Structural Patterns

August 07, 2006
Schlossplatz was once the home of the Berlin City Palace. In 1950 the palace, a symbol of Prussian pride and wealth was demolished by the GDR and erected in its place was the Palast der Republik. Due to the combination of the reunification of Berlin and the use of asbestos, the Palace of the Republic is being deconstructed and soon the old palace, Stadtschloss will be rebuilt.

Schlossplatz has historically been a highly contested site. On July 14th it became a site of public performance, sound broadcast and celebration.

Copa Sonar was organized by Marco Barotti, Emanuele Guidi and myself in collaboration with sonambiente, and tesla. Five experimental sound groups volunteered to overtake the desolate public plaza off of the touristic street Unter din Linden. Performances by ap/xxxxx, B Component, the rottt (the return of the thinking thing) and lekronk, OLYVETTY, saal-c were broadcast from the site via miniFM and visitors were offered free wine and beer. The audience was a diverse mix of sound art connoisseurs, curious tourists, and skaters.

The recordings from the event are now available as mp3s and high quality aifs to download – Copa Sonar. Enjoy the data tranformed into noise by ap/xxxxx; the relaxing sound of a Swiss precussion instrument electronically modulated by B Component; electronic and computer experimentation by the return of the thinking thing; Olyvetty’s trans-like performance or the more melodic compositions of saal-c.

Also read an interview concerning the public intervention with Emanuele Guidi.

July 13, 2006
As sonambiente, the festival for hearing and seeing wraps up, the Public Broadcast Cart will be used for a free outdoor concert of noise and experimental music featuring ap/xxxxx, B Component, saal-c, OLYVETTY, the rottt (the return of the thinking thing) and lekronk.

Copa Sonar, Friday 14 July, 7-9pm at Schlossplatz off of Unter din Linden, Berlin mitte. Free beer and wine will be served.

Preview

Organized by Marco Barotti and Emanuele Guidi in collaboration with sonambiente.

July 04, 2006

The group of projects featured at the old Polish Emabssy on Unter den Liden, I believe comprises the strongest set of works of sonambiente. From low-tech to high, from highly socially oriented works to articulations of new forms of mapping our Earth, the Polish Embassy features a wide array of art for seeing and listening. I will only discuss the ones that I most enjoyed.

Amongst the most powerful works on display in sonambiente is Artur Zmijewski’s “Our Songbook” (2003), a video that collapses social history with subjective memory or more appropriately the fading of personal memories and national identity due to war and social misconduct. “Our Songbook” features elderly Polish Jews who emigrated to Israel during or after WWII, now nearing the end of their lives at a nursing home in Tel Aviv. Upon visiting with these people, the Polish artist asked them to try and recall Polish songs of their youth. Few remember the entire songs, some only recall the refrain. The video is stirring and reflects the pain of dislocation, even after several decades. As I am someone like so many others today who grew up between two countries and does not necessarily feel a strong sense of nationalism, the video is awe striking due to the well-embedded desire to rekindle the actors’ sense of nationalism.

Artur Zmijewski, Our Songbook [2003], video stills

In a small dark room, lit only by small green LEDs that spotlight several digital screens mounted on the walls, Nic Collins has brought wreckage upon several cheap, noisy, hand held electronic games, the sort that are abundant in China Town. Collins tears away the plastic housing, manipulates the electronics, cables the screens so that they may be featured on the walls at an angle. The dancing cubes of the screens are lit by small LEDs that create a shadow play behind the screen. These screens are only connected to their brains by alligator clamps. Heaped in one corner of the room are all the electronics, the plastic housing and a blurbing speaker. Cheap, low-tech and messy, Collins transforms these repetitive, uninteresting, time-killing gadgets into an alluring installation – “no part of an eviscerated toy goes to waste.”

Nicolas Collins, Daguerreotypes 2006

Achim Wollscheid has animated the second story windows facing the tourist filled Unter din Liden as they open and close according to the movement of the viewers in the second story corridor. ” A program traslates the data gained by motion tracking into a correlative action of the mororized window openers.”

