“The Farther we emerge from the inner city, the more political the atmosphere becomes. We reach the docks, the inland harbors, the warehouses, the poor neighborhoods, the scattered refuges of wretchedness: the outskirts. Outskirts are the state of emergency of a city, the terrain on which incessantly rages the great decisive battle between town and country. It is nowhere more bitter between Marseilles and the provençal landscape. It is the hand-to-hand fight telegraph poles against agaves, barbed wire against thorny palms, the miasmas of stinking corridors against the damp gloom under the plane trees in brooding squares, short-winded outside staircases against the mighty hills. The long rue de Lyon is the powder conduit which Marseilles has dug in the landscape so that in Saint-Lazare, Saint-Antoine, Arenc, Septèmes it can blow up this terrain, burying it in the shrapnel of every national and commercial language. Alimentation, Moderne, rue de Jamaïque, Comptoir de la Limite, Savon Abat-Jour, Minoterie de la campagne, Bar du Gaz, Bar Falcutatif - and over all this lies the dust that here conglomerates out of sea salt, chalk, and mica, and whose bitterness persists longer in the mouths of those who have pitted themselves against the city than the splendor of sun and sea in the eyes of its admirers.” Walter Benjamin “Marseilles - The Return of the Flâneur, 1929″

Using “The City”, as a cyborg organism, driven by the interchangeable machinery of flesh and concrete in equal measure, steered by progress and technology into previously unreachable dimensions, Open Scripts will attempt to amplify the permutations of the city’s interior reactions to its shifting techno-meaderthalls or human glitches in its well oiled machine.

Participants will be asked to embark on the journey of a modern day flaneur as they navigate, observe and impose on the city. These observations, inflections and/or interruptions caused to the natural ebb and flow of the city’s are to be transmitted across the city from a plurality of points. A live mix from these data streams will be returned to each derive / flaneur and simultaneously broadcast across the net, both producing and reproducing the city and its flesh.

Equipped with mobile phones, the participants can team up to create and organize their own derive - their desired path into the belly of this city. During these expeditions into the city’s inertia, our techno-meaderthalls would connect to the pulsating brain of our server - the grey matter of this operation - with its nervous system of mobile phones stimulating its neurons with sensory data - voices, chattering, street sounds, text messages / poetics, videos and images. Information which has designs on the attention of our “deriver” will be collected, manipulated, transformed , reproduced and broadcast. This information may be a description of a situation, place or sound that the participants capture, record or produce and may take the form of a discussion or interview just as easily as being that of an image or text.

Meanwhile, the server, our automated system, will collect the data received from our Derivers and transform this into an audio- visual composition of the city through processes akin to that of Burrows’ cuts-up, the digital design of this neural stem will be both controlled by the participants and/or online users. This automaton will broadcast the data stream over web-radio. By allowing the possibility for anyone to access and to manipulate the data input by our techno-meaderthalls (text, photos, videos, etc) the city will multiply and transform inside-out, outside-in, both virtually and through its physical embodiment!

As a perpetual mirroring of the machine and its participants, a psycho-geographical mind-mapping is created through the flux of desired data yielded from the city, in order to produce, reproduce and reflect a new vision of the city, viewed via the techno-meaderthall’s own path, journey, derive, performance, action and interpretations. A techno-pirate’s geographical disassemblage, a dissemination of interconnected points of views that are all the time crossing over with each other and with themselves. Each path begins from the singular, but become multiplied through the potential of reinterpretation as driven by the machine and/or other derivers. Their ubiquitous presence, catching the real without closing it, opening nodes of bilateral trans-communication, the “deriver” swims in the streets of his own memory and the memory of his fellow city derivers.

Marching to a different beat, The Scie Protocol builds a continuity in the cycles (derive / performance / live stream / archives / interaction) of the city. The workshop is constructed by the exchanges made with individuals or groups desiring lines through the city - maps are to be re-interpreted, re-played whilst the machine will continuously accumulates, archives and processes information given or sent by the participants - this data is then re-injected into the next, new collation of the following day - thus, the past is visibly and sonically returned to the present to create the future.

