IOGraph “…is an application that turns mouse movements into a modern art.” All mouse movements are captured as trails and all points of rest as circles. Large circles represent the places where the mouse sat for longer periods.

I’ll continue to expand this gallery as writing continues, as it must.

Thank you Ali, Doug, and J for hosting a great festival in February! The Spark media producers have since been busy editing the festival documentation. It’s not like being there, but a these videos offer a decent tip of the iceberg. During the public tour of the Regis Center I gave a short talk on Sound Garden to provide attendees and other artists with an idea of what was happening in the skyway.

After Spark, I recorded Sound Garden at different times of day with all of the sounds that had been “planted” during the festival. These MP3s are titled by the time at which the recording was made. Due to differences in ambient light, temperature, air movement, and human presence at various times of day, each recording has something unique to offer.

Play 03-08-2009-1500.mp3
Play 03-09-2009-0000.mp3
Play 03-11-2009-1500.mp3
Play 03-18-2009-1200.mp3

Abstract: Dérive entre Mille Sons (Drifting in a Thousand Sounds) is a musical work that uses mobile media technology to artistically examine the relationship between music and the listener. Contemporary media technologies, be they at work, home or in your pocket, emphasize playback. These devices are designed to facilitate the storage and retrieval of pre-made media assets. This work leverages the processing capabilities that rest dormant within these technologies. Drawing from the writings of Guy Debord and the situationist/surrealist practice of the dérive, ‘drifting’ becomes a metaphor for instrumental performance in which the openness and emergence of interactivity is articulated through sound, as music.

Technoetic Arts requires a subscription. Check to see if your library has online access or print copies of the journal. My original Spark paper is available online.

The Syncretic Sense

4 April – 24 May 2009

Plymouth Arts Centre

The first UK retrospective exhibition of the pioneering cybernetic artist Roy Ascott, curated in collaboration with i-DAT (Institute for Digital Art and Technology, University of Plymouth).

Long before email and the internet, Roy Ascott started using online computer networks as an art medium and coined the term telematic art. Since the 1960s he has been a pioneer of art, which brought together the science of cybernetics with elements of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and Pop Art. Parallel to his artwork, Roy Ascott is a highly acclaimed teacher and theorist of art pedagogy.

This exhibition explores the influences and rhetoric of Roy Ascott’s work, mapping the impact, history and development of technology and looking to the future of Web2 and Second life. Roy Ascott sees telematic art as the transformation of the viewer into an active participant in creating the artwork, which remains in process throughout its duration.

Launch the Sound Garden project site

Sound Garden online and in the press:
“Cultivating the Sound Garden” from the IU News Room
Attention from networked_performance
Post in the Audio Cookbook

Launch first study: Dérive
Launch second study: Mazes

This research has taken me to some unexpected and very interesting places. “Psychogeography” in the writings of Guy Debord (1955) and the idea of “city imageability” by Kevin Lynch (1960) have helped me come to the latent realization of a conceptual spatiality in the way I organize sounds in a musical work. My approach is to first conceptualize the core ideas of a project as different sounds. I then arrange these within a conceptual territory (similar to Henri Lefebvre’s socially produced space (1991)) that is then given over to exploration. Debord’s psychogeography, Lynch’s imageability, and Lefebvre’s social space are all constructions of consciousness. They may make reference to actual physical space, but they are immaterial. These spaces are only real to us as a means of facilitating communication and understanding. I am interested in making music that can be experienced in this way. By conceiving of a subject spatially I find the freedom to explore that subject in all its nuance and complexity. When rooted in sound, spatial concepts can acknowledge potentiality. Movement through space then becomes a kind of instrumental performance where the openness and emergence of true interactivity is articulated through sound, as music.

Launch Perturb project site

Launch A(rt)Life 2.0 project site

Play max.s.o.mp3