:

-Your contact information (name, email address, phone number, website)
-The details of the work you are submitting (medium, length, title, date)
- Form of submission (video, mp3, etc.)
- Technical needs
- A brief bio/artist statement
- A brief statement about the specific work you are submitting. State if the work has been previously exhibited, and if so, where.
- Links to online samples of your works, if available.

Showing samples of other works is highly encouraged, though not required.
-For performance works, supplemental still images are encouraged and a more detailed explanation of the project proposed is required.

For any works that are unavailable online, please contact sonik@sonikfest.info, with “Submission Inquiry” in the Subject line, for further instructions on submitting.

Link: http://sonikfest.info/call/

basic.fm is a new radio station that forms part of Pixel Palace, an exciting programme of digital arts and new media at Tyneside Cinema. It hosts Broadcast Art, Sound & Independent Culture, aspiring to be a space that can be inhabited by artists, curators, thinkers and interesting people with something to share and will be gradually be populated with work, projects, shows and archived events.

Since launching in November 2011, basic.fm has commissioned an exciting number of leading artists, including Mark Vernon, The Noize Choir, Ed Carter, Sarah Boothroyd and People Like Us.

Call for Participation

Pixel Palace are seeking new or existing works to host on basic.fm. Selected works will form part of a series of curated programmes (one-off and regular shows) that will appear on basic.fm from April 2012. Work can include sound art, spoken word, field recordings and artist interviews within the context of Broadcast Art, Sound & Independent Culture.

This is an unpaid opportunity but all selected contributions will be fully credited and linked appropriately to relevant websites and/ or sources. This call is open to all artists, musicians, field recordists and sonic artists regardless of nationality, age, or career stage.

Submissions must include:

• Title and description of new or existing work(s) for basic.fm (100 words maximum)
• Examples of past work (please provide links to work as large email large media files cannot be accepted)
• CV and contact information

About Pixel Palace

Pixel Palace is the exciting programme of digital arts and new media at Tyneside Cinema. This programme takes the form of arts residencies, commissions, live events and exhibitions. We experiment with new ways of sharing creative work, ideas and stories as we move towards the future of cinema.

Tyneside Cinema’s mission is to bring together people to experience, enjoy and engage with the past, present and future of cinema. Pixel Palace aims to extend and deliver this mission by working with new media artists and curators embracing digital arts, not only to reflect upon the cinema’s past, but to engage new audiences in its expanded present and pervasive future.
Jean Luc Goddard’s classic film “Alphaville” provides a creative starting point for Pixel Palace to explore the influence technology has upon us, shaping our behaviour and understanding of the world.

As Godard predicted, life is indeed shaped by computers. In Alphaville, in our world today, the cinema is everywhere, in the flick of a cigarette lighter, in the glow of a light bulb… it is in the way we perceive our world, in the way we speak, in the way we dream. We have no need of entering a movie theatre to experience cinema; life itself is just like a movie.

Kelly Brougher (2008). ‘The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving image’

Pixel Palace aims to work with artists to investigate the way in which the cinema reflects life but also the way in which technology has an “Alphaville” effect.

How to apply

Please email submissions to Dominic Smith, Digital Arts Manager at the Tyneside Cinema: info [at] thepixelpalace.org with the subject heading: basic.fm

Artists will be notified via email regarding the outcome of their submitted work(s).

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. Similar to its most well-known President, Jack Valenti, who represented Hollywood interests in Washington, and vice-versa, the current chairman and CEO of the MPAA is Chris Dodd, a prominent member of the Democratic Party and US Senator from Connecticut for 30 years.

Artists, musicians, actors, writers, and media-makers need to sign. Your statement is powerful because the corporate music and film lobbies push these laws to censor the internet in your name.

In solidarity, Turbulence.org will feature a block out page from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST today, January 18.

INTERNET GOES ON STRIKE: ALL SITES AND PEOPLE TO GO OUT

Major sites all over the internet have gone on strike due to SOPA and PIPA, the hot-button anti-piracy legislation. Experts expect strike to last 150 seconds, and agree this is a “near eternity” in internet time.

Congress is about to pass what has been called the internet censorship bill, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. The Senate is scheduled to vote on its version of the internet censorship bill on Tuesday, January 24th, and unless there are 41 senators to voice their opposition to allowing the bill to proceed, it is expected to pass.

Legislation called the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House are purported to be a way to crack down on online copyright infringement. In reality the bill is much broader. It would empower governments and corporations to take down virtually any website, create new liabilities and uncertainties for web innovators, and make the web less safe. According to the varied and multitudinous reasons large numbers of sites and individuals are opposed to the bill, it betrays basic American tenets, such as free speech, prosperity, and national security. On top of all that, cybersecurity experts say it wouldn’t stop copyright infringement.

