IRZU – Institute for Sonic Arts Research, is announcing the third edition of: EarZoom – Sonic Arts Festival, which will take place between 30th September and 4th October 2011 at different venues in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The main aim of the festival is to present a set of carefully selected works of multi-profile individuals (artists/scientists) and thus promote the interdisciplinary field of electronic music – the myriad of possibilities it has to offer – to artists and scientists (engineers) within our local community. EarZoom 2011 features not only performances, exhibitions and installations by established international artists, but also workshops and lectures on a wide selection of different sub-topics of electronic music, ranging from mobile music computing, aco-acoustics, interactive installations, to hardware hacking.

In the framework of this year’s EarZoom sonic arts festival we are introducing a slightly different approach to the artistic program selection, aiming at widening the festival’s thematic spectrum. Within the Sounds of Europe project, we are shifting the focus from an exclusively technologically inspired concept of sonic arts towards a somewhat wider, socio-political context of contemporary arts, within which we are questioning the expressive potential of sound based practices.

Artists: Nicolas Collins, Ake Parmerud, Alexandre Torres Porres, Roger Dannenberg, Pietro Polotti, Mauricio Valdes san Emeterio, Chriss Kiefer, William Brent, Eduardo Miranda, Jure Gradišnik Mathew Burtner, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, Atau Tanaka, Adam Parkinson, Hans Tammen, Tae Hong Park, Igor Vićentić, Philippe Pasqieur, Jaime Bullock, Tomaž Grom, Vasja Progar, Aino Emilia Korvensyrjä, Jan Anderzen, Ana Hoffner, Johannes Kreidler, Elske Rosenfeld, Jovita Pristovšek, Nika Autor, Kim Myhr, Mathias Forge, Olivier Toulemonde.

Venues: Kino Šiška, Cankarjev dom, Menza pri Koritu, Kinoteka, ŠKUC, Aksioma, Moderna galerija, Ljudmila, Galerija na Gregorčičevi 3

Co-producers: Aksioma, SPLOH, Cankarjev dom, BOKS, Q-O2, CRiSAP, MTG

For more infos on EarZoom 2011 see:

http://www.irzu.org/EarZoom_2011_Program.pdf
http://www.irzu.org/EarZoom_2011_Exhibition.pd

or:

www.irzu.org

Travelling Time is the fourteenth edition of Sonic Acts, and its theme is the human experience of time. Time dictates our schedule; time gives us structure. We think of ourselves as living in the present, with the past behind us, moving towards the future. But in fact, there is nothing so complex and ambiguous as time: the arrival the early twentieth century of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics has tampered with our straightforward concept of time. The ongoing development and application of technology is challenging, changing and destabilising our sense of time. Communication networks function at light speed and processes are handled in real time by computers operating without human intervention. These technological advances have produced a gap between ‘machine time’ and ‘human time’.

Art, film and music all have the ability to make abstract concepts of time tangible and comprehensible; they can all manipulate time. In art, a relationship between time and movement creates a sense of space and can identify differences and correspondences between machine time and lived time. In Travelling Time, montage, rhythm and composition in sound and image will intensify the experience of time. Travelling Time is also about the need to act quickly in improvised music; the inevitable slowness of programming or constructing an artwork; time travels and art as a vehicle for imaginary journeys; and art as an artefact from bygone times. Sonic Acts XIV Travelling Time is a quest for space, detail and meaning in time.

Sonic Acts XIV is a four-day festival of performances, lectures, exhibitions, presentations, and film screenings. It will also present a lavishly illustrated publication with essays and interviews.

The pur­pose is to ex­plore the con­struc­tion and val­u­a­tion of par­tic­i­pa­tory dis­courses, de­signs, or ex­pe­ri­ences and chal­lenge re­ceived wis­dom of par­tic­i­pa­tion’s power. When does the dis­course of par­tic­i­pa­tion mask power? Who has ac­tual ver­sus per­ceived au­thor­ity? How do bot­tom-up, col­lab­o­ra­tive-based, lev­eled so­cial, cul­tural, and po­lit­i­cal ex­per­i­ments cre­ate new in­equal­i­ties?

