blink (hc gilje 2009) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

The digital network, where we all spend ever more of our time, is a vast infrastructure of generality. It deploys a system which is standardised, formally defined, highly structured, and internally consistent. If I send you an email, I do it trusting that the interlinked systems of hard- and software, the protocols for data encoding and transmission, the network switches and servers, will all hold together so that the email you receive is the same as the one I sent. Perhaps I’m in Australia, and you are in Norway: we could say that the network generalises our two points in space - for the network, they are the same. As I draft my email it exists as a pattern of voltages and magnetic flux inside my computer. To transmit that pattern effectively, the digital network must erase or resist any local errors or inconsistencies that it might encounter along the way, so that it does not matter if the pattern travels by optical fibre or copper, or in radio waves, or if a boat anchor cut through a cable near Indonesia. It does not matter that your computer is made of different atoms to mine. Those are specificities - local, material events and instances. Digital culture, and networked space, absorbs specificities, compensates for them, rectifies them into generality. Wireless broadband and mobile computing make us into human nodes, bathing in shared connective protocols.

The aesthetics of digital media flow from a related generality, where sound and image are encoded as fields of data. If a pixel is a number, an image is a grid of pixels, video a stream of images, and each of these numbers can take any value at all, then formally, an aesthetics of digital video is only a matter of finding the right values - fishing around in a space containing all possible digital video. If digital media creates this generalised space, anything at all, the media arts are faced with unavoidable questions: not only what to make - which values to choose, but how to choose them, and why?

242.pilots live in bruxelles (2002) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

HC Gilje’s work arises from a moment when the anything-at-all of digital video was just opening up, thanks to a combination of new real-time tools, cheap computing power, and some key interdisciplinary influences. Drawing on experimental sound and music, improvisation and performance became important solutions; working live in a specific situation, artists would gather, process, generate, and recombine material. In work from the late 1990s and early 2000s, from Gilje and his collaborators in 242.pilots, as well as video ensembles such as Granular Synthesis and Skot, the result is abstract and intense, a flow of layered digital texture. In performance it saturates the body and senses; big screens, big speakers. Instead of the narrative transport of cinema, which takes us somewhere else, this work creates - and is created in - an intensified sense of presence, what Gilje calls an “extended now”. This methodology is vital; it focuses the open-ended generality of digital media in to a point: on this, rather than anything-at-all.

This moment relies on a circuit, a close coupling between artist and media; data flows become experienced events - sounds and images - which in turn inform new data flows, and so on. Audience and performers share a digital-material situation. The specificity of digital media comes forward; for of course these media are always specific, always local, always embodied; but that specificity is usually suppressed by the functional logic of generality. At the same time though, the processes underway here depend on exactly that generality, on the machine’s ability to rapidly transform data and shift it between instantiations - from the voltages in video memory to the patterns of projected light.

In nodio (2005-) Gilje creates a system of networked audiovisual nodes that process and share image material. Each node generates sound derived from its image, in a process of automatic translation. On one hand this translation is another demonstration of the abstract pliability of the digital - its ability to transform anything into anything (generality); on the other, its tight audiovisual correpondences generate sparks of material intensity - real events, rather than digital effects (specificity). With these distributed nodes Gilje deploys audiovisual materials in space, creating flows and juxtapositions that function as dynamic sculpture. Of course the formal model of nodio echoes our most ubiquitous generalising paradigm: the network. Once again, the artist applies this digital tendency for generalisation in order to cultivate instances of specificity - the texture and sensation of the here and now.

drifter (hc gilje 2006) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

From drifter (2006) (above) to dense (2006) and shift (2008) (below), Gilje’s audiovisual nodes map out a developing exploration of specificity. drifter deploys standard computer hardware, formed into sculptural modules; in passing material between nodes Gilje begins to break the frame of the screen, creating an implicit inter-space. In dense, the hardware moves out of the sculptural field, and the screen is further deconstructed. Instead of the frontal configuration of the cinema / computer, these suspended fabric strips are illuminated from both sides with a video “weave”. The familiar architecture of the screen as a blank (general-purpose) substrate containing or supporting image content, is reconfigured here; the specific materialities of screen and content overlap. Even more so in shift, where the nodes are now wooden boxes, illuminated with precisely controlled video projections. As in earlier nodio works sound and image are directly related. Here Gilje extends this fusion to the sculptural objects; each node is also its own speaker-box, so that the digital articulation of sound and image is realised, and grounded materially, in the nodes themselves.

shift v1, prototype (hc gilje 2008) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

These works drive towards a spatial materialisation of audiovisuals: dynamic constellations of AV intensity, fields for what Gilje calls “audiovisual powerchords”. The projectors, speakers and networks of the nodio works present one means to this end, deploying existing media technologies. Again we find an interplay of generality and specificity, as Gilje adapts generalising systems - projectors, computers, networks - to realise materialised instances. The Wind-up Birds (2008) (below) represent another angle of approach; Gilje sets video aside, and creates materialised, local, sculpturally autonomous nodes from electronic and mechanical materials. In these robotic woodpeckers digital media and sculptural embodiment are further enmeshed. The birds communicate using digital radio, and their behaviour is programmed in a custom chip; but their sound is simply percussion - a mechanical switch, tapping on a specially constructed wooden slit-drum. Again this is specificity over generality: a loudspeaker is an acoustic shape-shifter, a technology which promises any sound, in the same way that the screen promises any image. By contrast the Birds produce only one sound, their sound, a specific conjunction of solenoid, timber and vibrating air.

wind-up birds (hc gilje 2008) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

The Birds will run for a month on their own batteries, strapped to trees, calling to each other and any other creatures nearby. These nodes are unplugged: they begin to come away from the technological support system of mains power and the shelter of the gallery or studio, and move out into the world. As in the artist’s other work the engineering here is inseparable from the artistic agenda; the Birds are in that sense a realisation of Gilje’s spatial and formal aims, an autonomous constellation of intensities. But they also literally expand from there; where the nodio works explore the composition of spaces within a network of intensities, the Birds move outwards, creating points of intensity in the wild, and evoking a spatial alertness - a way of being in and listening to the world - that extends beyond the well-marked edges of an artwork. The Birds are more like an experimental intervention, a digital-material overlay in a complex field of the living and non-living.

