Vague Terrain

SuperCollider 140

Greg J. Smith — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:13:56 PST

It was inevitable that somebody would do it but leave it to the fine folks at WIRE and the SuperCollider community to curate a call for musical works generated with less than 140 characters of code. Much like Tiny Sketch, SuperCollider 140 (sc140) is a succinct showcase of how more can be done with less. An excerpt from a statement describing the project posted by the WIRE camp:

It started as a curious project, when live coding enthusiast and Toplap member Dan Stowell started tweeting tiny snippets of musical code using SuperCollider. Pleasantly surprised by the reaction, and "not wanting this stuff to vanish into the ether" he has recently collated the best pieces into a special download for The Wire's online readership. Many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you re-run the source code (the track titles) you get a new piece of music.

The resulting compilation is fun and exploratory, repeated listening of the pieces reveals a surprising amount of depth (given the stiff constraints).

SuperCollider 140 contains contributions by: Nathaniel Virgo, LFSaw, Tim Walters, Batuhan Bozkurt, Thor Magnusson, Charlie Hoistman, MCLD, Julian Rohrhuber, Jose Padovani, Jason Dixon, redFrik, Sciss and Andrea Valle.

Download the compilation here [also note the sourcecode].

Nite Ride (Ottawa)

Greg J. Smith — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:07:14 PDT

A very interesting show is taking place at Artengine in Ottawa right now where Tim Hecker and Marla Hlady have been commissioned to create 5.1 surround audio compositions for a 45 min bus tour. Nite Ride is a "permanent sound installation for car stereos" that plays "over the course of a specific driving route which the artists have mapped out for the audience."

Tim Hecker 5.1 Surround Sound Bus Tour 7PM and 9PM, October 24th-31st
Marla Hlady Surround Sound Loop Experience 8PM and 10PM, October 24th-31st
$10.00 in advance or $15 for both rides
$7 for students
More info at http://artengine.ca

See also a related blog post by Nite Ride co-curator Emily Falvey.

SPUTNiK 2 (Toronto)

Neil Wiernik — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:00:51 PDT

The Ambient Ping presents SPUTNiK 2 Launching LAiKA featuring Beta Cloud, NAW & The Sales Department - Tues. Nov. 3rd 200
Supermarket 268 Augusta Ave. Kensington Market - just south of College, Toronto, ON
doors open at 8pm / $6

Vague Terrain 15: .microsound

Kim Cascone — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:30:00 PDT

[Ant Scott / Repetitive Beats (detail) / 2008]

Ten Years of Not Being There

In the late 90s there was something lurking in the shadowy corners of electronic music: a slightly tarnished machine, covered with silver knobs and gleaming switches, nestled in a rat's nest of intricate cabling, sat blinking feverishly, stuck in an infinite loop of consume and recycle. From the looks of it electronic music was broken, churning out self-similar content at a breathtaking rate.

  The promise of technology had failed us, leaving us to choose between two paths: the ivory tower of sterile academia or the seizure-inducing din of the dance club. Both paths, with a few exceptions, had become formulaic and resistant to innovation.

As a result, the musical malcontents among us began to look for ways to disrupt, subvert, and deconstruct digital audio in hopes of finding new ideas and sounds within.

  Pioneers such as Yasunao Tone and Markus Popp of Oval helped forge a path by gouging, scarring and affixing small bits of tape to the surfaces of compact discs, wounding the medium, eking out the secret signals and hidden textures contained on compact discs using cutup techniques not unlike those of Burroughs and Gysin.

  This 'disc bending', often typecast as 'failure', was more importantly a way of tinkering with technology below the surface. A peeling back of the shiny, hermetically sealed surface of digital audio, enabling musicians and composers to work with sound on a sub-atomic level, so to speak. If one were to examine the praxis of .microsound they would find this as a common denominator to all approaches.

This is not to say that the device of using 'accidents' or 'failure' didn't play a large role in the initial development of the .microsound aesthetic and even took some of its cues from “The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music” (a paper I wrote for the Computer Music Journal in 2000) but what had become known as 'glitch' or 'clicks and cuts' was absorbed into the fabric of .microsound (and electronica in general) and was relegated to being a subset of ideas and techniques. Once plugins began to emulate the 'glitch effect' we saw what was once an exploratory mode of inquiry and critique quickly turn into a cliché.