Work­ing across the arts, music, and pol­i­tics, this panel con­sid­ers the dy­nam­ics of power in me­di­ated par­tic­i­pa­tion. Bor­row­ing its title from the work of Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, who ques­tioned the le­git­i­macy of par­tic­i­pa­tory de­vel­op­ment pro­jects led by the World Bank and other in­ter-gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies, this panel ad­dresses the un­in­tended con­se­quences of, and the power strug­gles in, col­lab­o­ra­tive music plat­forms, so­cial net­works, wire­less in­fra­struc­tures and open gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives. The pur­pose is to ex­plore the con­struc­tion and val­u­a­tion of par­tic­i­pa­tory dis­courses, de­signs, or ex­pe­ri­ences and chal­lenge re­ceived wis­dom of par­tic­i­pa­tion’s power. When does the dis­course of par­tic­i­pa­tion mask power? Who has ac­tual ver­sus per­ceived au­thor­ity? How do bot­tom-up, col­lab­o­ra­tive-based, lev­eled so­cial, cul­tural, and po­lit­i­cal ex­per­i­ments cre­ate new in­equal­i­ties?

Paper Ab­stracts

A Brief His­tory of Mu­si­cal Au­thor­ity
by Jon Lei­decker

This pre­sen­ta­tion fo­cuses on the re­la­tion­ship be­tween record­ing, au­thor­ship and the idea of com­po­si­tion. Work­ing across three dif­fer­ent pe­ri­ods, I ex­am­ine the ten­sions be­tween in­di­vid­ual and col­lec­tive mu­si­cal cre­ation and look at music as a liv­ing so­cial prac­tice as op­posed to an ob­ject. West­ern no­ta­tion im­mor­tal­ized in­di­vid­ual com­posers and cre­ated a mu­si­cal hi­er­ar­chy in which music be­came a less col­lab­o­ra­tive so­cial prac­tice and more an in­dus­trial fac­tory re­pro­duc­ing the com­poser’s prop­er­ties. In the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury, record­ing tech­nol­ogy chal­lenged the in­di­vid­ual com­poser’s au­thor­ity by grant­ing the same im­mor­tal­ity to im­pro­vis­ing mu­si­cians and other live per­form­ers. Since the year 2000, new tech­nolo­gies have en­abled col­lec­tive tools for col­lab­o­ra­tive com­po­si­tion (e.g., Rocket Music, Ind­aba). Though these tools promise dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship, they may also be re­in­forc­ing in­di­vid­u­al­is­tic ten­den­cies in mu­si­cal cre­ation, com­po­si­tion, and recog­ni­tion.

Cor­don Off the Con­tempt in a Word Com­part­ment (and Other Whis­per­ing Mo­ments)
Joshua Kit Clay­ton

A video-di­rected group ex­er­cise/med­i­ta­tion/con­ver­sa­tion by Joshua Kit Clay­ton, Cor­don Off the Con­tempt in a Word Com­part­ment (and Other Whis­per­ing Mo­ments) in­ves­ti­gates the uses and val­ues of con­tempt, hy­giene, lan­guage and im­por­tantly, of whis­per­ing, as a means of con­tain­ment- para­dox­i­cally through the process of prop­a­ga­tion. The video asks au­di­ence mem­bers to con­sider and/or dis­cuss their own re­la­tion­ship to con­tempt and other top­ics within the space of the video it­self.

