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.

Images of Ebb (with Adnan Hadzi (Deptford TV) + Rob Canning (GOTO10)) will introduce participants to Sousveillance and CCTV filmmaking where material and images from the Deptford.TV archive will be edited to submissions from Sounds of Ebb. Footage taken from Deptford.TV was filmed during a previous TV hacking workshop where participants equipped with CCTV surveillance signal receivers were lead through the city by incoming surveillance camera signals. CCTV video signal receivers cached surveillance camera signals into public and private spaces and were made visible: surveillance became sousveillance. By making images visible which normally remain hidden, we gain access to the “surveillance from above” enabling us to use these images to create personal narratives of the city. The Images of Ebb Workshop will look at constructing a narrative to the Sounds of Ebb.

Sound of Ebb (a branch project of The End of Something) is an open source sound series that asks sound artists and artists working with sound to respond to the question: What is the sound of Recession? Contributions are collected internationally reflecting the affects of crisis and recession from various social contexts and geographic locations. Together the Sounds of Ebb and images from Sousveillance produce articulations of a local city in crisis with global resonances of recession.

Deptford.TV is a research project on collaborative film - initiated by Adnan Hadzi in collaboration with the Deckspace media lab, Bitnik media collective, Boundless project, Liquid Culture initiative, and Goldsmiths College. It is an online media database documenting the urban change of Deptford, in Sout East London. Deptford TV functions as an open, collaborative platform that allows artists, filmmakers and people living and working around Deptford to store, share, re-edit and redistribute the documentation of Deptford.

GOTO10 is a collective of international artists and programmers, dedicated to Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and digital arts. GOTO10 aims to support and grow digital art projects and tools for artistic creation, located on the blurry line between software programming and art.

The End of Something is a critical archival project that aims create a platform for reflection on the global crisis. During August 2009, LOUDSPKR in collaboration with Volume will embark on an on-going process of accumulation to build up an archive of personal, critical and creative reflections from a local and international community. Located in the former “Archive Room” of a police station, Volume will become once again a bureau and repository for information. The archive exists both online in a ‘digital archive’ and in a physical archive at Volume. As a provisional space, the archive is perpetually incomplete and flawed. It, however, offers a space for dialogue and critical reflection on notions of crises that demand urgency as it increasingly seeps into our everyday. Through events, workshops and talks, the public will be engaged in processes of creating and imagining new narratives and understandings of a rather complex time.

In This Place Of Safety (ITPOS) uses a building as a projection screen to explore intersections between temporary video interventions, architecture and art. It combines images of empty playgrounds projected across NOVAS gallery building facade and sound of children’s voices on a playground. It aims to add an extraordinary element to the cityscape of LB Southwark, but also more quietly start a conversation about how safe do we feel and why.

As a logical progression from large-scale outdoor video installation 205A Morning Lane, ITPOS looks into new forms of displays on buildings with knowledge of recent technical developments addressing the chances and risks of this development. The project looks into relation between the content and the display structure on the one hand and the building structure and it tries to find its specific correspondence.

Artist talk, private view and lovely Japanese DJs on 17th July 2008, 7.00 - 10.30 pm

Novas Contemporary Urban Centre
73-81 Southwark Bridge Road
London, SE1 0NQ

Supported by the University of Westminster and Arts Council England.

Part of London Festival of Architecture 2008.

Editors notes:

Larisa Blazic’s work is focused on interactive site-specific installation exploring audience participation, real-time audio distribution and networked audio-video installation. It explores location as main carrier of meaning, aesthetics of everyday urban experience, creative use of surveillance technologies, real-time video stream and moving image in the context of temporary public art interventions and its communication to wider audience.

Novas CUC - London Bridge Bankside: Novas is at the cutting edge of tackling social disadvantage through creating inclusive employment in social enterprises, providing flexible community based support services to vulnerable people and offering quality art and cultural programmes, which involve the wider community in understanding complex social issues.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

The Coda

337

http://www.e-w-n-s.net
http://www.ex-centric.net

Please join us as we host an international group of scholars and practitioners who are gathering to explore the roles of narrative and mediation in art practices that engage sound as a material. The symposium will consist of three panel discussions as well as an exhibition of audio-works for portable music players made expressly for the geography, architecture, and social spaces of the Princeton University campus.

