Audio Data courtesy of CARISMA, operated by the University of Alberta, funded by the Canadian Space Agency. Special Thanks to Andy Kale.

Made for the exhibition Invisible Fields at Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona Spain.

05.00 minutes. / HD / 2011
HD single channel and HD 3D single channel.
20Hz is co-commissioned by Arts Santa Monica + Lighthouse . Supported by the British Council.

AlgoRhythms of mobile phones 2 with detektor prototype from Shintaro Miyazaki on Vimeo.

Almost any electronic gadget can be transformed into an audible and sometimes rhythmical sound object. “Detektors” is firstly (A) a cartography of user-generated geolocational sound recordings, logs and walks, which reveal hidden electromagnetic geographies of our urban areas and secondly (B) a database and catalog of sonic studies of electromagnetic emissions produced by our everyday electronic devices.

“Detektors” is an open, collaborative project which uses sonic strategies and DIY-devices to make audible the hidden infoscapes of
our time. The presentation will show data, recordings and cartographies of different spectral ecologies and trans-sonic machinic
assemblages.

Live sound from multiple sound makers is streamed from a set of wireless transmitters placed at opposing sides of an urban space. These transmitters broadcast these audio streams locally on the same radio frequency to a group of participants wearing wireless headphones tuned to this frequency. Because the transmitters broadcast on the same local frequency, a zone of interference is created where multiple audio streams compete for signal dominance.

Participants carry umbrellas made of electromagnetic field (EMF) shielding fabric that enable them to actively shape the surrounding environment of radio waves. By orienting the umbrella in different ways, one is able to filter the interfering radio signals and select a single audio stream to listen to.

The movements of the crowd are sensed by accelerometers attached to the umbrellas and this data is broadcast locally to the sound makers via an ad-hoc wireless network, who in turn use these data streams to modify the sound streams. The resultant feedback loop provides for a form of indirect communication, where the sound producers influence bodily movement of the crowd that in turn influences the sounds the producers make.

This workshop is a detour through the city of Ghent guided by environmental data. Fit up with a self-made antenna, city walkers are dwelling through the electromagnetic fields of Ghent.

Part 1: EMF Antenna: After a contextualization of the workshop by a presentation and introduction of EMF, participants will make their own EMF antenna. Tools and material are provided by Constant. Duration: 3 hours.

Part 2: Collective Sound Performance: Cars, wires, streetlights, security installations and a lot of other electronic devices create a urban environment saturated by electromagnetic radiation. By walking, the EMF-orchestra scans the city. The registered radiation becomes audible by portable speakers the participants are wearing. Electronic rhythms, pulses, noise, frequencies, dissonant tones, feedback … Duration: 3 hours

The Brussels-based, non-profit organization Constant is operating in the field between art and media. Constant is an interdisciplinary studio involved in ethics and culture on the Internet. Their artistic practices are inspired by the way technological infrastructure, data transfer en software are changing our daily life. Important points of interest are free software, alternative license agreements and (cyber)feminism.

Sensory Threads — by Proboscis — is a work-in-progress to develop an instrument enabling a group of people to create a soundscape reflecting their collaborative experiences in the environment. For this interactive sensory experience, we are designing sensors for detecting environmental phenomena at the periphery of human perception as well as the movement and proximity of the wearers themselves. Possible targets for the sensors may be electro-magnetic radiation, hi/lo sound frequencies, heart rate etc). The sensors’ datastreams will feed into generative audio software, creating a multi-layered and multi-dimensional soundscape feeding back the players’ journey through their environment. Variations in the soundscape reflect changes in the wearers interactions with each other and the environment around them.

