“A weekly broadcast of Slow Electronics - measured sounds in active inversion of misogynist+fascist Power Electronics. The grind of disused VHS decks, turntables at -500%, low-power high-impact wall-of-drone solutions.” … listen to the slow streams within streams of recursive machines inna feedbacked whirld we live in live every Sundaze: glitch.fm_v2.

Southbridge is the label for the musical genre of Slow Electronics. We are concerned with decoding and resisting crypto-fascist patriarchal Power Electronics. We believe in the process of slowness in terms of processing power, data streams and carefully considered recursions folding in on themselves through ’screeching waves of feedback, analogue synthesizers making sub-bass pulses or high frequency squealing sounds, and screamed, distorted, often engaged and relatively unknown lyrics.’

We consider most Power Electronics to be celebrations of structures of domina(nce|tion) and a performance of the open embrace of shadow self that often surfaces as a sort of “extreme” shadow play of sexual violence.

We read Power Electronics according to this interpretation and respond to it on those terms. We hope that this opens conversation, because while we are familiar with explanations by some Power Electronics artists of their intents and strategies we feel that on the whole these intents and strategies have a tendency to go largely unquestioned and spin out of the realm of open questions thru self-parody and into acquiescence.

This is one of the Southbridge points of origin. Another important vector we travel is concerned more with experimental strategies (for|of) slowness as a way to work+play between the cracks of various technologies, especially audio technologies. We use electromechanical sound + devices that can be slowed down i.e. the turntables we use for our radio show that go to -60% speed, obsolete software to modify playback in realtime to .01% speed, a speculative cassette player that can be cranked by hand, or the ’southbridge’ on a computer motherboard which connects the processor to the ’slow electronics’ like the snd card + keyboard…

Southbridge DJs are Jake Elliott and jonCates. Jake and Jon have been performing and DJing in the international noise, new media art and techno communities since the 20th century, including shows in Chicago, New York, Mexico City, Linz, Montreal and Beijing.”

Slow Electronics
Southbridge
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From glitches and disrupted audiovisual flows to scrambled signals and noise via avant-retard aesthetics and live montage — Sound & Television offers you artistic re-imaginations of the future (and past) of live digital-TV broadcasting. As a Transmission Art series, Sound & Television invites artists who work with the materiality of audiovisual flows to realise performances exploring the performativity of television: not live on TV, but live as TV. During six half-hour long television transmissions, a group of Danish and International artists develop performances where the transmission itself becomes the artwork. The performances all reflect on different significant aspects of the changing conditions of broadcasting. In the new DVB-T (digital terrestrial television) environment, the very transmission format of TV has changed, from symmetric analog to asymmetric data flows, encoded in the MPEG format and decoded through software implemented in everything from flat-screen TV’s, set-top-boxes and PC’s.

Signal, noise, feedback, liveness and flow along with standardized production formats are all aspects of the television medium which are reshaped in digital, networked media. Rather than a stream-lined sound- image of digital convergence, Sound & Television will strive to act as a springboard for an aesthetic “media-clash” reflecting on the political- aesthetic of old and new media forms.

Transmission Schedule Spring 2010:

Apri 27___AYMERIC MANSOUX
May 4___DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION feat. LAMBURG TONY (open studio)
May 25___ROSA MENKMAN
June 1___SVEN KONIG
June 8___JACOB KIRKEGAARD
June 15___VICKI BENNETT aka PEOPLE LIKE US (open studio)

Sound & Television is curated by Linda Hilfling and Kristoffer Gansing in collaboration with tv-tv, Copenhagen.

tv-tv is a non-commercial TV channel which started as a local Copenhagen channel in 2005 but which can now be viewed across Denmark, broadcasting 1 hour per week on all DK regional channels.

The prototype of the work (v1) was presented in the Microwave International New Media Art Festival 2009 in which a set of toy birds performed a sequence of calls and movement interfered by the passers-by at the lobby of Langham Hotel, while this time, Vasco has made the toy birds migrate to the raw space of Videotage where they would react to the motion and sound of a new player - a real mynah bird.

This autonomous species, with its amazing imitative abilities, will respond to the sounds and motion of the 120 plastic birds while the electronic songbirds inherit their own kind of copying ability and react to the environment accordingly. The duo combination is a blown-up orchestra inviting visitors to observe both the psychology and intelligence of the natural-born and the computational singers. Together they become a feedback loop system, a true cybernetic nature.