Among other top­ics, this work plays with the no­tion that given a propo­si­tion (for ex­am­ple, a par­tic­i­pa­tory art­work) there is value in one’s con­tempt for the propo­si­tion and its ar­ti­facts, as a means of main­tain­ing one’s agency in the face of the propo­si­tion. Propo­si­tions them­selves may be con­sid­ered au­thor­i­ties and their pre­sen­ta­tion is­sues de­mands to the ob­jects of their “tyranny”, ei­ther im­plic­itly or ex­plic­itly. This work is an ex­plicit, though hu­mor­ous, tyrant, and re­in­forces its au­thor­ity through the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, en­cour­age­ment, and ma­nip­u­la­tion of the ob­ject’s re­sis­tance to au­thor­ity. A ques­tion for dis­cus­sion is whether given such a de­f­i­n­i­tion of au­thor­ity, is it ever pos­si­ble to elim­i­nate au­thor­ity, and if so what is the value in our ef­forts to do so?

Se­cu­rity Gate 26.11
by John Kim, An­thony Tran, Vasily Tru­bet­skoy

Se­cu­rity Gate 26.11 is an Ar­duino-based, in­ter­ac­tive, elec­tronic art­work that de­tects wire­less emis­sions given off by in­di­vid­u­als, in­clud­ing cel­lu­lar and smart­phone trans­mis­sions, wifi, blue­tooth, RFID, and oth­ers. Se­cu­rity Gate 26.11 pro­duces in­di­vid­u­al­ized au­dio­vi­sual re­sponses to these trans­mis­sions. Our lives are sub­jected to daily forms of sur­veil­lance via mech­a­nisms that are less rec­og­niz­able to us as such, pre­cisely be­cause they are not vis­i­ble. Today, wire­less trans­mis­sions are the cor­pus of con­trol and re­pres­sion, as ev­i­denced by so­phis­ti­cated gov­ern­men­tal sys­tems of mass sur­veil­lance and snoop­ing (Car­ni­vore and its vari­ants) and cor­po­rate mon­i­tor­ing (data-min­ing and soft­ware rec­om­men­da­tion sys­tems).

Se­cu­rity Gate 26.11 demon­strates how we vol­un­tar­ily par­tic­i­pate in tyran­nies of our own cre­ation. Var­i­ous crit­i­cal the­o­rists have com­mented on how in­ter­ac­tive par­tic­i­pa­tion is the ide­ol­ogy of cap­i­tal­ist con­sumerism over in­for­ma­tion net­works. By our par­tic­i­pa­tion in in­for­ma­tional net­works (in­clud­ing cell phone usage, on­line brows­ing, email, SMS and oth­ers), we ac­tively vol­un­teer in­for­ma­tion about our­selves to forms of gov­ern­men­tal and cor­po­rate sur­veil­lance. Data are di­rectly and in­di­rectly col­lected about us in our use of these net­works. Se­cu­rity Gate 26.11 ren­ders vis­i­ble these in­vis­i­ble mech­a­nisms of dis­ci­pline and con­trol and doc­u­ments our par­tic­i­pa­tion in pos­si­ble tyran­nies of our own cre­ation.

Par­tic­i­pat­ing in Par­tic­i­pa­tion: Pol­i­tics and Cit­i­zen Power
by Seeta Peña Gan­gad­ha­ran

Sim­i­lar to the cul­tural zeit­geist in the 1970s, the past sev­eral years have been marked by an op­ti­mistic dis­course about the tech­nolo­gies of po­lit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion in Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment. From elec­tronic town hall meet­ings to Pres­i­dent Obama’s Cit­i­zen Brief­ing Book to the Face­book pages of politi­cians and po­lit­i­cal in­sti­tu­tions, the cur­rent po­lit­i­cal cli­mate is com­mit­ted to in­stan­ti­at­ing ideals of par­tic­i­pa­tory democ­racy in tech­no­log­i­cal tools for cit­i­zens. But what power have these tools cre­ated?

