On January 5th 2012, on RaiTunes, the sounds of Alessio Bertallot meet the hybrid, neo-real worlds of Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico. The language of radio will be contaminated with the language of new media arts, generating novel forms of expression and narratives.

Starting at 11pm and up to 11:40pm, “VersuS, the real time lives of cities” will be showcased in an entirely new version created to interact in real time with the RaiTunes playlist.

This version of the VersuS project will be officially presented during the broadcast, in which listeners will be invited to a realtime voyage into music and the emotions of London, New York, Philadelphia, Berlin, Bristol and Milan.

Moving from city to city, Alessio Bertallot will lead the audience through the discovery of the music that originates in those places, expression of concrete and flesh.

Simultaneously, planet earth will revolve towards the cities: a plunging zoom will allow us to experience cities’ chitchat in front of our eyes; the messages which people, in that moment, are exchanging on social networks will be captured, analyzed, and shown over the places in which they originated, in a dynamic, neo-real, visualization, showing in realtime the sensations of the people which live in that city, transforming us into global eyes, in emotional voyeurs of the whole planet.

January 5th, 11pm – 11:40pm, on RaiTunes.

Realtime updates and dialogue with Alessio Bertallot and the creators of VersuS will take place on RaiTunes’ Facebook page.

This project on FakePress.

Some great new faces and sounds — improvisations and open form scores — live electronics, feedback, live sound processing, sample processing, theremin, homemade electronics. “i-semble” (iPhone / iPad ensemble), plus piano, violin, guitar, voice and even amplified water jug.

Featuring: Tycho Horan, Aimee Norwich, Alejandro Zuleta, Ryan Doubiago, Andrew Lection, Brian Bourque, Carson Grub, Douglas Moss, Eric Bergen, Douglas Roj, Andrew Stein, Patrick Deeney, Paul Wittschen, Rebecca Dole, Sarah Streit and Yuval Ronen. Visuals contributed by Brendan Reilley. & with special guest Slavo Krekovic..

PuréeData is a web-browser interface for a single shared sound environment that allows live, collaborative patching for anyone, anywhere. Visitors interact with a shared PureData audio synthesis patch and listen to the results as an MP3 stream, with no software to install or set up. The project is open-source, and all are encouraged to modify, improve and set up their own PuréeData servers.

PuréeData is a 2011 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHIES

Ted Hayes is a poet-inventor: conceiving objects and experiences that explore the sublime and the enigmatic through recombination and deconstruction. He is a proponent of what he has dubbed “Research Art,” or art-as-science experiment, and actively investigates the themes, technologies and ramifications of autonomy, emergence, semiotics, pattern recognition, and neural networks. Ted’s works range from a group of language-inventing robots to a mythological city-founding ritual for soprano and string quartet, is a graduate of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. His operating principle is, in a word, poetry: to pique with enigma and confound with beauty.

Junction by Micah Frank is a sound sculpture generated by thousands of New York City taxi cabs as they move through the city. Through the use of publicly available live footage from New York’s Traffic Management Center, Junction tracks the movements of taxis in some of the city’s busiest intersections. It uses their position, velocity and overall density to synthesize sounds… A taxi’s position might control only one partial of a complex frequency spectrum, or a single frame of a granular cloud. Up to 40 taxis are tracked on the grid simultaneously. They are indexed and vectored every 50 milliseconds. Once a taxi leaves the scene, its index dies and a new taxi is tracked.

A collaborative project of underwater musical performance and state-of-the-art ‘over-water’ live-electronic signal processing.

Being a passionate and experienced scuba diver for more than 10 years, Ulrich Krieger will dive into a pool in full scuba gear, tank and all, for at least 60 minutes. He will sit on the ground or swim around, producing underwater sounds with metal, stone, plastic, and other ‘waterproof’ objects, including ‘underwater didjeridus’, underwater singing, and plastic instruments, like blue toy saxophones. These sounds will be picked up by hydrophones and transmitted to Clay Chaplin, sitting above water, treating and signal processing these sounds to create an electronic ambient soundscape.

This performance will be taking place at the BELLYFLOP Gallery: “BELLYFLOP is a Southern California gallery space, theater, concert hall, disco, opera house, laboratory, auditorium and space of worship that appears as a full-water 10 ft.-deep swimming pool with diving board. BELLYFLOP emphasizes projects with ideas and executions that take risks, whether they glide smoothly or result in a mid-torso redness. Like the white cube galleries and black box theaters of tradition, BELLYFLOP’s aqua box comes with its own set of parameters to be explored in the fine arts. Visitors may wish to dress in water-appropriate attire.”