Similarly the Soundpockets works (both 2007) make small sonic interventions in urban spaces, pursuing local intensification and juxtaposition through directional soundbeams and micro-scale radio transmissions. Once again we find this interplay of the general - the anything-at-all of the digital - and the specific, the here and now. The “extremely local radio stations” of Soundpockets 2 form a sort of folded juxtaposition of three layers: globalised network infrastructures and protocols, the traced or mediated locations of field recordings, and the specific time and place of the transmissions. Just as Soundpockets 1 uses exotic soundbeam acoustics to perturb urban spaces, Soundpockets 2 shows how we can draw in technological infrastructures in order to reconfigure the real environment, creating flows and distributions that form intense moments of difference and specificity.

In this reading Gilje’s work is partly critical. Pursuing specificity, and an intensified, material experience of the here and now, it pushes against the generalising tendencies of digital media. By the functional logic of the network, each node is formally identical, and must be effectively insulated from its environment. Ubiquitous computing promises us “everyware” - total connectivity, the complete interpenetration of the network and our lived environment [2]. But if the network is a generalising force, if it erases differences between places, what will life in “everyware” be like? Gilje’s work suggests a utopian alternative: networks that are always local in time and space; nodes of right here, right now. Gilje’s work strives for what Hans Gumbrecht calls “presence”; a way of knowing the world that is characterised by intense moments of encounter or revelation - aesthetic experiences that place us in the world, and of it, rather than observing from the intellectual distance of interpretation.

The beauty of Gilje’s work though is that it not only suggests this prospect, but demonstrates it, makes it happen; and in that sense the work is constructive, rather than critical. In emphasising the specificity of media technologies, Gilje’s work shows us a different way to frame those technologies; as always material, always in the world with us - a view I have called transmateriality. As Matthew Kirschenbaum writes, “computers … are material machines dedicated to propagating a behavioral illusion, or call it a working model, of immateriality.” Gilje shows us both sides of this statement, the functional illusion - generality - and its material foundation - specificity. It shows us a way to reframe the network, too; as always local, always specific; a tangle of real flows and propagating patterns; and endless possible ways of reconnecting the world with itself. Finally Gilje shows us one crucial role for the artist, in this context: seeking out configurations that intensify, rather than dilute, our sense of being in the world.

You will need to download the free Second Life client to access Adam’s work in Second Life. Or you can see video documentation of some of his works. URLs can be found at the end of this interview.

Adam will be answering reader’s questions in the comments section below until January 31, 2008.

Helen Thorington: I understand that you do not think of yourself as a sound artist in Second Life. I wonder if you would explain why?

Adam Nash: I think of a realtime 3D multi-user environment (3D MUVEs), like Second Life, as a post-convergent medium. This means that no single media-element (sound, vision, sociality, network, time, etc) takes precedent, rather they all exist equally in a symbiotic relationship, without which none of them could exist.

[Image: Unsung Song #16: Blue Sound Ground]

Helen: Do you have any musical training? Do you play any musical instruments? Does this help or hinder your explorations?

Adam: I don’t have any formal musical training, but I do play a few instruments badly, chiefly the drums and keyboards. I have many years’ experience playing in bands and making music for soundtracks and performances. I also have quite a lot of experience as a live performer in performance art, dance and movement. Like all experience, it both helps and hinders my explorations in 3D MUVEs. While I am able to build and expand upon musical performance techniques, I assume that the same experience severely hampers my ability to see potential in a new environment. I really love music, but I think new environments like this reveal music as an outdated concept. I still think music is useful – indeed I release a lot of my own music under a Creative Commons license via my net-label at www.concentrated-sound.net – but anachronistic. I was first drawn to realtime 3D back in 1997, when I first encountered VRML, and it struck me as a very similar environment to the inside of my own head when I was creating music for performances. It is a spatial environment in which sounds can be animated in a way that is easy to visualize but impossible to achieve in the physical world. It is a logical next step to see the environment as the performance environment as well as the composition environment, and from there quickly grows the concepts that I explore in 3D MUVEs, basically audiovisual environments that users navigate within to create their own unique experience from the elements provided by me. It’s like the composer’s mind, the instruments and the venue all rolled into one.

Helen: Tell us about composing sound for Second Life. You have called it a “technically very limited and frustrating environment.” What are the limitations and frustrations? Are there redeeming features?

Adam: Composing sound for Second Life, or any 3D MUVE, is fun, because of this ability to provide the basic audiovisual elements and then leave the user to arrange (ie, navigate) the elements as they please. This is an extremely exciting and satisfying way of working, because it removes the need for arrangement – a skill, different from composition, that is absolutely crucial in linear music. There’s nothing wrong with arrangement (often in linear music it is the thing that turns something great), but often there are an unlimited number of potential ways of arranging a piece of music and the musician is forced to choose only one.