In this pre­sen­ta­tion I apply a sem­i­nal dis­cus­sion of par­tic­i­pa­tory pol­i­tics writ­ten in the 1970s in re­la­tion to mod­ern day ex­pe­ri­ences of cit­i­zen par­tic­i­pa­tion. Writ­ten by Sherry Arn­stein, A Lad­der of Cit­i­zen Par­tic­i­pa­tion, looks at the pal­lia­tive ef­fects of par­tic­i­pa­tory pro­jects, cit­ing the prob­lem of “par­tic­i­pat­ing in par­tic­i­pa­tion”. Seen in re­la­tion to cur­rent ef­forts to har­ness cit­i­zen power in po­lit­i­cal de­ci­sion mak­ing, the prob­lem of “par­tic­i­pat­ing in par­tic­i­pa­tion” un­masks the su­per­fi­cial­ity of par­tic­i­pa­tory pro­jects and prac­tices. Ex­am­ples will be drawn from the Unites States’ pre­mier reg­u­la­tory body for media, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and in­for­ma­tion pol­i­cy­mak­ing.

Bios of the Par­tic­i­pants

Jon Lei­decker (aka Wob­bly) is a San Fran­cisco-based mu­si­cian, com­poser, and lec­turer on ex­per­i­men­tal elec­tronic music. He has re­leased works on Tiger­beat6, Il­le­gal Art, Alku, Ph­thalo, and oth­ers. He has been pro­duc­ing music since 1987 and on­go­ing stu­dio and live pro­jects in­volve col­lab­o­ra­tions with Peo­ple Like Us, Thomas Dimuzio, Kevin Blech­dom, Tim Perkis, Mat­mos and The Weath­er­man of Neg­a­tiv­land. He is also a mem­ber of the Chop­ping Chan­nel and Sagan. In 2002, Lei­decker was re­spon­si­ble for the first mon­tage and final cleanup of the Keep the Dog album, That House We Lived In (2003).

Joshua Kit Clay­ton is an artist, mu­si­cian, and com­puter pro­gram­mer, liv­ing and work­ing in San Fran­cisco. He is a grad­u­ate of the Bard Col­lege MFA pro­gram in Film/Video. He pro­duces dance music for post-rave ca­su­al­ties both on his own and in the band Pi­geon Funk. He is re­spon­si­ble for the de­vel­op­ment of Jit­ter, a video and 3d graph­ics ex­ten­sion to Cy­cling ‘74’s Max vi­sual pro­gram­ming en­vi­ron­ment. His per­for­mance and video based pro­jects ex­plore com­mu­ni­ca­tion, spec­u­la­tion, value, di­rec­tive, and the space be­tween artist and au­di­ence.

John Kim is an As­sis­tant Pro­fes­sor of New Media The­ory and Prac­tice in the de­part­ment of Media and Cul­tural Stud­ies at Macalester Col­lege. Be­fore ar­riv­ing at Macalester, John taught at the Uni­ver­sity of San Fran­cisco, Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity and Williams Col­lege. In ad­di­tion to re­search­ing new media, he is an artist as well and has ex­hib­ited in­ter­ac­tive in­stal­la­tions at mu­se­ums and gal­leries across the United States.

An­thony Tran is a new media artist re­sid­ing in Min­neapo­lis. His art­works ex­plore and prob­lema­tize the tran­si­tion be­tween con­tem­po­rary hu­mans and fu­ture tech­nolo­gies. He is also a stu­dent at Macalester Col­lege, where his re­search in­ter­ests in­clude cog­ni­tive res­o­nance, vir­tual in­ter­group dy­nam­ics and tag­ging/rec­om­mender sys­tems.

Vasily Tru­bet­skoy is a stu­dent of physics and math­e­mat­ics at Macalester Col­lege. Past re­search has fo­cused on crys­tal­liza­tion and bio­min­eral sys­tems. His in­ter­ests span both dig­i­tal and ana­log elec­tron­ics.

