:: Saturday, November 22, 2003 ::

For those of you who are in Amsterdam, Netherlands tonight, I'd strongly recommend popping along to this event featuring the now infamous "Nanoloop" (music composing software for the Nintendo Game Boy)...

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SMART Project Space | 1e Constantijn Huygensstraat 20, Amsterdam

SOUND PERFORMANCE.
Monthly series in which the boundaries between music and art are
explored.

Curated by Alex Cecchetti

Location: Cafe De Ruimte
Price: free admission
Saturday November 22nd, 22.00 hrs.

Play Boys with a Game Boy
Featuring Oliver Wittchow, COVOX, Lo-Bat and Myfanwy Ashmore

'Nanoloop' and 'Little Sound DJ' are two softwares designed to transform the famous Nintendo Game Boy into a small, hand-held music workstation.

That means that over 100 million people, approximately the number of Game Boy's sold, are now potentially electronic musicians. These softwares are not supported by Nintendo company who after the sucess of 'Nanoloop' and 'Little Sound DJ', are working on their own music device.

Oliver Wittchow started his project with his own students at Hamburg art school, called 'Nanoloop', consisting of a software synthesizer and sequencer for the Nintendo Game Boy. After that, many musicians and artists began using the program to play techno, house, and experimental music. For Smart Project Space, he is going to show how it all started, programming, in real time, on the game boy itself, with just 3 lines of BASIC code. And then how it will evolve, presenting a new software for 'smartphones' and performing minimal house music on a cellphone.

Covox is Thomas S=F6derlund Gear used: GameBoys, Novation BassStation, Clavia Micromodular, Digitech Vocalist, Behringer UB1204FX-PRO and some other stuff.

Lo-bat, at the moment, is making music on game boy using 'LSDJ'. www.littlesounddj.com, and nothing else.

Myfanwy Ashmore will present 'Mario Battle No. 1', which is an altered version of the popular Nintendo's Mario Bros game. Ashmore, simply removed all the enemies, prizes, architecture within the game. Now as a game
player, all you can do is to go for a walk. Eventually you run out of time and die. Myfanwy Ashmore, as well as being an exhibiting artist, is currently a technician at the 'Ontario College of Art' and 'Design in the Academic Computer Centre'. Most recently she was nominated and short listed for the prestigious 2003 K.M. Hunter award through the Ontario Arts Council.

For information please contact Alex Cecchetti alex@smartprojectspace.net

:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
...

Having access to information becomes vital for creating a history. As new technology is developed more efficient ways of archiving are introduced in various fields of research. The main preoccupation by those developing new archiving technologies is the preservation of information for generations to come. The computer database is perhaps the most popular and efficient form for archiving and accessing information today.

In Le Catalogue, the mastermind behind h-arn.org has created a database of documentary images (an archive) of art projects between 1990-1996 available for public access. Everytime an image is viewed, a horizontal and vertical line forming a cross are added to the archived image, which is then again stored for access by another user. The more the images are accessed, the more they are abstracted or -- if one is thinking of preservation -- destroyed.

Here the archive is similar to analog vinyl records losing their fidelity and being slightly deteriorated everytime the needle passes through the groove. Unlike a record player, however, which is fabricated with the aim to provide the least damage possible while offering an aeshtetic experience to the user, Le Catalogue actually makes the most of destruction in order to create a unique image for the present user. The image is unique in time and space because next time the same file is accessed, there will be two more lines added, and so on. In this way, Le Catalogue takes on the idea of destruction as a progressive movement, bringing on the new;and so, one can look forward to destruction as a type of online collaboration, where the archived is not preserved but rather reinterpreted as constant shifting information. History is here dependent on linear traces that expose the instability of interpretation; much like tree rings, traces are left behind by the process of development, leaving us with an allegorical database presenting destruction as an inevitable part of life.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
...

The nominees of the Berlin new media festival Transmediale 2004 were announced today.
They can be watched: http://www.transmediale.de/03/
en/newsdetail.php?id=84#

:: Peter Luining [+] ::
...