From: Infra_Assemblage

Also, with this idea of the melding of the composition environment and performance environment, the act of creating work is often enormously enjoyable because you get to fly around and through your ideas, trying out different ways of navigation that you may never have realized were possible when conceiving of the piece. It’s like a slightly more concrete iteration of the limitless imagination scape in which all these ideas are found.

The technical limitations of Second Life are significant and many. The main limitations, for me, are the lack of a proper modeling hierarchy, and a few things to do with sound, like the 10-second limit per file and lack of control over falloff. There is also an undocumented limit to the number of simultaneous sounds that can be played. On the other hand, there are a lot of positives about working within limitations, as the artist is forced to be creative and come up with novel solutions. It also means many formal decisions are made prior to starting work, which in some ways makes things easier. Like most things, it is both blessing and curse.

[Image: Unsung Song 2: Crescent]

Helen: Avatars play an important role in your work by activating the sound. And yet you have “core problems” with them. “The avatar concept”, you say in July’s empyre discussion “is the one I find the most troubling, and it also grows from the 3d-space-as-physical-simulation misassumption. There is no need to concentrate presence into one cohesive point (an avatar).” I wonder if you would explain what you mean by this, and perhaps suggest alternatives.

Adam: Well, if avatars play an important role in my work, it’s because they play a very important role in Second Life itself. The problems I refer to are both technical and conceptual. First, the analogy of a single point of presence, from which the rest of the world is perceived, and in which the rest of the world perceives you, arises directly from our physical world, where our sensory organs are coalesced in a single unit and cannot be separated. Recently, humans have been able to spread out perception and presence through technological mediation, for example cameras, telephones, radio and the internet, and I think we are certainly slowly moving away from the concept of a single point of perception and presence, but mostly it is still how we negotiate our physical existence.

But, it is a very underexamined concept in realtime 3D, and particularly in Second Life. This is true of the entire physical world analogy that controls the working concept of Second Life. Even though it may seem natural to use 3D space to recreate physical space, that is only one possibility, and certainly not the easiest, because it can never recreate physical space, only represent it. Once we move into the sphere of representation, different modes of perception are required (one never actually walks on a map).

Because the system to which our bodies are subject (ie, physical space) is now being represented, we need also to represent our bodies, not recreate them, otherwise things quickly get confusing and the representation becomes limited in usefulness. This happens as soon as we move our ‘camera’ away from our avatar – we are no longer seeing and hearing via our avatar’s eyes and ears, rather we are perceiving from whatever point in the 3D space that our ‘camera’ is at. Yet, within this synthetic space it is perfectly feasible that we could perceive from both the position of the camera and the position of our avatar. This is not difficult or unusual, in fact we are already doing it twice simply by having a default avatar in Second Life. The first, significantly, is the physical/virtual superposition, where my physical body is seeing and hearing my avatar see and hear – already I have two points of perception (literally and conceptually). Then there is the ‘over the shoulder’ point of view that SL avatars default to, behind and above the head of your own avatar, really a camera that is following your avatar. It is seeing and hearing your avatar see and hear. So now I am seeing and hearing my camera seeing and hearing my avatar seeing and hearing. I am simultaneously perceiving from three different points, literally and conceptually. I think this is one of the reasons so many people feel so disoriented when first encountering realtime 3D space.

Since it is possible, indeed common, to perceive from two or three points, then it’s a small step to expand the number of points of perception arbitrarily, both in space and in time (lag and multiple private chats are both examples of multiple points of perception in the temporal dimension that all SL users are comfortable with).

Practicing the agency of presence via multiple points perhaps seems a more subtle or difficult concept, but again SL users constantly deal with others via multiple points of presence. For example, most users quickly become comfortable with the idea that another user may not be seeing and hearing the scene from their avatar, or that they may be simultaneously dealing with the physical world and the synthetic world and the mediation device itself. Indeed, SL specifically acknowledges this via the device of having the avatar’s eyes and head follow the user’s mouse pointer when dealing with the user interface. This means that others’ avatars are, variously, a presence notifier (the person is logged in), a mouse, a representation, none of these things, all of these things and potentially many more things besides.

[Image: Unsung Song #9:Corona]

Helen: I can fly alone through your installations and activate sounds. I can get friends to move through them with me and produce different sounds. I can play with the work and it changes. Isn’t it in fact important for your work to have the avatars’ presence concentrated in one space?

Adam: In that sense, the avatar is serving the standard function of a mouse pointer for 3D space. Again, this is mainly because of the restrictive working analogy of Second Life itself, which enforces this role for the avatar, and it’s true that some of my works are a specific comment on, and working within, that restriction. But, it is not necessary for the user’s avatar to be concentrated in one space. Ideally, for many of the works, the user would be able to branch off avatars and move spatially through works in different ways simultaneously. Similarly for time. Or, to be able to interact with different works simultaneously in space and time.

Certainly, I consider all the pieces in, say, Seventeen Unsung Songs to be all parts and aspects of the same work, quite literally. Sonically, they are all constructed from the same rational scale that I devised, based on a fundamental tone of 77Hz then proceeding in intervals of ratios over 7. All of the pieces use this scale, and one of the pieces (Blue Sound Ground, which users pass through at the entrance) contains all of the sounds used in all the other pieces, both as a conceptual readying and also a technical device to load as many sounds into the user’s cache as possible. Visually, also, all the pieces are clearly very strongly related, sharing colours methods of distributing colour across hue, saturation and opacity spectra. It would be ideal if they could be experienced in multiple modes over space and time.