“Every toy bird is built with an audio sample and movements that resemble the real birds, a cheap attempt to emulate the real ones. The mechanical bird is therefore the perfect object to create an artificial output based on the natural conditions of the environment. The sound and motion of the mynah bird will be used as the value that calibrates the amount of voltage sent to control the movement of the bird toys and the playback of the samples. With amazing imitative abilities, the mynah bird will respond to the sounds and motion of the plastic birds. This process will create a feedback loop, the circuit direction will be from the reading of the mynah bird’s behavior to the interference of the work itself with the environment. The orchestra will be divided into several groups and each group will have its own interpretation of the given data. The overall musicality from the bird toys together with the myna bird will be the final product of the piece.” — Joao Vasco Paiva

Joao Vasco Paiva is a Portuguese artist currently living in Hong Kong. His work is based on the exploration of sound and visuals produced through the isolation of physical patterns. He uses digital and analog systems to depict scores in everyday life situations and rearrange them as sound and visual compositions. He presents his work as live performances, single channel videos and audio visual installations. He graduated from a Fine Arts Degree in Porto Art School. (E.S.A.P.) In 2006 he was awarded with a 2 years scholarship from Fundacao Oriente, a Portuguese Foundation that supports young artists in Asia. He obtained a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Media in the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, where he currently teaches. His work has been showed in festivals such as FILE Hypersonica International Festival of Electronic Language, London Exploratory Music Festival, Athens Video Art Festival, CityTransit, 2pi Festival, Hong Kong and Shenzen Architecture and Urbanism Biennial and other venues and locations in Beijing Hong Kong, London, Porto, Hangzhou, Sao Paulo and Vienna.

The station is currently actively fielding talent!

If you’re interested in getting involved, please feel free to contact us.

DJ Applicants: The application process is OPEN! Feel free to apply on our contact page!

“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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nTFjVm9sTQ

As well as being technically cool, the project is yet another sign of the increasing cultural prominence of data as both material and idea - in that sense, after Design and the Elastic Mind and Wired’s “Petabyte Age“, this is more of the same. But it’s also something different, it seems to me. Like any other visualisation, House of Cards doesn’t only use data, it presents a certain sense of what data is, means, and (crucially) feels like; and this is where it’s different. The dominant narrative of data visualisation at the moment is informed by the networked optimism of web 2.0, where the social sphere, and increasingly the world as a whole, is unproblematically digitised; where more is more and truth, beauty, and commercial success all are immanent in the teeming datacloud.

House of Cards, by contrast, is a manifestation of data melancholy. Data here is low res, with a sketchy looseness of detail that evokes the gaps, the un-sampled points. This data is also abject or corrupt, the scanner intentionally jammed with reflective material, a bit like the metallic chaff used to confuse missile guidance systems. These glitches are familiar devices in electronic music and video, including Kid A-era Radiohead. However here the errors are very much in the data; they have migrated out of the music, which is human, organic and more or less intact here. This disjunction between failed data and the emotional, human domain is what characterises the data melancholy; it’s illustrated beautifully at the end of House of Cards, with the “party scene” (one of Thom Yorke’s ideas for the clip), a social scene decimated into abstract clouds of points. This theme also resonates across In Rainbows, especially in the closing track, Videotape: “this is one for the good days / and I have it all here, in red blue green.” Here image data is again a sort of failed trace of an emotional reality, all that remains of “the most perfect day I’ve ever seen.”

Yorke’s other motif for House of Cards was “vaporisation,” which is clear enough in the clip; I think its most effective in the final shots of the house; the earlier clips of Yorke disintegrating seem a bit langurous, with that undulating look of Perlin noise (is it, anyone?). The house shot in particular reminded me of Brandon Morse’s Preparing for the Inevitable; Morse’s work in general has a related feel about it, though the models seem t be synthesised rather than sampled. Again the poetics is one of cool, digital melancholy, where tragedy is stripped down to a set of vectors and forces (above: Collapse, from Flickr). Here though, rather than a failure of data (sampled representation) it’s a failure of the procedural model, or perhaps failure with, or in, the model. [posted by Mitchell Whitelaw on The Teeming Void]

The following interview by Peter Traub focuses on the well-known 2001 work, Dialtones (A Telesymphony), a concert performed through the choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones, in which Levin collaborated with Gregory Shakar, Scott Gibbons, Yasmin Sohrawardy, Joris Gruber, Erich Semlak, Gunther Schmidl, and Joerg Lehner. Levin’s more recent work is primarily in the area of installations using computer vision and robotics (e.g. see this YouTube video), and unrelated to Dialtones. None-the-less, we felt this was an interesting interview and dealt with issues that are still relevant to new forms of interaction with music and sound, and raises such questions as: is this music or does it occur in the place of music?