On the short waves of our radios, voices read out uninterrupted series of numbers. 2… 11… 58… 35… 23… Whether they are encrypted instructions intended for sleeping agents, messages exchanged between traffickers, or simple telephone settings, the “Spy Numbers Stations” have been broadcasting for several decades without their precise function becoming known. In the wake of GAKONA, the previous exhibit inspired by the work of Nikola Tesla, Spy Numbers continues the exploration of the electromagnetic spectrum and its margins in this second session of 2009. Beyond the visible and closer still to the infra-thin and the spectral, the Palais de Tokyo experiments with forms of art that elude any wistful desire for fixed interpretations. In spite of a reduced exhibition area due to renovations, Spy Numbers brings together a variety of artists whose interests include mathematical encoding, the production of aurora borealis, archiving contact lenses, seismic sensors, the disappearance of hanged men and mountain summits.

Ten solo exhibitions by Dove Allouche & Évariste Richer | Pascal Broccolichi | Luca Francesconi | Ken Gonzales-Day | Norma Jeane | Arthur Mole & John Thomas | Matt O’dell | Felix Schramm | Jim Shaw | Tony Smith | Stephane Vigny.

MORE OF SPY NUMBERS…

A SPECIAL MODULE WITH JEAN-MARC CHAPOULIE

THURSDAYS OF SPY NUMBERS /
TOKYO CODE /

Gypsy sound system
Return of the duo DJ Olga and Dr. Schnaps for a frenzied DJ set.
Thursday, may 28th / 8 p.m. to midnight

Hack Lab (1/3)
A class in three parts to learn how to become a perfect hacker. With /tmp/lab. In conjunction with ”Hack Space Fest’ at Vitry-sur-Seine.
Reservation: jeudis [at] palaisdetokyo.com
Thursday june 4th / 7:30 p.m.

Hack Lab (2/3)
Reservation: jeudis [at] palaisdetokyo.com
Thursday june 11th / 7:30 p.m.

Hack Lab (3/3)
Reservation: jeudis [at] palaisdetokyo.com
Thursday june 18th / 7:30 p.m.

Visite codée
Guided visit of the exhibition Spy Numbers accompanied by the artists and Marc-Olivier Wahler, director of the Palais de Tokyo.
Thursday june 25th/ 7:30 p.m.

Streetwars
Streetwars come back to Paris. An envelope contains a photo and address of your target. With a water gun, the city wide manhunt can begin. Reservation and infos: http://www.streetwars.net
Thursday june 2nd

Under pressure
Full immersion with a selection of submarine cinema. Projections on the facade of the Palais de Tokyo all night. Part of the 1st Night of Cinema.
Saturday july 4th / From 9 p.m.

Blitz
Session of chess simultaneously with a young champion, playing alone against everyone. With the Fédération Française des Échecs.
Thursday, july 9th / 7:30 p.m.

Micro-ondes
Concert-performance of Ondes Martenot, instrument with electronic oscillation contemporary of the Theremin. Performed by Julie Normal.
Thursday, September 3 / 7:30 p.m.

MAGAZINE PALAIS / Issue 9 - OUT on May 28th

New issue around SPY NUMBERS: an essay on Mole & Thomas by Louis Kaplan, portfolios (Ken Gonzales-Day, Matt O’dell…), sound phenomena by Pascal Broccolichi, archive documents about aurora borealis (proposed by Dove Allouche and Évariste Richer), as well as a guide section. Bilingual magazine (French & English)

The exhibition Fuzzy Electronics (& Magnetics) highlights the importance of accidental changes in so-called “new” media. There are a number of frictions provided, causing irregularities that cast a different light on the tight framework of digital imaging. On the one hand there are references to phenomena such as physical alienation and nostalgia, while at the same time there is also room for the poetic possibilities of sensory deficient digital processes and surprising electro mechanics. The collision between complex analogue impulses, such as 16 mm or traditional black-and-white photography, with the binary logic of digital image grids, adheres with a number of artists as an important starting point. They refer to the phenomenon of contingency: unforeseen factors that crisscross and deregulate the computer-generated signals. Other artists focus more on electromagnetic and kinetic processes. All play with unpredictability and set off in search of the physiological and metaphorical jammers in the reduction process and strengthening process of technology and new media.