Achim Wollscheid, inlet outlet 2006

Both the larger GP4 (Global Player 04) and it’s much smaller sibling GPod are on display transmitting the sounds of the Earth. Jens Brand has made audible the real-time data of over 1500 satellites so that you may listen to the Earth in the comfort of your home or now with GPod while you are on your way to work or jogging. The GPod displays 3D model of the Earth, along with the coordinates tracked by the satellite that you select. You may listen to the low rumble of canyons or the high pitch of mountain peaks. Anything may be converted to data, mapped and computationally manipulated, the end result is left to the producer’s imagination.

Jens Brand, GPod

Another personal highlight of this festival is my discovery of Joanna Dudley, an extraordinary, multi-talented and powerful artist. I write this not so much because of her installation at the old Polish Embassy, which I did enjoy, but moreso due to further research into her work and the concepts and approaches described in her more theatrical exploits, so please have a look at her site! I haven’t seen her perform, so I might be mistaken, but based on the documentation the work seems very exciting.

The installation “Tom’s Song” (2006) is quite stirring for several reasons, the music is beautiful, the story behind the music is heart warming, it is technically involved and it is all analog! At the core of the installation is a song, “It’s June in January” sung by an older man Tom who also plays the ukulele as he sings. The floor of the installation is covered by portable LP players, each LP player is an individual element of an orchestra assemble to accompany Tom singing his song. From the ceiling hang music boxes that play paper scores to also accompany Tom. Full description

Joanna Dudley, Tom’s Song 2006

As sonambiente berlin2006 is spread out throughout Berlin mitte, several large scale installations are located at both Akademie der Kunste in the old east and west of Berlin. Below are a selection of projects installed at Akademie der Kunste at Pariser Platz, on the old East side of Berlin. Their were several other projects, but I only documented the ones that I was intrigued by.

Near the entrance of Akademie der Kunste sits Jan-Peter E.R Sonntag “Modern Minimal Disco” where one stands on a round steel pedestal that feels as if it is hiding a giant subwoofer while bright lights shine on you as if you were the center piece of a photo shoot and if that isn’t enough attention behind one is a wall sized mirror with the listener as the focal point. The audio presents a narrative that follows a progression that reaches nerve wrecking peak while the pedestal rumbles under one’s feet, the lights shine and the listener begins to reach a club like ecstasy.

Jan-Peter E.R Sonntag “Modern Minimal Disco”

One room contains two works by Tilman Kuntzel – “Maintenance Measures for the SoundUnit Fan and Soundwall?” and “Sleep Capsule.” The first presents a wall of shelves with the adidas footballs designed for the 2006 world cups all listening via headphones to the matches played. Each ball represents a country playing in the world cup and each ball listens to its country’s games in its proper language. These audio broadcasts are being recorded and at the end of the World Cup Kuntzel will transform this recordings into an audio collage, I think largely composed of “GOAL” or “GOL” or “TOR”… and all the other forms of crying in happiness at one’s nation’s goal…

“Maintenance Measures for the SoundUnit Fan and Soundwall?” by Tilman Kuntzel

And across from this soccer balls sits an isolation room where one may lay down and escape all the hysteria of the World Cup.

“Sleep Capsule” by Tilman Kuntzel

As one continues into the next gallery, elegantly installed is Bernhard Leitner’s Serpentinata II in which several speakers play their own solitary audio. As one moves from speaker to speaker, one feels as if s/he is moving through a sound scape. The sounds of each speaker are incredibly crisp and alluring.

“Serpentina II” by Bernhard Leitner

The highlight of this portion of sonambiente is Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller “Opera for a Small Room.” As usual with this duo’s work they create an enthralling narrative with great technical skill. As I understand it, they have recreated the listening room of an opera lover. The individual may be a fiction, as the installation with exquisite surround sound, outside the reconstructed room tells a story composed of the records of the character. The installation becomes a bit Disneyesque with it’s thundering sound and flashing lights, for a moment it reminded me of Disneyland’s Tiki Tiki room in which the birds come alive and suddenly a terrifying storm comes along. I realize that this sounds like a negative critique, but in reality I absolutely love this piece, it is installation art, sound art, theater, fiction, beautifully created. Below is an excerpt of the artists description.

