onedotzero_adventures in motion digital film festival :: April 17 – 19, 2009 :: EMPAC, The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.

A captivating weekend packed with visionary new motion graphic video and live cinematic work that spans the range of moving image creative practice, from industry to art gallery. The weekend kicks off with a moving audiovisual performance by Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) and Olga Mink and a reception with lush live video and music by EMPAC luminaries skfl and jenkins. Over three days from the mezzanine to the studios, from the Theater to the Café, EMPAC spaces will flicker and pulse with sound and vision courtesy of the internationally revered onedotzero digital film festival. Continue reading

From Information Aesthetics, January 28, 2009: Rubens’ Tube: Real Life Sound Visualization with Fire and Propane: A classic physics experiment called Rubens’ Tube involves sound, a tube of propane, and fire. A length of pipe is perforated along the top and sealed at both ends. One seal is attached to a small speaker or frequency generator, the other to a supply of a flammable gas. The pipe is filled with the gas, and the gas leaking from the perforations is lit. If a constant frequency is used, a standing wave can form within the tube. When the speaker is turned on, the standing wave will create higher and lower pressure points along the tube. Continue reading

Digicult presents OTOLAB — Audiovisual performance & presentation :: January 16, 2009; 8:30 pm :: O’ | via pastrengo 12, Milan | Isola, Italy.

The OTOLAB collective will introduce its work to the public along with Marco Mancuso (critic, curator and director of Digicult) who has long followed and promoted their multimedia production. Two audiovisual performances will follow, Circo Ipnotico and Giardini Neri (european debut).

OTOLAB was born in 2001 in Milan as an affinity group made up of musicians, djs, vjs, video artists, video makers, web designers, graphic designers and architects who embarked on a common path within electronic music and audiovisual research. Continue reading

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia presents Music, under your Feet by Rolf Julius — installation with objects, sound, and video :: November 22 – December 20, 2008; 2:00 – 8:00 pm :: Opening: November 22, 6:00 – 8:00 pm :: 882 Third Avenue (between 32nd and 33rd Street), 10th floor, Brooklyn, NY.

“Rolf Julius integrates acoustic and visual coordinates in his installative, synaesthetic concepts. Far removed from elaborate electronics, he works with simple things and sounds of everyday life, an aesthetic and acoustic minimalism with the simplest use of cassettes and loudspeakers, effecting a concentrated perception…” – Rudolf Frieling Continue reading

Subway Synesthesia by Kenji Kojima — the first exhibition in AC [Direct]’s Unearthed series :: November 6 – December 13, 2008 :: Opening: November 6, 2008; 6 – 8:00 pm :: AC [ Direct ], 547 W. 27th St, #519, New York City.

Since 1990, Japanese artist Kojima has been experimenting with the relationships between perception and cognition, mathematics, technology, music and art. Kojima’s series of photographs, New York City Subway, are presented as diptychs that become the material for his moving image and sound installations. These photographs, along with simple text overlays, act as a sort of eye-to-mind primer that are then dissolved into hundreds of pixels of flowing color and sound. Through RGB Music, these digital photographs are further reduced to their color pixels that are then transformed into a series of musical compositions.

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Babbling / Sounding / Noising Cubes by Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon :: November 8 – December 13, 2008 :: November 8; 5:00 pm :: OBORO, 4001 Berri, 3rd floor, Montreal, QC, CA.

The Cubes à sons / bruits / babils (Sonic Cubes) are pleasant-to-touch wooden objects containing a multitude of sounds and composing together an acoustic vocabulary. By holding them in your hand and turning them in all directions, you discover their contents and, in the course of manipulating them, unexpected and unpredictable associations and entanglements occur that you can model as you wish. Sighing, coughing, sneezing, leaves rustling, thunder, car humming, water gurgling in metal pipes, door banging — brief and fleeting stories thus unfold and fold, each time reinvented, starting from a tactile, visual and sound object. Continue reading

The Voice by Art of Failure (Nicolas Maigret and Nicolas Montgermont) – The Voice arises from the diversion of a software for blind people, allowing to transform a video image into sound. The concept is used to design a tool for a performance / installation, where some objects chosen on the place become a series of instruments producing tones according to their shape and color. The performers stage objects of everyday life in a concert where the spectator is immersed « in an almost utopian relationship between visual and sound ».

The Voice software has been designed by Peter B. L. Meijer to propose an alternative way of perception for blind people. With the use of a webcam or a mobile phone, a sound transcription of the visual scene recorded by the device is synthesized. After a learning phase, this set-up allows blind people to recognize some elementary objects, and then a real space movement (link). Continue reading

javoice: See with sound – see with your ears! Free soundscape synthesizer and sequencer! This fully interactive page allows you to draw your own 64 × 64, 16 grey-tone image and immediately hear the corresponding 64-voice polyphonic visual sound being synthesized on the fly! See and hear how The vOICe mapping works for your input. The 64-channel sound synthesis maps the image into an exponentially distributed frequency interval for a one second visual sound.

Furthermore, you can view sound waves, sonify existing images, train for audiovisual synesthesia, perform on-line composing, make visual sound animations and create spectrograms (sonograms, sonagrams). Continue reading

[Image: NOVA – visuals in 3D by Squidsoup] CreateKX and futureflux present Fast Forward: Exploring the Visual-Sonic Interface – Speakers include Michael Faulkner and A. N. Other, D-Fuse, Anthony Rowe, Squidsoup, Russell Richards and Maurice Owen, KickiT, Ollie Sorenson, VJ Anyone :: September 23, 2008; 9.30 am – 4:00 pm :: The Birkbeck Screen, The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London.

A day of overviews and talks on the emerging interface of sound and images, as explored by artists and practitioners working in visual-sonics, generative, immersive, interactive and synaesthetic arts. futureflux aims to provide inter-industry briefings on areas of new media, art and design developments that will impact on your sector. Continue reading

Abandoning any attempt at continuity or chronological order, here’s another project from a while back that really should have been posted here months ago! Synchresis is a DVD I curated for the Australian Network for Art and Technology late last year; it’s a survey of Australian audiovisual practice, with an emphasis on “fused” or “synaesthetic” AV – a niche where the Australian scene is very strong. The DVD features work by Jean Poole, Andrew Gadow, Robin Fox, Gordon Monro, Wade Marynowsky, Abject Leader, Pix + Delire, Ian Andrews and Botborg.

Below is the essay,”Monsters and Maps,” that I wrote for the project. It introduces the works on the disc but also touches on some more abstract thoughts about synchresis, synaesthesia, cross-modal perception, the map, and audiovisual practice. Continue reading