[Conceptual mock-up of Se­cu­rity Gate 26.11 by Molly Reichert] ISEA Istanbul presents Tyrannies of Participation — Chair Per­son: Seeta Peña Gan­gad­ha­ran; Pre­sen­ters: Jon Lei­decker, Joshua Kit Clay­ton, John Kim, An­thony Tran, Vasily Tru­bet­skoy :: Sep­tem­ber 16, 2011; 9:00 am - 10:30 am :: Sa­banci Cen­ter Room 3, Sa­banci Cen­ter, Lev­ent.

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. Continue reading

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[Image: Sound Art by Alan Licht] American Quarterly: Special Issue on Sound; Kara Keeling and Josh Kun, Guest Editors :: Call for Papers — Deadline: August 1, 2010.

The field of American studies has long been a familiar home to scholars interested in the social and cultural worlds of sound. Yet while visual culture has had a more visible presence on the pages of American Quarterly, sound has been heard in sporadic bursts, forceful whispers, and sudden critical noises. We propose a special issue of American Quarterly that highlights the key role of sound in the formation of central themes and areas of inquiry within contemporary American studies.

While the study of sound has gained momentum in the last three decades across a variety of disciplines, much remains to be gleaned from a rigorously interdisciplinary focus on sound in its cultural, political, technological, economic, socio-historical, spatial, temporal, affective, and formal contexts. Continue reading

Springerin 2/2010: Intermedia 2.0 | Hefte für Gegenwartskunst:

It is impossible to imagine art nowadays without the kind of interdisciplinary and multi-media approaches that began to play a key role in the 1960s. Since then, sculpture, sound, film, theatre, performance and many other branches have embarked on a broad spectrum of different kinds of fusion with pictorial forms. Recently, such “inter-mediality” has been given an additional boost thanks to new notions of creativity. It might be argued, albeit somewhat over-stating the point, that media-specific working methods have been replaced by more overarching types of production that short-circuit fairly disparate realms with each other. “Inter-creativity”, a paradigm of working methods located in the zone between individual disciplines, has begun to take the place of traditional models of creativity. “Intermedia 2.0″, produced in cooperation with Vienna’s “departure” initiative, examines the potentials and promises to be found in these broader concepts of media and creativity. Continue reading

From eastbayexpress.com: The Fall of Pirate Cat Radio by David Downs.

The Bay Area’s biggest pirate radio station is off the air, fined $10,000 for illegal broadcast, and its owner threatened with arrest if he returns. But Pirate Cat Radio isn’t going quietly into the night.

Not only is the thirteen-year-old San Francisco station still quasi-legally streaming to half a million listeners online per month, but the 1,200-watt station formerly broadcasting at 87.9 FM is fighting the Federal Communications Commission in federal court. While the station is raising funds to pay its fine with local events this month, it has joined a historic battle under way in Washington, DC over local control of the airwaves. Station owner Monkey (aka Daniel Roberts) says terrestrial radio has failed to serve the public interest, and Pirate Cat is fighting for consumer rights alongside pirates and politicians across America. Read more here .

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Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla :: July 11 - September 6, 2009 :: Opening: July 10; 9:00 pm :: Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, Schlossplatz, Berlin-Mitte.

Allora & Calzadilla’s new work Compass, conceived specifically for the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, creates a new spatial and acoustic experience. Dividing the Kunsthalle horizontally, a new level is introduced into the space, inaccessible to the viewer and reducing the grand exhibition hall to less than one third of its normal height. Visitors can only hear the vibrations and sounds of an a capella dancer performing a choreography above their heads. The otherwise empty exhibition space is turned into a huge resonating chamber: “The performer is like a specter that moves through this flat horizontal stretch and whose sonic traces become a type of metrical language – a rhythmic and poetic means of communication with the public below.” (Allora & Calzadilla) Continue reading

Zeppelin 2009: Sounds of Power | Listening of Fear :: December 10-12, 2009 :: Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona, Spain :: Call for Electronic Sound Works — Deadline: November 15, 2009.

We dedicate Zeppelin 2009: Sounds of Power | Listening of Fear to thinking about issues that have been insidiously encircling us for some time. We are concerned about signs that might suggest we’re going backwards in terms of hard-won social and intellectual achievements and freedoms. This concern led us to pose the following series of questions, which we hope will go some way to inspiring the pieces presented: Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Hard Data by R. Luke DuBois [Needs Flash plugin and speakers; wait for data to load] Hard Data is a data-mining, sonification, and visualization project that uses statistics from the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as source material for an interactive audiovisual composition based around an open-source “score” of events. Using Xenakis’ understanding of formalized music as a starting point, DuBois draws upon a variety of statistical data ranging from the visceral (civilian deaths, geospatial renderings of military actions) to the mundane (fiscal year budgets for the war) to generate a dataset that can be used for any number of audiovisual compositions. Continue reading

Pace Digital Gallery is pleased to present Turbulence@ PaceDigitalGallery, an exhibition premiering 3 works commissioned by Turbulence.org :: April 7 - May 1, 2009 :: Reception: April 7, 5:00 - 7:00 pm :: 163 William Street, New York City.

Hard Data — by R. Luke DuBois — is a data-mining, sonification, and visualization project that uses statistics from the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as source material for an interactive audiovisual composition based around an open-source “score” of events. Using Xenakis’ understanding of formalized music as a starting point, DuBois will use a variety of statistical data ranging from the visceral (civilian deaths, geospatial renderings of military actions) to the mundane (fiscal year budgets for the war) to generate a dataset that can be used for any number of audiovisual compositions. Continue reading