[Image: Anahata,The Mute Swan]

Helen: Have you considered what kind of work you might produce if in fact presence were not concentrated in one point? If presence were distributed over time, location, data and media?

Adam: I think it implies a more involved work, a work where the user experience becomes extremely important to the work. The extent of the user interaction over multiple points determines, to large extents, how the work develops and emerges. Works could take dynamic notions much further. For example, currently we can trigger a certain sound or animation based on sensed data about an avatar’s position and other metrics – this could be expanded to include many different aspects of the nature of the user’s engagement with the work. It suggests work that exists across environments, building on gameplay techniques to build a performative and experiential vocabulary cooperatively between artist and user. This is tremendously exciting and suggests a kind of work that could accompany users through time and space, growing and changing together. This kind of thing would start to approach the mechanics of true non-linear interactivity.

Helen: It seems to me that your work adds new parameters to sound/musical composition. In most of the networked musical pieces I’ve heard or seen described, this has not been true. Music remains music, separate or separable from other things, like the space in which it is played and its audience. And while I find this very difficult to talk about, what you introduce has to do with audience immersion and presence in the space; and audience activation of the work as a result. Thinking of the participant, I think of words like “experiential” (experiencing through the movement of my avatar-body as it explores the space you have created), the bringing into existence of music/sound. Thinking from the point of view of the music/sound, it’s not like filling a space with pre-determined sound (as so many of us have done in RL), but rather creating a dimensional space with potential… And that the two constitute a unique approach to creating and experiencing music.

I’m reminded of NOX Son-O-House, a public pavilion that is both an architectural and a sound installation that allows people to not just hear sound in a musical structure, but also to participate in the composition of the sound. It is an instrument, score and studio at the same time. A sound work, made by composer Edwin van der Heide, it is continuously generating new sound patterns activated by sensors picking up actual movements of visitors.

Is this similar to the work you’re doing?

Adam: Oh, well, I certainly hope so. I’m not familiar with that work, but it sounds very similar conceptually to the process I touched on earlier, where the compositional environment, the performative environment and the experiential environment converge, and the resulting symbiotic relationship reverberates back and forward throughout the previously distinct stages, merging them into a new, post-convergent environment of interactive, emergent, audiovisual experience.

Helen: Given the desire for multiple avatars to simultaneously/collectively activate your installations, how do you reconcile the absence of avatars or the single avatar interacting with the piece with your intentions?

Adam: I’m not sure I fully understand this question, but most of my pieces can be experienced at multiple levels in terms of number of avatars, length of time spent, familiarity with 3D space, etc. Again, this is related to my desire for an approach to the medium that is not tied to a physical world analogy of a single person with a single body. Even though SL is a multi-user space, it doesn’t preclude single users, and this is true of my work too, I hope. Some works are probably more satisfying aurally when used with other people (eg, Rarer Air), but other works are designed for individuals to interact with different elements of the SL experience, besides the social, in which case the number of avatars using it doesn’t really matter too much (eg, The Space Between). Yet others are unaffected by the number of avatars accessing them (eg, Appolinarium). I really try to explore many different aspects of the realtime 3D MUVE environment in all my different works, so its difficult to align all the work with an over-riding desire on my part.

From: Bell Garden

Helen: Have you created sound installations in other virtual worlds? If yes, can you talk about the similarities and differences, pros and cons?

Adam: Again, I really don’t think of them specifically as sound installations, but yes I have worked in many different virtual worlds/environments over the past 10 years or so, including VRML/X3D, ActiveWorlds, Blaxxun/Contact, Unreal, Torque, Quest 3D, Multiverse and even GEM in Pure Data. Differences are mainly technical, with VRML/X3D being by far the freest and most able to accommodate large scale, unrestricted concepts. In practice, it’s always had some problems dealing with lots and lots of simultaneous sounds, but I think that Niall Moody has solved that with his Helian browser, though I haven’t had a chance to use it – I’d like to but SL has got the mindshare at the moment, so that’s where curators want you to work. It’s a shame VRML/X3D never gained wide acceptance in the media arts community. As for the other environments I mentioned, they’re all commercial products to greater or lesser extents, except for Pure Data, so they all have significant technical restrictions that arise as a function of the commercial aims. Multiverse looks interesting in terms of extensibility and freedom, but again I haven’t had a real chance to properly check it out. I’m trying to at the moment with my colleague John McCormick, but again we’ve been commissioned to do a mixed reality piece using Second Life, so that takes up most of our time. Pure Data (known as pd) is the opposite, it’s open source and specifically designed for audio. With the GEM library in pd you can use OpenGL to create responsive 3D environments, and John and I have been working with that a little, with promising results. Most of these environments have things that they do better than others and things they do worse. SL does a lot of things poorly and a few things well, with its popularity being its chief advantage at the moment.

From: A Rose Heard at Dusk

Helen: You refer to your SL pieces as “audiovisual sculpture” and “site-specific installations.” Can you talk about the difference, and what makes Seventeen Unsung Songs site-specific, but not A Rose Heard at Dusk?

[Image: A Rose Heard at Dusk]

Adam: I guess “audiovisual sculpture” refers to all my work in 3D environments, whereas something like Seventeen Unsung Songs is a collection of inter-related audiovisual sculptures that were commissioned by Sugar Seville specifically for an island that already existed, therefore it is “site-specific”. It wouldn’t be possible to recreate Seventeen Unsung Songs in its entirety without having an island that was very similar to East of Odyssey, but it would of course be possible to install individual pieces from within that show in different places.

