Panel Statement
Chair Person: Bernhard Garnicnig
Presenters: Bernhard Garnicnig, Ceci Moss, Jamie Allen, Peter Moosgaard, Constant Dullaart, Julian Palacz, Joel Holmberg & Will Schrimshaw
Computer networks and cities both are social spaces that have emerged as material spaces where lives are lead and work gets done. They are superstructures for communication, networks of channels where information and goods are transferred. Both spaces have their particular acoustic properties and qualities, and while extensive studies of environmental acoustics and the soundscape of our environment have been emerging in the last 40 years, network spaces are still considered to be spaces without sound, acoustics or any sonic properties.
The panel on Soundwwwalks will explore this from multiple perspectives: Investigations towards an Acoustic Ecology of Networks, and web browsers and media stored on the web as interface and material for live sound performance. The invited artists and researchers prepare lecture performances within the standard presentation setup of the conference.
Performances by:
- Bernhard Garnicnig, exploring the transition of the built and “natural” environment to the network space as the defining sonic environment of our lives.
- Ceci Moss, playing a “dense, carefully arranged Soundwwwalk composition using recordings of the human voice found on the web. Beatboxing instructional videos, vocal meditation exercises, online singing lessons will all find their way in this eclectic chorus, one that foregrounds the warmth and dexterity of the human voice”.
- Jamie Allen will perform a soundwwwalk which references and mines the vast functional audio archives of the internet. A sound walk for hardware, through hardware, on hardware.
- As well as improv, remote and tape performances Peter Moosgaard, Constant Dullaart, Julian Palacz, Joel Holmberg and Will Schrimshaw.
- Ceci Moss is a freelance writer, musician, DJ, and curator. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at NYU. Her research addresses contemporary internet-based art practice, digital technology and perception, the materiality of media, postmodernism and digital art preservation. From 2007-2011 she was Senior Editor of Rhizome, where she is presently a Staff Writer. She writes and edits the online contemporary art and music blog A Million Keys. For the past ten years, she’s programmed the weekly radio show Radio Heart on KALX and East Village Radio. She studied Sociology, History and French at UC Berkeley, and Critical Theory in Paris, France at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III/Centre parisien d’études critiques.
- Jamie Allen makes things with his head and hands. These things most often involve peoples’ relationships to creativity, technology and resources. They often attempt to give people new, subversive and fun ways to interact with all of these. As someone who works at the intersection of art, social theory and technology, Jamie is an artist, a designer and a technologist, as well as a teacher, researcher and experimenter. His work has been featured in a number of media outlets, including Wired.com and the New York Times.
- Bernhard Garnicnig is an artist and curator based in Newcastle and Vienna. In 2011 he graduated with an M.A. in Digital Arts from the University for Applied Arts Vienna. He has been researching the relationship between sound and its spatial context from different aspects. In Craving (with Gottfried Haider) they developed a GPS based binaural sound simulation engine for urban spatial sound narratives in 2006. After that he started playing and organising electroacoustic improv concerts at c17 Vienna, an art space he co-founded with Albért Bernàrd. After that he focussed on sonic action in the field of browser and network based art, started to commission browser based Soundwwwalk performances with WORM/vienna and released “Three Recurring Irregularities”, a website thats part feedback instrument, part network field recording device. acgunsdcroses.com
- Peter Moosgaard is a media artist and writer, working in Vienna and Helsingborg. In his work he deals with topics like pain, nationality, mythology, science and digital media. Moosgaard’s ambition is “…to exploit the neverland between art and technology,” as he once said, “because I´m not sure that culture is my friend.” vimeo.com/user1091327
- Joel Holmberg is a Los Angeles-based artist, one of the founding members of the Nasty Nets surfing club, and the creative force behind Chillsesh. Combining original performance and video with mash-ups of all kinds, Holmberg’s site makes the line between what he’s found and what he’s originally authored difficult to decipher. Selected works include Palm Tree Palindrome, a video that features a mesmeric procession of palm trees on either side of the frame, evoking film sprockets and the notable absence of narrative in a piece with a seemingly forward thrust; BwO, which hilariously elevates the soft-focus effects in a scene from the movie My Life starring Michael Keaton to the metaphysical by overlaying a reading of A Thousand Plateaus, a famous book by theorists Deleuze and Guattari; and Log roll, which literally shows the artist rolling across an empty studio, a repetitive gesture amplified by a technique that rolls the video back and forth in perpetual motion. joelholmberg.com
- Constant Dullaart (NL 1979, Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, Rijksakademie Amsterdam). Trained as a video artist, his work has recently focussed on the Internet and re-contextualizing found material. Working as a so called ‘internet aware’, or ‘post internet’ artist, his work shows the changing vernacular of the contemporary computer user, and how global corporations (google, adobe, apple) control that new language. In networked performances, curated salon evenings, photographic prints, youtube video’s, domain name works, blogposts, lectures, Dullaart finds a way to emphasize the value of changing international dominant (image) dialects. His works are widely seen and discussed online on blogs such as vvork.com, rhizome.org, artinamerica.com, todayandtomorrow.net, trendbeheer.com etcetera, and his recently featured in the MetropolisM. Dullaart taught at the Rietveld academie, and (co)curated several events in Amsterdam, Berlin and New York, such as the periodically held Lost and Found evenings (with his final event in the New Museum), the Cyclus DVD for PARK4DTV / Mr Motley, ‘Contemporary Semantics Beta’ in Arti et Amicitiae, and recently the exhibition “Versions” in NIMK. His work is shown internationally in places as the MASS MOCA North Adams USA, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Art in General and MWNM gallery in New York, ICA London, NIMK, de Appel, W139, the Stedelijk Museum, Ellen de Bruijne projects, and Gallery West. Dullaart lives / works in Berlin (DE) and Amsterdam (NL). constantdullaart.com
- Will Schrimshaw is an artist-researcher from Wakefield based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Often working with sound amidst a larger vibrational continuum, his work is broadly concerned with the subliminal influence of backgrounds, ambiances and atmospheres, with the often imperceptible determinants of space and place. These concerns are manifest in an experimental practice combining earth, text and code. willschrimshaw.net
- Julian Palacz is an artist and programmer based in Vienna, Austria. He graduated with an M.A. in Digtial Arts from the University for Applied Arts Vienna in 2010. His piece “Algorithmic search for love” has recently received a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention and the Interactive Art Prize from the Festival Internacional Multimédia, Portugal. julian.palacz.at
Full text (PDF) p. 900-902