On the evening of Wednesday 30th November I’m giving a talk about networked sound from an artists perspective as part of the the workshop series for the NBN Geek in Residence program. I’ve both witnessed (such as the networked live jam at Art on Wires 2010) and participated (Caterwaul, Echo Chamber, European Teleplateaus) in a number of different networked sound projects.

I’ll be touching on the following topics, talking about both the practical aspects and pitfalls as well as artworks in this field:

• Recording devices and methods
• How, what, where, when and why to sample
• Designing hardware and software for sonic projects
• Writing ambiguous scores for sound art
• Mixing and remixing sound
• Recording live streams
• Aural histories and online story telling
• Streaming platforms
• Streaming sound projects in electronic art
• Using live stream audio for live performance
• Copyright and IP
• What the NBN means for downloading vs. uploading

The address and details for the event are:
Time: 6:30-8:30pm on Wednesday Nov 30th
Address: 242 Victoria St, Brunswick.
Visit http://www.nbngeeks.net/ for more details

Finally my first significant showing of work in Melbourne, after so many years away. On the 6-9th of December I’m having a solo show at Goodtime Studios as part of the New Low series of exhibitions organised by Tara Cook. The opening will be on the 6th, from 6-9pm. You can also check out the Facebook event too.

Here’s the blurb for the show:

Frequency is a concept that binds natural and artificial worlds. The steady beat of a heart, the measurable wavelengths of light, the recurring call of an insect, and the ubiquitous pulsating Megahertz of our machines. Our earthly lives have cycles of their own, with troughs and peaks of emotion, and unshakeable cycles of addiction and habit. Cycles per Second is an abstract investigation into the oscillations present in our lives and our relations to them. It an effort to raise our awareness of our interconnectedness with cycles and their pervasiveness.

I’ll be showing the following 3 pieces:

Brickets
The Brickets are an ecology of devices that communicate wirelessly creating a field of distributed
and synchronised audio-visual pings. They are an investigation into the dynamics of coupled-
oscillator synchronisation, the latter being a technical term for the types of synchronisation found in
nature, such as flashing fire-flies, synchronised frog calls, synchronisation of pace-maker cells in
the heart, circadian rhythms and so on.

StutterSpot
Part reactive lamp, part immersive experience, this piece is an experiment in making sound
tangible. The installation responds to an approaching body by pulsating at a rate that fluctuates
based on distance to the centre of the light. The frequency of the lamp becomes a physical
experience.

Duty Cycle
The duty cycle of a machine or system is the time that it spends in an active state as a fraction of the
total time under consideration. This video piece is a portrait of six people playing a networked
version of the Call of Duty first-person shooter video game. While participating in the shared cycle
of death and re-spawning, they experience never ending victory and defeat in physical isolation.

I’ve got a piece down at the Gertrude Projection Festival this week which ends on Sunday 31st July. Together with my studio mate Tara Cook we installed ourselves in an empty store room next to Dean’s Art on Gertrude street. Thanks to both Dean’s Art and the Gertrude Association for allowing us to participate with not a great deal of notice. The people at Dean’s Art were particularly accommodating, although their shop closes at 5:30pm and once they are closed there’s nothing to do if your installation accidentally crashes. Which mine hasn’t, so far. It’s running a fluid animation of pollen particles, similar to my previous work Pollen Soup (screen shot above of the software, which runs in real-time).

Here’s a photo of the installation on Gertrude Street:

The Media Lab Melbourne project which I am co-director of in conjunction with Tim Devine together with our technical director Jesse Stevens launched its website this month. We’ve already put out a call for applications for our first project, ‘Closer’, which investigates the relationship between the body and technology in the very broadest sense, including fashionable technologies. Further details can be found on the web site linked to above. We are also on Facebook and Twitter, should you want to connect with us there. We also have a mailing list people can sign up to on the main site.

I officially began my term as Geek in Resident at the Emerging Writer’s Festival yesterday. This was not the first time I’d met with festival director  Lisa Dempster and co-geek in residence Daniel Donahoo. We’ve liaised a number of times already and even caroused together at the closing of the EWF festival last month. Having been away from Melbourne for the greater part of the last eight years, it has been my pleasure to catch up with a number of artistic and cultural projects that have sprung up around town. The EWF is one of them, and Freeplay (directed this year by Paul Callaghan who I had the pleasure of meeting recently) is another.