Kjell Bjørgeengen (°1951, Oslo) is one of the prominent Norwegian artists of the moment. He works in collaboration with innovative experimental musicians like Marc Ribot, Keith Rowe, Evan Parker and Joëlle Léandre. His installation work is very often monumental — for Network he created a new installation – which brings together a disorientating yet meditative experience. Beneath the chopping sound of approaching helicopter propellers, which include a.o. excerpts of music by Streifenjunko, strategically placed CRT tubes flicker at full strength. In the tradition of video pioneers like The Vasulkas, Bjørgeengen makes use of transmitted video and audio signals to illustrate and visualise the suppressed corporality of signal receiving media. With the support of the Office of Contemporary Art Norway.

Frederik De Wilde (°1975, Aalst) began his research on the linkages between art and science with Electric Organ Discharge (EOD), a project in which he animates into image and sound the mating signals of bio-electrically-charged fish (Electric Courtship Songs). Throughout his very versatile practice he develops strategies to enhance interaction between humans, technology and nature to nano-technological levels. Currently he is exploring the sensitivity of fish in relation to pollution (EOD4) and the operation of their bio-electrical senses: the electro-sensitivities with which they map out the ecological parameters of their environment.

Jerry Galle (°1969, Antwerp) reveals the hidden life of images within a machine, often drawing from the one question: can a computer create art? Does the methodical logic of a computer stand in the way of humanity and poetry? Galle exposes not only the invisible mechanisms of digital images, but also shows how one develops through observation an intimate relationship with the images. The spectator - ad hoc witness the emergence of new images and meanings - balancing on a thin dividing line between the tangible aspects of the world on one hand, and the latent processes of imaging and observatories on the other.

Doris Kuwert (°1952, Bückeburg) studied visual art in Amsterdam and Berlin, and shows her work at home and abroad. The artist allows simple basic materials to be affected by electromechanical and electronic interventions to form subtle poetic audiovisual sculptures. In Netwerk she examines the influence of magnetic fields on the movement and sounds of small objects. The interaction between objects ranges from touching or clear collisions to hardly visible changes in position. These movements produce a richness of (enhanced) sounds that make all the physical components of the installation heard as well as felt.

Thanks to Matthew Miller (Fabrica, Brighton)

The work of Bram Vreven (°1973, Ghent) is made up of tightly composed visual structures, which by using different methods are often set in motion. Each composition developments as an elegant series of almost choreographic-like patterns through a silent rhythm that brings varying degrees of complexity. In Netwerk Bram Vreven shows a monumental kinetic sculpture, in which it’s large proportions become stressed by the flowing of movements. Simplicity and reduction are the basic principles, while combined with a sustained cyclical movement, the work gains a new complexity.

“The Farther we emerge from the inner city, the more political the atmosphere becomes. We reach the docks, the inland harbors, the warehouses, the poor neighborhoods, the scattered refuges of wretchedness: the outskirts. Outskirts are the state of emergency of a city, the terrain on which incessantly rages the great decisive battle between town and country. It is nowhere more bitter between Marseilles and the provençal landscape. It is the hand-to-hand fight telegraph poles against agaves, barbed wire against thorny palms, the miasmas of stinking corridors against the damp gloom under the plane trees in brooding squares, short-winded outside staircases against the mighty hills. The long rue de Lyon is the powder conduit which Marseilles has dug in the landscape so that in Saint-Lazare, Saint-Antoine, Arenc, Septèmes it can blow up this terrain, burying it in the shrapnel of every national and commercial language. Alimentation, Moderne, rue de Jamaïque, Comptoir de la Limite, Savon Abat-Jour, Minoterie de la campagne, Bar du Gaz, Bar Falcutatif - and over all this lies the dust that here conglomerates out of sea salt, chalk, and mica, and whose bitterness persists longer in the mouths of those who have pitted themselves against the city than the splendor of sun and sea in the eyes of its admirers.” Walter Benjamin “Marseilles - The Return of the Flâneur, 1929″

Using “The City”, as a cyborg organism, driven by the interchangeable machinery of flesh and concrete in equal measure, steered by progress and technology into previously unreachable dimensions, Open Scripts will attempt to amplify the permutations of the city’s interior reactions to its shifting techno-meaderthalls or human glitches in its well oiled machine.

