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.

“I draw a sharp distinction between revolutionary music and critical music: “Revolutionary music” advocates for a particular (extra-musical) ideological position. This work is more wholly “political” in the way that term is traditionally understood. It is music about winning… This music is most often considered propaganda, and this may in fact be a fair judgment…

“Critical” music on the other hand doesn’t try to win — thus distancing it from a particular movement or ideology — but rather to observe, illuminate, and critique a particular aspect of society.” (via Until The Next Revolution by David T. Little, The New York Times.)

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. The rise of new technologies for the production and circulation of sound has coincided with exciting historical investigations into the ways sound has functioned as a cultural force through various media. Provocative investigations into the sonic valences of subjectivity and the socio-cultural politics of listening have nuanced our understanding of the ways that sound functions to both disturb and recalibrate processes of identity and identification, and to form and de-form notions of nationalism, transnationalism, and post-nationalism.

Scholars whose work has been gathered into the emerging field of sound studies have played a vital role in thinking through sound as a critical space, thinking through listening as a critical and cultural act, and thinking through sonic media as key technological sites of investigation. New developments in network technologies, digital audio, and mobile media have not only shaken up the financial models of conventional media structures, but have radically altered the workings of the everyday sensorium (as Walter Ong might have called it) and the way we re-visit sound’s role in media histories — old and new, localized and transnationalized — across the Americas.

How are new sound technologies and sonic media practices impacting “American” identities in the age of globalization? What role have hearing and listening played in “American” formations of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, community, and class, and how has the birth of recorded sound in the late 19th century informed those formations? What are the political economies of sound? How do we begin to theorize the sound of American studies?

We seek work that delves more deeply into questions already being addressed about sound and/or that takes existing scholarship in new directions. We are particularly interested in scholarship that analyzes sound from within an interdisciplinary American studies framework and/or that explores inter-American soundscapes within the following areas:

-sound and media technologies
-sound and consumption
-sound and U.S. racial formations
-sound and citizenship, belonging, and community
-sound and nationalism
-sound and religion
-sound and time and/or temporality
-sound as historical method
-sound and political economy
-sound and social change
-sound and U.S. sexualities
-sound and/as theory

Email essays by August 1, 2010, to aquarter [at] usc.edu. Information about American Quarterly and submission guidelines can be found on our Web site.

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.

Contents:

Christian Höller: The Promise of Media De-Limitation
Alexander Horwath in Conversation with Eva Fischer about Visualizations of Music
Christa Benzer: Visualizing Classical Music – “Hugo Wolf Festival 2010″
Roundtable with VJs and Visualists Participating in the “Hugo Wolf Festival 2010″
Diedrich Diederichsen: Hatred of “Regietheater” and the New Tendency towards Opera
Christian von Borries: Strategies of the Common – Music, Opera, Politics
numen/for use: Intercreative Textures
Georg Schöllhammer in Conversation with Artist Markus Schinwald
Barbara Lesák: Frederick Kiesler’s Works for Theater
Jasper Sharp: In Two Minds – Creativity and Collaboration
Anne Hilde Neset: Sound Bleed – Music in Other Media
Thomas Keul: From Audio Book to “Visualized” Book
Kathrin Röggla & 4youreye: “die ansprechbare” – Example of a Visualized Reading
Christoph Thun-Hohenstein: The Importance of Intercreativity

Artscribe: Reviews about “Gender Check” (Mumok Vienna), “Afro Modern” (Tate Liverpool), Nasreen Mohamedi (Kunsthalle Basel), Luis Camnitzer (Daros Zurich), “Niet Normaal” (De Beurs van Berlange Amsterdam), plus many more.

Cover Image: LIA – Blumengruß_2010_03_20_16_25_36

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 .

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)

Allora & Calzadilla will also present their most recent video work How to Appear Invisible. Filmed in Berlin on the site of the Schlossplatz at the close of 2008, it documents the last remains of the Palast der Republik being torn down. Bearing witness to this event is a German Shepherd dog wearing a makeshift cone collar fashioned from the trademark container of one of the largest American fast food franchises: Kentucky Fried Chicken. The camera follows the dog roaming through the barren no man’s land of the palace ruins as if it was searching for the last remains of an utopia that has vanished.

Both pieces address the historically significant grounds where the Kunsthalle has been temporarily erected: the Schlossplatz with its remaining traces and signs. The empty space of the hall points to the vacuum left behind by the deconstruction of the Palast der Republik and to the debate about the future of the site, while the film puts into play notions of iconolatry and iconoclasm within monumental public space. With their exhibition, Allora & Calzadilla elaborate on the relations between orientation and disorientation, memory and visibility, presence and absence – as well as on the realms of imagination, projection, and possibility.

Known for their complex artistic vocabulary utilizing film, installations, performances, and sculpture, Allora & Calzadilla’s artistic practice engages with history and contemporary geo-political realities, exposing their complicated dynamics, destabilizing and re-ordering them in ways that can be alternately poetic, humorous, and revelatory.

Jennifer Allora (*1974 in Philadelphia/USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (*1971 in Havanna/Kuba) live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Currently they are living in Berlin as DAAD fellows. Their installations and performances have been on view in large solo exhibitions, among others, Haus Esters, Krefeld Germany (2009); Haus der Kunst / Kunstverein, München (2008); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2008); The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (2007); Serpentine Gallery, London (2007); Kunsthalle Zürich (2007); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006); S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent (2006) and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2004).