Seeta Peña Gan­gad­ha­ran re­cently com­pleted a Ph.D in the De­part­ment of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity. She is a post­doc­toral fel­low in the In­for­ma­tion So­ci­ety Pro­ject at Yale Law School. Her dis­ser­ta­tion in­ter­ro­gates con­ven­tional the­o­ries and de­signs for pub­lic par­tic­i­pa­tion in com­mu­ni­ca­tion pol­i­cy­mak­ing. She has sec­ondary re­search in­ter­ests in the cul­tural his­tory of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies. She has also worked with ad­vo­cacy and ac­tivist groups, in­clud­ing Cen­ter for Media Jus­tice, Pub­lic Knowl­edge, Media Al­liance, and Prometheus Radio Pro­ject.

Com­puter net­works and cities both are so­cial spaces that have emerged as ma­te­r­ial spaces where lives are lead and work gets done. They are su­per­struc­tures for com­mu­ni­ca­tion, net­works of chan­nels where in­for­ma­tion and goods are trans­ferred. Both spaces have their par­tic­u­lar acoustic prop­er­ties and qual­i­ties, and while ex­ten­sive stud­ies of en­vi­ron­men­tal acoustics and the sound­scape of our en­vi­ron­ment have been emerg­ing in the last 40 years, net­work spaces are still con­sid­ered to be spaces with­out sound, acoustics or any sonic prop­er­ties.

The panel on Sound­wwwalks will ex­plore this from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives: In­ves­ti­ga­tions to­wards an Acoustic Ecol­ogy of Net­works, and web browsers and media stored on the web as in­ter­face and ma­te­r­ial for live sound per­for­mance. The in­vited artists and re­searchers pre­pare lec­ture per­for­mances within the stan­dard pre­sen­ta­tion setup of the con­fer­ence.

Per­for­mances by:

Bern­hard Gar­nic­nig, ex­plor­ing the tran­si­tion of the built and “nat­ural” en­vi­ron­ment to the net­work space as the defin­ing sonic en­vi­ron­ment of our lives.

Ceci Moss, play­ing a “dense, care­fully arranged Sound­wwwalk com­po­si­tion using record­ings of the human voice found on the web. Beat­box­ing in­struc­tional videos, vocal med­i­ta­tion ex­er­cises, on­line singing lessons will all find their way in this eclec­tic cho­rus, one that fore­grounds the warmth and dex­ter­ity of the human voice.”

Jamie Allen will per­form a sound­wwwalk which ref­er­ences and mines the vast func­tional audio archives of the in­ter­net. A sound walk for hard­ware, through hard­ware, on hard­ware.

As well as im­prov, re­mote and tape per­for­mances Peter Moos­gaard, Con­stant Dul­laart, Ju­lian Palacz, Joel Holm­berg and Will Schrimshaw.

Bios of the Par­tic­i­pants

Ceci Moss is a free­lance writer, mu­si­cian, DJ, and cu­ra­tor. She is cur­rently pur­su­ing a PhD in Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture at NYU. Her re­search ad­dresses con­tem­po­rary in­ter­net-based art prac­tice, dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy and per­cep­tion, the ma­te­ri­al­ity of media, post­mod­ernism and dig­i­tal art preser­va­tion. From 2007-2011 she was Se­nior Ed­i­tor of Rhi­zome, where she is presently a Staff Writer. She writes and edits the on­line con­tem­po­rary art and music blog A Mil­lion Keys. For the past ten years, she’s pro­grammed the weekly radio show Radio Heart on KALX and East Vil­lage Radio. She stud­ied So­ci­ol­ogy, His­tory and French at UC Berke­ley, and Crit­i­cal The­ory in Paris, France at the Uni­ver­sité Sor­bonne Nou­velle, Paris III/Cen­tre parisien d’études cri­tiques.

