All artists will be appearing sometime during April 19 to 21, 2013, unless otherwise noted (see current schedule). Need tickets? Follow the E:
+ + + + + + + + + +
FEATURED
Andrea Seabrook (sponsored by Transom.org)
Anna Friz + Eric Leonardson (UnionDocs on Apr. 13)
Christopher DeLaurenti
Ezekiel Honig
Flutronix
Kitchen Sisters w/ Sean Cole (sponsored by AIR)
Lea Thau / Strangers
Leif Elggren
Love + Radio
Mountains
Nina Katchadourian
The Truth with Jonathan Mitchell
CREATE
ExiTrip: Hacking the iTrip + The Cheapest Way Too … – Ed Bear
Free Music Archive Remix Challenge – Andrea Silenzi
Handheld Recorder Ensemble – Byron Westbrook
Jazz Drum Machine – Ben Lacker
Sounds Real: Telling Stories with Sounds – Kaitlin Prest + Brendan Baker
Urban Menagerie (or, A Zoo Without Walls) – Robin Amer
EXPERIENCE
Blade Runner: Final Final Cut Pro MEGA Cut – Chris Collins
DeTrop
E.S.P. LAB
Experimental Noise Karaoke – Gambletron
Graphic Ships to Sonic Shores – Jesse Ricke and Lisa Lee
HAUSER/QUAID
Live Footage
Manipulated Tape – Patrick Carey
Salvage – Anis Haron
Spirograph Agnew
Touchscreen – Jeff Kolar
Treasures of The Jonesonian – Alex Gallafent
whiteout. [new york] – Jason Sloan
INSTALLATIONS
Call Your Sequencer – Tony Lim
ECO(SOUND)SYSTEM – Peter McQuillan
Echoes of Footprints – John Capogna and Louise Foo
MeatRAVE – Britt Wray + Chris Wood
Noisemakers – Matthew Matthew
radio silence – Mickey Capper
Speaking of Birds and Boundaries – Annie Berman
The Hard Drive – MEGAPOLIS NYC Staff / Hethre Contant
The Idea of Space – Liz Bustamante
LEARN
Do It Yourself Success: Plan your Dream Project – Eleanor Whitney
Improvisation Workshop – Mike Bullock
Music, Machines and Meaning – Andy Cavatorta
Radio Producer as Flâneur – Sam Greenspan (99% Invisible) (with support from PRX.org)
Rawllege Craydio – Avery Trufelman, Grace McCreight + Chelsea Stokes
Sounding Place, Placing Sound – The Sonic Ethnography Workshop
The Urban Ear of Tony Schwartz – David Suisman
The Way Things Travel – John Roach + Aaron Moore
Visualizing Hertzian Space – Brett Ian Balogh
MISC.
And Then… – Katherine Gorman
Footfollow – Brian House
Localore Producers
Re-Wired – Amelia Marzec
SCREENINGS
Acommunication – Jean-Michel Rolland
Ashes – John Kreitzberg
Chiayi Symphony – Stefano Giannotti
Hidden Sound – Julien Clancy
I, Tourist, NY – Angelica Piedrahita
The Tower of Now – Daniel Jenatsch
Zepelim: Plant Consciousness & Communication – Carlo António Ribeiro Patrão
TOUR
A Bicycle Built for Three – David Weinberg
Good Vibrations – Johann Diedrick and Christie Leece
Passing Stranger – Pejk Malinovski
+ + + + + + + + + +
FEATURED
Andrea Seabrook (sponsored by Transom.org)
Sometimes even professional professionals gotta break out of the mold and go DIY all over the place. Andrea Seabrook‘s values as a journalist and commitment to telling the whole story led her to leave NPR last year and start a new show: DecodeDC. It is her attempt to stop re-playing soundbites of political attacks and start talking about what’s wrong with Washington. She Kickstarted her show into a popular podcast and now goes at it alone, her own way. Catch Andrea sometime Saturday the 20th or Sunday the 21st tba at the New School. (Andrea’s appearance is made possible through generous sponsorship by Transom.org)
Anna Friz and Eric Leonardson (@ UnionDocs on Apr. 13)
An intimate atmosphere of transmission, where audience and performers share the acoustic space inside a multi-channel array of suspended radio receivers and micro-watt transmitters. Restless voices, sounds of breath, and other bodily exclamations seep up through the welter of signals creating a milieu of harmonic interference and uneasy night-time respirations. Anna and Eric perform within this world: Eric plays a self-made instrument that he calls the “Springboard”, an electroacoustic percussion instrument which produces rich enharmonic timbres from coil springs, plastic combs, pocket radio, and wooden daxophones; Anna plays electronics, free reeds, and small acoustic instruments.
Anna Friz is a Canadian sound and radio artist who specializes in multi-channel transmission systems for installation and performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work.
Eric Leonardson is a Chicago-based audio artist and teacher. He is President of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Christopher DeLaurenti
Christopher will present Live at Occupy Wall Street, a live performance of binaural, camera, and stereo microphone recordings made at Occupy Wall Street from the shutdown at Zuccotti Park to May Day to Occupy Wall St’s one year anniversary. An oral history made in the moment, Live at Occupy Wall Street ranges from tender moments to the mundane to the inspiring People’s Microphone to the brutal tactics of law enforcement. One of a series of protest symphonies dating to 1999 beginning with N30: Live at the WTO Protest. See DeLaurenti’s site for details, and hear a sample here.
Christopher DeLaurenti is a composer, improvisor, phonographer, and writer. His electro-acoustic works are composed of field recordings and often deal with political issues, political protests in particular. His weekly column, The Score, appeared in the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger from 2002 to 2010, and he has also appeared in 21st Century Music, The Seattle Times, Signal to Noise, Soundscape, Earshot Jazz, and Tablet.
Ezekiel Honig
Ezekiel Honig, a New York City native, is a musician and label manager for Microcosm Music and Anticipate Recordings. He is a well-known figure in the electronic music community. Honig usually follows a strict production code on all of his songs using ‘found-sound’ and warm melodies. His latest album is Folding In On Itself, called “seductive listening” and a “wild and unqualified synthetic wonderland“, can be found here.
Flutronix
Flute duo Flutronix, Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull, have incorporated electronics into a chamber music context in a wide range of repertoire. They have collaborated with Dan Deacon, Ski Beatz, and ICE, and are preparing their sophomore album, 2.0.
Kitchen Sisters w/ Sean Cole (sponsored by AIR)
The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, are award winning documentary radio producers who have been working together for more than twenty-five years. They are the creators of the popular Hidden Kitchens series on Morning Edition, the Peabody Award winning NPR series Lost & Found Sound, and the post 9-11 Sonic Memorial Project, co-produced with Jay Allison. They are currently producing an NPR and online series about girls around the world. As independent producers, they are the creators of more than 200 stories for public broadcast about the lives, histories, art and rituals of people who have shaped our diverse cultural heritage. They are the recipients of numerous awards including the duPont-Columbia Award, two Peabodys, and three Audies.