The legislation is backed and largely written by the MPAA, as they have said in media reports. They have also spent millions in lobbying dollars to pass this legislation.

To see the bills, go here:
www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/show
www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show

NOW, IT’S YOUR TURN TO TELL CONGRESS NO TO WEB CENSORSHIP:
CALL (202) 224-3121

WHAT’S WRONG WITH SOPA / PIPA?

Free Speech

Takes down hosts of content and legitimate free speech. The legislation is overly broad and could block some of our favorite websites to Americans only over just one claim to an infringing link posted by users.

The Economy

Creates massive new legal uncertainties and liabilities for web startups, stifling job creation in our most vibrant sector. As 54 leading tech venture capitalists wrote to Congress, the censorship bills would, “stifle investments in internet services, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness.”

Security / Privacy

A web security initiative that has been in development for more than a decade and is just beginning to be implemented, DNSSEC, would be illegal under the bill. The DNS filtering and anti-circumvention provisions in the bill would force a huge step backwards for securing critical national infrastructure from cyberattacks, preventing online identity theft, and stopping the spread of malware.

Copyright Infringement

People that want to share copyrighted content online would still be able to. To get around DNS blocking, all you have to do is enter the IP address of a website into your browser’s url bar.

Learn more:

americancensorship.org is supported by Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Fight for the Future, Participatory Politics Foundation / Open Congress, Center for Democracy and Technology, MoveOn, Cato Institute, Don’t Censor the Net, Urban Dictionary, 4chan, Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla, Demand Progress, Free Software Foundation, and see more at americancensorship.org/supporters.html

The bill is opposed by:

CEO’s of Huffington Post, Google, Twitter, and thousands and thousands more. To see a full list, go here.

SOPA becoming election liability for backers

To the ranks of same-sex marriage, tax cuts and illegal immigration, add this to the list of polarizing political issues of Election 2012: the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The hot-button anti-piracy legislation that sparked a revolt online is starting to become a political liability for some of SOPA’s major backers. Fueled by Web activists and online fundraising tools, challengers are using the bill to tag its congressional supporters as backers of Big Government—and raise campaign cash while they’re at it.

Among the fattest targets: SOPA’s lead author, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and two of its most vocal co-sponsors, Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has also felt the wrath of SOPA opponents.

Even GOP presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were asked by voters recently to weigh in on the bill (neither gave definitive answers, though activists have interpreted Santorum’s response as more sympathetic to SOPA than Romney’s).

KEY POINTS ABOUT SOPA / PIPA

1. Leading constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe and internet law expert Marvin Ammori have argued that the bill violates the First Amendment because they would restrict considerable speech by people who are not engaging in infringement, either directly or indirectly.

2. 54 leading internet venture capitalists have signed a letter stating that legal uncertainties under PROTECT-IP would “stifle investment in Internet services, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness.”

3. Contrary to its supporters’ claims, the bill will affect domestic websites. Any site that can be shown to enable circumvention of website blocking under the bill would face penalties. This could include sites where users have posted links to IP addresses or new domains for sites that have been blocked.

4. The bill would use DNS filtering to block sites, which is the same technique used for web censorship in China and Iran. The U.S. will no longer have a moral high ground when talking about protecting internet freedom globally.

5. An internet security initiative that has been in the works for more than a decade and is just starting to be implement, DNSSEC, would be considered an illegal circumvention tool under the bill. The DNS filtering and anti-circumvention provisions in the bill would force a huge step backwards for securing critical infrastructure, preventing identity theft, and stopping malware.

6. The bill has not received sufficient committee work and is not ready for floor action. The bill did not receive a single hearing and the mark-up session held by the Judiciary Committee on May 26th lasted less than 8 minutes and featured no amendments and no substantial debate.

Published by internet sites around the world. To get more involved see americancensorship.org

The sonic environment is an indicator for the quality of life: One crucial aspect, however, remains open and leads to a multitude of questions: Is this, what our hearing is exposed to, satisfying and enhancing our individual, social, functional, biological, economical, aesthetic and existential needs and endeavors? If not, which concepts exist to “orchestrate” everyday life’s cacophony? Which methods exist to successfully evaluate the quality of soundscapes? Which criteria and values have to be developed, which practical constraints and habits to be dismissed in order to design the everyday as a “Hörenswürdigkeit”, which means: as something worth listening to?

How to improve the Global Composition to make the world more liveable?