Jamie Allen makes things with his head and hands. These things most often in­volve peo­ples’ re­la­tion­ships to cre­ativ­ity, tech­nol­ogy and re­sources. They often at­tempt to give peo­ple new, sub­ver­sive and fun ways to in­ter­act with all of these. As some­one who works at the in­ter­sec­tion of art, so­cial the­ory and tech­nol­ogy, Jamie is an artist, a de­signer and a tech­nol­o­gist, as well as a teacher, re­searcher and ex­per­i­menter. His work has been fea­tured in a num­ber of media out­lets, in­clud­ing Wired.​com and the New York Times.

Bern­hard Gar­nic­nig is an artist and cu­ra­tor based in New­cas­tle and Vi­enna. In 2011 he grad­u­ated with an M.A. in Dig­i­tal Arts from the Uni­ver­sity for Ap­plied Arts Vi­enna. He has been re­search­ing the re­la­tion­ship be­tween sound and its spa­tial con­text from dif­fer­ent as­pects. In Crav­ing (with Got­tfried Haider) they de­vel­oped a GPS based bin­au­ral sound sim­u­la­tion en­gine for urban spa­tial sound nar­ra­tives in 2006. After that he started play­ing and or­gan­is­ing elec­troa­coustic im­prov con­certs at c17 Vi­enna, an art space he co-founded with Albért Bernàrd. After that he fo­cussed on sonic ac­tion in the field of browser and net­work based art, started to com­mis­sion browser based Sound­wwwalk per­for­mances with WORM/vi­enna and re­leased “Three Re­cur­ring Ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties”, a web­site that’s part feed­back in­stru­ment, part net­work field record­ing de­vice.

Peter Moos­gaard is a media artist and writer, work­ing in Vi­enna and Hels­ing­borg. In his work he deals with top­ics like pain, na­tion­al­ity, mythol­ogy, sci­ence and dig­i­tal media. Moos­gaard’s am­bi­tion is “..​to ex­ploit the nev­er­land be­tween art and tech­nol­ogy,” as he once said, “be­cause I´m not sure that cul­ture is my friend.”

Joel Holm­berg is a Los An­ge­les-based artist, one of the found­ing mem­bers of the Nasty Nets surf­ing club, and the cre­ative force be­hind Chillsesh. Com­bin­ing orig­i­nal per­for­mance and video with mash-ups of all kinds, Holm­berg’s site makes the line be­tween what he’s found and what he’s orig­i­nally au­thored dif­fi­cult to de­ci­pher. Se­lected works in­clude Palm Tree Palin­drome, a video that fea­tures a mes­meric pro­ces­sion of palm trees on ei­ther side of the frame, evok­ing film sprock­ets and the no­table ab­sence of nar­ra­tive in a piece with a seem­ingly for­ward thrust; BwO, which hi­lar­i­ously el­e­vates the soft-fo­cus ef­fects in a scene from the movie My Life star­ring Michael Keaton to the meta­phys­i­cal by over­lay­ing a read­ing of A Thou­sand Plateaus, a fa­mous book by the­o­rists Deleuze and Guat­tari; and Log roll, which lit­er­ally shows the artist rolling across an empty stu­dio, a repet­i­tive ges­ture am­pli­fied by a tech­nique that rolls the video back and forth in per­pet­ual mo­tion.