Peter Traub: In reading some of your previous interviews, you stated that you didn’t really think of Dialtones as a musical work, but rather as a performance piece. In what way do you think the difference in thinking about the piece affected your compositional choices?

Golan Levin: Dialtones was always, to begin with, a kind of sound-art piece or conceptual performance artwork. I say this because the project originated from a pure concept (that of performing the audience’s mobile phones), and was motivated by a curiosity to discover what it would be like - sonically, visually, and socially - to experience such a concept. In this sense, I don’t think it’s too much to say that the project conformed well to John Cage’s definition of experimental music: as music that “initiates sonic processes the outcomes of which are not known in advance.” The problem with Cage’s definition, though, is that it suggests that it wouldn’t have mattered whether or not the results reflected any human patterning, or that we oughtn’t intervene in some way to ensure an interesting outcome. I think if Dialtones just sounded like a pile of 200 phones ringing on and off randomly for half an hour, people would have been really profoundly disappointed. For the project to succeed, it was necessary for us to demonstrate that we could actually tame this enormous and unruly beast - the mobile telephony network of Upper Austria - in order to bend it to more musically structured ends. For these reasons, I would say that Dialtones was a performance piece in its conceptualization, but ultimately a musical work in its realization.

It’s important to say that, in the end, it took three people to compose Dialtones. Apart from the concept itself and some very telescopic decisions about overall sequencing, I was really the least involved in the actual musical composition; my hands were already quite full with logistical issues and software programming. The greatest bulk of the concert was composed by Gregory Shakar, who developed most of the orchestra’s ringtones, and Scott Gibbons, who also composed ringtones as well as the central solo section of the performance. I think, for them, the compositional process was governed by very explicitly musical concerns - melody, rhythm, texture, drama. We all recognized that this piece had to function in a way that would be recognizably musical, or at least played with this concept by deliberately treading the fuzzy boundary between music and noise. As much as we all admired Cage’s practiced indifference to chaos, we felt that the days of purely random music were over, and that taking a completely hands-off aleatoric approach would have been a cop-out. And as it turns out, there really were a ton of aleatoric elements in its presentation that made it (perhaps pleasingly) difficult to listen to anyway. As I explain below, our job as music composers really came to focus on effectively managing the considerable randomness built into the situation.

Part 1: 15.4 M
Part 2: 13.2 M
Part 3: 18.8 M

Peter: You described one person’s experience with the work in which they entered their phone info in a kiosk, but then had to skip the performance, but kept getting dialed by your performance system. This seems to suggest an almost opposite event, in which people at the performance who had their phones turned on were called normally by someone outside the event. Do you know if there were any occurrences of this? Furthermore, if, hypothetically, a number of people were called from outside sources during perhaps the solo section of the piece, would you consider that an interruption or a serendipitous moment in the piece? I’m curious if you can speak to the idea of tapping into this phone network to produce an organized work, but in the act of doing so, also leaving yourself susceptible to the interruption and chaos that could be introduced into the network from outside of the performance.

Golan: The possibility that people could receive outside calls during the performance certainly occurred to us, when we cheekily instructed the audience to “please leave your cellphone ringers on.” If this event actually did occur, we had no technical tools for detecting it; we would have had to listen for unintended rings, and usually there were so many phones ringing at the same time that we wouldn’t have heard it. My feeling is that we would have only conceived such an event to be an undesirable interruption if the audience member actually answered their phone and started having a conversation in the middle of the performance. But we had also explicitly requested the audience not to answer their phones, and fortunately nobody did this.

More generally, your question brings up the topic of chance and unpredictable events in the Dialtones performance. We were able to count at least seven different sources of unpredictability that affected the concert. Some of these were due to properties of the network itself, while others could be attributed to specific audience members or to audiences generally. Chance elements in the performance included the following:

The telephone network imposed an unpredictable latency between the time that we dialed a phone, and the time that the requested phone would begin to ring. We did some experiments and determined that the average delay was 4.74 seconds, with a standard deviation of about a second or so. In some cases, particularly when we dialed international numbers, the delay could be as long as twelve or thirteen seconds. This fact had serious compositional consequences, musically speaking, since it meant that we couldn’t create precise synchronizations between rhythmic ringtones. It also meant that any chord progressions would have to play out over a fairly long timescale in order to be reliably perceived. We ended up composing ringtone melodies which all shared the same tonal center - I think it was A-880 - and adopted a more textural approach to compensate.