Helen: What do virtual worlds offer you as an artist that real world spaces don’t?

Adam: To me, this comes back to my concept of the post-convergent medium. The physics of realworld spaces make it impossible to attempt such things as continuous realtime dynamic animation of arbitrary numbers of sound and vision sources based on continuous realtime sensing of presence and other metrics. However, the comparison still considers the primary role of virtual spaces to be a recreation of physical space, which is not what I think. The kind of art that I have ever attempted in real world spaces has always been primarily performative and very different from virtual work. I guess there was a point of crossover when I was still working with The Men Who Knew Too Much and looking to combine real world and virtual art, but since 2002 any work I’ve done that involves so-called mixed reality has chiefly been in the service of others like Igloo, but then I tend to do the music/sound and some performance. I don’t see virtual spaces as a separate reality, I very much see virtual space as wholly contained within the real world.

Helen: We’re seeing more and more artists combining sound/music and moving images/video, referring to themselves as a/v artists and VJs. Why do you think this is?

Adam: I guess it’s a natural progression from a past that had discrete partitions between all sorts of experience, as a result of both technical and conceptual limitations. As media starts to converge, and access to both the means of production and means of distribution becomes easier, it becomes more viable technically to enact the kind of concepts that naturally emerge. In particular, two generations of music video and clubbing combine with more meme-like concepts of emergence and networks to create a desire to operate across a range of media. Most people’s media vocabulary is of a sufficient level of sophistication that practitioners are driven to explore new modes of expression to engage meaningfully with an audience.

Helen: Are there any other artists working in the same vein as you?

Adam: Plenty of really interesting artists operating in Second Life, many of whom share aspects of exploration and practice with each other, myself included. Some who come to mind are Gazira Babelli, Annabeth Robinson/AngryBeth Shortbread, Christopher Dodds/Mashup Islander, Bingo Onomatapoeia and the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, DC Spensley/Dancoyote Antonelli, Brad Kligerman, Juria Yoshikawa, Keystone Bouchard, Daruma Picnic, Christine Webster/Wildo Hofmann and Andrew Burrell/Nonnatus Korhonen. That’s just a short list, there are lots of people doing lots of interesting work all over Second Life.

Helen: Who are some of the artists you most admire?

Adam: John Power, John McCormick, Burno Martelli and Ruth Gibson (Igloo), Bruce Mowson, Melinda Rackham, George Clinton, Prince, Greg Egan, Yoko Ono, Morton Feldman, Brian Eno, Mark Rothko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. There are so many artists whose work I really appreciate, but those are the ones I genuinely admire.

Helen: Do you have predictions for sound art trends, developing technologies, the 3-D web? Have you any thoughts on what the future impact of immersion/presence might be? Do you think it might make “play” and “fun” more important to our lives.

Adam: I think we’re entering the post-convergent era, where distinctions between sound, vision and other media elements will cease to be meaningful. I definitely think play and fun will become more important as 3D environments grow in acceptance, alongside the growth of computer games as a medium. I certainly think that games, in the broadest sense, are the artistic medium of this century. Simulation and modeling will be of enormous importance to society and we will learn a lot from artists and practitioners of games and virtual worlds, and vice versa. The distinction between real world and virtual world will cease to be meaningful. We’ll see a convergence of networked experience via 3D, something like a 3D web but much deeper and more enjoyable than that phrase suggests. I definitely think we’ll see a move beyond the use of 3D space as just for representing physical spaces. The multiple points of perception and presence that we’ve already talked about will grow in acceptance and utility, along with an expectation that art will manipulate this.

Helen: Thank you, Adam, for this great interview.

Visit the following URLs for more information on Adam’s work:

seventeen unsung songs: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/unsung_songs.html
a rose heard at dusk: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/rose_heard_at_dusk.html
anemochord: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/anemochord.html
eudemonia stellata http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/eudemonia_stellata.html
infra assemblage: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/infra_assemblage.html

For information on Adam’s other projects, go to: http://yamanakanash.net/projects.html

Videos of some of his works are available for viewing at: http://www.waystowave.com/adam/secondlife/movies/

“In 1973 I made Rainforest IV where the objects that the sounds are sent through are very large so that they have their own presence in space. I mean, they actually sound locally in the space where they are hanging as well as being supplemented by a loudspeaker system. The idea is that if you send sound through materials, the resonant nodes of the materials are released and those can be picked up by contact microphones or phono cartridges and those have a different kind of sound than the object does when you listen to it very close where it’s hanging. It becomes like a reflection and it makes, I thought, quite a harmonious and beautiful atmosphere, because wherever you move in the room, you have reminiscences of something you have heard at some other point in the space. It’s (can be) a large group piece actually, any number of people can participate in it. It’s important that each person makes their own sculpture, decides how to program it, and performs it themselves. Very little instruction is necessary for the piece. I’ve found it to be almost self-teaching because you discover how to program the devices by seeing what they like to accept. Its been a very rewarding type of activity for me. It’s been done by as large a group as 14 people. So that was how our Rainforest was done.” — David Tudor

Performed by: Ryan Jordan, Julien Ottavi, Kasper T Toeplitz, Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut, John Bowers, Dominique Leroy, Philip Julian, Chris Weaver, Jenny Pickett, Ryo Ikeshiro, Dawn Scarfe, Andy Wheddon, Duncan Ravenhall, Antonis Antoniou, and more.