They have also participated in important group exhibitions including “Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art,” Barbican, London (2008); “Greenwashing,” Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2008); 7th Gwangju Biennial (2008); “After Nature,” New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City (2008); 16th Biennial of Sydney (2008); Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art (2007); Istanbul Biennial (2007); “All About Laughter,” Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2007); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2006); “Beyond the Museum,” Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2006) and 51st Venice Biennial (2005).

Curated by Dirk Luckow (Director of Kunsthalle zu Kiel, and since 2007 Member of the Artistic Advisory Board of the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin)

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:

1. What does it mean to receive and/or give an order?

2. The verbs “obey” and “hear” are known to be closely linked. How, then, should we view a society that appears increasingly ready to obey without stopping to think? What link is there between obeying and believing?

3. Why do we have a need for absolute truths, even where we know it’s impossible? Why do we think we already know everything? Do we need to learn techniques or not? Why do we think anyone can do anything? Shouldn’t we respect the ability to do things? To what extent is the term “art” relevant or not?

4. In what sense have we moved from alienation at work to alienation in every, or almost every, sphere in life? Are we losing our awareness of alienation?

5. What does it mean to talk about control in the name of security? Don’t we feel safe? Why do we allow things to be done in the name of democracy that we?d condemn in a dictatorship?

6. Does a welfare society mean a growth society? (Cage said: “I don’t know if life is characterised by progress.”) Why do we think we live in the best of worlds?

7. What role or roles do sounds play in a welfare society and a growth society? Are they related to a loss of privacy? To what extent have neighbours become a new system of control in the hands of the state?

8. How do we view the fact that our instruments for organising sounds are linked to instruments designed to control? Is there a relationship between organising and controlling?

9. At a time when words are being chipped away at until they have a new meaning set down by law, and people who disagree with the criteria of others risk being branded as intolerant, how can we unmask this warped language without discrediting things further?

We invite people interested in sound to think about these questions and send us their sound works.

The pieces will be played through a system of eight loudspeakers on 10, 11 and 12 December 2009 at the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

All works received will be accepted provided they meet the following conditions:

1. Pieces should be NO LONGER than ten (10) minutes.

2. The format for the pieces should be WAV or AIFF at 44.1 kHz and 16 bits. Pieces may have up to eight tracks. Each track should be in a separate file (so a piece with eight tracks should have eight files each containing a single track).

3. The following documentation should be included:
3.1. Comments on the piece.
3.2. An artistic biography of the author.
3.3. A document signed by the author either giving or refusing explicit authorisation for the piece to be posted on the internet.
3.4. A document signed by the author giving authorisation for the piece to form part of the Sonoscop sound art archive.

4. The pieces and documentation should be sent on a CD/DVD by 15 November 2009 to:

caos/ZEPPELIN/convocataria
Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona
C/Montalegre, 5
Barcelona 08001
Spain

Hard Data is a 2009 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

BIOGRAPHY

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, video artist, and programmer living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia’s Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He is best known as a co-author of Jitter, a software suite developed by Cycling’74 for real-time manipulation of matrix data. His music is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling’74, and Cantaloupe music.

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. The intention of the project is to recontextualize the formal stochastic music in the context of real-world statistics, and to provide a compositional and metaphoric framework for creating an electroacoustic music relevant and significant to our time.

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, video artist, and programmer living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia’s Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He is best known as a co-author of Jitter, a software suite developed by Cycling’74 for real-time manipulation of matrix data. His music is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling’74, and Cantaloupe music.

School of Perpetual Training — by Stephanie Rothenberg — is an ironic edutainment website that exposes the underbelly and not so glamorous side of the computer video game industry. An animated personal trainer leads eager job seekers through a series of webcam game training exercises for outsourced jobs in digital game manufacturing and global distribution. Classic arcade games such as Dig Dug and Space Invaders are redesigned to train job seekers for positions in mineral mining and printed circuit board assembly. Pushing joystick and mouse aside, the webcam interface utilizes motion detection requiring full range of body motion to play. Through the relationship of physical labor for virtual gain, the reality of the actual physical, labor critical to running virtual worlds is made visible.

Stephanie Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary practice merges performance, installation and networked media to create provocative interactions that question the boundaries and social constructs of manufactured desires. She has lectured and exhibited in the US and internationally at venues including the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, 2008 Zer01 San Jose, 2004/2008 ISEA; and the Knitting Factory, NYC. Stephanie received her MFA in 2003 from The Department of Film, Video and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo.

Plazaville — by G.H. Hovagimyan, with Christine McPhee — is a new media video artwork based on the classic 1965 movie Alphaville by Jean Luc Godard. Set in 21st century New York City, the scenes from the original Alphaville are re-enacted, interpreted and improvised upon by the artists, actors and videographers. The piece uses the internet as one means of distributing the short video clips. For Pace Digital the scenes will be projected as a randomly assembled movie.

G.H. Hovagimyan is an experimental artist working in a variety of forms. His work ranges from hypertext works to digital performance art, installations and HD video.

Christina McPhee is a media and visual artist whose work reflects on and interprets generative environments at the edge of the urban. She is based in the central coast of California. Current exhibitions include “Twice Upon a Time” at Galerie Andreas Huber Vienna and Silvmernan Gallery, San Francisco. Her new science fiction project “Tesserae of Venus” debuted at Silverman Gallery San Francisco in fall 2008 and in Belfast for the ISEA festival in August 2008. Her work has recently shown at Documenta 12, Lyon Biennial 2007, Bucharest Biennial 3, and Bildmuseet Umea, Sweden.

Turbulence@Pace is supported in part by public funds from The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.