Sean Cole is a public radio reporter, producer and sometimes host. He’s worked on staff at This American Life and Radiolab and contributed to lots of other shows, including All Things Considered, Only a Game, Studio 360, Marketplace and 99% Invisible. Most recently he’s been filling in for Dick Gordon on “The Story with Dick Gordon.” His latest volume of poetry is called “One Train,” published by Dusie press.
Be A Kick-Ass Storyteller – Lea Thau / Strangers podcast
Lea Thau is a Peabody award-winning producer, and the creator and host of the “Strangers” podcast sponsored by KCRW. She was the Executive & Creative Director of The Moth for 10 years and created The Moth Podcast and The Moth Radio Hour. Lea will conduct an interactive workshop to highlight the elements of great storytelling.
Leif Elggren
Leif (Sweden) is a multimedia artist who conceives music as a soundtrack to a visual installation or experimental stage performance, usually presenting carefully selected sound sources over a long stretch of time and that range from mesmerizingly quiet electronics to harsh noise. He will be conducting an experimental dance/sound performance and a short lecture on related artistic processes.
Mountains
The NYC duo called Mountains started around the Art Institute of Chicago and have been on the respected Thrill Jockey label from the start. They specialize in long-form, textural ambient musics of the instrumental variety, using processed and unprocessed analog instruments and no beats, sort of a hybrid Fennesz and Eno. Everybody loves them and their latest album Centralia has received consistently high reviews from the big boy reviewers: the Wire called them something something “infinite sheets of grainy sound.” We like those kinda sheets. LISTEN for more clues!
Nina Katchadourian
Nina (NYC) works in photography, sculpture, video and sound. She installs subversive urban audio interventions, rigs cars with alarms that sound like jungle birds, documents crossdressing animals, creates telemarketing infomercials out of sound samples from John Cage, repurposes magnetic tape found in gutters, and re-edits recordings from moon walks into incomprehensible bits. She’ll be doing something fun-ly interactive at MF’13.
The Truth with Jonathan Mitchell
THE TRUTH is fiction — we make short films without pictures. Movies for your ears. We’re a contemporary re-imagining of what audio drama is and can be, exploring unusual approaches to telling stories with sound. We develop our stories as a collective, and often the dialogue is completely improvised. We record on location, and then take those recordings into the studio to edit them and add music and sound design. The result sounds kind of like a movie, only the pictures are all in your imagination. Our dramatic fiction has been heard on many nationally-syndicated public radio programs, including This American Life, Studio 360, Snap Judgment, and The Story.
CREATE
ExiTrip: Hacking the iTrip + The Cheapest Way Too … – Ed Bear
Ed is offering two different workshops. Each workshop is limited to 20 participants and requires a $15 fee for materials. RSVP for one of these two workshops on our ticketing page (must also buy a festival pass, either full or student).
1. ExiTrip is a project by NYC artist/engineer Ed Bear which uses obsolete FM transmitters—specifically iTrip Nano FM devices—as a creative tool. These hacked transmitters are a self-contained opened-source hardware platform for subversive/creative acts. Ed will demonstrate various uses of the device including generating feedback, using the transmitter as a wireless microphone, and altering the range through antenna manipulation. Each participant will leave the workshop with his or her very own hacked iTrip device. No experience necessary. All ages!
2. Cheapest way too … make three simple audio circuits suitable for mass production. Have you ever thought: “If I only had 100 microphones”? Or “But that would need 50 boom-boxes”? How about “I just need 100 different musical tones”? This workshop covers three easy-to-clone electronic circuits which, at this time, are the absolutely cheapest and quickest ways to create battery-powered tone generators, small condenser microphones, or amplified speakers. Explore the limits of low budget DIY. Realize your massively multi-channel sound installation. All levels of experience welcome; No experience necessary. Learn to solder, find cheap parts, learn the basics of practical audio electronics [including transistors!], and walk out with a decent clip-on microphone, a tunable oscillator, and a five-watt amplifier.
Ed Bear is an American performing artist and engineer. His work with robotics, sound, video, transmission and collective improvisation investigates the questionable calibration of perception. As an educator and designer committed to an open source world, he researches and practices material reuse and as a civil responsibility.
(Radio Zombies by Mayuko Fujino)
Free Music Archive Remix Challenge – Andrea Silenzi
WFMU’s Free Music Archive will teach brief lesson on finding music for your projects legally, including podsafe music, instrumental tracks, and music you can modify, adapt or build-upon. For the rest of the workshop, participants will be given a selection Creative Commons music tracks and raw Public Domain audio elements with which to construct an original 1-3 minute creation. The winning entry will take home a bounty of WFMU swag.
Andrea Silenzi is the Managing Director of the Free Music Archive at WFMU in Jersey City, where she also helps produce the shows Seven Second Delay and Radio Free Culture. Her work has aired on The Organist, PRI’s Studio 360, BBC4, Re:Sound and beyond. She holds the world record for most guests booked for an hour-long radio show, and that’s 68.
Handheld Recorder Ensemble – Byron Westbrook
A small group (max 8, min. 4; RSVP after buying a festival pass) will convene to work together to explore the process of recording sound as performance, using movement of the body and recorder as an instrument to “play” sounds heard via headphones through the recorder. Each member will take a turn making a recording of the same sounds with emphasis on listening to how their movement changes the sound. At the end of the process, all recordings will be played back simultaneously through separate speakers as a temporary installation. The site sound/drone common to each recording will highlight the movement and performed actions of each participant, causing a dynamic shift in the playback architecture and creating a new type of space from the process of performing/recording.
Byron Westbrook is a sound artist working with site-specific installations and unique listening formats to activate architecture and community. He has presented work at Clocktower Gallery, Diapason Gallery, LMAK Projects, ISSUE Project Room, ExitArt, (NYC), ICA London (UK), The LAB (San Francisco), VIVO MediaArtCenter (Vancouver), O’ (Milan), among many others. He has performed in ensembles of Phill Niblock and Rhys Chatham. He holds an MFA from Bard College and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Jazz Drum Machine – Ben Lacker
This workshop introduces the Jazz Drum Machine, software that turns any sound file into a playable instrument through the Echo Nest‘s computerized audio analysis. Participants will get a crash course in the software and then use it to create their own music, re-sequencing jazz drums or any other recorded audio they’d like to supply. No coding required.
Ben Lacker is a musician and software engineer based in New York. He likes to help humans and computers make sound and art.