Thanks to ResonanceFM for their support!

Who is David Tudor?

David Tudor was born in Philadelphia, PA, in 1926. He studied with H. William Hawke (organ, theory), Irma Wolpe Rademacher (piano) and Stephan Wolpe (composition and analysis).His first professional activity was as an organist, and he subsequently became known as one of the leading avante-garde pianists of our time. Tudor gave highly acclaimed first or early performances of worksby contemporary composers Earle Brown, Sylvano Bussotti, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, Stephan Wolpe, and La Monte Young, among others.

Tudor began working with John Cage in the early fifties, as a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and with Cage’s Project of Music for Electronic Tape. Tudor gradually ended his active career as a pianist, turning exclusively to the composition of live electronic music.

As a composer, Tudor chose specific electronic components and their interconnections to define both composition and performance drawing upon resources that were both flexible and complex. Tudor was one of four Core Artists who collaborated on the design of the Pepsi Pavilion for Expo ‘70, Osaka, Japan, a project of Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc. Many of Tudor’s compositions have involved collaborative visual forces: light systems, laser projections, dance, theater, television, film. Tudor’s last project, Toneburst: Maps and Fragments, was a collaboration with visual artist Sophia Ogielska. Tudor’s several collaborations with visual artist Jacqueline Monnier included the development of a kite environment installed at the Whitney Museum (Philip Morris, NYC) in 1986, at the exhibition “Klangraume” in Dusseldorf in 1988, and at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City in 1990. Other collaborators have included Lowell Cross, Molly Davies, Viola Farber, Anthony Martin, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Tudor had been affiliated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) since its inception in the summer of 1953. In 1992, after Cage’s death, Tudor took over as Music Director of MCDC. Merce Cunningham has commissioned numerous works from Tudor, including Rainforest I (1968); Toneburst (1974); Weatherings (1978); Phonemes (1981); Sextet for Seven (1982); Fragments (1984); Webwork (1987), Five Stone Wind (1988), Virtual Focus (1990); Neural Network Plus (1992); and most recently Soundings: Ocean Diary (1994) for what was John Cage’s last conception, Ocean.

You are invited to participate in a multiplayer performance within Colony, an interactive urban art environment. Bring your iPhone, borrow a friends or steal one and download the free Colony app from the App Store. Up to thirty people may simultaneously play the urban art environment and feed energy to the media creatures that inhabit it. Each of the totems in the networked sculpture may be played like a musical instrument responding to touch with light and sound.

Colony, by Troy Innocent (weathering steel, acrylic, computer-controlled light, 12-channel sound, interactive installation, iPhone web app), is part artificial lifeform, part icon of a digital media landscape. The weathered totems use light and sound to communicate with one another in response to human presence. Affect the colour and sound patterns of the artwork by walking through the environment or playing the totems with your iPhone.

A demonstration and workshop on how to play shall take place from 8pm onwards. At dusk we will commence the performance. Pick a totem and begin to play! Rules of play announced on the night.

Register for the event via colony [at] iconica.org by sending your name and email address. You need to bring an iPhone or iPod touch loaded with the Colony app to participate. People without iPhones are welcome too join in, as the artwork responds to your presence as you walk along the forested path.

Related: SWM: distributed bodies of musical-visual form, a 2006 Turbulence Commission by Troy Innocent, et al.

For When Absence Becomes Presence, the next installment of the WPA’s Experimental Media Series, curators Sonja Simonyi and Niels Van Tomme have organized an exhibition of international sound and video art at the WPA’s new headquarters. Dealing with issues of memory, meaning and representation, the exhibition is a play between two separate, but inherently linked conditions: absence and presence. Both states can be mediated through representations in images and sound; what is absent can become present and presence can be experienced through the realization that something is not there.

“We have known at least since Magritte that when we look at an image of a pipe, we are regarding not a real pipe but one that has been re-presented. The pipe as such isn’t there, it isn’t present; instead, it is depicted as being absent.” - Boris Groys

For a screening accompanying this exhibition, the curators are calling all video and sound artists to submit works that explore these notions in innovative ways. A selection of the received video and sound works will be presented along with works from the show on December 4, 2008 in the framework of a public screening. Selected artists will be notified during the last week of October. Additionally, two artists submitting the most compelling entries, as reviewed by the curators and based on overall quality and innovation, will be awarded the Kraft Prize for New Media of $750 and the WPA Experimental Media Prize of $750 on the night of the event. Please note that the WPA Prize will go to an artist living and working in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Sonja Simonyi is a film researcher, currently pursuing a PhD in Cinema Studies at NYU. Previously, she has worked at the National Gallery of Art’s film department where she organized the film series Modernity and Tradition: Film in Interwar Central Europe, which traveled to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, among other venues.

Niels Van Tomme is a curator and researcher. His exhibitions and screenings are shown internationally and investigate the sociopolitical aspects of contemporary audiovisual culture. Since fall 2007, he is the Curator and Director of Arts and Media at Provisions Library in Washington, DC.

DOWNLOAD FULL CALL FOR ENTRIES AND ENTRY FORM HERE: For more information please call the WPA office at (+1) 202.234.7103.

The group show Voice & Void is dedicated to the representation of the human voice – and its absence – in the visual arts. The voice and its fading away, speech and the loss of speech, both the presence and the immateriality of the voice, the relation between the voice and corporeality as well as sound and image are only a few of the many aspects addressed in this exhibition.

