“Moving across two and a half decades from the windy north Atlantic coast of Canada to the center of Warsaw, the large-scale Aeolian instruments of Gordon Monahan form a temporal bridge between the Fluxus-propelled experimental music of the sixties and seventies and contemporary sound art production. Taking the former’s deconstruction of musical heritage and combining it with an approach closely related to land art, in 1984 Gordon Monahan made his first long string installation in the snow covered plains of New Brunswick. His Long Aeolian Piano had wires 20 to 50 meters long attached to its sounding board. The wires were strung across a field so that, when exited by the wind, they produced Aeolian tones that would travel across the landscape, placing a spell on the quiet Canadian countryside. In 2010 Gordon Monahan produced a new work for the old city center of Warsaw, A Piano Listening To Itself – Chopin Chord. Continue reading

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“With the installation Sonicity, the English artist Stanza adds another significant chapter to his quest for new metaphors to translate the countless interactions produced by data passing through an environment into a sensory plane. Stanza’s aim is to create a data space that is perceived as alive. To achieve this goal he has installed a great number of sensors that are able to detect the smallest changes in variables (such as light, temperature, noise, humidity and the location of certain objects) in the building that houses the gallery. Each of these sensors provides information on the parameters being monitored. These data are then transformed by Sonicity into a sound environment through the use of a wireless network consisting of hundreds of small speakers positioned on the floor and walls of the exhibition space. Continue reading

Posted by Mitchell Whitelaw on Teeming Void: This essay was commissioned by Hordaland Kunstsenter in Bergen, Norway, to coincide with HC Gilje’s solo exhibition blink (video below). It looks at Gilje’s recent work – which spans audiovisual installation, performance, hardware, and networked forms – through the notion of specificity (developed earlier here).

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

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[Image: Cover of Brian Eno’s 1974 album “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)”] Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics by Geeta Dayal, Rhizome.org:

Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots – the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words like “control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. “Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking… a whole system is a living system is a learning system,” as Stewart Brand put it in 1980. Continue reading

Video, Interview: ATOM by Robert Henke, Christoph Bauder – Musical Balloon Sculpture by Peter Kirn — Inside a computer, digital music is entirely unseen. But translate it into the tangible world, and it can be anything you imagine – not limited by acoustic reality or practicality, music can become three-dimensional sculpture.

For artist Christoph Bauder and composer Robert Henke, ATOM’s light and sound sculpture found a three-dimensional matrix of balloons as its medium. Flashing in hypnotic patterns and moving into different configurations, accompanied by live laptop music from Henke (aka Monolake), music and visuals become an inseparable fusion.

ATOM received its North American premiere at Montreal’s MUTEK in May. That turned out to be perfect programming, as it placed ATOM in a week that featured complementary work from artists Artificiel. Continue reading

Image: SND (Photo: basic_sounds) It is understandable that we sometimes overlook the surge of innovation and experimentation that has taken place within live musical performance over the last decade. A culture obsessed with emerging channels of distribution and incremental software upgrades is almost predisposed to overlook the virtuosity (or lack thereof) that drives live performance. A pertinent frame of reference in considering evolving paradigms in musical performance is the MUTEK festival, a progressive electronic music summit that takes place in Montreal each spring. Launched in 2000, and having just celebrated their tenth anniversary this past week, MUTEK has consistently programmed dynamic lineups of luminaries representing various facets of global house, techno and experimental music communities. Continue reading

Wearable Forest by Ryoko Ueoka and Hiroki Kobayashi from the University of Tokyo is “bio-acoustic” clothing which is networked with a subtropical forest of the southern Ryukyu Islands of Japan. Equipped with embedded speakers, LEDs, an embedded CPU system and a wireless internet connection, the dress processes and remotely plays the soundscape of the jungle through the speakers and uses the LEDs to create patterns reflecting the activity level of jungle life. More than just a receiver sensors also let the user transmit pre-recorded acoustic data back to the forest installation, creating a bioacoustical loop. Continue reading

Cronicaelectronica recently released Digital Sound Drawings by Moren Riis, 6 pieces that use direct processing of drawings into sound. The release, which is free to download, is also complimented with a limited edition set of prints from Marius Watz, where traced segments of conical shapes cause vibrantly coloured interference patterns.

Network diagrams, occlusions and eclipses of celestial bodies, and dynamic charts reminiscent of Paul Klee’s Pedological sketches all abound in Cornelius Cardew’s experimental musical scores. Continue reading

Dana’s work is always so delicate, inspiring and challenging. Here is her WildUrban Radio. My take on it is that you just need to turn the knob to listen to a variety of birds from your area. The radio is mapped directly to your location and you can hear the smallest species directing you closer to them whether you are going North or South …. I have ordered one of those from her and will update on my productivity level asap. [posted by Cati Vaucelle on Architectradure]