Within this process: What role does media play and relation to its commodification of sound? Are there valid approaches to or even successful examples of shaping the soundscape in ways that are beneficial or at least acceptable for a majority? Are there strategies for overcoming the societal, political and economic hindrances that inhibit the inclusion of auditory considerations in the making of a sustainable society? What is the role of art in developing paradigms for auditory solutions applied to our living environments?

How to foster listening abilities within the concert of the senses?

Last but not least, what educational concepts and methods exist for integrating listening abilities into the concert of the senses, and develop auditory faculties as important tools for understanding, criticizing, shaping and designing the global environment?

Proposals are invited for roundtable discussions, workshops, papers/posters, applied and artistic contributions, relating, but not limited to the conference’s main focus. The conference’s official language will be English.

Providing a specially positioned “Next Generation”-thread, the conference is very interested, to create a forum for young scholars, scientists, artists as well as for students, and encourages them to send in their proposals. Please send abstracts for roundtable discussions, papers/posters, workshops & proposals for compositions or other artistic contributions by March 1,
2012.

As keynote presenters we expect Bill Fontana, R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp et al.

Please note, that our venue is situated not far from Frankfurt airport in beautiful historic surroundings, providing not only the productive frame for an interesting conference, but also attractive landscapes, very good wine, culinary highlights, therefore good conditions for exchange and conviviality. All this makes, too, a central starting point for your summerbreak, be it locally, nationally or internationally.

We’re half-way through our end of year fundraiser. Please make a donation (tax-deductible for US residents) before December 31.

Now embarking on its 32nd year, New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. — an independent not-for-profit organization founded in New York City — continues to agitate the institutional art world through its trailblazing projects, including New American Radio (1987-1998), Turbulence.org (1996-), Networked _ Performance (2004-), Networked _ Music _ Review (2007-), and Networked: a (networked _ book) about (networked _ art) (2009-).

Since 1981, NRPA has commissioned more than 500 works by more than 400 artists, many of them just beginning their careers. The Turbulence.org archive spans a crucial 15-year period of exploration and innovation in digital, networked environments, ranging from hypertext to information visualization, blogs to social networks, and interactive dance/musical compositions to 3-D architecture.

Here’s what Régine Debatty and Timothy Murray have said about Turbulence.org:

“Turbulence because they’ve been consistently commissioning net.art … and because they have a great blog called Networked_Performance that documents better (much better) than me the calls, essays and events that interest the whole new media art community.” Régine Debatty, we-make-money-not-art, 2006

“Turbulence … has developed into a natural archive of Internet art, housing the largest representation of American art produced as networked art. Indeed, no other on-line exhibition project has played such an influential and lasting role.” Timothy Murray, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, 2011

Please help us keep doing what we’re doing by making a donation via PayPal on http://turbulence.org or by sending a check to:

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.
124 Bourne Street
Roslindale, MA 02131
United States of America

Thank you.

We wish you all a peaceful and prosperous 2012.

Warmly,

Jo and Helen

Now embarking on its 32nd year, New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. — an independent not-for-profit organization founded in New York City — continues to agitate the institutional art world through its trailblazing projects, including New American Radio (1987-1998), Turbulence.org (1996-), Networked _ Performance (2004-), Networked _ Music _ Review (2007-), and Networked: a (networked _ book) about (networked _ art) (2009-).

Since 1981, NRPA has commissioned more than 500 works by more than 400 artists, many of them just beginning their careers. The Turbulence.org archive spans a crucial 15-year period of exploration and innovation in digital, networked environments, ranging from hypertext to information visualization, blogs to social networks, and interactive dance/musical compositions to 3-D architecture.

Here’s what Régine Debatty and Timothy Murray have said about Turbulence.org:

“Turbulence because they’ve been consistently commissioning net.art … and because they have a great blog called Networked_Performance that documents better (much better) than me the calls, essays and events that interest the whole new media art community.” Régine Debatty, we-make-money-not-art, 2006

“Turbulence … has developed into a natural archive of Internet art, housing the largest representation of American art produced as networked art. Indeed, no other on-line exhibition project has played such an influential and lasting role.” Timothy Murray, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, 2011

Please help us keep doing what we’re doing by making a donation via PayPal on http://turbulence.org or by sending a check to:

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.
124 Bourne Street
Roslindale, MA 02131
United States of America

Thank you.

We wish you all a peaceful and prosperous 2012.

Warmly,

Jo and Helen

About ICAD : The 18th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2012) will be held June 18-22, 2012, at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the heart of midtown Atlanta, Georgia. The event will mark the 20th anniversary of the 1st International Conference on Auditory Display. Since 1992, ICAD has been the premier international venue for the dissemination and discussion of work related to the science, art, and practice of sound as a communicative display. Through its active Sonification Lab and Center for Music Technology, Georgia Tech is pleased to host ICAD’s vibrant community of researchers and practitioners on its campus.