As I watched this 'post-digital' aesthetic ferment due to advancements in computer technology and the Internet, I felt compelled to create a place on-line where like-minded artists could act as nodes in a network, exchanging ideas and information in hopes of resuscitating experimental electronic music.

  On October 27th 1999, 5:01:33 GMT the .microsound list was born with this goal in mind.

  The .microsound community, drawing from areas as discontinuous as Gilles Deleuze, Curtis Roads and the Aphex Twin, is a 'body without organs' in Deleuzian parlance; an amorphous object, a fluid changing shape as its poured into different containers.

In writing a description for the .microsound Facebook page I used some tags I had jotted down over the years: post-digital, laptop, glitch, aesthetics of failure, circuit bending, electro-acoustic, hydrophone recording, ultrasound, noise, bufferfuct, geophone, acousmatic, field recording and sound art. From this granular stream of tags I had hoped to form a vague contour, a sort of Shroud of Turin, capturing the blurred outline of .microsound.

All of which makes filling the container of an on-line arts journal with something amorphous like .microsound very difficult, like 'nailing jelly to a tree' to borrow an old saw. In order to bracket the various styles of sound art and music I used the Deleuzian concepts of 'smooth space' and 'striated space.' Striated space is where I put all the pieces that made use of gesture and beats while 'smooth space' is where I put pieces that made use of texture and internal movement. But within those two categories what constitutes a .microsound-sounding piece becomes blurred. 

 Yet here we are ten years later and it seems no-one can offer a stable definition of what .microsound is exactly. Journalists consistently get it wrong, outsiders get it wrong, and sometimes even some of our list members get it wrong by conflating it with 'glitch' or some other mutant strain of electronica. As of today there are no useful descriptions of tendencies in the contemporary practice of .microsound, which, in my opinion, gives testament to its success. This very success has become carved into the name itself as a prefix in the form of punctuation.

Appropriated from computer programming the '.' is used to make a file 'invisible' on a hard drive. Which in the case of .microsound just serves to further blur any visible contours, allowing it to quietly slip along a smooth surface undetected and stealth-like while the uninitiated are left scratching their heads.  

.microsound Compilations

Text & Video Contributions:

Ben Neill - Inevitable Improvisations
Charles Turner - Two Documents of Microsound
Dextro - Selected Videos
Joanna Demers - After the End of Music: Listening to Kim Cascone's "Music for Dagger and Guitar"
Pere Villez - Waveholes
Thanos Chrysakis - The Molecular Aesthetic of Sound
Thomas Bey William Bailey - .microsound During Wartime: On Perpetual Techno-War, and the Aesthetics of Extreme Computer Music
William L. Ashline - Clockworks, Duration and Temporality: The Signs of the Time

As Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, 'There is no there there.'

  Here's to ten more years of not being 'there.'

Kim Cascone, San Francisco
October 2009

X AVANT 2009: "Convergence and Collaboration" (Toronto)

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:29:56 PDT

Inspired by ambient music forefather Brian Eno’s idea of “scenius” the festival celebrates the notion of co-operation in modern music making, as opposed to the glorification of individual genius. In contrast with the stereotype of the solitary composer locked in his attic railing against the ignorant outside world, some of today’s most innovative music is forged out of communities — through co-operation, collaboration and unexpected convergences of mutual interests and ideas. The Music Gallery is grateful to Celebrate Ontario for their support of X AVANT.

X AVANT IV: Convergence & Collaboration will feature five days of world-calibre concerts, workshops and symposia, with visitors from Germany, Czech Republic, Japan, the US and UK. This year will also feature two high-profile concerts at an off-site venue: the larger-capacity SPK (Polish Combatants Hall), a 300-seat theatre, just up the street on Beverley, south of College.

Wednesday, October 21 @ SPK Cluster (Canadian debut!) + Hauschka with String Quartet MG Presentation at SPK, 206 Beverley St. 8pm • $30/$25/$20

Thursday, Oct. 22 @ MG Phantom Orchard (Zeena Parkins & Ikue Mori) + Ken Aldcroft’s Convergence Ensemble (CD release) 8pm • $20/$15/$10

Friday, Oct. 23 @ MG Phantom Orchard FREE workshop @ noon!