“Opera for a Small Room” by Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller

“R. Dennehy lived most of his life in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, Canada. Not a lot is known about him, but he is listed in the telephone book as Royal Dennehy. One thing we do know is that he once collected opera records. He was infatuated with great tenors. We are aware of these facts because we bought all his records (which were signed at the top) at the second-hand store in Salmon Arm. There were approximately one hundred records. We are interested in the extreme cultural juxtaposition between opera and the smallwestern town in which R. Dennehy lived. What did he think about while listening to these records, recorded in cities half-way around the world? Was he a trained singer? Did he want to have a career in opera? Did he lose a lover and find solace in the music? Did he dream of traveling to faraway opera houses one day? We imagined him singing along to the records, creating his own opera, displaced in time and space. So we made a small room for the opera of his life. There are twenty-four antique loudspeakers out of which come songs, sounds, arias, and occasional pop tunes. There are almost two thousand records stacked around the room and eight record players, which turn on and off robotically syncing with the soundtrack.”

“Opera for a Small Room” by Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller

tesla, a great space in the Berlin mitte, right across from Alexander Platz, is dedicated to the production and exhibition of new works encompassing installation, performance, sound and radio works.

Artists are given studio residencies and plenty of support to produce new works. As the directors of tesla, carsten seiffarth, detlev cutters, and andreas broeckmann, describe the art center:

“tesla is of Berlin laboratory for media arts; for the investigation of the relationship between art and science, old and new, analog and digital media; for open and process oriented artistic and technological research; for the dialogue with current form artistic practice; for the development of co-operation and networks” –

Currently tesla is in collaboration with the festival sonambiente Berlin2006 in presenting new audio and visual works and giving sonambiente artists, like myself a studio for production. Here are a few images taken at last Wednesday’s opening at tesla:

réactions épidermiques by lynn pook + julien clauss

Participants lay in these hammocks that have various points of stimulation – at the hands, feet, heart and ears sound and some sort of mechanical devices embedded in pillows titillate and relax the participant.

pneumatic sound field by edwin van der heide

Embedded in a large steel grid that is permanently part of tesla’s courtyard is Edwin Van der Heide’s sound installation. The sound is created from air shot through valves. The valves are mechanized and digitally controlled to play compositions. At first the compressed air instrument is relaxing, but over time becomes abrasive as one stands below or near the pneumatic sound field.

The wooden knob to the right is for the volume and red and green buttons are on/off – simple and elegant.

In the main lobby near the entrance of tesla is a work by graphic design students of the

Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. The students listened to electronic music compositions, by artists produced by the record label of Carsten Nicolai and then created visualizations of the audio. One may listen to the composition and study the visual designs by the students.

the public broadcast cart, miranda zungia

I have been given a studio at tesla, however my project, the Public Broadcast Cart is located at the Art Academy in the Paris Plaza, across from the giant soccer ball. The audio recorded when the cart is out and about will be edited and re-broadcast via the tesla radio – 1:1, 95.2FM Berlin.

On tesla’s second floor, in a dance/meeting hall space is the installation “fades” by carsten nicolai. Unfortunately it’s a very dark installation that is difficult to visually document. Light, smoke and sound come together to create the installation, as light projects through the smoke onto a large black screen to accompany a surround sound composition.

June 04, 2006
I’m in Berlin for the next six weeks participating in sonambiente, a sound art festival that is dispersed throughout the mitte of Berlin. And thus far this has been one of the most diverse and exciting festivals that I’ve witnessed. While the underlying theme is the creative use of sound, the festival is composed of performance, installation, radio, sculpture and public intervention and to boot the opening weekend is bracketed by the end of the Berlin Biennial and the beginning of the World Cup, what more could one ask for in one of the greatest cities of the world.

On the opening night I only made it to one third of the evening events, so I will begin with works documented that evening and progressively present documentation of other works over the next several weeks.