The exhibition will begin the festival on the morning of Friday, March 28th. Thirty iPods and corresponding maps will be made available for check-out from the Mendel Music Library Circulation desk in the Woolworth Center for Musical Studies. After participants have had time to explore the audio-works, opening comments and a panel comprised of artists and musicians will start the symposium. The first panel will consist of musician and sound artist William Basinski, whose melancholy minimal electronic music has achieved critical acclaim; artist Jon Brumit, whose Neighborhood Public Radio project is featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial; multimedia artist Brenda Hutchinson, who will lead sunrise and sunset bell-ringings throughout the festival; as well as sound artist Michael J. Schumacher, founder of New York’s Diapason Gallery for Sound Art.

After more time Saturday to explore the site-specific audio-works, the second panel will take up the notion of narrative as it relates to sound practices. Kristin Oppenheim’s spare and hypnotic sound installations invoke layers of personal memory, while Stephen Vitiello’s work transforms incidental atmospheric noises into mesmerizing soundscapes that alter our perception of the surrounding environment. Mendi + Keith Obadike collaborate on interdisciplinary projects investigating race, history and identity, and Thomas Levin, a curator and cultural theorist, focuses on sound technologies and issues of surveillance in media practices.

The symposium’s third and final panel will address issues of mediation in sound art. Ruben Gallo will talk about Mexican sound artist Taniel Morales’s Pirate Radio. Ed Osborn will present his kinetic and audible sound installations, while Camille Norment will discuss her artistic practice, which extends the fine arts into extra-disciplinary realms such as scientific research, city planning, and interaction design. Tianna Kennedy, program director of Brooklyn’s free103point9 transmission arts network and a participating artist in the festival, will discuss issues related to transmission, participatory practice and social sculpture.

Sonic Fragments is sponsored by the Princeton University Department of Music, The Peter B. Lewis Center for the Performing Arts, The Graduate School, The Sound Lab research group in the Department of Computer Science, The Aesthetics and Media Track in the Department of German, The Program in Media and Modernity, The Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Lise Autogena’s Sound Mirrors was inspired by the derelict acousic mirrors at Denge, England. It aims to create two new sound mirrors on the coasts of England and France to enable people on either side of the English Channel to speak to each other.

“This project … thematically twists the mirrors by 180 degrees, turning what was to be a shield of defence and surveillance into a tool for communicating with the continent. A new sound mirror will be built on Dungeness and a second facing it near Boulogne, probably at Wimereux (appropriately, where Marconi’s first radio broadcast was received).” - Tom Dyckhoff, Guardian, 2001.

Announced by Arts Council England in 2000 with an end date of 2004, the project has yet to be completed.

There is a lengthly text accompanying a YouTube video about other Sound Mirror artworks that preceded Autogena’s. And there’s Troika’s Sonic Marshmallows which I posted on NMR a while ago. For much more on the subject, see Andrew Grantham’s page.

UPDATE: I have removed the YouTube video and the excerpted text from the original post because it has come to my attention (see the comments section below) that the person behind them has been slandering Lise Autogena and Tacita Dean (whom he also mentions).

“‘Mix House’ expands the modernist notion of visual transparency afforded by the ubiquitous picture window to include aural transparency as well.

Situated on a generic suburban plot, the dwelling is composed of two sound-gathering volumes outfitted with three audiovisual windows. The curved profile of each of these sonic windows is composed of two elements: a louvered glass window wall that regulates the sound of the air-borne ambient environment, and a parabolic dish that electronically targets domestic sounds and transmits them to an interior audio system controlled from the kitchen island. From this sound command center of the house, occupants are free to design original domestic soundscapes by mixing media sponsored sounds with the ambient noises of the neighborhood.