Sounds Real: Telling Stories with Sounds – Kaitlin Prest + Brendan Baker
Strategies on using sound and music to make radio that feels real (real GOOD!). Using and recording real situations/scene tape, how and when to recreate “real situations”, how to build scenes, and how to use music to bring it home. You can look forward to lots of fun listening examples from Audio Smut (Kaitlin Prest) and Love + Radio (Brendan Baker) lots of session screen shots and hands on production playtime. Be warned that some of the audio samples used will make you blush.
Kaitlin Prest and Brendan Baker are independent radio producers, musicians and sound designers based in Brooklyn NY. Prest is the creative co-director of the show Audio Smut: a sonic adventure into love, sex and gender. Baker is a co-conspirator on the show Love + Radio–a public radio podcast featuring in-depth, otherworldly-produced interviews, from the seedy to the sublime. L+R was the recipient of the 2011 Third Coast Competition Gold Award for Best Documentary.
(photo by Erik K. Veland/Flickr)
Urban Menagerie (or, A Zoo Without Walls) – Robin Amer
In this hybrid performance/workshop led by Chicago-based multimedia producer Robin Amer, we’ll turn the urban zoo — a classic city tourist attraction — on its head. Inspired by works of speculative urbanism like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Alexander Trevi’s (Im)Possible Chicagos, we’ll create an aural city in which the zoo has no walls, and in which, as Trevi envisions it, “the sonic ambience of jungles and savannas mingle with that of the city.” The session will begin with a short live performance. Then participants will create their own 90-second soundscapes that will serve as exhibits in our imagined aural zoo. Robin will pick her favorites and feature them alongside her own in an upcoming episode of her cities-themed podcast.
Robin Amer is a Chicago-based producer whose work straddles the lines between art and journalism. Much of her work, including her forthcoming podcast, takes up issues of urban planning, the built environment and the complex lives of post-industrial cities. Robin graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude from Brown University with a degree in Art Semiotics and currently works on WBEZ’s digital team. Follow her on Twitter @rsamer.
EXPERIENCE
Blade Runner: Final Final Cut Pro MEGA Cut – Chris Collins
Come participate in a live, improvisational redubbing of the Ridley Scott cyberpunk classic. Bring your own musical instruments, noisemakers, foley gear, or voice over skills, or use the ones provided.
Chris Collins is a Chicago-based new media artist. Utilizing disparate elements like video, writing, participatory events, social media stunts, video games, and curatorial practices, Collins’ work coheres in the way it highlights the human dramas that arise when we engage with technology. “Biting, bizarre, and slyly heartfelt: the world of Chris Collins is an utterly awkward squirm in the second skin of a digital simulacrum that never quite seems to fit.”
DeTrop
DeTrop are Ryan Smith (York Factory Complaint, Hanel Koeck), Theresa Smith (Bleak Race, Home Blitz), and David Grant (Ideal Forms, Action Patrol). Based out of Brooklyn, DeTrop have been playing music made with modular synthesizers and tape loops since 2011. Check some audio and video.
E.S.P. LAB
E.S.P. LAB is a media based collaborative, formed by Victoria Keddie and Scott Kiernan in 2012. The collaboration explores sound and vision through analog methods and electronics. Work is presented in both a performative context as well as exhibited. Their hybrid station for manipulating video signals and soundwaves is comprised of signal generators, TV monitors, video mixers, and modulators. Kiernan and Keddie also direct and operate E.S.P. TV, a live taping broadcast on MNN network.
Experimental Noise Karaoke – Gambletron
Karaoke of a different structure. Everything is exactly like regular karaoke only the music will be improvised, noisy -glich -beatz made by Gambletron and friends. People should sing but are welcome to bring their newly made bleep machines (or whatever) and join the ensemble. The words of the hit songs will be projected and singers voices will be mixed into the mess. This is a great activity for early drunkenness and extraverts. Together we will Re-interpret the hitz.
GAMBLETRON is a sound artist, musician, and improviser based out of Montréal, she is known for her noise-electronic improvisations, roving radio transmissions, experimental noise karaoke, and for curating performances in unique outdoors locations. She creates loud, glitch, textural soundscapes with a reference to dance music, lo-fi, circuit bent toys, found objects, musical saw, home made mics, radios, bowed bike wheels, cheap synths and other types of electronics. Gambletron has toured internationally and participated in various festivals and residencies. She is also found performing and collaborating in numerous projects on Constellation Records such as Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista, Hrsta, Clues, and Matana Robert’s Coin Coin.
Graphic Ships to Sonic Shores – Jesse Ricke + Lisa Lee
A creative means for a mediated journey, built from interactions between audience and performer, to achieve a synchronous audio expedition via an interactive visual vehicle. Artists will perform from locations throughout the Europe for an audience at CultureHub in New York, improvising off an ever changing graphic score generated by the presence of audience members. The audience will be free to move about the venue, their positions and movements interpreted as phrases for the score displayed as a 245 square foot projection. Artists will include Andre D. of France, Hervé Perez of the UK, Frank Wilke of Germany, Tommaso Cavallini of Italy, and Vasco Moraes of Portugal.
Jesse Ricke is a media practitioner working in video, audio, and music, with an expertise in venue operation and event documentation. His political and social interests have lead him to internships with One Laptop Per Child in Peru, working with children in developing areas, The Groundswell Collective in the US, and his current position as technician for the new media non-profit studio CultureHub. His musical experience includes jazz studies at Florida International University and work in signed and independent groups.
Lisa Lee is an interaction designer and multimedia artist. Lisa had been working as a web designer with International Community Radio Taipei (ICRT) and with the digital advertising agencies Kehch Creative Inc. and Bremen Digital Creative on campaigns for BMW, MINI, Benz, Nike, Levi’s, M&M’s, Dove, and others. She holds a BFA in Commercial Design from Chun Yuan Christian University in Taiwan and received her MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design in 2012. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
HAUSER/QUAID
Hauser/Quaid is a musical alias of New York based sound and video artist Greg Zifcak. The project examines the material artifacts of dystopian
cyberspace/time travel, while advancing an agenda of rave-singularity. LOOK AT THE MUSICS
Live Footage
Brooklyn-based electroacoustic duo Live Footage (Mike Thies and Topu Lyo) score eclectic contemporary pieces on air, in dance, and in tune. Conceived through the art of improvisation, Lyo plays cello, incorporating the use of live loops and a handful of electronics with no pre-recorded samples. Thies plays drums and keyboards, often simultaneously. Live Footage’s songs are structured in such a way that enables them to build loops without disaster, all while keeping the music’s integrity and allowing ample room for improvisation even when covering the likes of Jay-Z, Dr. Dre and Squarepusher.
Love + Radio: Pressure to Be Someone – Shani Aviram, Brendan Baker, + Nick van der Kolk
A music-documentary hybrid version of the podcast Rick Moody called “one of the great underground radio phenomena of recent years.” Delve into the hidden and personal far reaches of human experience with found sound, unreleased material, remixed stories, live production and tons of stuff you will never hear online or anywhere else (because we’re not allowed to).