On the first of June, I made it to Allianzgebaude am Ostbahnhof, this is an office complex of which sonamiente took over the mezzane, second floor and fifth floor, in which artists were given offices and conference rooms to create installations. Appropriately this part of the exhibition is titled sonambiente_laboratorium, since many of the installations seemed unfinished, experimental or created by young artists in very hipster fashion.

Amongst my favorite works were:

“Koexistenz” by Young-Sup Kim, 2006 in which the Korean artists recreates precious, traditional urns from white shelled audio cables that feed the audio into the speakers sitting within the urns. The urns are connected to play a multichannel composition of traditional Korean drumming created from household, everyday sounds. Perhaps I’m a romantic pushover, but I found this translation of two Korean traditions into contemporary art quite beautiful.

“The Perfect Shot” by Satoshi Morita, 2006 is whimsical, and very well produced. Various sports balls – soccer, golf, ping-pong, baseball sit one small green platforms with headphones plugged into the top center of each ball. Upon putting the headphones on, you hear all the sounds of the given sport from the ball’s perspective. Incredibly well produced, each audio composition presents crisp detail, from the soccer players feet running to the ball to swift kick and flight through the wind onto the next player or the ground and the scream and chanting of the arena. Or the baseballs release from the pitchers hand, through the wind, into the painful crash of the bat and through the air into a mit… Perhaps the funniest are the golf ball’s sounds of birds in the trees, and the wind rustling for a very long time, I left it before the swing of the golf club, and of course the back and forth of the ping pong. Each sound work captures the pace and excitement of the sport.

All be it not my favorite work, “3HfA,” 2006 by Iris Rennert and Oliver Friedli was amongst the stronger installations as the presentation effectively establishes a 60s mini lounge ambiance. Viewers enjoy 3D images through the viewfinders.

In very Ars Electronica fashion, here are two clear resin perhaps, well some sort of plastic with lots of electronics embedded collars that viewers may wear. Apparently based on the video documentation, when two participants wear the collars and walk toward one another, there’s a good bit of clicking from the collars. Perhaps best to review the website:

Martin Bllardi

I didn’t understand this work, but there’s something interesting about it, perhaps the sounds that I didn’t record. It is an “Endless space for communications with myself – a vector based score series”

Here is one other installation that was visually nice:

There were several other installations/projects and one performance that I didn’t document visually, since they were primarily concerned with sound.

May 19, 2006

From June 1st through July 17th, I will be participating in a sound art festival in Berlin – Sonambiente 2006.  The festival organizers have invited me to participate with the Public Broadcast Cart – traversing the streets of Berlin.  In preparation for the festival, I have revamped the project’s website, adding to the site lots of info that others may find useful, such as how to build your own cart.  Keeping with the goal of the project as a tool for civil empowerment and to generate discussion surrounding increasing control of dissemination media by very few wealthy private entities the site is intended as an informational repository surrounding radio transmission in the hands of the public.

February 28, 2006

“A voice-activated recorder is sent through the mail to impossible addresses and then returned to sender with acoustic doucmentation of its journey. Postal workers singing and gossiping, the creak and bang of a mailbox chute opening and closing…? Or, maybe God and Baby Lindbergh have handlers who reject suspicious packages and return them unopened, and we are privy to their secret celestial conversations. Personally, I like to think it’s the latter.” The piece was on exhibit at Location One last fall.

July 10, 2005
Marc Bohlen applies a dadaist twist to technology – he questioning the common uses or expectations of technology by inventing technologies that are applied to seemingly purposeless activities, but in doing so delves into deep philosophical questions concerning human nature.

I recall walking into Marc Bohlen’s studio in 1999 and encountering three chickens and a robot in a large chicken coop.  As Marc explained he was seeing if the chickens and robots could happily c-oexist.  The project is titled Advanced Perception and as Marc puts it

“This project was an early experiment in mixing machines and animal societies. Three chickens, Rhode Island Red hens, were held in a spacious cage together with a mobile robot for 60 days…  A gala omelet dinner was held in an art gallery where a world-famous chef, Rudy Stanish, created omelets according to his own secret recipes with the eggs from these chickens.