Competition Theme

ICAD 2004 titled its sonification competition ‘Listening to the Mind Listening’ and invited entrants to sonify EEG data captured while a subject was listening to music. The ICAD 2012 competition is inspired by this same idea: music (or sound) about listening to music. It is also inspired by the radical changes over the past decade in how we listen to music and how we share our listening activities with others. As portable media players and always-connected smartphones have become our primary listening platforms, social media services have become our primary sharing platforms.

This competition adopts the theme ‘Listening to the World Listening’ as it challenges us to explore what we can learn about listening through the analysis and sonification of social media data about listening.

There is no static data set for this competition; instead, entrants are invited to use a set of data APIs to obtain social media listening data. Use of a Twitter Music Trends data feed, which aggregates music listening data from Twitter by artist, is required. Entrants may optionally gather related data about the tweets themselves from the Twitter API, and about the referenced artists from the MusicBrainz and Echo Nest APIs. Detailed information about each API is included in the full call at http://distributedmusic.gatech.edu/icad/.

Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2012

Notification of finalists: April 1, 2012

Submission Requirements:

Sonifications may be fixed-media audio files, interactive software programs or web sites, smartphone apps, musical performances, or sound installations. They may sonify the data in real time or out of real time. They may work with as little as a single set of fifty artists from Twitter Music Trends or as much as several months worth of data collected across all of the APIs.

Submissions must include an audio or video recording, no more than five minutes in length, of the complete sonification, excerpts from the sonification, or documentation of the sonification, as appropriate. Submissions must also include a 2-4 page statement, following the ICAD 2012 paper template, that describes the techniques used to create the sonification and the motivations behind them.

All questions should be addressed to Jason Freeman, ICAD 2012 Music Chair.

Jury, Finalists, and Winners:

A jury will select finalists to be featured during ICAD 2012, and the winner will be announced during the conference. The statements of each finalist will also be published in the ICAD conference proceedings.

Jury:

Alberto de Campo, Professor of Computational Art, Universität der Künste Berlin

R. Luke Dubois, Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media, NYU-Poly

Adam Lindsay, chief scientist, SocialGenius

Brian Whitman, co-founder and CTO, The Echo Nest

Full Details on the data sources and the competition are available at:

http://distributedmusic.gatech.edu/icad/

Link: http://distributedmusic.gatech.edu/icad/

Deadline: Thu March 1, 2012

The *Network Music Festival* will take place in January 2012 in Birmingham (UK) in the heart of Birmingham’s creative community. Presenting a diverse programme of laptop performances, live coding, communicating home-made musical gadgets, sound installations, workshops and everything else in between, the Network Musical Festival boasts an international line-up including some of Birmingham’s best home-grown hi-tech musical performers.We are looking for proposals for performances, talks, installations, demos and workshops. http://networkmusicfestival.org/open-call/

Network Music Festival aims to showcase a broad spectrum of musical and sound related works, research and participatory activities which use networking as part of their aesthetic, creation or performance practice. Network Music Festival would like to invite submissions in the categories of Performance (Concert or Club), Installation, Talks, Demos and Workshops.

We are also open to other suggestions, where you are free to submit proposals that fall outside of the above categories but that you feel would be an appropriate addition to the festival programme.

PERFORMANCES: Performances where networking in an integral part of the aesthetics or performance practice. This could include: Laptop Ensembles/Orchestras/Bands, Instrumental and Electronic groups; Performances which use the internet as part of the performance; any performance that use networking in some form.

Proposed performances should be 10-30 minutes in length.

INSTALLATIONS: Sound installations which use networking as central to the aesthetic and/or creation of the work. Could include static installations or installations which explore the surrounding area.

TALKS: We will be accepting submissions for informal talks, accompanied by slideshow presentations. Talk topics should be suitable for the general public.

DEMOS: The Network Music Festival will include an interactive hands-on session where festival attendees can try-out or see your hardware or software network music device/installation/toys/etc in action. The session will be in the form of a market-place. You will be provided with a small space with a table where you can set up your tech for attendees to look at and have a go.

WORKSHOPS: Participatory workshops which cover topics related to sound and networking. May focus on technological and/or artistic aspects. Please note this is a submission to LEAD a workshop. Please state the experience level required in order to take part in the workshop and the length of time and resources required in workshop description.

OTHER: If there’s anything that you would like to submit that you don’t feel is covered by the above categories but would be an appropriate addition to the festival programme, please submit a proposal with as much information as
possible.

DEADLINE FOR ALL SUBMISSIONS: 5 December, 2011. hhttp://networkmusicfestival.org/open-call/