From WBEZ Chicago, Nick van der Kolk’s Love and Radio features in-depth, otherworldly-produced interviews with an eclectic range of subjects, from the seedy to the sublime. L+R won the top prize at the 2011 Third Coast Festival Competition (often described as the “Sundance of public radio”), the first podcast to do so in the history of the competition. Creator Nick van der Kolk is a 2012 USA Collins Fellow.
Manipulated Tape – Patrick Carey
Patrick Carey is a musician and programmer who records and performs under the moniker Rare Storms. His work draws from noise, drone, and computer music. At Megapolis I will be integrating a series of tapes I have found at yard sales over the last few years into my laptop/synthesizer setup. These tapes can best be described as self-help resources, dealing more with self reflection and health than music or entertainment. A similar piece can be heard here.
Salvage – Anis Haron
Salvage is a live improvisational sound performance, exploring the idea of revisiting obsolete information by means of analysis and synthesis. It is performed with a handmade instrument [I call it Floppy] and a computer program. The instrument generates sound by reading data from 5.25″ floppy disks with magnetic tape heads. Serving as an analog signal generator, the instrument provides signals which are then digitally processed via a Pure Data patch, applying digital signal analysis and synthesis techniques in an attempt to construct a timbral experience out of what appears to be obsolete at it’s source.
Anis Haron is a media artist from Penang, Malaysia. He started to be actively involved with music at an early age and was introduced to multimedia, computer systems and programming in college. In 2007, he earned his BFA in New Media Design & Technology from Universiti Sains Malaysia with a minor in Music Technology. He received his MFA in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2010, where he developed his interest in sound art and physical computing. He is currently a graduate student in the Media Arts & Technology Program at UC Santa Barbara.
Spirograph Agnew
Spirograph Agnew is an improvising quartet, consisting of three string players and one computer audio+video performer, that does live multimedia freakouts for 3D glasses. Everything is created in real time as the video plays. See a video sample here.
Spirograph Agnew is a group led by Daniel Iglesia, who creates music and media for humans, computers, and broad interactions of the two. His works have taken the form of concert works for instruments and electronics, live audio and video performance, generative and interactive installations, and collaborations with many disciplines such as theater and dance. His work has been presented around the world and throughout New York City in such diverse venues as Lincoln Center, Zankel Hall, Eyebeam Gallery, The Stone, Merce Cunningham Studio, the Kitchen, VertexList Gallery and many others. Spirograph Agnew is Daniel Iglesia (electronics), Jim Altieri (violin), Bob Jones (double bass), and Jessie Marino (cello).
Touchscreen – Jeff Kolar
Touchscreen is an audio exploration of surface acoustic waves that emanate from electronic visual displays. “Touchscreen” replaces the touch of the human finger on a screen with an ultrasonic sensor. This sensor functions as a conductive input to capture the sonic activity of the various touchscreen devices. The audio addresses the presence, location, and detection of ultrasonic waves and electro-static fields that pass over touchscreen panels. “Touchscreen” experiments with the event of touch through a series of freestyle-tapping techniques, gestural signal processing, and distorted cadence structures. The MEGAPOLIS performance will use a specific instrument arrangement of touchscreen hardwares and softwares (i.e. GPS devices, radio controller units, mapping service applications) to investigate electronic tools designed for mobility.
“Touchscreen” was also a release by Panospria net-label in September 2012. Download and stream it here.
Jeff Kolar is an audio artist working in Chicago, USA. Jeff is a free103point9 Transmission Artist, and also the director of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform. His work has been released on Panospria (Canada), HAK Lo-Fi Record (France), free103point9 (USA), and has appeared in compilations by Furthernoise.org (Australia) and Sonic Circuits (USA). He presents work at audio festivals, radio programs, exhibitions, and performance venues which recently include GLI.TC/H, Kunstradio, and The Kitchen.
Treasures from The Jonesonian – Alex Gallafent
The Jonesonian Institution is a museum dedicated to preserving the curios of history. Here, Chief Archivist Gordon Jacobs presents remarkable selections from the Institution’s unique audio archives, including the sound of tulips growing (an excerpt from German radio), the origin of the ‘Fundamental’ hairstyle, and a wax cylinder recording of Edison’s forgotten rival at work. Produced by Alex Gallafent.
Alex Gallafent studied at Oxford and LAMDA. He’s performed at venues from London’s Old Vic to the Edinburgh Fringe. He’s also a theater composer with various credits across the UK. In NYC, Alex improvises one-act plays at the PIT, plays drums for The BTK Band, and tells stories at shows including Real Characters and The Story Collider. A former producer for BBC Radio, he’s currently a correspondent for PRI’s The World.
whiteout. [new york] – Jason Sloan
whiteout is a new series of live FM transmission performances exploring and questioning the aesthetic of noise on the radio. These new gritty and textural ambient works are created live in the moment through the use of multiple analog electronic instruments and a 7-watt FM transmitter. Each work is recorded directly off the radio as it was potentially heard by the listener. The whiteout works are generally performed in undisclosed locations although a few public performances have recently been held. So far the whiteout itinerary has included Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Boston, Baltimore, Washington DC and at the Wave Farm in Acra New York on Free103point9’s Saturday Afternoon Show. For more about the whiteout series, audio clips from previous performances and a full artist statement about the work go here.
Jason Sloan has played live all over the US, Canada and Europe including the influential Live Constructions radio program at Columbia University, STEIM in Amsterdam and Philadelphia’s The Gatherings concert series, one of the country’s oldest continuing ambient and electronic music series. He has created numerous sound installations and transmissions artworks for over a decade and have exhibited work internationally including Berlin, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Kiev, Nagoya, Saint-Petersburg, Toulouse, Lisbon, Uden and Vienna. He is a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland.
INSTALLATIONS
Call Your Sequencer – Tony Lim
Calling a designated phone number will immediately connect you to a mutually shared 8 step audio sequencer. See a video demo.
Tony Lim is a composer, programmer and interaction designer. He has been creating tweaked out modules in order to, one day, actualize his dream interactive system. His recent focus has been abridging the gap between video, audio and the user.
ECO(SOUND)SYSTEM – Peter McQuillan
The Eco(Sound)System will be an interactive music & sound art installation exploring humans’ relationship with nature & technology. The project will combine field recordings, sound collage, music and visual art to create an ecosystem of sound. Visitors to the installation will be able to create their own sounds together, listen to pieces on various audio devices and interact with a variety of physical set ups.
The design of this project will be greatly influenced by Permaculture, an ecological design system which aims to realign humans with nature in resilient, regenerative and mutually beneficial relationships, while scientific backing will come from Urban Ecology.