Atlantic Center for the Arts announces its upcoming residency program for March 2004:
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MARCH 1 - 21, 2004 (Application Deadline: December 1, 2003)

CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN, visual artist
MARK STRAND, poet
JOHN ZORN, musician/composer

Since 1982, Atlantic Center's residency program has provided artists from all artistic disciplines with spaces to live, work, and collaborate during three-week residencies. Located just four miles from the east coast beaches of central Florida, the pine and palmetto wooded environment contains award-winning studios that include a resource library, painting studio, sculpture studio, music studio, dance studio, black box theater, writer's studio, and digital computer lab. Each residency session includes three master artists of different disciplines. The master artists each personally select a group of associates - talented, emerging artists - through an application process administered by ACA. During the residency, artists participate in informal sessions with their group, collaborate on projects, and work independently on their own projects. The relaxed atmosphere and unstructured program provide considerable time for artistic regeneration and creation. Atlantic Center for the Arts provides housing (private room/bath with work desk), weekday meals (provided by ACA chef) and shared studio space.

For more information on how to apply, please telephone (386) 427-6975 or (800) 393-6975 (domestic US only) or visit atlanticcenterforthearts.org or email us.

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:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
...

"Generative SoundTracker" by Sam Woolf is a audio compiling environment for video based on keyword search's via the lycos search engine.

"The program works by providing an interface through which the user can allocate descriptive keywords to sprecific parts of the movie timeline. Once the user is satisfied that the movie file has been adequately annotated with descriptive and evocative words, these words are then automatically entered into Lycos's multimedia search engine and corresponding sound files are retreived from the world wide web.

When the movie is played back, each retreived sound starts to play when the point in the timeline associated with its keyword is reached."

Designed to compose audio tracks not fully controlled by the user, the sound composed has the potential to be based on context rather than content and to produce unexpected collages of sound. The process of editing and layering the sound over the already edited video becomes a formalised selective and regenerative process, using found sounds, where the application takes control. At no point is the user allowed to participate in the process of selecting and pre-editing their sound, these are chosen by the application only in the final stages allowing the user to position them. The final result is a technique as structured, formal and unexpected as the cut-up techniques of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs.

Not without its little quirks, soundtracker does require a little patience but is well worth the time invested to make it work.

:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
...

Guest curator at Turbulence:

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 17, 2003
Turbulence Guest Curators: "ICONography" by Patrick Lichty


"(The) development of iconography in the digital signifies far deeper connections with the human construction of meaning than merely creating a mental mnemonic to represent a program, dataset, document, etc."--Patrick Lichty

For thousands of years, from Lascaux to the computer desktop, the practice of creating iconographic language has been part of human existence. Lichty considers the role of the icon in computer and human culture in context with the works shown in this exhibition.

ICONography includes: Babel, Giselle Beiguelmann, Simon Biggs, Justin Buck, Johannes Blank, Troy Innocent, M. Takeo Magruder, Vincent Makowski, Mr. K, John Simon, Plasma Studii, Andrei Thomasz, Carlo Zanni, Jody Zellen, and Ricardo Miranda Zuniger; as well as texts by Lichty, Alina Serban and Valentina Tanni.

BIOGRAPHY

Patrick Lichty is a digital intermedia artist, writer, and independent curator of over 15 years whose work comments upon the impact of technology on society and how it shapes the perception of the world around us. He works in diverse technological media, including activism, printmaking, kinetics, video, generative music, and neon. He is Editor-in Chief
of Intelligent Agent, an electronic arts/culture journal, and operates IALA Gallery in Baton Rogue, Louisiana.

For more Turbulence Guest Curators, please visit
turbulence.org/curators

:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
...

Two french pieces of net.art entitled "Le Cri" ("The Scream"), one by Nicolas Clauss of flyingpuppet.com and the second by Michael Sellam of incident.net.

The title, "The Scream", comes from Edvard Munch's painting of 1893 illustrating the fear / angst / depression / helplessness brought on by modern living acutly felt in the artist more than anyone else. Munich himself stated of the day he conceived the painting...

"I was walking along the road with two friends.
The sun was setting.
I felt a breath of melancholy -
Suddenly the sky turned blood-red.
I stopped, and leaned against the railing, deathly tired -
looking out across the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword
over the blue-black fjord and town.
My friends walked on - I stood there, trembling with fear.
And I sensed a great, infinite scream pass through nature."

Here presented in digital media form (moving, sound, interactive) we see that while the form might advance and grow ever more sophisticated, the themes of artists remain the same.

:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
...