Location will be provided upon registration.

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.

Moori, by Haeyoung Kim, is an interactive audience participatory audio-visual performance. By incorporating multiple modes of messaging on a mobile phone, users tell their stories to guided questions by the performer. User data is processed to generate algorithmic audio and visuals while creating a larger narrative. This collaboration creates dialog among the performer and audience members and suggests new possibilities that can exist through the combination of algorithmic animation, audio and language.

Through text inputs, buttons, and multi-touch pads, user-data is processed to generate algorithmic audio and visuals. iPhone, iPod, and iPad users are encouraged to download the Mrmr application prior to the concert. The set up guideline can be found here.

Moori from haeyoung kim on Vimeo.

As a part of our Non-Bio Boom season we are delighted to host a new work development residency by Marco Donnarumma, with Brendan F Doyle (Production Sound Engineering). The residency will conclude with two concerts over the course of one evening for bio-sensing wearable technologies.

The first concert will include Music for Flesh II, a new solo piece by Marco Donnarumma; the second concert will be the premiere of a multi-channel work specifically created by the artist for Inspace, which will actively involve the audience in an augmented Cagean Musicircus.

Xth Sense is an ongoing research project which investigates experimental applications of Open Source based, bio-sensing technologies for musical performance and responsive milieux. The Xth Sense software framework is implemented in Pure Data.

Marco Donnarumma is a performer, new media and sonic artist currently interested in critical analysis and development of experimental paradigms for embodied interaction in performative environments.

More about Music for Flesh II

Music for Flesh II is a solo sonic piece for augmented muscles sounds, which aims at demonstrating an experimental coupling between theatrical gesture and biological sounds of human body.

Composition was developed as a first milestone of the Xth Sense project, a broader ongoing research which investigates exploratory applications of biophysical sound design for musical performance and responsive milieux. The long-term outcome is the implementation of low cost, open source tools (software and hardware) capable of providing musicians, performers and dancers with a framework for biosensors-aided auditive design in a real time environment; such framework will be re-distributable, customizable and easy to set up.

Presently Xth Sense technology consists of a low-cost, biosensing wearable hardware device and a Pure Data-based framework for capture, analysis and real time processing of biological sounds of the body.

In Music for Flesh II the only musical instrument available to the performer is his own body. Performer’s voluntary muscles contractions produce kinetic energy, an acoustic sound which is captured by the biosensor and deployed as only sonic source. At the same time the biological signal undergoes a feature extraction which provides control parameters for the real time processing of muscles sounds.

Performer uses his body not only as a controller, but, more importantly, also as a truly real musical instrument; he is capable to actually creates music in real time exciting his muscles fibres.

Such paradigm attempts at informing classical gestural control of music and musical performance itself. During the execution both performer and listeners can perceive an authentic auditive and cognitive intimacy; the neat and natural responsiveness of the system prompts a suggestive and unconventional coupling of sound and gestures.

One of the major aims of the design of Music for Flesh II was to avoid a perception of the sound being dissociated from the performer’s gesture. The dissociation I point at does not only refer to the visual feedback of performer’s actions being disjointed from the sonic experience, but it also concerns a metaphorical level affecting the listener’s interpretation of the sounds generated by the performer’s somatic behaviour. Therefore, chosen sound processing techniques were evaluated according to their capability of enhancing the metaphorical interpretation of performer’s physiological behaviour.

Additional Information

The use of open source technologies is an integral aspect of the research. The biosensing wearable device was designed and implemented by Marco Donnarumma, with the support of Edinburgh Hacklab, Andrea Donnarumma and Marianna Cozzolino. The Pure Data-based framework for real time analysis and processing of biological sounds was designed and coded by the author on a Linux machine, with inspiring advice by Martin Parker, Sean Williams, Owen Green and Andy Farnell.

Below you can view a live recording of the performance at The University of Edinburgh, UK, March 2001.
Music for Flesh II, for solo performer Marco Donnarumma (Xth Sense biosensing technology).

Music for Flesh II - solo piece for Xth Sense biosensing wearable device from Marco Donnarumma aka TheSAD on Vimeo.

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.