Peter McQuillan is a musician, radio producer and show promoter based in New York City. Originally from western Massachusetts, he is a founder of Rooftop Shout, a DIY artist collective & record label. McQuillan also co-hosts and produces Amplified Friends, a performing arts podcast on WNSR New School Radio and is a soon-to-be graduate of Eugene Lang The New School for Liberal Arts where he studied Music & Environmental Studies.
Echoes of Footprints – John Capogna + Louise Foo
Echoes of Footprints is an interactive sonic installation that uses echolocation to manipulate sound. An ultrasonic sensor array tracks movement and position. Sounds are created when motion is detected. Moving closer and farther away modulates pitch, tempo and delay. Standing still produces no sounds to emphasize movement. The name “Echos of Footprints” refers to the changing soundscape as it represents the participator’s temporary footprints in space.
John Capogna is half artist and engineer. The other half is unknown. His primary goal is to make your eyes bug out when you see his stuff. He is a lifetime student at the school of Do It Yourself, and taught himself how to program without a computer (by reading books and writing code on paper), while working on farms and hitch hiking around the country. See the work he has created since then here.
Louise Foo is currently a master’s candidate at The Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of New York University, where she is exploring visual aspects of sound and audible aspects of image. With a background consisting of studies in visual arts from Funen Art academy in Denmark and a music career in the electronic group Giana Factory, she is now creating applications, instruments, devices, interactive installations and experiments that explore synesthesia of image and sound. Check out her Tumblr.
MeatRAVE – Britt Wray + Chris Wood
MeatRAVE comes together as a hands-on Foley workshop and audio extravaganza of food and bodies, played loud in the dark. Join us on a biotouristic holiday inside a curated selection of meats, fish and your own lunch leftovers! We bring the edible materials we consume everyday to life through sound recording, processing, hard repetition and a deep love of dance music.
Come to a workshop to make your own recordings that will then be used in the installation environment. Much like jumping into the belly of a whale, audiences entering the MeatRAVE will be enveloped and then painlessly eaten by sounds that they’re more familiar with devouring themselves. Before activating MeatRAVE, we will precede the piece with a discussion of biotourism, biohacking, and what it can mean when organic materials that are not your own become an immersive environment.
MeatRAVE is brought to you by Chris Wood and Britt Wray. Chris Wood is a sound artist and audio producer who is interested in hierarchies of narrative and space and developing tools to play with them. He hails from London, UK. Britt Wray is an audio maker, radio producer, podcaster and investigative researcher of biotech from Toronto. Formerly of the biological sciences but now looking at it through art, Britt’s work paints an always-morphing Venn diagram that combines media and science.
Noisemakers – Matthew Matthew
Humans make noise. We cough, sneeze, sniffle, click, la, ummmm, pop, giggle and shush all day long. Noisemakers re-imagines New Yorkers as an instrument, using the sounds and video of everyday folks as the source material for a publicly playable musical/visual installation. Through an intuitive percussive interface anyone can play a boisterous bank of projected humans making human noises.
Matthew Matthew is an artist and composer whose work dances at the crossroads of music, film, art and interaction. He observes the world to be inherently musical and seeks to open people’s eyes and ears through wide-eyed musical installations and publicly playable experiments. He exhibits the ongoing project called On a Human Scale (see video).
Radio Silence – Mickey Capper
“THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SILENCE. GET THEE TO AN ANECHOIC CHAMBER AND HEAR THERE THY NERVOUS SYSTEM IN OPERATION AND HERE THERE THY BLOOD IN CIRCULATION. I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY AND I AM SAYING IT.” – John Cage
radio silence is a pop-up LPFM station that only airs silence. Using I Ching charts and live sound-based chance operations, radio silence indeterminately programs a broadcast of library whispers, laundry machines, broken pop songs, ums, ahs, and rough drafts. radio silence is currently awaiting a license from the Federal ExCommunications Commission.
Mickey Capper studies the concept of religion and produces WESU Middletown’s live music program, Wild Wild Live. He graduates from Wesleyan University this May and appreciates job offers.
Speaking of Birds and Boundaries – Annie Berman
A craigslist ad leads to a fascinating series of phone calls between a Hasidic man and a secular woman. Foregrounded by beautiful experimental animation, we watch as they thoughtfully explore the subjects of faith, love and loss. Arts Fuse says ‘This is no prank call.’
Annie Berman, a Brooklyn-based media artist, has screened work in theaters, galleries, festivals, and universities, and has received support from the Puffin Foundation the Somerville Arts Council, and the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Arts. In addition to making work, Annie has taught workshops in cinematography, editing, animation, and interactive and media. She served as Associate Producer for Greogry Crewdson: Brief Encounters and as Outreach and Distribution Consultant for award winning films. Annie is the founder of Fish in the Hand Productions, former President of Women in Film and Video New England, and MFA candidate at Hunter College.
The Hard Drive – MEGAPOLIS NYC Staff / Hethre Contant
A low-wattage broadcast to FM receivers installed in the Air Space playing audio from the Hard Drive: experiments and ephemera established and budding radio producers, curated by MEGAFest NYC staff. Also a nice quiet space to write emails, jack in, and or record an interview with your new BFF in the installed recording booth.
The Idea of Space – Liz Bustamante
The Idea of Space is a story told by toy piano, electronics and hotel bell. It’s about taking a trip while you’re falling asleep and traveling to places that might not really exist. Play the piano according to the sheet music and you’ll be there in no time at all.
Liz Bustamante is a Master Control Engineer for WBEZ in Chicago where she writes and records music as noise&light. She lives with her cat Chester who doesn’t like it when she plays the drums.
LEARN
Do It Yourself Success: Plan your Dream Project – Eleanor Whitney
Providing you the tools you need to make your project idea a success. Whether its finishing a piece for the radio, launching your own radio show or station, or starting an organization, this session will help you to your goal. You will define your goal and work with other participants in small groups to set and share your project, articulate your goals, and identify areas where your need to find additional resources to bring your project to fruition. Come with an idea you want to develop and expect to leave with concrete steps to take to actualize your project and the motivation that comes with knowing you are part of a strong community of DIY producers.
Eleanor Callott Whitney is the author of Grow: How to take your do it yourself project and passion to the next level and quite your job! and is an educator, arts programmer and manager living in Brooklyn. She holds a Masters in Public Administration, plays in the band Corita and writes regularly about art, culture and nonprofit management. She publishes a personal zine Indulgence and founded the annual Portland Zine Symposium in 2001.
Improvisation Workshop – Mike Bullock
This workshop has three basic guidelines, with corollaries:
1. Bring stuff that makes sound.
a. Non-instruments are encouraged but not required.
2. Novices and newbies encouraged (but not required).
a. That includes people who have never made sound on purpose before, as well as musicians who don’t already think of themselves as improvisers.
3. Bring your ears, and use them first.
a. Absolutely required.