Friday, Oct. 23 @ MG “Beats, Notes & Loops”: A Hip-Hop/New Music Summit with: Nicole Lizee + DJ P-Love; Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan, Abdominal + InsideAMind 8pm • $20/$15/$10

Saturday, Oct. 24 @ MG A New Way of Hearing: Music and Auditory Research Co-presented with Array and SMART Lab 3pm • $20/$15/$12

Saturday, Oct. 24 @ SPK Iva Bittová + Chris Cutler with Antonin Fajt MG Presentation at SPK, 206 Beverley St. 8pm • $25/$20/$15

Sunday, Oct. 25 @ MG (Fellowship Room) X Avant: Convergence & Collaboration Symposium More info TBA 3pm • FREE

Sunday, Oct. 25 @ MG Start : Stop Co-presented with Continuum Contemporary Music 8pm • $25/$15/$5

Music Gallery members can reserve tickets in advance at 416-204-1080. Tickets available online at http://www.ticketweb.ca

Fibreculture 14: Web 2.0: before, during and after the event

Greg J. Smith — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:59:52 PDT

[Tim O'Reilly / Web 2.0 Meme Map / 2005]

Web 2.0: before, during and after the event: An issue of the Fibreculture Journal critically exploring the ontogenesis of Web 2.0

Featuring contributions from: Aden Evens, Ben Roberts, Ien Ang and Nayantara Pothen, Ganaele Langlois, Fenwick McKelvey, Greg Elmer, and Kenneth Werbin, Geert Lovink, Ned Rossiter and Ippolita, Michel Bauwens and Juan Martin Prada

From the Editorial:

Although Tim O'Reilly famously declared in 2005 that 'Web 2.0 is not a technology, it is an attitude', in 2009 it's clear he's grammatically incorrect (O'Reilly, 2005). Web 2.0 is not an "is", or not only this. Web 2.0 is also a verb or, as they taught us in primary school, it's a doing word. Here's a list of some web 2.0 things to do: apping, blogging, mapping, mashing, geocaching, tagging, searching, shopping, sharing, socialising and wikkiing. And the list goes on. Yet as the list goes on it becomes apparent that part of what web 2.0 does, while doing all the things on this list and more, is colonise everything in the network. It seems that there is no part of networked thought, activity or life that is not now web 2.0. To draw up another kind of list, a list of 'things' that have been done over by web 2.0, we find: Gov 2.0, Identity 2.0, XHTML™ 2.0, Classroom 2.0, and publish2 ...and the list goes on. Anything can become or be 2.0 as long as it demonstrates or is affiliated with a certain set of qualities. A list of typical Qualities 2.0 might look something like this: dynamic, participatory, engaged, interoperable, user-centred, open, collectively intelligent and so on. Clearly an 'attitude' can go a long way.

What, then, do we call something that sits somewhere between doing, being and qualifying? That systematises, indexes and categorises, on the one hand, and yet, on the other, willfully overruns categories and enthusiastically keeps adding to its own lists of things, activities and characteristics? That is poised between what has just happened (web 1.0) and what will be about to happen in a minute, soon, or later (web 3.0, the semantic web, next web)? That seems ineffable, not quite there (attitude) yet is also everywhere (lists, lists and more lists)?

In light of the strange space and odd temporal dimension it inhabits, it seems appropriate to call web 2.0 an 'event'. Something has certainly happened to the web as we knew it circa 2001 and that something is both a new technical infrastructure for online ICTs – what is now referred to as 'an architecture of participation' (O'Reilly, 2004) – and a change in attitude, a change in the ways we think about doing, communicating and inhabiting networks. The web 2.0 event moves the technical infrastructure of networks even closer to the transitive, to the nature of event itself. Events are things that happen to things, aren't they? Perhaps not, especially when we are dealing with phenomena that are truly dynamic, where change, hence unpredictability and fuzziness, is their immanent modality. When we start to flesh out what the event 'web 2.0' comprises, it is not some thing (a technology, an attitude) happening to some thing (web 1.0, information-based networks) already existing. Rather, with its dynamic apping of education for example, web 2.0 as event also opens up the question of the event itself: when and where is it?