Participants will be asked to embark on the journey of a modern day flaneur as they navigate, observe and impose on the city. These observations, inflections and/or interruptions caused to the natural ebb and flow of the city’s are to be transmitted across the city from a plurality of points. A live mix from these data streams will be returned to each derive / flaneur and simultaneously broadcast across the net, both producing and reproducing the city and its flesh.

Equipped with mobile phones, the participants can team up to create and organize their own derive - their desired path into the belly of this city. During these expeditions into the city’s inertia, our techno-meaderthalls would connect to the pulsating brain of our server - the grey matter of this operation - with its nervous system of mobile phones stimulating its neurons with sensory data - voices, chattering, street sounds, text messages / poetics, videos and images. Information which has designs on the attention of our “deriver” will be collected, manipulated, transformed , reproduced and broadcast. This information may be a description of a situation, place or sound that the participants capture, record or produce and may take the form of a discussion or interview just as easily as being that of an image or text.

Meanwhile, the server, our automated system, will collect the data received from our Derivers and transform this into an audio- visual composition of the city through processes akin to that of Burrows’ cuts-up, the digital design of this neural stem will be both controlled by the participants and/or online users. This automaton will broadcast the data stream over web-radio. By allowing the possibility for anyone to access and to manipulate the data input by our techno-meaderthalls (text, photos, videos, etc) the city will multiply and transform inside-out, outside-in, both virtually and through its physical embodiment!

As a perpetual mirroring of the machine and its participants, a psycho-geographical mind-mapping is created through the flux of desired data yielded from the city, in order to produce, reproduce and reflect a new vision of the city, viewed via the techno-meaderthall’s own path, journey, derive, performance, action and interpretations. A techno-pirate’s geographical disassemblage, a dissemination of interconnected points of views that are all the time crossing over with each other and with themselves. Each path begins from the singular, but become multiplied through the potential of reinterpretation as driven by the machine and/or other derivers. Their ubiquitous presence, catching the real without closing it, opening nodes of bilateral trans-communication, the “deriver” swims in the streets of his own memory and the memory of his fellow city derivers.

Marching to a different beat, The Scie Protocol builds a continuity in the cycles (derive / performance / live stream / archives / interaction) of the city. The workshop is constructed by the exchanges made with individuals or groups desiring lines through the city - maps are to be re-interpreted, re-played whilst the machine will continuously accumulates, archives and processes information given or sent by the participants - this data is then re-injected into the next, new collation of the following day - thus, the past is visibly and sonically returned to the present to create the future.

By J. Pickett & J. Ottavi

more information:

http://www.noiser.org
http://www.mobilefest.com.br

in collaboration with APO33

A10LAB LONDON

As part of Area10 Project Space the new medialab platform is being introduced to facilitate the development of research and art practices using new technology in the media arts.

At the end of this trip, a floating listening lounge is unfolding as an Archipelago of creations: embarked on a specially fitted sightseeing boat (a 3000 Watts 4.1 embedded sound system), one will discover there the 27 sound pieces created on board by the residents but also the 10 imaginary audio landscapes from some ten guest composers. These 7 cruises along the Strasbourg canals will each be punctuated by a live performance taking place in a different background each time. At the same time, on the Nuits Electroniques de l’Ososphère site, the Mirror Ball installation will display visual documentation of the two parallel journeys…

ESD is therefore ending after 3 months on the water, a long vibratory cruise is echoing this finale along the sonic and aquatic waves of Strasbourg.