For this 90 minute workshop, participants will encounter various simple, fun strategies for improvising music as a group. The strategies I will present emphasize active, free decision-making rather than playing with prescribed sounds or patterns.
Mike Bullock is a composer, improviser, intermedia artist, scholar based around Boston, MA. Bullock has performed across the US and Europe with Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, Steve Roden, Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley of nmperign, Mazen Kerbaj, and Theodore Bikel, and his music has been released by numerous labels including Intransitive, Important, Winds Measure, Sedimental, Grob, 1.8sec, al Maslakh, and Homophoni. He received a PhD from the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and has taught and lectured in the US and Europe on field recording and improvisation.
Music, Machines and Meaning – Andy Cavatorta
Music, Machines and Meaning is a lecture started at MIT that covers the history of creating music and sound-based meaning through the medium of machinery: 16th century clockwork automata, 18th century bird boxes, orchestrions, the Telharmonium, Jean Tinguely’s metamatics artwork, and much more. This explores the aesthetic issues encountered immediately when using unemotional machines to express an inherently emotional medium like music. Andy also explores the dimensions of aural expressiveness and the paradoxes encountered when trying to quantify pitch and timbre, two of the most fundamental aspects of musical sound.
Andy Cavatorta is Director of Engineering for Ensemble Robot, a robotic ensemble dedicated to commissioning and performing compositions for robot musical instruments. He has a Masters Degree from the MIT Media Lab, with a research focus on physical synthesis of sound, and recently completed a 12-month collaboration with Bjork on experimental musical instruments.
Radio Producer as Flâneur – Sam Greenspan (99% Invisible)
(with support from PRX.org)
A new aesthetic of radio storytelling is emerging. Radio where you get lost in the details. Radio where drama is propelled by inanimate objects. Radio that teaches you to see differently. Radio that is powered by your feet. This session reveals how to literally wander into a story, and cull together a narrative from the grit and minutiae discovered along the way. Starting with the concept of the flâneur–a “connoisseur of the street” (particularly in 19th Century Paris)–this session will explore how the simple act of walking can become a powerful force for generating dramatic tension in documentary, cultural reportage, and even hard news.
Sam Greenspan is a staff producer at 99% Invisible, a radio show about architecture and design with Roman Mars. Previously, Sam was a producer at NPR where, among other things, he helped launch the pilot series of the TED Radio Hour. Sam got his start in radio at WSLR, a community radio station in Sarasota, Florida. He now lives in Oakland.
Rawllege Craydio – Avery Trufelman, Grace McCreight + Chelsea Stokes
College radio, much like the institution of college its self, has traditionally been a safe space for experimentation. Though atonal music shows and on-air bloopers can be endearing, many communities have grown to rely upon college radio stations for news and entertainment. In addition, a number of organizations and companies have started to capitalize on the “trendiness” of college radio, offering underwriting in exchange for promotion. If student (and non-student) DJs are tasked with creating and financing stimulating programming that engages their listenership, can they find a place for art on the airwaves anymore? A panel of college station leaders discusses how to balance artistic and professional integrity while still leaving plenty of room for scratchy vinyl and alien-themed talk shows.
Grace McCreight is the general manager of WBAR at Barnard College, a non-licensed, student operated internet station that hosts a number of concerts and events on campus. Chelsea Stokes is the station manager of WFNP at SUNY New Paltz, a licensed station with an in-house news department, associated with a local television channel. Avery Trufelman is the president of WESU at Wesleyan University, an NPR affiliate with nighttime programming from both students and community volunteers. Grace invited Chelsea and Avery up to Barnard once upon a time to discuss their respective stations, and they ended up sharing some interesting insights (and youtube videos) with each other.
Sounding Place, Placing Sound – The Sonic Ethnography Workshop
Hearing is as fundamentally important to anthropological and documentary practice as sight, and yet ethnographies tend to rely on a very attenuated acoustic manifestation of culture: transcribed dialogue. In this session we will showcase a number of nonfiction audio works that tackle the question of how the sonic can go beyond the discursive in evoking and representing people, places, events and experiences. The practice of sonic ethnography occurs in a boundary zone between the familiar and the unfamiliar: some of us record where we live, and yet – as outsiders of one kind or another – this doesn’t mean we are not tourists. For those of us far from home, sonic ethnography becomes a way of taking a non-place and making it familiar. As both a chronicle of personal experience and a journey into the life-worlds of others, recording inspires us to question how we should document, represent and evoke human experience. The act of listening challenges the audience to explore a site without sight, as well as to question how our understandings of place emerge.
The presenters (Andrew Littlejohn, Thomas Brandon Evans, Veronika Kusumaryati, Megan Roguschka, Benny Shaffer, Abby Sun, and Zoe Tucker) are students in Ernst Karel’s Sonic Ethnography studio course in the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. Since 2006 the Lab has been supporting innovative audiovisual combinations of aesthetics and ethnography that deploy original media practices to explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human and animal existence, and the aesthetics and ontology of the natural world. Learn more about the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard.
The Urban Ear of Tony Schwartz – David Suisman
In this talk and multimedia presentation, David Suisman brings you into the world of Tony Schwartz—famed New York City sound recordist, advertising consultant, and media theorist. Come learn about the man who launched the career of Moondog, the Viking of Sixth Avenue, and whom Marshall McLuhan called “the guru of the electronic age.”
David Suisman is the author of Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music and is an occasional disc jockey at WFMU. He teaches history at the University of Delalware and lives in Philadelphia.
The Way Things Travel – John Roach + Aaron Moore
The Way Things Travel is a project that combines hands-on workshops and a culminating performance. No musical, sound, or building expertise is required and the optimal result would be a blend of trained (native) and untrained (tourist) participants. The workshops will involve instrument building and foley techniques and the culminating performance will utilize a three-screen video projection of archival travel and tourism footage that will act as a visual score for groups of performers. The Way Things Travel embraces Cage’s statement about the “tourist attitude” by inviting performers to mingle with non-performers, non artists to work side by side with artists. The project courts Cage’s views on indeterminacy through its visual and sonic improvisational collisions.
Day One: Friday April 19th.
4:00-5:30pm
In this first day participants will work with the artists to create instruments that can be used during the performance on day 2. Some possibilities might include the rubber band instruments known as bandophones that are played with motors and rods, simple straw saxophones, balloon whizzers, and experiments with wire.
Day Two: Saturday April 20th.
Warm up from 4:00-4:30pm + Performance from 4:30-5:30pm
Participants from day one are strongly encouraged to join us on this second day (because it will be fun) where we will perform with the instruments as a sonic accompaniment to video images of travel and tourism. The first 30 minutes will be a warm up. The last hour (beginning at 4:30) will be a performance open to the world! Visitors are invited to participate. There will be instruments available to play as well as guides who can orient you to the rules of the performance.