Peter: How many of these chance elements were you able to play with before the first concert? Were you able to conduct small experiments on a limited number of phones prior to the initial performance? If so, were there issues, such as the dial/ring delay you mention above, that you encountered before the first concert and then made compositional changes to deal with it?

Golan: That’s exactly what we did. One of our main logistical challenges in developing the project was actually getting enough phones to test the system. Through a variety of contacts and sources we managed to borrow about seventy phones. Nokia Austria loaned us ten, Ericsson loaned us ten, our main sponsor loaned us about twenty, and a local phone store in Linz provided another ten or so. Another ten were actually loaned to us from individuals! It was a real hodge-podge of different models, which turned out to be quite helpful for the purposes of testing and debugging. Computing the average delay-time was one of the first experiments we conducted once we got the dialing system to work. We only had a couple of days before the show in which everything was actually up and running, and that’s when most of the real composition got done - testing different combinations of ringtones, etcetera.

When we were first developing the concert, it was almost impossible for us to get enough phones to test and compose with. We were really desperate, and we were lucky to have the assistance of the Ars Electronica development office. The staff there called every conceivable sponsor trying to get phones for us, and most of the time they were turned down. It’s sad, but true: once the idea had been successfully demonstrated, it was an entirely different story. This is well-illustrated by the following two pictures. This photo shows our testing setup at Ars Electronica in 2001, while this one shows the 150 test phones that Swisscom Mobile loaned us one year later. They even built a custom charging station for us!

On rare occasions, a requested connection was dropped by the network. This happened less than 30 times (out of the approximately 5000 dialing requests that constituted the concert) and generally only when we were pushing close to the signaling capacity of the concert hall’s base station antenna. It’s impossible to know for certain, but I suspect that there may have been some extraneous phone activity outside the concert hall which, from time to time, ate up one or two channels on our antenna system. Theoretically we had 60 signaling channels, but I don’t think we ever got more than 58 of them going at once.


We were only technologically capable of specifying the ringtone melodies for roughly two-thirds of the audience’s phones. When Dialtones was performed, in late 2001, many people still did not own phones that could receive new ringtones via the Short Messaging Service - this feature was still just being introduced in the latest models by only a few manufacturers. As a result, we were unable to know exactly what sound would occur when we dialed those people with older phones - about a third of our orchestra, or 65 people. Fortunately, we had a good idea who they were, since we asked all of the participants to provide the exact make and model of their mobile phone when they registered their phones before the concert. With this in mind, we were able to use this fact compositionally: at the beginning of the performance, we dialed all the people with unknown ringtones. It turns out most of those people just had “regular phone” ring sounds, e.g. non-melodies.


Peter: How were the ‘unknown’ ringtones used later in the piece? Other than at the beginning, did they have a special use within the composition throughout, or did you try to always keep them at some limited percentage of the overall sound texture?

Golan: Generally speaking we tried to avoid clicking on the “unknown” phones except at designated times. This was done just to keep the different parts of the concert perceptually distinct. The alternative would have diluted the character of the different sections with an even blanket of off-color sound.

Some people deliberately (and probably mischievously) changed the ringtones on their phones, even though we transmitted one of our own ringtones to their phone. This happened on at least two occasions. One person, actually a good friend of mine, later confessed to me that he had replaced our ringtone with the theme song from the television show “Dallas.”


People could have deliberately, prematurely terminated the connection while their phone was ringing (or thoughtlessly attempted to answer their phone, out of habit). It is even possible that people could have turned their phone off altogether. I have no information about whether any of these things actually occurred.


People could have switched seats with another participant, or sat in one of the (few) empty seats. Their phones would still ring, but their personal spotlight would not hit them, and their sound would have a different spatialization than we intended. More drastically, a person could register for the event, and then not show up; their phone would still ring, but not be heard at all in the performance venue. This definitely happened at least once.


As you mentioned, it was possible for people to receive phone calls that originated externally. We were not aware of this happening, but it very likely could have.