In this issue of FCJ, Web 2.0: before, during and after the event, we are as much interested in opening up a space for thinking how networked events might look, feel and impart themselves as we are in adding to critical thinking about particular web 2.0 phenomena. We want to put forward a proposition that goes something like this: web to the nth dimension could be a contemporary and collective movement, an event in research and thought creation, and web 2.0 might just be a version, one extended duration within that larger movement. By this, we mean that critical thinking, researching and writing about networks has entered the space and time of a phenomenal, explosive and singular event, web to the 'n'. We want to think with/in this milieu. Web 2.0 may only be part of that broader movement in thought but it certainly presents an opportunity, perhaps a vital and critical one, to both grasp, and pause during, the event that is networked thinking. Thinking right now about web 2.0, thinking about it in critical and inventive ways, as the essays published in this issue do, is part of participating with this broader event—and of thinking networked events beyond the buzz of the immediacy of new apps, social media or service platforms.

Read on at http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/

Glitch: Designing Imperfection

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:38:34 PDT

I just wanted to provide a quick heads up to Vague Terrain readers about a very exciting publication that was recently released. Glitch: Designing Imperfection, the long-promised glitch art book project by Iman Moradi and Ant Scott (aka beflix) is finally in circulation. This gorgeous text was published by Mark Batty Publisher a few weeks ago and I posted a review of it on Serial Consign earlier today. It is hard for us at Vague Terrain to NOT be excited about this book as Glitch features work from about a dozen artists that have contributed to our publication in the past. Consider picking up a copy of this text as you'll be hard pressed to find a more interesting archive of digital art in treeware-form anytime soon.

Tone Deaf 8 (Kingston)

Neil Wiernik — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:18:38 PDT

In its eighth year, Kingston’s unique festival of adventurous sound performance TONE DEAF presents a special focus on the eminent American composer of experimental music and sound installations Alvin Lucier (pictured above). Since the mid-1960s, Lucier has been a pioneering force in music and sound art, whether working with a brainwave-activated percussion orchestra or traditional chamber ensembles. His recent works include a series of sound installations and works for solo instruments, ensembles, and orchestra in which, by means of close tunings with pure tones, sound waves are caused to spin through space.

Tone Deaf 8 will feature a week-long exhibition of two Lucier sound installation works at Modern Fuel, with an opening reception to mark the start of the weekend’s program of concerts at the Artel and Sydenham Street United Church, and a day of discussion at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Tone Deaf 8 affords a great opportunity to encounter one of the masters of contemporary music.

Also performing in Tone Deaf 8 are two former students of Alvin Lucier, well known as experimental composers in their own right. Nicolas Collins (Chicago) is widely known for his electronic music, developed around homemade devices and hacking of everyday electronics such as CD players. Ben Manley (New York City) creates intense improvised performances exploring the natural variability of wind, amplified small vibrations, and resonating objects to generate dynamic musical environments

Tone Deaf 8 is supported by Modern Fuel Gallery, Queen's University, and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Alvin Lucier's appearance is made possible through the Queen's University Visiting Artist Program.

Alvin Lucier was born in 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire. Since 1970 he has taught at Wesleyan University where he is the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music.

Nicolas Collins studied composition with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University, worked for many years with electronic music pioneer David Tudor, and has collaborated with numerous soloist and ensembles around the world. He is currently Chair of the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ben Manley studied music at Wesleyan University with Alvin Lucier and Ron Kuivila. He presents electroacoustic performances and installations that call attention to interests in sonic potential and the imagination of sound energy.

Schedule of Events:

October 23-31 at Modern Fuel Gallery, 21 Queen Street
Alvin Lucier: Installation Works
Music On A Long Thin Wire,
The Queen Of The South
realized by Ben Manley
Reception 10/23, 6PM

October 23 at The Artel, 205 Sydenham Street
Nicolas Collins & Ben Manley: A Really Live Electronics Concert, 9PM
$5 for students, $10 general

October 24 at Sydenham St. United Church, 82 Sydenham Street
Alvin Lucier: Two Portrait Concerts with Anne Bourne (cello) and Michel Sczcesniak (piano), 4 & 7PM. Reception and Q&A with Alvin Lucier following the 4PM concert.
Each concert: $5 for students, $10 general

October 25 at Agnes Etherington Art Centre , University Ave. at Bader Lane
A day of discussion about the work of Alvin Lucier
A talk by Alvin Lucier, 11AM
A talk by Nicolas Collins, 2PM
Panel discussion with Alvin Lucier, Nicolas Collins, Ben Manley, Anne Bourne, Clive Robertson, and
others, 3:30PM

Festival Pass for all 3 concerts: $12 for students, $20 general. All October 25 discussions are free admission