John Roach deals with the misuse of objects to make sound and the awkward relationship between sound and image or object. He teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York City and currently teaches a course entitled Sound Matters.
Aaron Moore is an Englishman residing in Brooklyn, New York who plays music with instruments & devices. His primary instruments are drums, voice & trumpet but he generally considers any instrument (or object) playable in one way or another. Moore is a founding member of the English experimental music group Volcano The Bear. His current solo project is called Invisible Sports.
Visualizing Hertzian Space – Brett Ian Balogh
Since the inception of radio as a broadcast medium, the earth has been covered by an increasingly dense network of airborne communications. AM/FM/SW and other portions of the radio spectrum can become a medium through which a re-imaging of space is possible. This hertzian space is not defined by surveyed boundaries or geographic constraints, but by field strengths, mass-media service areas and consumer markets. The overlapping spaces defined by these broadcasts can be collectively conceived as an envelope of thought around the world, or Noosphere. This session will cover the history of wireless visualization, tools and techniques, conceptual issues such as public/private space and alternate geographies, and artistic applications. The presentation will last approximately 45min. Bring your own laptop and stay another 45min if you want to install software tools and participate in some demonstrations.
Brett Ian Balogh is a Chicago-based artist working at the intersection of objects, sounds and spaces. He is currently an instructor at both the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology, teaching courses in architecture, computer-aided design and manufacturing, do-it-yourself broadcasting and acoustics. Brett is a free103point9 transmission artist and has exhibited and performed at P.S.1 (NY), Diapason (NY), Devotion Gallery (NY); The MCA (Chicago) and The Hyde Park Arts Center (Chicago) among others.
MISC.
And Then… – Katherine Gorman
And Then is an audio exquisite corpse. Over the course of the festival attendees will be encouraged (by posters and also calling cards that will be handed out) to call a google voice number and tell the next step in a story. Each call should be no more than 30 seconds, and each call will be tweeted out so that attendees can follow the story as it progresses over the weekend. The calls will then be edited together into a cohesive story. The first line of the story will be about exploring a new city.
Katherine Gorman is an associate producer for Here & Now. Produced by WBUR in Boston, it airs on radio stations across the country. Katherine has been working in radio since high school when she hosted a late night music show on her school’s radio station. She’s particularly interested in developing her knowledge of multimedia platforms and in finding new ways to make science stories accessible to listeners.
Footfollow – Brian House
Footfollow is an experiment in patterns and contraints, data and control. It’s also a webapp for iOS and Android. Here’s how it works: 1) visit http://footfollow.org on your mobile device and get out your headphones, 2) choose a walk, 3) put your phone in your pocket and listen, 4) what you hear is a click track that matches the footsteps made by the person before you — can you match them?, 5) your footsteps have now also been recorded, and someone else will listen and walk to them, 6) and so on and so forth.
Brian House is a media artist whose work traverses alternative geographies, experimental music, and a critical data practice. By constructing embodied, participatory systems, he seeks to negotiate between algorithms and the rhythms of everyday life. He is currently studying media theory and computer music for a PhD at Brown University and teaches in the Digital + Media program at RISD.
Re-Wired – Amelia Marzec
Re-wired is is a wearable device that translates ambient sound into haptic feedback using bone conduction technology. After losing hearing in one ear due to a tumor, Marzec became aware that experiencing sound through bone conduction was possible. At first her auditory perception seemed flat, but soon she began to notice that she was experiencing sound through a combination of tympanic hearing and vibrational resonance. She decided to adapt bone conduction technology into a helmet, in order to share her emerging haptic perception of sound without the necessity of surgery. Re-wired consists of a helmet that leaves the wearer free to roam their environment and experience a physical sensitivity to sound. At the festival Marzec will provide hearing protection so people are able to isolate their new sense of sound.
Amelia Marzec has created several prototypes that address sound and communication. One is the Signal Strength Project, which is a set of modems that turn regular cell phones into nodes on a secret, untraceable, peer-to-peer network. She is also currently working on a Sound Booth, which creates an amplified but visually obscured space for democratizing performance. Both projects are ideal for enabling political protest. She holds an MFA from the Parsons School of Design and was a resident at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center.
SCREENINGS
Acommunication – Jean-Michel Rolland
Five arms are struggling to silence three telephones, an alarm clock and a timer without success. This rejection of communication and more generally of what connects us to time is a pretext for a new experimentation where you “hear what you see” and vice versa. These simple gestures, intended to break an unwanted process, are repeated in a quasi-schizophrenic way. The result is a choreographic and musical fight that will end with some effort.
Jean-Michel Rolland is a French artist born in 1972. A musician and a painter for a long time, he manages to melt his two passions – sound and image – in video art and audiovisual performances since 2010. At the origin of each of his creations, musicality plays a role as important as image does and each one influences the other by transmediality.
Ashes – John Kreitzberg
“Ashes” is a short piece of found audio that focuses on an Act Up! protest in 1996 where activists threw the ashes of friends, family, and lovers who died of AIDS onto the white house lawn. The audio is stripped from youtube videos and explores what happens with the listener is dropped into the middle of something extremely personal and passionate, but without the comfort of visuals.
John Kreitzberg, originally from outside of Philadelphia, is a 20-year-old student at Macalester College in St. Paul Minnesota where he is studies Religious Studies, Classical Language, and Gender and Sexuality. This is the first piece of audio John as made.
Chiayi Symphony – Stefano Giannotti
Chiayi Symphony is a sort of poem of sounds and images which rises up from the Taiwenese mountains and flows down the paddy fields streams of water, to reach the Chinese sea, gathering landscape memories along its path, people’s movements, songs and most of all, tracking the ineluctability of everything; the eternal typhoon cycle, approaching as Taiwaneses switch on ventilators and disappearing as soon as they switch them off; chickens, geese and pigs cooked, eaten, digested and evacuated; adults and children, games and work; city traffic, markets and hawkers, tv-zapping, puppets and flute lessons. The video is part of the project ART AS ENVIRONMENT – A CULTURAL ACTION IN TROPIC OF CANCER 2006, promoted by the Chiayi County Government; its aim is the revaluation of a country wasted by a rough and chaotic urbanization, pushing artists to interact with villagers and educating them to the idea of art and life.
Stefano Giannotti (1963), composer, guitarist and performer. His repertoire ranges from music theatre, radio and video-art, to song-writing and chamber music. Many of his radio works have been produced for Deutschlandradio Kultur, SWR, Sender Freies Berlin, WDR Köln, Australian Broadcasting Company, YLE, RAI, Magyar Radio, Polskie Radio, Radio France Culture; among the several international prizes and grants: Prix Macrophon’91 (Poland), Prix Ars Acustica International (WDR Köln 1994/95), DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm (1998/99), Karl-Sczuka-Preis 2002 and 2007.