It was left to the visitors to ponder where the advanced perception was to be found, whether it was in the machine vision system guiding the robot in the cage, the chickens’ perception modalities (in some ways superior to our own), or in the idea of advanced/alternate modes of perception necessary to contemplate solutions for a future in which our technologies kindly intertwine with the world of simpler creatures.”

http://www.realtechsupport.org/repository/adv_perception.html

At the time Marc was pursuing a dual masters in Fine Arts and Robotic Vision at Carnegie Mellon University.  Since then Marc has continued along the same trajectory, inventing new high level technologies that are placed in creative situations, works shared and respected by both art and science communities.  The same approach of applying hi-tech to nature to question our assumptions of science and nature is used in more recent commission.  Unseen, 2002-2003 uses machine vision to monitor the changes in a garden, once again to best explain the project, I’ll quote Marc:

“UNSEEN is a nature interpretation center with second thoughts. Set in the Reford Gardens of Grand-Métis on the Gaspé Peninsula of eastern Québec, the multi-camera real time machine vision system observes select plants indigenous to the region… Using data analysis and classification techniques, the system searches for instances of these plants. Short texts depict factual knowledge on the select plants. Over the course of the summer, however, the flavour of the texts changes.”

http://www.realtechsupport.org/new_works/unseen.html

In another recent and ongoing project, Marc attempts to use whistling as a form of interaction with computers:

“U.W.M is an investigation into the vexing problem of human-machine interface design. Whistling is much closer to the phoneme-less signal primitives compatible with digital machinery than the messy domain of spoken language. As opposed to pushing machines into engaging humans in spoken language, U.W.M. suggests we meet on a middle ground. Whistling occurs across all languages and cultures.”

http://www.realtechsupport.org/new_works/uwm.html
Marc uses artificial intelligence to question the nature of information, perception and knowledge.  To view other works by Marc, please visit his portfolio site:

http://www.realtechsupport.org/

February 10, 2005
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what work really leads to anything lasting.  Since the TAZ, the Critical Art Ensemble (in the U.S.) and any number of off shoots have established what can now be identified as a movement.  A movement within contemporary art composed of collectives that embark on subversive or critical action using new communication technologies.  Each of these collectives embrace to some extent CAE’s opening paragraph from the Electronic Disturbance (1994, Autonomedia):

The rules of cultural and political resistance have dramatically changed.  The revolution in technology brought about by the rapid development of the computer and video has created a new geography of power relations in the first world that could only be imagined as little as twenty years ago:  people reduced to data, surveillance occurs on a global scale, minds are melded to screenal reality and an authoritarian power emerges that thrives on absence.  The new geography is a virtual geography, and the core of political and cultural resistance must assert itself in this electronic space.

Ok, so plenty of collaborators/colleagues and students of these practitioners have emerged over the last several years – Subrosa, Institute for Applied Autonomy, the Carbon Defense League, rtmark, the Yes Men, Conglomco and the list will hopefully continue to grow…  These are creative people that band together to generate technically involved work that questions the society we function in/through.  But over and over as I learn about their projects, the work executed and worst of all some of the egos generated, I wonder what the point is.  Do these tactical media projects, prankster art, subversive acts really lead to anything other than a bi-line notice on NPR or even NBC and Fox?  Do these works generate anything lasting.  Some are satisfied in the idea that it causes reflection, a dialogue and perhaps that is enough, to get people thinking, cause people who would not otherwise talk to talk, but then what.  Lately, more and more, I’ve been thinking that community based projects is where it’s at, community advocacy and projects that function in a small, regional space present the building blocks to create something that can turn into something adoptive, something that can cycle beyond a few months, that may last a generation or two.  And then perhaps there’s already plenty of people doing this sort of work, so it’s appropriate that artists are engaging in collaborative action that may or may not have any consequence…  Recently I attended a talk at NYU’s ITP program and one of the Conglomco guys who presented was so proud of their media coverage that it brought to question any of their work…