The exhibition studies the effects of a sensual perception being replaced by another one and the conditions under which the voice allows itself to be imparted by other means – be it written notation, technical recordings or visual representation. While the voice has very specific qualities in its immediate expression, “translated into another medium, the voice becomes apparent as a medium.” (Thomas Trummer) The works allude to the relation of image and sound so that they reciprocally define the specific characteristics of imagery and sound, either underscoring or even subverting each other.

The exhibition comprises thirteen very different approaches to “voice and void”. Historical points of reference include Joseph Beuys” legendary performance “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare”(1965) which is featured in Ute Klophaus” photographs; John Cage”s text sheets titled “Lecture on Nothing (Silence)” (1959) where acoustics of a silence imbued with “presence” is implemented both verbally and visually by means of text notations; and VALIE EXPORT”s “Tonfilm” (Sound film) from 1969, showing the draft for a performance in which the voice is manipulated by means of technological interventions in the glottis and the ear.

These early works are followed by a row of contemporary studies on the phenomenon of the voice – also touching upon its absence. One work, by American artist Rachel Berwick, is an installation with two live parrots. In his journey through South America in 1799 explorer Alexander von Humboldt discovered a parrot that was the only surviving living creature which could speak the language of the indigenous tribe of the Mayporé. Humboldt documented 40 words of this lost language that is now being reanimated in Berwick’s work.

In his site-specific installation Hans Schabus refers to the particular acoustic and visual situation of hidden spaces. He makes these spaces accessible to the visitor by transferring them into the exhibition space.

Asta Grőting”s work revolves around the process of ventroloquism where the performer is no longer just the speaker but also the recipient and interlocutor of his own “second voice”.

The exhibition is rounded off by a number of other works by artists such as Janet Cardiff/ Georges Bures Miller, Anna Gaskell, Christian Marclay, Melik Ohanian, Nedko Solakov and Julianne Swartz. They all approach the voice as the vehicle of language, communication and bodily expression.

The curator of the exhibition is Thomas Trummer who developed the project as part of an international fellowship awarded by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT (USA) where the exhibition was shown first.

Performativity, Ideologies of Liveness, and Listener-Consciousness in Electronic-Music Performance featuring Mark Butler: In DJ sets and laptop performances, an unprecedented level of technological mediation comes into conflict with the expected “liveness” of performance. As a result, musicians frequently express various techno-performative anxieties in explanations of their performance approaches. In particular, they are concerned that the audience experiences a performance, one that is imbued with a sense of live presence, rather than simply the playback of a recording or the clicking of a mouse. They work to convey this “presence” in a number of ways, which include dancing, other significant physical gestures, and the use of carefully selected electronic hardware. The audience responds in kind, thereby completing the liveness of the event. This talk will address these issues in both theoretical and analytical terms, drawing material for discussion from interviews and field recordings made in Berlin in 2005–2007.

Mark Butler is a music theorist with interests in popular music, rhythm and meter, music and sexuality, musical meaning and aesthetics, and the history of music theory. Butler’s research integrates theoretical, historical, and anthropological approaches to music, with particular emphasis on the use of ethnographic methodology to address music-theoretical questions. His book Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music (Indiana University Press, 2006) explores the rhythmic and metrical organization of electronic dance music from the measure to the complete DJ set, drawing upon field research with audiences and creators of electronic dance music as well as musical analysis. His current research includes a book focusing on relationships between technology, improvisation, and composition in electronic–music performance.

“Earth Art uses the planetary dimension of the earth as an artistic medium and was developed in this century as a corollary to the telecommunications revolution and to the globalization of all spheres of human activity. Earth art uses planet Earth as the raw material for emotional and introspective expression.

The appeal of distance is in the very loss that defines it. The tools that we use, even the very sophisticated ones, are unable to adequately convey the sense of distance. Our senses must be at their most alert to be able to conceive of the other or of elsewhere. Being absent wakes our senses up by reorganising perception: consciousness participates with the mental reconstitution of an emotion-filled puzzle. As touch is useless, it becomes virtual; unfathomable, it is exacerbated.

Fingertips become useless: we must touch with the heart, the soul, the body. Perception reorganises itself. Sight and touch are no longer supreme. The ears and voice become the vectors of exchange, of interactivity. Loss, reconstituting a void: no longer is there a vision or distorted vision.

In Orient Express, the picture taken every hour on the hour prompts us to reconstitute the intervals. Orient Express makes holes in space and time. The conception of time has been exacerbated by a focus on points.

In Thaon/New York, sound is transmitted by satellite and image by slow-scan. The sounds mix, especially during the transatlantic interactive music piece. With the collage of sounds, spatial references are lost. The image is blurred and sequential and is therefore only partial in time and space. These lace-like holes in sound and image become a shadow theatre with shades of images and shades of sounds. Here, removal and loss is what creates art from reality.

Why is this pleasurable and why is ubiquity so moving?

It is the beauty of distant presence: I share my consciousness. My body is here, but my consciousness is shared between this place and elsewhere, between me and others. Here again there is a loss, an exchange. It is the beauty of communication with another place, with another person: I participate in that elsewhere, I participate in the “else”.

In this intent, this virtual gesture, there is love: spiritual love because it is disembodied. There is eroticism because senses are sharpened and fantasy exacerbated.

It is the sublime pleasure of distance. Uncertain distance: in-between, ambiguity, ambivalence, shared value.

Creating emptiness, a space of possibilities, the utopia necessary to every birth, to all creation.

Earth art is a form of art that takes Earth in its planetary dimension, as material for artistic reflection and emotion.

