Anonymous Free Speech

You are invited to participate in the inaugural performance of One Free Minute, a mobile sculpture designed to allow for instances of anonymous free speech. Callers to One Free Minute’s cell phone are connected to an amplifier and have their speech projected in public space for exactly one minute. One Free Minute also houses a digital archive of calls made to its answering machine, which are played back randomly between live calls.

There are two ways to participate in One Free Minute: (1) Call the archive number and leave a message for future performances: 614-441-9533. (2) Call live during the first performance Friday June 3rd, 5-7PM EST. Your calls during this time will be projected in the public green space of the Ohio State University Oval. 614-288-7248
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FLOSS Away Technical Constraints

Videotage FLOSS in Media Workshop–Speakers: Kam Wong (Assistant Professor of School of Creative Media, City University) and Annie Wan (Instructor of FLOSS in Media Work Shop); Date: 5 June 2005 (Sunday), 2pm; Venue: Videotage, Unit 13, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon.

The limits of media art should not be the software license or functionalities created by software designers. Pure Data, free libre and open source software allow you to tailor your own software to match the requirements of your own art piece. FLOSS stands for free libre and open source software. Pure data, an excellent example of the FLOSS idea, is a programming language that can be used in a wide variety of multimedia creation. Annie Wan will touch on interactive installation, VJ performance, audio synthesis & analysis, motion detection and tangible media. You will be working on your own creative project, and you will have a chance to present your work at the party on 27 August.
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Interaction as Pure Sound

Across-Offshoot–by Keiko Uneshi (o.blaat)–was recorded and broadcast by ORF radio in Vienna in April of 2005. In the words of the artist it is an ?acoustic laptop? recording with radio and laptop computer interaction as pure sound. One of these pure sounds became the feedback that Keiko Uenishi, aka o.blaat, used for her radio piece ?across-offshoot.? The artist used a portable radio to create feedback in the laptop speaker. As we listen we hear airwave communication between two everyday devices ? laptop and transistor radio ? in the form of feedback off the FM carrier frequency. Listen to Across-Offshoot (.mov)
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Hosting Open Jams Every Sunday

SHARE Audio Jam: Prepared and spontaneous music from eight plus simultaneous performers. This is the time and place to perform a piece of music you’ve written and hear it on a large sound system, improvise spontaneously with other participants, get feedback on your latest project or try out that new max patch/software setup. Bring your noise maker of choice and an XLR, quarter-inch or RCA cable to join.

SHARE Video Jam: multi-user live video synthesis. Generating an immersive visual environment, in the SHARE tradition, in which multiple participants are able to jointly compose the video output. Try out and learn about new VJ wetware. As with the audio, walk-in sets are encouraged. Bring your clips or camera or laptop/amiga and VGA, S-Video, or RCA cables to join.
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Environment-Sensing Adventures in the City

Neighbourhood Satellites is one of my favourite projects. Ever. I’ve spammed Myriel Milicevic with messages asking her if she’d send me pictures, when she’ll have something online, etc. So far, there’s only the PDF of her brilliant thesis project. Proper website is coming soon.

Neighbourhood Satellites are handheld sensing devices that monitor people’s local environment. In its current prototype form, the satellite is able to sense air quality, light, and the presence of cell phone signals.
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Audio Messages Left in Space

Theodore Watson’s Audio Space allows you to leave messages in specific locations within the room. Wearing a headset equipped with earphones and a microphone, visitors record messages that are then placed in the spot where it was recorded. Through the earphones, the messages are played along with those recorded by previous visitors. Each message sounds as if it is coming from the spot where it was recorded. The resulting effect is the sensation of walking through a space inhabited by ghosts, with each visitor leaving an aural mark for others to uncover. Video (wear headphones!) This work is part of the Parsons Thesis Show 2005.

Audiograffiti, by Andreea Chelaru, Ben Dove, Noel Perlas and Thomas Stovicek, investigates the “space with an audio memory” idea as well. The system allows you to leave tracks behind you through an “audio imprint”, just by going into an inflatable fabric tunnel, and activating one of the microphones that are ready to record and broadcast whatever we like, in a sort of melodic loop. More info: 1 and 2.
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Whispers in the Maze

Since May 6, visitors to the oldest maze in the world, Hampton Court Palace Maze can hear cymbals, a dog barking, a child laughing, the rustle of silk skirts, a tune from a music box, and the murmurs and sighs of three centuries of chatter at the palace. The sounds float around the maze so subtly that it is hard to distinguish them from real-life ones. Besides, quotes from staff discussing the facts and figures behind the attraction are interspersed in the sound effects.

The maze has been filled with sensors that trigger hidden speakers, which emit a variety of strange sounds and voices, waiting to be triggered by a footfall. The sounds are part of Greyworld’s last installation, Trace. The centre has been replanted with hornbeam and features touch-sensitive benches that create subtle sounds as visitors sit to relax. There are thousands of permutations of the sounds triggered from 20 speakers, so no visitors will ever hear exactly the same. [blogged by Regine on near near future]

mission: engage playful imagination

Jenny Marketou’s Flying Spy Potato mission-based reality game sends the player into a demarcated section of the urban environment with a tethered weather balloon equipped with a networked cam that transmits wirelessly via radio receiver back to the gallery where the video from the floating cam is both logged and projected.

The game objective is for each player to complete their mission which contributes toward the collective capturing of the game board.

information technology for everybody else

The Incommunicado 05 Conference has grown out of the internet forum of the same name to explore accountability and representation in an emerging global info-politics negotiated in terms of corporate accountability, state transformation, and the role of an international civil society in the creation of a new world information order. The working conference will start mapping some of the faultlines of such a politics, and it will do so by engaging people from different info-political backgrounds in a collaborative exploration of concepts and strategies.
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the freeways of art practice

Pall Thayer’s latest work Autodrawn, subtitled: Sketching landscapes seen through my window, is a real-time software application that renders or “sketches” an image grabbed from online freeway webcams. In reference to the Krawftwerk song Autobahn, Pall presents a contemplative, aesthetically based experience of the increasingly complex associations with freeway culture.

The experience is meditative in its abstraction and repetition: the image is never completed before it is wiped and redrawn. The experience is made richer with the accompaniment of the sound assemblage made of electronica and what seems to be police and traffic control audio pulled from scanners.

There are no bodies or human interaction in this work, but the proposition that the computer is performing as an intermediary of a live moment. Autodrawn personifies the computer through a first person perspective. The pronoun in the subtitle is the computer’s. Pall presents the computer as playing artist by co-opting the artists creative exercise of sketching, real-time drawing as consciousness, and the appropriation of public web cam images as framing the computer’s subjectivity: my windows: my eyes.
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