By J. Pickett & J. Ottavi

more information:

http://www.noiser.org
http://www.mobilefest.com.br

in collaboration with APO33

A10LAB LONDON

As part of Area10 Project Space the new medialab platform is being introduced to facilitate the development of research and art practices using new technology in the media arts.

HAN BAT is a multi-channel sound installation work by Carl Stone that builds from slow juxtapositions of various acoustic dimensions and spatializations that were enregistered using a special 8-channel portable recording system, The Octaphone, in 2007 and 2008. The Octaphone was developed by Carl Stone in collaboration with Professor Oizumi Kazufumi, of Chukyo University, and features 8 separate microphone capsules connected to two four-channel recorders, mounted on a specially designed transport bar that is light and small enough for portability.

In this installation version, processing and spatialization of the sounds is achieved using Max/MSP and based on algorithmic software program that proceeds largely without human intervention, In live performances, Stone intercedes and guides the processing, plus adds additional elements.

After a live performance June 30th at 6:30 p.m., the installation portion of the exhibition will continue until July 26 2008.

“Eight-Channel Field Recordings Never Sounded So Good…”

To see more details:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?event.php&eid=52360710050

Recomputing Space is a sound installation which employs field recordings as a psychogeographic study of urban sound. “Following the commands and rhythm imposed by an algorithm, two persons walk around in chosen locations in the city, recording a mix of noise, language, music and the sound of their own steps. The chosen locations are public places, such as public squares, parks, tram stations etc.

The algorithm they follow is composed of a number of simple commands (left, right, forward, back, stop) and a metronome. It is rendered into sound and received on headphones. It tells the two microphone operators how to walk and provides the walking rhythm which structures their recordings. Both recorded soundtracks are later played back at the soundscape-installation, which consists of 30 loudspeakers ordered in a 5×6 matrix, placed on the floor approximately 2 meters from each other. The sounds “move” from speaker to speaker, reconstructing the paths of the microphone operators at the time of the recording.” [posted by Garrett on Network Research]

“The Warbike, a project that sonifies computer wireless networks to a bicycle rider, is presented within the framework of psychogeography, its contemporary counterpart of locative media, wardriving, and the bicycle as symbol and political platform. An account and analysis is presented of the methods and choices for the construction of the device, and the applied sonification techniques. The central consideration is how sonification can be used to communicate to a participant his movement through the invisible infrastructure of wireless networks. Data from wireless networks, including network activity and encryption status, are sonified to a cyclist through a speaker-enabled backpack powered by a PDA. Exhibitions of the Warbike showed that participants reacted favourably, and that the chosen methods of sonification properly conveyed their movement through the wireless communications infrastructure.” Read his thesis here [PDF]. [via Network Research]

These recordings, created for podcast distribution, were made in the southeast of the United States on various points along Interstate 95 from Richmond Virginia and Fayetteville North Carolina. They capture profiles of American consciousness as competing sectors of the consciousness industry represents them and simultaneously they are the decomposition of preconfigured and seemingly stable consciousness moving at high velocity toward utter decay and slippage into forbidden, unclaimed and contested spaces.

The artist’s automobile acted as crude mixing instrument as it was driven recklessly between competing frequencies sliding in and out of coherence and exploring the spaces between stations, colonized electromagnetic frequencies and codified identities.

WS_30060.mp3, Time 4:51, Size 4.45mb
WS_30062.mp3, Time 8:59, Size 8:23mb
WS_30067.mp3, Time 5:11, Size 4.75mb
WS_30070.mp3, Time 4:40, Size 4.28mb
WS_30071.mp3, Time 4:42, Size 4.30mb

Course fee 10 euros. Please RSVP m[at]1010.co.uk to reserve places.