As part of our collaboration Daniel and I were given artist passes to the festival to acquaint ourselves with its structure and audiences. My reaction was overwhelmingly positive….despite having most of my writing confined to artist statements and grant applications I felt that the broader issues discussed at the festival were experiences shared by the general creative community, not just aspiring writers. Then there were some hilarious performances, both staged and impromptu, such as the darkly humorous details of getting ahead in a writing career. My overall impression of the festival was one of dynamic, flexible, fresh offerings catering to a very broad and diverse audience.

Our initial discussions regarding the outcomes for the Geek in Residence program have been fairly broad and wide ranging, but I can safely say that terms such as digital strategy, interactivity, transmedia and even generative writing were bandied about with great gusto. We also hope to provided best practices for some of the everyday IT operations of the festival as well.

However now that I’ve been restored to health this year is looking up, and already a number of projects are in motion, the first of which being the construction of some small, solar powered audio-visual devices that will hopefully be installed in the paving stones of a lane-way somewhere. They will be called Brickets and will be receptive to basic forms of interaction, creating a blinking, chirping digital ecology.

In the meantime, here’s some food for thought related to the field of Augmented Reality, an interesting critical article on the medium.

Borderless Dreams, an exhibition co-organized by Art Center Nabi, ISMAR 2010 and V2, will allow you to explore a borderless world developed from the point where physical reality and virtual layer become entangled in augmented and mixed reality technologies. The exhibition is comprised of eight works: three entries – Augmented Shadow, Sound Walk, and Frame Seductions selected from the Art Gallery of 9th ISMAR (IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality) 2010, and three works –Mirror Scrutinizer, RE:, Serendipitor that are receiving support or being developed by Netherland’s V2 Lab, where augmented reality is one of their main research topics. Art center Nabi chose the classical pieces TelematicDreaming and Picnic on the Screen by Paul Sermon, which adopts the augmented reality concept of the early 90’s.

I was recently asked by the lovely Nora O’Murchu to show my piece Frame Seductions at the festival she curates in Limerick city, Ireland. Tweak, now in its third year, is a festival for interactive digital festival that also includes electronic music performances, talks and films. I met Nora last year when Arturo Castro and I taught an OpenFrameworks workshop as part of the festival. Tweak is a small festival but it has a lot to offer, not the least being fantastic Irish hospitality. I’m not able to attend the festival this year, but so far I’ve watched a charming video of a demonstration of Soomi Park’s LED Eyelash and I’m already sorry I couldn’t make it. My piece is part of the exhibition program at Tweak 2010.  Tweak runs between September 17th – 24th.

My Frame Seductions piece recently won an interactive art honour award at the FILE Prix Lux. From the FILE website:

In 2010, FILE launches FILE PRIX LUX, an international prize for professionals in the area of electronic-digital languages. This is an unprecedented initiative in Latin America that values the art of the XXI century viable for the first time by Santander through the Lei Rouanet de incentivo à Cultura.

This initiative was conceived to complement FILE’s actions in the area of electronic and digital languages, with the intent of rewarding, motivating and stimulating the emergence of new talents. FILE intends with FILE PRIX LUX, besides the exhibition and presentation of works, to add value to such manifestations, conferring to the awarded artists a national and international impact.

The 2010 prize received 1,235 registrations from 44 countries among which 90 works were nominated. Of those nominated, 21 works were selected, 7 in each category (Interactive Art, Electronic Sonority and Digital Language). The top two works were given 1st and 2nd prizes respectively. The remainding five works (such as mine) were given honourable mentions. The Awards ceremony took place on July 26th, 2010, at Teatro do SESI – São Paulo, in conjunction with the opening of the FILE exhibition.

Due to bad health, I was unfortunately unable to attend the opening exhibition. However in my place I sent my friend and collaborator Andre Mintz to set up the installation. Andre worked on the project during the Interactivos workshop in Lima, Peru, where the work was conceived. Andre can be seen in the picture above taking a photo of the installation with what looks to be his phone camera.

A review of some of the projects from the FILE Prix Lux exhibition, including mine,  has been written up at We-Make-Money-Not-Art.