Con­stant Dul­laart (NL 1979, Ri­etveld Acad­e­mie Am­s­ter­dam, Rijk­sakademie Am­s­ter­dam): Trained as a video artist, his work has re­cently fo­cussed on the In­ter­net and re-con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing found ma­te­r­ial. Work­ing as a so called ‘in­ter­net aware’, or ‘post in­ter­net’ artist, his work shows the chang­ing ver­nac­u­lar of the con­tem­po­rary com­puter user, and how global cor­po­ra­tions (google, adobe, apple) con­trol that new lan­guage. In net­worked per­for­mances, cu­rated salon evenings, pho­to­graphic prints, youtube video’s, do­main name works, blog­posts, lec­tures, Dul­laart finds a way to em­pha­size the value of chang­ing in­ter­na­tional dom­i­nant (image) di­alects. His works are widely seen and dis­cussed on­line on blogs such as vvork.​com, rhizome.​org, artinamerica.​com, todayandtomorrow.​net, trendbeheer.​com etcetera, and his re­cently fea­tured in the Me­trop­o­lisM. Dul­laart taught at the Ri­etveld acad­e­mie, and (co)cu­rated sev­eral events in Am­s­ter­dam, Berlin and New York, such as the pe­ri­od­i­cally held Lost and Found evenings (with his final event in the New Mu­seum), the Cy­clus DVD for PARK4DTV / Mr Mot­ley, ‘Con­tem­po­rary Se­man­tics Beta’ in Arti et Am­ici­tiae, and re­cently the ex­hi­bi­tion “Ver­sions” in NIMK. His work is shown in­ter­na­tion­ally in places as the MASS MOCA North Adams USA, Cen­tre Pom­pi­dou in Paris, Art in Gen­eral and MWNM gallery in New York, ICA Lon­don, NIMK, de Appel, W139, the Stedelijk Mu­seum, Ellen de Brui­jne pro­jects, and Gallery West. Dul­laart lives / works in Berlin and Am­s­ter­dam.

Will Schrimshaw is an artist-re­searcher from Wake­field based in New­cas­tle upon Tyne. Often work­ing with sound amidst a larger vi­bra­tional con­tin­uum, his work is broadly con­cerned with the sub­lim­i­nal in­flu­ence of back­grounds, am­biances and at­mos­pheres, with the often im­per­cep­ti­ble de­ter­mi­nants of space and place. These con­cerns are man­i­fest in an ex­per­i­men­tal prac­tice com­bin­ing earth, text and code.

Ju­lian Palacz is an artist and pro­gram­mer based in Vi­enna, Aus­tria. He grad­u­ated with an M.A. in Dig­tial Arts from the Uni­ver­sity for Ap­plied Arts Vi­enna in 2010. His piece “Al­go­rith­mic search for love” has re­cently re­ceived a Prix Ars Elec­tron­ica Hon­orary Men­tion and the In­ter­ac­tive Art Prize from the Fes­ti­val In­ter­na­cional Mul­timédia, Por­tu­gal.

STEIM (Studio for electro-instrumental music) organizes the Patterns + Pleasure Festival a festival for adventurous contemporary electronic music, on 26, 27 and 28 September at Frascati Amsterdam. This three-day festival presents the latest and most adventurous contemporary electronic music from today. There will be lectures, workshops, debates and performances by musicians and sound artists from home and abroad. Starring Alex Nowitz, Tom Johnson, Jessica Rylan, Fuyuki Yamakawa, Steina Vasulka, David Toop, Moldover, Edison and many more.

STEIM has been working with a growing international network of musicians, performers and visual artists for more than 42 years now. STEIM invites people for residencies and provides them with an artistic and technical environment to work on the development of unique instruments and new music.

The Patterns + Pleasure Festival provides an overview of the latest creations and developments within electronic live music. The daily program consists of workshops and a symposium with lectures by artists, writers and scientists on themes such as improvisation, intuition, complexity, and the changing relationships between past, present, and future. In the evening there is an extensive music program with various artists. Many of them will be performing for the first time in Amsterdam.

For the complete line-up and tickets see: www.steim.nl

Patterns + Pleasure Festival, 26, 27 + 28 September 2011, open daily from 10:00 am to 0:00 pm. Frascati, Nes 63 Amsterdam. Day-ticket: € 30,- (symposium + festival), Festival Passe-partout: € 75,-.

Artist-technologist Honor Harger listens to the weird and wonderful noises of stars and planets and pulsars. In her work, she tracks the radio waves emitted by ancient celestial objects and turns them into sound, including “the oldest song you will ever hear,” the sound of cosmic rays left over from the Big Bang. Related.