Earth art is sublime because it mixes fear and a sense of wonder.

To imagine on a planetary scale is to resize one’s consciousness. Human consciousness can now extend to a planetary scale. Consciousness extension.

We are at once infinitely big and infinitely small, lost and found. In Le bleu du Ciel, the viewer looking at the average of the two skies, the one above him and the one a thousand kilometres away—mentally reconstitutes the colour of the far away sky from grey to blue. The spectator reconstitutes the atmospheric cloud cover and his consciousness spreads over the globe. Ozone, each sound makes us shift from one antipode to the other. Oscillating movement with a 20,000-kilometre amplitude. Sounds from the automobile pollution in the city of Lille, and sounds from the riddled atmosphere. Interactions between man, air and sun. Network and noosphere. Planetary interdependence.

We change our point of view : at the same time it develops in space, consciousness is extended. Cosmic consciousness. The ego is finally abandoned. The self vanishes. Our point of view is now a point of fractal being, at once distant and involved, particular and infinite.

Perspective no longer limits our vision. We are in another place inside us, another place in the other, up there. The you and the me meet between Earth and sky.

Here is thus a lesson on distance and on wisdom: it is a lesson for the spirit.”

Stéphan Barron

(1) SERRES Michel, Atlas, Ed. Julliard, Paris, 1994, p.24

[Image: Stéphan Barron, Le Jour et La Nuit, Two computers, one in Brazil, one in Australia, averaged the images of the skies of the two countries, 1995] Electronic art is matched with environmental sensibilities in French artist Stéphan Barron’s “technoromantic” work. Using video, computers and community agit-prop Barron has found ways to bring abstract notions of space, gardening and urban land use to neighbors and gallery goers alike. The challenge of much technology based work is often the distancing that occurs when presented by a computer screen. In works such as Night and Day Barron brings the averaged sky tones from remote cameras in Brazil and Australia together into one computer image, creating a work that emphasises the electronic and environmental systems which unite far away lands. “Ozone” manages a similar feat by converting ozone levels in French car exhaust and Australian UV levels coming through the ozone layer into music. The abstraction and mystery provide a window into the surprising connections which connect us together. More at the greenmuseum.org

CD Rom Earth Art - Art Planétaire

The CD-ROM’s summary is composed of clouds. A sound from the project is generated when the cursor is placed on one of the clouds. Clicking on a cloud opens an interactive animation that sums up each earth art project. This non-narrative, non-textual presentation emphasizes the auditory aspect of Stephan Barron’s work.

The CD-ROM includes theoretical texts by Roy Ascott, Théo Barbu, Paul Brown, Laurent Benoit, Augustin Berque, Anna Capella, Mario Costa, Jean-Paul Fargier, Jürgen Engel, Fred Forest, Edmond Couchot, Jacques Donguy, Derrick de Kerckhove, Antonin Kosik, Markus Müller, Louise Poissant, Pierre Restany, François Terrassoné … as well as 300 pages from Stéphan Barron’s doctoral dissertation on his work.

Toucher l’espace, poétique de l’Art Planétaire is published by L’Harmattan, November 2006 - The first part of the book describes artworks that use planet Earth in its geographic entirety as an art medium. It describes the emergence of this art form which developed over the last century and whose importance grew with that of telecommunication technologies. Globalisation and ecological issues are essential themes of this art form.

In the second part of the book, 25 artworks or projects are featured, recounting 23 years of the author’s own creative work. 42 colour photographs and 17 black and white pictures illustrate the text.

Earth Art takes the Earth as its raw material for emotional and introspective expression, using telecommunication technologies to highlight distance and geographical space. This art form explores the emotions and poetry of distance, and reflects on globalisation, and its human and ecological consequences; Stéphan Barron’s adventure awakens and alerts us to a broader conscience of our planet.” - Edgar Morin

Browsing the Synapse Database — which is searchable by “Individuals”, “Interests”, “Projects / Events / Publications,” “Organizations” and “Gallery” — I came across Nigel Helyer’s Sonic Landscapes R + D project:

From June 1999 until September 2001, Helyer worked as an Artist in Residence at Lake Technology in Sydney, developing the Sonic Landscapes Virtual Audio Reality system … The salient feature of the Sonic Landscapes project is the juxtaposition of a fictive (but very convincing) 3D immersive sound-scape, accurately positioned by cartographic software, upon a physical terrain. The effect is somewhat akin to Murray Schafer’s concept of ‘Schitzophonia’, where, by the simple act of recording, sound is split from its original physical context and projected into another context.

However within a Sonic Landscapes experience we are not simply dealing with the disembodied voices of popular music reproduced and re-contextualised via a stereo-sytem! Here we are engaging with a seemingly live sonic organism that is responsive to our presence, our orientation and the traces of our wanderings, and which appears un-cannily embedded in the site itself.

The prototype Sonic Landscapes Unit is capable of operating with a 2cm positional accuracy when employing differential GPS (Global Satellite Positioning) and with a one degree accuracy for rotational head orientation, which, when combined with Lake’’s headphones delivered virtual speaker array, provides a highly realistic immersive audio environment. Tracking technology for the Sonic Landscapes project has been provided throughout by the SNAP Lab of the University of New South Wales under the guidance of Professor Chris Rizos. Future collaborative projects are currently underway between the Artist and UNSW c.f. “Audio Nomad”.The choice of a prototype test site for the project was St Stephens graveyard in Newtown; one of Sydney’s oldest burial grounds, which provided an ideal pedestrian environment, rich in historical material and interesting physical structures.