Conception and coordination : Collectif MU (Paris-France)
Associated curators : Valérie Vivancos et Joachim Montessuis

PROGRAM

All departures: Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art embankment

September 26, 2008

Opening cruise
2.30 pm to 4.30 pm
with a concert of Aki Onda

Concerts in the MAMCS Auditorium
6.30 pm to 09.00 pm
with
Rainier Lericolais (France)
Christian Zanesi (France)
Phill Niblock (USA)
Katherine Liberovsakaya (Canada)

Mirror Ball at Osophère main site
10.00 pm to 04.00 am
video installation of Vincent Voillat

September 27, 2008

Cruise 1
10.30 am to 12.30 pm
with a concert of Michel Guillet (France)

Cruise 2
01.00 pm to 03.00 pm
with a concert of Rainier Lericolais (France)

Cruise 3
07.00 pm to 09.00 pm
with a concert of Aki Onda (Japon-USA)

September 28, 2008

Cruise 1
07.00 am to 09.00 am
with a concert of Michel Guillet (France)

Cruise 2
02.00 pm to 03.30 pm
with a concert of Michel Guillet (France)

Cruise 3
04.00 pm to 05.30 pm
with a concert of Philip Griffiths (Brazil-France)

FREE ACCESS on reservation (booking: rendezvous [at] ososphere.org). Tickets out at the reception desk (MACMS embankment) 15 minutes before departure

Today’s radio spectrum is predominately utilized by the military and governmental organizations, with government regulating bodies doling out expensive licenses to corporations for the right to broadcast en masse in public space. These powerful “one way” broadcast licenses have come to be understood as ‘radio’ versus the initial conception of radio as a “many to many” communications medium. Except for a small fraction of frequencies allocated to amateur operators, who only need to pass a simple exam to receive the right to use the spectrum, there is no other way for the public to gain any access to this resource, arguably one of Earth’s most important, and only inexhaustible resources.

Our situation today is far from Guglielmo Marconi’s visions of radio’s ability to save lives and enlighten humanity, or Velimir Klebnikov’s ‘Radio of the Future’. Instead, today’s radio spectrum is a tightly controlled, profitized commodity. In this light, DAREDX seeks to re-establish the public’s presence and right of occupation within the radio spectrum. While there exists an active and progressive amateur radio community worldwide, it is out of sight from the general public. DAREDX will expose and access the radio spectrum by aurally re-broadcasting nightly explorations throughout the radio spectrum. Activating the evening air of Cabot Square in order to re-establish the connection of the spectrum to public space. DAREDX will allow the public in the square to hear the signals we are enveloped in. Re-invigorating the words of an infamous amateur operator in the early 1900s when told by the US Navy to remove himself from a particular frequency: “Say, you navy people think you own the ether. Who ever heard of the navy, anyway? Beat it, you, beat it.” The spectrum will no longer remain closed to the ears and eyes of the public, and instead will become part of the natural landscape of Cabot Square.

Matthew Biederman, working under the call sign VA2XBX/P will be operating a high frequency transceiver in the open air of Cabot Square. He will be attempting long-distance communication with as many different operators as possible over the course of the intervention. Each complete communication will be logged and mapped creating a diary of the airwaves every night (radio.dare-dare.org). Additionally, DAREDX will attempt a set of digital communications, in order to receive SSTV (SlowScan Televsion), WEFAX (from NOAA Satellites) and many more. All of the actions’ audio will be played in Cabot Square, creating a sonic landscape of the electromagnetic spectrum in real time. All of the audio will be archived and made available under a creative commons license. The aggregation of these actions build into the overall DAREDX project.

Originally from the United States, Matthew Biederman (Montréal) has been doing performances, installations and exhibitions since the mid-1990’s. www.mbiederman.com www.spectralecology.org.