Hidden Sound – Julien Clancy
Hidden Sounds introduces us to the spectacular aural landscape of the natural world, as captured by Irish sound recordist, Dr. Tom Lawrence. Tom spent countless hours alone, rambling the wilds of the open countryside at all times of the day and night to capture the sounds of worlds which remain hidden to the naked ear. Whether it’s the inner monologue of cantankerous trees, moaning in the stormy wind, or the Moog-like orchestras of underwater insects, Tom’s incredible recordings reveal the voice of nature as never heard before. Hidden Sounds is a carefully created sound collage of these secret worlds as well as an intimate portrait of the man who captured them revealed by those who knew him best.
Julien Clancy is a freelance radio documentary maker based in Dublin, Ireland. He is a passionate believer of the idea that great stories only happen to those who can tell them and is determined to share such stories through listening parties he regularly curates back in Dublin.
I, Tourist, NY – Angelica Piedrahita
This video builds an atmosphere of New York City “the hyper visualized city”. Set of millions of movies seen around the World and almost 47 millions of tourists a year, anxious to take pictures of it. A constant allegory to popular culture and a space build through globalized imaginaries. The video explores the iconic surface of the city in a constant confrontation with its complex deeper layers. A sequence that contains images and audios taken from movies; footage shot on the touristic sites and images from popular culture that mingle with the touristic-artistic experience.
Angelica Piedrahita is a multimedia artist from Bucaramanga, Colombia, nowdays living and working in Buffalo, NY. Her work has been focus on video aesthetics experimenting with the medium in different aspects as installations, sculpture, video sharing on Internet and short video pieces. Since 2010 she has been producing work about travel imaginaries observing the relationships between perception and representation of a place. She works for the Visual Arts Department at Javeriana University in Bogotá Colombia. She is currently an MFA candidate of the Media Study Department at the SUNY University at Buffalo.
The Tower of Now – Daniel Jenatsch
Daniel Jenatsch and The Para-Archeological Society for the Recovery of Lost Stories Presents: “The Tower of Now” an auditory journey from the Tower of Babel to the Power of Now as the present and past are obliterated, reconstituted and re-activated through the act of listening, whilst our protagonist struggles to bridge a gap in time and space by using psycholinguistic techniques offered by experts of self hypnotism, the findings of the Para-Archeological Society for the Recovery of Lost Stories, and Occult wisdom.
Daniel Jenatsch (Melbourne, Australia) is an interdisciplinary artist, sound designer and composer, whose work explores the interrelation of the real and the virtual, through, installation, sound, performance and film. He has composed for dance and theatre, has made sound design and designed musical instruments for artists such as Matthew Barney, Jonathan Bepler, Arto Lindsay, and Kim Sooja, and writes sci-fi in his spare time.
Zepelim: Plant Consciousness & Communication – Carlo António Ribeiro Patrão
This sound collage aims to visit the fringe world of plant consciousness and communication along with its peculiar relationship with music. At some point in our lives, we’ve all come across the notion that music improves the growth of plants and that plants can grow stronger and healthier if we take some time out of our day to talk to them. All of these popular notions came from experiments that took place at some point in the history of science, giving way to other fascinating experiments, stories, and myths, but above all, an impressive adventure in sound. The collage features plant-based generative music, music to grow plants by, music using plants as instruments, music inspired by plants, and audio evidence of electrical signalling in plants that supports theories of plant consciousness.
Carlo António Ribeiro Patrão has been working in radio since I became a member of the freeform independent radio station Rádio Universidade de Coimbra (RUC) in 2007. At RUC, he started working on the program Zepelim to explore the diverse possibilities of radiophonic space through the use of field recordings, experimental music, musique concrete, drones, archived sound and live improvisation. Zepelim has been featured in radio art festivals like RadiaLx and the UK Radio Boredcast/AV Festival curated by Vicki Bennett (People Like Us). Recently, his video How do you say goodnight? was selected as the winning entry of the audio/video remix contest The Past Re-imagined As The Future hosted by the Free Music Archive (WFMU) and the Prelinger Archives.
TOUR
A Bicycle Built for Three (Bikeus) – David Weinberg
My friend Jim is a public school teacher in New York City by day. He’s also a big fan of holding up giant cardboard signs in public to get people’s attention so he can and interview them. He recorded the stories of the homeless in Tompkins Square Park for his first book Stranger to the System. For his latest project he made cardboard cutouts of the three NYC mayoral candidates which he will mount on a 3-person bicycle. Then he will take these fine candidates on a tour of the city — giving citizens the opportunity to meet their future overlord and pepper him/her with questions. On this short tour, as we make our way along the sidewalks of Manhattan we will meet the NYC mayoral candidates along with some special friends. We will explore the city as it prepares to vote for it’s new leader and the candidates will play the role of tourists in the land they hope to govern.
David is a radio producer based in L.A. He does a podcast called Random Tape that was featured on Transom.org. He moved from St. Louis where he was an artist-in-residence at The Luminary Center for the Arts, and before that he lived in New Orleans where he was a regular contributor to WWOZ’s Street Talk series. His work has been broadcast on The World, Hearing Voices, Marketplace, Wiretap, and 99% Invisible.
Good Vibrations – Johann Diedrick and Christie Leece
Good Vibrations is a tour and acoustic exploration kit for the less audible sounds of New York City. Through the use of our listening devices, participants can tune in to subtle, sonic vibrations in the environment, giving them new, unfamiliar ways to perceive the sounds around them. The kit includes a mobile listening device with three different types of microphone: a contact mic, a hydrophone and a probe mic. The variety of microphones encourages exploration of the city’s cracks and surfaces. These expeditions will include a series of investigation topics and a field guide for urban listening as well as stops at acoustic “points of interests” between the middle of downtown Manhattan out to the Hudson River Greenway. Along the way, the sonically curious explorers will also get a chance to test additional prototype devices. These include a “kite mic” that is suspended in the air and allows participants to hear sounds from many feet above their heads, as well as a “fishing mic” that allows participants to cast out a hydrophone to hear sounds beneath the water’s surface.
Johann Diedrick and Christie Leece are graduate students at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Johann makes sound installations and sound-based performances, mostly dealing with real-time audio synthesis and acoustic ecology. Christie’s work merges her interests in archaeology, fieldwork, animal studies and new technologies, and frequently involves sound.
Passing Stranger – Pejk Malinovski
Passing Stranger is an audio walking tour of poetry-related sites in New York City’s East Village. Narrated by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, it contains site-specific poetry, interviews with poets, archival recordings and music by John Zorn. The audio file can be downloaded at eastvillagepoetrywalk.org and allows the user to take the tour using their own mp3 player. The tour is about 2 miles and lasts about 95 minutes.
Pejk is a freelance radio producer, sound artist, and poet. His documentaries have aired on public radio networks around the world and his sound pieces have been shown in museums and galleries.