Suzan Sherman: In the past your work has focused on the natural world, and toying with the intricate and seemingly set systems within that world. But for this project, The Marfa Jingles, you’ve honed in on Marfa, Texas — the systems of shops and business and organizations that are this tiny town’s glue. Like some of your other work, your jingles seem to be an attempt at organizing and arranging (you’re literally arranged the music and the lyrics for them). At the same time, I would have never expected you to come up with a project of writing and producing a series of audio advertisements. How did this idea come about for you?

Nina Katchadourian: I’m often looking at the natural world, but just as often I’m looking at the human and social world. The Marfa Jingles looks at the town as a social structure — as a place where people live, work, and run businesses and organizations. I’ve kind of collected Marfa, and used the project as a vehicle to get to know the town. Continue reading

“Grey zones are spaces or places of alterity. They could be Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’, or Marc Augé’s ‘non-places’, or Edward Soja’s ‘thirdspace’ (just to name a few) [1]. They exist as real spaces and places we know and are also new spaces created by the use of technology. As artists begin to explore these spaces with locative media, what are some effects of locating and properties of these spaces and what might be their correlates in other discourses around space?

The field of research and practice of locative media is abuzz with new work and ideas, especially with work that deals with specifics of a data- or narratively-described place implied in ‘locating’. With much focus on the specific, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that there do exist ruptures in locating and its related technologies. In the process of locating, boundaries shift, errors occur, things are read as something else, signals get lost. These are some of the effects or properties of ‘locating’ that make evident the slippery boundaries in locating, revealing spaces that can be defined in some way as ‘other’ and that shift over time to occasionally blur the pinpointing of a locative ‘moment’…” From Swimming In The Grey Zones – Locating The Other Spaces In Mobile Art by Leslie Sharpe, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2006.

Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman will exhibit Are We there Yet? — a sound work, video installation and public work — at gallery Souzoukukan9001, ZAIM gallery and in public space in Yokohama Japan for Dislocate 08 the International Festival for Art, Technology and Locality, Yokohama/Tokyo. Are We there Yet? is a sound map of stories collected from passengers on Yokohama’s blue line, mapping travelers’ internal states in real space. Visitors can download MP3 sound files and travel the subway inhabiting riders’ stories at the exact physical location they took place. In the gallery exhibition the sound map is extended into an interactive video and sound installation, which layers public and private perceptions of the subway. Exploring space and place as what we hear as well as what we see. Continue reading

ELSEWHERENESS:YOKOHAMA by Anders Weberg and Robert Willim – created for Dislocate08, this audio-visual work is intended to evoke imaginary geographies. The film is made solely from Yokohama-related audio and video found on the web. This material has been manipulated and composed into a suggestive imaginary journey through an estranged landscape. The film can be downloaded into a media player or mobile phone and enjoyed when walking around the surroundings of Yokohama. The work deals with questions of media representations and site specificity. It calls forth the sometimes whirling experiences of elsewhereness that may characterize societies of today. Continue reading

The Marfa Sessions – Emily Jacir, Nina Katchadourian, Christina Kubisch, Louise Lawler, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Kaffe Matthews, neuroTransmitter, Dario Robleto, Steve Roden & Stephen Vitiello, Steve Rowell & Simparch, Deborah Stratman & Steven Badgett, Julianne Swartz :: September 27, 2008 – February 1, 2009 :: Ballroom Marfa, 108 E. San Antonio St., Marfa, TX :: Curated by Regine Basha, Rebecca Gates, and Lucy Raven :: With special performances and programs throughout the opening weekend, including a collaborative performance by Steve Roden & Stephen Vitiello and a discussion with authors David Toop and Josh Kun.

The Marfa Sessions is a series of sound projects embedded within the public spaces and private corners of Marfa to create a sonic portrait of this unusual West Texas town. Continue reading

Sound, Space, Visuality and Emotional Geographies of Violence – Clemencia Echeverri in conversation with Gabriela Salgado (Public Programme Curator, Tate Modern) :: July 10, 2008, 7:00 – 8:00 pm :: Delfina Foundation, 29 Catherine Place, London :: Reservations: RSVP [at] delfinafoundation.com

The memory of a sound is a peculiar mechanism, and its resonance is shared collectively. In her artistic practice, Clemencia Echeverri tries to capture the particular element of sound that, whilst echoing the present, conjures up past experiences through evocations, archetypal relationships and a sense of place. Continue reading

China Gates – Mobile Music Piece for Gongs and Satellitest by Art Clay & Erratum Ensemble Shanghai-Basel (INT) :: September 27, 2008; 1:30 – 6:00 pm :: Münsterplatz, Basel, Switzerland :: Phone: 41794301348 :: Email: tonetext [at] bluewin.ch.

The work China Gates is technically based on possibilities of synchronizing a group of performers using the clock pulse emitted from GPS satellites. Aesthetically, China Gates is rooted in works for open public space and belongs to a series of works, which celebrate the use of innovative mobile technologies to explore public space and public audience. Continue reading

The Olympics are not simply a matter of fun and games. They are a multi-national media spectacle that–as we’ve seen in recent protests–can arouse and galvanize political action. The event’s organizers pitch it as a zone outside of politics, but of course issues of national identity, human rights, autonomy, economic might, and foreign policy all coalesce around the Olympics. While much of the current attention to these matters is directed at Beijing, groups in Montreal and London are already forming to address the impact that the arrival of the famous torch (ceremoniously relayed in a model invented by the Nazis to promote a strong image of the Third Reich around the 1936 Berlin games) will have upon local communities. Continue reading

Rust Belt / Bayou by Julia Christensen [Needs Flash Player and Speakers] – Rust Belt / Bayou is an aural exploration of two cities: Cleveland, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. For the past several years, Christensen’s artistic practice has been based in extensive travel throughout the United States, surveying the ways in which communities are changing in the shadow of corporate real estate development.

During these travels, she has often been struck by the similarities between Cleveland, a city of the Rust Belt, and New Orleans, a city of the bayou. Both cities dwell on the shores of bodies of water with global reach: Cleveland on Lake Erie, New Orleans on the Mississippi River. Continue reading

Soundpockets is a series of intimate sound interventions in public spaces. By using FM radiowaves, soundbeams and miniature speakers to create local pockets of sound, the different projects create private listening rooms, change the soundtracks of locations, and/or displace time and space.

Soundpocket 1 — created for Urban Interface, Oslo (2007) — was installed in a narrow passageway connecting two parts of the city. The soundbeam, which can be as narrow as 50 cm in diameter, was mounted on a pan/tilt head which made it possible to place the sounds very precisely in the passageway. Continue reading