During the decade leading up to the first World War, composers such as Debussy, Schoenberg, Scriabin, and Stravinsky were writing music in active dialogue with the social upheavals, intellectual currents, and political events of their day, embracing the same radical spirit that inspired their colleagues in the visual arts. This gallery program highlights selections of music from 1910–18 performed by Typical Music, an ensemble comprised of New York New Music virtuosi Todd Reynolds (violin), Ashley Bathgate (cello) and Vicky Chow (piano). A talk by American composer R. Luke DuBois precedes the concert.

Halim El-Dabh composed his first experimental piece in Cairo in 1944, his work can be related to other pioneers such as Luigi Russolo, John Cage, Walter Ruttmann, and Pierre Schaeffer. The official history of experimental and electronic music is mostly centered around three starting poles : Paris, Cologne, New York and then everything seems to have spread all over the Western civilization. This is what C-drík learned when he studied electro-acoustic music at the conservatory. Most contemporary media introduces us to Western electronic music as if nothing else existed, the West is self-centered and consciously or not often denies the others the right to express themselves.

Have you ever heard about the pioneers who composed electro-acoustic music in Israel, Japan, Iran, Turkey or Indonesia in the 1950′s and 1960′s ? The Filipino experimental scene ? The Chinese sound art scene ? The Tunisian electronica ? The South African shangaan electro ? The Lebanese dubstep and breakcore parties?

This lecture will be an introduction to C-drík’s research on electronic and experimental music in Africa and Asia, from 1944 until today.

http://www.syrphe.com/

http://www.myspace.com/syrphe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFt4MgN7JPQ

L2Ork, founded by Dr. Ivica Ico Bukvic in May 2009, is part of the latest interdisciplinary initiative by the Virginia Tech Music Department’s Digital Interactive Sound & Intermedia Studio (DISIS). L2Ork consists of up to fifteen tightly networked, yet independently operated laptop computers running open source software (Linux, PD). Instead of designing new instruments, L2Ork’s focus is on perfecting use of existing technologies within a context of a standardized ensemble. Consequently, what arguably sets L2Ork apart from a growing number of laptop orchestras is its focus on physical presence and performance practice, consistent exploration of coupling traditional instruments with contemporary technology, and tight integration of networked data streams that fundamentally alter the orchestra’s properties and consequently sound. Each laptop computer utilizes a custom hand-built hemispherical speaker to create a location-aware presence of sound for each performer. Some of the compositions in the Laptop Orchestra’s unique repertoire seamlessly integrate solo acoustic instruments such as percussion, Shona Mbira, voice (both singing and spoken word), etc. The standardized use of Wiimote controllers and their extensions establishes an embodied performance and visual indexing of each laptop performer’s sound influenced by traditional instrumental performance gestures to control synthesized digital sound as well as captured acoustic audio samples in composed and improvised contexts. The use of improvisational elements along with shared gestures and audio content allow the real-time interactive group production of a music that transcends the technologies involved, allowing a coherent exchange of ideas and emotions between networked individuals of different abilities and experiences.

The performance and lecture in Ljubljana is the second stop on L2Ork’s maiden tour of Europe May 12 – June 1, 2011. Joining forces with their guest soloist Ron Coulter and talented soprano l2orkist Aurora Martin, the ensemble will be touring 8 countries, performing and holding workshops in following locations:

May 14 – Linz, Austria (as part of LiWoLi festival)
May 15 – Ljubljana, Slovenia
May 16 – Budapest, Hungary
May 19 – Croatia
May 21 - Hamburg, Germany (Academy of Music and Theater)
May 24 - Amsterdam, Netherlands (STEIM)
May 25 – Amsterdam, Netherlands (Zaal 100)
May 26 – Utrecht, Netherlands (HKU)
May 30 – Paris, France (IRCAM)
June 01 – Oslo, Norway (NIME 2011)

http://l2ork.music.vt.edu/