Peter: The second possibility you describe above (of the person registering but not showing up), is quite interesting. Are you familiar with Thomson and Craighead’s Telephony [pictured right]? It’s a gallery-based cell phone piece that allows users to dial out from phones on a gallery wall, or dial into that network of phones from their own phones. Some people would dial their own phones from the gallery wall, thus leaving their numbers in the gallery phone’s register. On multiple occasions, people at later times would hit the send button twice on a gallery phone, thus redialing its last number, and this would end up calling some previous gallery visitor. I found this a very interesting phenomenon, as in some sense the visitor had left the real space of the gallery but had perhaps become trapped in the virtual space of the piece. This sounded very similar to me to your description of people who registered but then left before the performance and were called anyway by your software. Besides the fact that the person receiving the call might be annoyed, would you consider those events happy accidents of a sort, in that the network and the piece are perhaps extending themselves beyond the reach of the physical performance space? I’m not quite sure if that is the right question to ask, but there seems to be something important about this phenomenon and I’m wondering what you think of it?

Golan: I am familiar with Thomson and Craighead’s project (I’ve listed it, for example, in my Informal Catalogue of Mobile Phone Performances, Installations and Artworks), but I wasn’t aware that it enabled the particular behavior you mention. I do agree that this is one of the most interesting aspects of both projects. Speaking for the Dialtones concert, I can only say that this aspect emerged anecdotally, and not due to our explicit intention or on any significant scale.

As you can see, the telephone network itself was unpredictable in many ways. Our attitude was to embrace serendipity, as we really had no choice about it. In some sense, Scott Gibbons’ solo section (which he performed very carefully on 6 phones) became an even more significant contrast to the orchestral sections because of his high degree of control.

Peter: Several interview respondents have talked about the fallibility of networks or the imperfections in networks as being a point of interest for them artistically. In a piece I’m currently working on, the degradation of feedback through audio streaming is a focal point of the work. Why do you think there is such a great interest for many electronic artists and artists working with networks to exploit imperfections, artifacts, and failures within the medium? Did you have similar interests in creating Dialtones, and if not, how do your interests differ?

Golan: By coincidence, I’ve just been reading some essays on this topic, about musicians’ interest in their tools’ artifacts and imperfections. Kim Cascone has a nice article about ‘Glitch’ musics (”The Aesthetics of Failure: Post-Digital Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music“, in Cox & Warner’s Audio Culture reader), and Rob Young has written a related article, “Worship the Glitch: Digital Music, Electronic Disturbance” (in the new WIRE anthology, Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music). Most of their examples concern composers who are deliberately using vinyl crackling, digital clipping, and digital compression artifacts as foreground elements of their compositions, and these authors’ main conclusions, which I think are quite reasonable, are that (1) “failure is more interesting than success“, especially insofar as it is a progenitor to further discovery and evolution, and (2) artifacts reveal the true nature and limits of a medium. So I agree that it’s quite natural for artists to explore the imperfections and artifacts of a well-understood medium because it gives the listener a new appreciation for a system which is otherwise all-too-often assumed to be perfectly transparent.

As I suggest above, I think these sorts of preoccupations with the failure-points of a given medium presuppose, to some extent, the audience’s familiarity with that medium’s “normal” mode of operation. It’s a cheeky gag to include tape hiss or MP3 phasing in a new CD, because we all know from considerable experience with these media that they’re not “supposed” to sound that way. In the case of Dialtones, on the other hand, nobody knew what 200 simultaneous mobile phones would sound like, and we were just trying to get this telephone network to sound like something at all. So, to answer your question, no: as best as I can recollect, we were interested in overcoming the failure-points of the phone network (like dropped connections, etc.) rather than exploiting them. Of course, it’s sort of an odd glitch in the first place that the telephony network could be abused in order to produce a symphonic chorus of ringtones.

Peter: One of your primary interests in Dialtones was to create this grid of audiovisual pixels through using the audience as a canvas (or screen?). And perhaps that already answers this question, but I’m wondering how you thought about the large and complex phone network that you tapped into as a compositional tool? Did you think about it as a transmission medium for the work much like one thinks about a sound system (i.e., as a means to end) or did you think about it in some way more central to the idea of the work and its structuring?