For further information, contact:

Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre
21A Queen St, Kingston, ON K7K 1A1 | info@tone-deaf.org
(613) 548-4883 | www.modernfuel.org | www.tone-deaf.org

EvoMUSART 2010 - Call for Work

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:05:58 PDT

[Arto Bendiken / Conway's Game of Life in JavaScript / 2006]

EvoMUSART 2010 is the eighth European Event on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design. Following the success of previous editions and the growth of interest in the field, the main goal of EvoMUSART 2010 is to bring together researchers who are using biologically inspired techniques for artistic tasks, providing the opportunity to promote, present and discuss ongoing work in this area.

EvoMUSART 2010 will be held from 7-9 April, 2010 in Istanbul, Turkey as part of the European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation, EvoApplications 2010.

Accepted papers will be presented orally at the conference and included in the EvoApplications proceedings, published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

EvoMUSART 2010 important dates are:

Submission deadline: November 4, 2009
Conference: 7-9 April, 2010

Topics of Interest

The papers should concern the use of bio-inspired techniques (Evolutionary Computation, Artificial Life, Artificial Neural Networks, Swarm Intelligence, etc..) in the scope of the generation, analysis and interpretation of art, music, design, architecture and other artistic fields. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Generation

Biologically Inspired Design and Art-Making Systems that create drawings, images, animations, sculptures, poetry, text, objects, designs, webpages, buildings, etc;
Biologically Inspired Sound-Generators and Music-Systems that create music, aggregate sound, or simulate instruments, voices, effects, etc;
Robotic Based Evolutionary Art and Music;
Other related generative techniques;

Theory

Computational Aesthetics, Emotional Response, Surprise, Novelty;
Representation techniques;
Comparative analysis and classification;
Validation methodologies;
New biologically inspired computation models in art, music and design;

Computer Aided Creativity

New ways of integrating users into evolutionary computation art and music frameworks;
Analysis and evaluation of: the artistic potential of biologically inspired art and music; the artistic processes inherent to these approaches; the resulting artifacts;
Collaborative distributed artificial art environments;

Automation

Techniques for automated fitness assignment;
Systems that exploit biologically inspired computation to analyze artistic objects and artifacts;

Please see http://www.evostar.org for more information on this event.

Vague Terrain 16: Architecture/Action (Teaser)

Joshua Noble — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:42:50 PDT

A teaser from guest curator Joshua Noble for the forthcoming Vague Terrain 16: Architecture/Action - the issue will be published in early 2010.

[Gordan Savicic / Constraint City / 2007]

What does it mean for computing to be embodied? What does it mean for living or working spaces to be computationally enabled? It seems that these two concepts are tied together in important ways that shape the emerging answers to both. Architecture/Action is an exploration of the body in architectural computing, that amorphous territory where cybernetics, phenomenology, physiology, and architecture come together to create functional and controllable spaces organized around the human body. Inevitably, when technology changes, the relationship of the human body to the space of action that we experience as our environment changes as well. From agriculture, to industry, to computing, a shift in how and where we act, work, and communicate alters our perceptions of our bodies and of the spaces around them. The now near-ubiquity of computing and networking and the explosion of interest in the body and gesture in interaction design has created an array of new areas for exploration in designing, altering, and questioning the way we relate to the world. The points of intersection between physicality, architecture, and computation seem to multiply almost daily. Networks of tiny devices enable rooms, appliances, buildings, personal devices, and systems to communicate seamlessly. Techniques for computer vision enable the creation of reliable, consistent, and robust systems to detect gesture, combine live images in live time, and perform complex motion detection are open source and available. The beginnings of the tools to integrate movement, space, computing, and communication are available, so the questions now become: how are we tying spaces, devices, and bodies together? Where is the boundary that separates space from computation or action from communicative action and data? What will a truly reactive and intelligent architecture and environment look like and how will it shape the way that we interact with our world? What modes of artistic expression and inquiry will arise from the attendant sociological shift? In Architecture/Action we examine some of the implications of working this territory for the designers and artists that approach it, examining projects in critical design, interaction research, installation art, and architecture that are creating spaces for play, work, contemplation, and communication. We’ll be including contributions from Usman Haque, Andres Ramirez Gaviria, Mark Shepard, Carolina Vallejo, Patrick Grizzard, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, and many others.