Background: A weekly series of constructivist workshops emphasising making and connection within the field of the existent. Workshops led by field-expert practitioners extend over realms of code and embedded code, environmental code, noise, transmission and reception, and electromysticism. Workshops solely utilise free software and GNU toolbase. Practitioners include Julian Oliver, Derek Holzer, Jeff Mann, Martin Howse, Fredrik Olofsson, superfactory.

Further planned workshops will cover PD connectivity and hardware, free software documentation, VLF reception, radio antenna design, FPGA design…

xxxxx, pickledfeet, Linienstrasse 54, Berlin 10119
U2, Rosa-Luxemburg-Pl.
U8, Rosenthaler Pl.
Telephone: 3050187482.

In the work the listener is asked to locate various substances that form the contemporary urban environment (glass, stone, concrete etc.). As they mark the location of each one they begin to hear interwoven stories connecting them to remote locations around the world, soundtracked with a generative music score. The narratives are progressed and concluded as the listener returns to the locations they chose. The piece is reflective and sometimes melancholy, it touches on issues of climate change and global awareness, but ultimately encourages the listener to treasure the moments around them…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd8Fy9gyH1w

Always Something Somewhere Else depends very much on its story, its fiction, being engaging and it is. The narrator tells us about his location and the events he sees and remembers as he moves through it and asks us to find the same substances that he associated with these events in our location so we are both re-enacting his journey / memories and simultaneously creating our own. You want to find out more about the girl he tells us is climbing a tree and where the narrators poetic monologue is headed and so the work compels you to comply.

As you find each substance in the urban environment you are asked “will you remember this place?” (see image above, my stone) to which you respond yes or no by tapping a button on the touchscreen pda. This is in fact your current GPS location being saved, a waypoint marking your walking journey, but at no time is this indicated and it does not get more complex allowing the interface to really not become an obstacle to the work. The walk is in fact a loop which takes you back to where you began, approximately fifteen minutes outward bound throughout which you are told that we will come back to each location later and now to “keep walking”. The return journey, also obviously fifteen minutes, revisits the locations and notes how they have changed.

Luckily enough I bumped into Duncan and asked what would become of all the journeys/maps created throughout the weekend? Would this then be used to map all routes that had occurred of this re-enacted journey/memory? The response was that the journeys were not in fact saved longer than the running of the mobile application as they were the users personal fiction, their journey and hopefully would become their memories.

Some other work at the exhibition which played with similar(ish) themes to Duncan’s work (walking as an event, location etc.) was Simon Whitehead & Barnaby Oliver’s Wade (part of Dulais, Dulais Duck can be heard here) which was shown as an audio installation. You should of course know about the work of Richard Long who has been working with ideas of walking, location and site-specific art for years and as concepts Guy DeBord’s Dérive and Psychogeography.

Participants are given a kind of scarf with a mobile phone in each end and off they go to explore the neighborhood. One of the phones takes pictures every 20 secs and collects sounds, the other talks to the GPS (also in the scarf) and to the server inside the gallery space. On a radar they can see themselves pictured as dots but also the images they’re taking. The sounds and pictures collected in the streets are sampled and mapped to a 3D city map in the gallery. As users are walking they can hear some voice instructions through a pair of headphones. Those comments suggest paths to follow or turns to make, they are generated and heard in a musical fashion. The voice instructions are inspired by the old Situationist games and theory of the Dérive - now brought into the digital and mobile spheres. As the user chooses to heed or ignore these instructions, a trace of his/her path is carved out in the city.

The engine then generates an audiovisual amalgam based on this information, and feeds it back as a live stream to each mobile client. The simultaneity, history, and memory of the various users’ paths and images become an abstract narrative that is summed together and projected in the gallery space. A feedback mechanism is created as users’ actions generate the collective narrative that in turn directs them.

Presented in Paris during the IntensiveScience exhibition of Sony CSL Paris, 6, 7-october 2006

Photos by Walter Kim. Images and information courtesy of Atau Tanaka.

Related: Sonic City, a wearable piece that enables people to compose music in real time by walking through the city; headphones that turn urban noise into music. Atau Tanaka’s talk at Futuresonic; Pixel bondage on rice paper. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art]