Golan: Hmm.. I guess my answer partially derives from my experiences in high school, back in the late 1980’s, with keyboard synths. To some extent during its development, I began to think of the Dialtones telephone network as a very large polyphonic synthesizer, albeit one with a lot of unpredictable quirks (especially with regard to latency). And each of the audience’s phones were voices or individual oscillators in that large synth, and my job was to play the instrument by clicking on the right notes on its keyboard at the right time.

I say I “began” to think of the phone network as a polyphonic synth, but I certainly didn’t end that way. My concept of the instrument changed entirely on the night of the first performance, when we were finally able to bring a live audience into the situation. What you have to understand, which was a little weird, is that we were projecting the image of our grid like graphical interface onto the audience from above (as you mentioned). The logic of this was to project a spot of light onto the head of an audience member whenever his or her phone was ringing. What we didn’t quite foresee was that the audience was also able to witness my cursor as I hunted around for a person to click on. My whole concept of the instrument changed when I was performing the piece for the first time, and I looked up from my personal LCD screen just to double-check the location of my (projected) cursor in the crowd. My cursor had landed in the lap of this woman and I suddenly made eye-contact with her. I had been thinking, I’m going to click on this cell, but in her mind, she was waiting for a phone call from me. And when her phone started to ring she smiled at me, and I suddenly realized that I was actually able to address individual people in the crowd, and in a peculiarly personal way. I’m not sure what else to say about this, but it certainly yanked me back from conceiving of the phone network as an abstract sound-triggering system, and reminded me about what it really is, which is a communications medium that connects people. I guess that’s sort of sappy (”Reach out and touch someone”), but that’s exactly what the network/instrument became about, from my perspective as its performer.

Peter: I know you’re not sure what else to say about this, but that is a wonderfully illuminating story. With respect to the phenomenon of people seeing the mouse pointer as you looked for ‘pixels’ to activate, was that something you tried to get rid of for subsequent performances, or did you end up viewing it as an important part of the piece and as a phenomenon that was important in the audience/performer interaction?

Golan: Yes, we kept that. Among other things it was significantly helpful in communicating and illustrating what was going on.

Dialtones (A Telesymphony) - Ars Electronica 2001
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1G-YesiBB8

This interview was originally published in Contemporary Music Review.

ANAT, the Australian Network for Art and Technology has just launched its latest copy of Filter magazine (issue 66, [southern] summer 2007) with Synchresis the theme, with a special release DVD, and the launch (and xmas party) tonight at the Chauvel cinema in Paddington…

The launch featured masterful live performances from Peter Newman, Ian Andrews and Robin Fox. Fox in particular has blown me away yet again with new aural/visual brain-warping material drawn from laptop and relic of a Cathode Ray Oscilloscope (that induces quite some nostalgia for me as it’s the same model as ones I used to do electronic labs on in the mid 90s). Since I last saw the oscilloscope set, a few of his laser shows ago, the camera trained on the CRO seems to have zoomed closer to the dot that pulses with rough, almost DC modulations, beginning the set. The hazy grain of the CRO’s phosphors are accentuated with the green brightness gradients of arrhythmia-inducing, hard edged bass signals pumping from the laptop. The dot begins to pop around the screen on a coiled trajectory that leaves a sheen prompting me to wonder if this is still the analogue oscilloscope or some fantastic jitter-generated pixels driven by the tetchy sounds. Some time later, traces of earlier sets appear, yet the sounds are much faster, less tethered, yet more tightly mobile if that’s possible, jerked from image to image…. and I realise that in this synchresis, not only are the images made by the sounds, but I think the sounds are probably also made by the images - not in the realtime sense, but in the process of composition of the possibilities. It dawns on me that the sonic assault strikes these ears as quite novel itself - even without its visual counterpart - and that, while the Backscatter release made it clear that sounds were designed to make good images, this fact and much exploration has brought new sounds as well. The search for new images from the sounds and the design of improvisation possibilities has also created new electronic music, let alone this incredible aural-visual experience.

A set of photos from the Synchresis performance are up on my flickr. [posted by Nick Mariette on Sonic Surrounds]

While it provides an excellent historical overview, the book’s main concern is in the noise music that has emerged since the mid 1970s, whether through industrial music, punk, free jazz, or the purer noise of someone like Merzbow. The book progresses seamlessly from discussions of John Cage, Erik Satie, and Pauline Oliveros through to bands like Throbbing Gristle and the Boredoms. Sharp and erudite, and underpinned throughout by the ideas of thinkers like Adorno and Deleuze, Noise/Music is the perfect primer for anyone interested in the louder side of experimental music.