The living/dining wing, oriented horizontally on the site, frames the driveway at one end and the rear yard at the other, while the den/bedroom wing is oriented vertically to capture audio-visual views of the sky. In the living area, the sonic picture window aimed at the backyard swivels like a camera to extend its range of motion. At the entry, the front window wall doubles as a sliding glass door that allows the occupant to hear the sounds of the streetscape. Located above the bed, the skylight captures sky-borne sounds, as well as signals transmitted through TV and Internet connections.”

animation of “Mix House” in action.

“I try to make people think about their surroundings with my work, to slow them down”. And last month he staged - in the heart of London at Broadgate Arena - an environment of sound built on field recordings of bird and moth wings from locations including the Amazon, upstate New York and Virginia.

Stereo composite mix of Smallest of Wings (excerpt) as presented at Broadgate Arena, London, May 2007 (4.5 mb) and stereo mix of Night Chatter, installation at the Weatherspoon Museum, 2007 (9.1 mb) at stephenvitiello.com.

Vitiello is also interested in connecting sound experience to the concepts of surveillance and chatter, a term which, since 9-11, often refers to communications picked up by U.S. government surveillance to track potential terrorist threats. [posted by Ilari Valbonesi on EcoPolis]

Are tracking systems like for example GPS dangerous for our society? How will the development of biometry influence civil rights? Who is why interested in collecting data of patients within the health system? These and other questions, which reflect the relationship between computer technology and society are discussed by the monthly program Chaosradio. This broadcast has existed since 1995 and has become a real classic. It is one of Germany’s oldest radio programs on new technologies and communication. It can be listened to every last Wednesday in a month between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. on Radio Fritz/Radio Berlin Brandenburg. For those, who have no access to the on air programs, there is a website, where all programs since the first one from 1995, is available as download or podcast.

If you’re interested in radio and sound art, you should check http://www.swr.de/swr2/audiohyperspace/engl_version/. There’s a German version as well.

Please call 1.800.749.0632. You will be asked the channel number, which is 12260 and the channel password, which is 12345. Then, just follow instructions! It’s very easy. “If you have questions, concerns, want to know more about the project, etc, feel free to email me at feldman.jm[at]gmail.com. Thank you!”

Overheard seeks to break down the boundaries of private and public sound and information by examining the way that amplification and recording and broadcast technologies can facilitate or destroy these boundaries. The work turns private sounds into public property, secret information into common knowledge, makes obvious the hidden and hides the obvious, seeking to invert the intentions of surveillance and increase our individual and collective awareness of our community’s habits of listening, listening in and being listened to. For the piece, Feldman has collected hundreds of individual recordings of people from the area whispering their secrets (with the promise that the recordings will be broadcast in such a way that the person becomes indistinguishable from these secrets.) The voices are then slightly manipulated in time/pitch and the recordings are played back, layered and sculpted, many at a time, in the extremely resonant, extremely public space of the arched passageway. The resultant sounds fill the arch with a rich chorus of the echoes and ghosts of these voices, each of which is just on the verge of audibility/distinguishability in relation to the others. The piece poses the possibility of removing the danger of sharing information by bringing voices together, in public.

Part of Roulette’s THE PUBLIC SOUNDS: A Festival of Sound Art in Public Space.

By Amy Alexander, Wojciech Kosma, Vincent Rabaud with Nikhil Rasiwasia and Jesse Gilbert. Production Assistants: Marilia Maschion, Annina Rüst, Cristyn Magnus. The project that asks the question: If computer vision technology can be used to detect when you look like a terrorist, criminal, or other “undesirable” - why not when you look like a rock star?SVEN (Surveillance Video Entertainment Network) is a system comprised of a camera, monitor, and two computers that can be set up in public places - especially in situations where a CCTV monitor might be expected. The software consists of a custom computer vision application that tracks pedestrians and detects their characteristics, and a real-time video processing application that receives this information and uses it to generate music-video like visuals from the live camera feed. The resulting video and audio are displayed on a monitor in the public space, interrupting the standard security camera type display each time a potential rock star is detected. The idea is to humorously examine and demystify concerns about surveillance and computer systems not in terms of being watched, but in terms of how the watching is being done - and how else it might be done if other people were at the wheel.