A mobile opera house that can be pulled apart and fit into a shipping container was unveiled by the Bavarian State Opera. The €2.1 million Pavillion 21 - designed by architect Wolf Prix of the firm Coop Himmelb(l)au – seats 300 people and it will host its first performances during the Munich Opera Festival in the summer of 2010.

COOP HIMMELB(L)AU was founded by Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky and Michael Holzer in Vienna, Austria in 1968, and is active in architecture, urban planning, design, and art.

The Pavillon 21 building has perforated, sloping aluminium walls with a “crystalline outer skin” ; gleaming spikes on the outside the opera house were based on a computer space modelling of sound frequencies from Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze and Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni”, overlayed and parametrically transferred into the pyramidal forms.

The inside is similarly angular and includes a lobby and a large stage. The main auditorium is free of clutter to house experimental performances. It is being built in collapsible modules that can be dismantled and fit in a shipping container: the philosophy behind the portable building is staging travelling shows. It will then return “home” every summer for the festival, but the rest of the year it will travel the world and can be hired out to other opera and theatre companies.

Dears,
after months, probably years, of rethinking intersubjectivity issues and remixing theory, I am very happy to annouce the birth of RAM LIVE under my direction.

RAM LIVE is a internet radio and place for the transmission of memories and experiences, providing an ethical listening before an aesthetic experience, open to a plurality of voices and the exchange of practices on an international level.

RAM LIVE is unique in its kind on the international scene, breaking away from genre and news radio stations.

RAM LIVE offers round-the-clock web streaming and (soon) monthly podcasts of: selections and remixes of sound works from SAM and RAM archives, interviews, historical recordings, popular music from the 1920s to today, field recordings, artist monographs, and new cultural programs, respecting the environments difference and languages.

Please feel welcome to send us sound materials, debates recording and to make purpose of collaborations.

The theme underlying the programming for October is the voice in a political view of an ethics of sound – from the first Beat revolution to the Black Panthers’ protest – featuring interviews to the protagonists of the cultural revolution in the USA (provided by filmmaker Ferdinando Vicentini Orgnani), and music of the time selected on the basis of a philological and emotional research.

The programming also gives room to multicultural reflection: the Mediterranean by Michelangelo Pistoletto; Carla Accardi and Gianna Nannini in Moscow; RAM travel diaries in Tunisia and China; FLUSSORAM sound geography; Manifesta sound landscapes; and other interior journeys through the voice of leading voices in contemporary culture.

Included in the schedule are also RAM LIVE’s regular programs: “Minima” (an hour of remixed material from the SoundArtMuseum archive), “Ready-Heard” (live broadcasts), and “Mono” (monographs on sound artists active on the international scene). The month of October will be dedicated to: Alvin Curran, Richard Crow, Jan Fabre, Michael J. Schumacher, Stephen Vitiello, and Luca Vitone.

Happy listening!

Ilari Valbonesi

Mail: live@radioartemobile.it
Skype: radioartemobileLIVE!
Web: http://live.radioartemobile.it/

„Radio signals are limited under the river and the constant roar of the 433 makes easy listening difficult. iPods are turned up high and Metro sentences are read and re-read. The Tunnel is just a means of getting from A to B, which is what most users need.” ( Alan Dunn, „When two worlds collide”, http://www.alandunn67.co.uk/soundtrackforamerseytunnel.html )

Werner Moebius‘ radio piece “Soundtrack for a Mersey Tunnel – extended” refers to a project by Alan Dunn in Liverpool 2008. Artists were commissioned to create soundtracks for the bus route 433 New Brighton – Liverpool. This bus spends 2 minutes and 33 seconds underneath the River Mersey, transporting passengers from the peninsula Wirral to Liverpool City and back. These sound pieces, partly recorded inside the Tunnel or in its immediate environment, were compiled on a CD an edition of 433 pieces.

Werner Moebius modifies the concept of acoustic interventions in relation to the Mersey Tunnel by using specific sound qualities of the tunnel architecture. He sketches an audiovision of a new, extended, imaginary non-place.

On the one hand Moebius uses his own sounds recorded in the City of Liverpool and the neighbouring Merseyside / Wirral region in the Northwest of England, and on the other hand he uses samples from the contributions of a.P.A.t.T., Büchler & Wand, Caroline Kraabel & Phil Hargreaves, Claire Potter, Gintas K, James Chinneck, Mark Pilkington, Ocean Viva Silver, Patricia Walsh, Pete Wylie & Jeff Young, Roger Cliffe-Thompson, unclejim und Wibke Hott & The Tunnel Choir, that were published on CD.

Werner Moebius enters an acoustic space which is real yet imaginary, a paradox constellation between concrete and abstraction. He sketches an audiograph of the European Cultural Capital of Europe 2008 Liverpool and its environment in the form of a fragmentary cut up collage.

(Text: Werner Moebius, May 2008; translation: Anna Soucek)

Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci was born in San Frediano, low-class area of the city of Florence, on April 13, 1808, while the city is under Napoleon rule. His family is poor and, even if he is admitted to the Art School [Accademia di Belle Arti], he cannot end his studies as he needs to start working very young. He changes many jobs, from custom employee propman for the “Pergola” theater in Florence. Here he builds an acoustic telephone: that is a telephone in which sound is conducted inside tubes. In the “Pergola” he meets Ester Mochi, a costumer, which he will marry.

Antonio Meucci gets interested in animal and physiological electricity while he was young. He is active in politics too, and he gets into the revolutionary movements aimed at the Unification of Italy which took place in 1831. Being him a liberal and a repubblican he is be arrested and remains three months in jail, sharing the cell with Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi. He is then pushed to leave the Great Duchy of Tuscany and will finally sail to Cuba. He settles in Havana as propman for the Tacòn Theatre. While in Cuba, while he was trying to cure rheumatisms of a patient via elettotherapy he manages to hear more clearly than he expected the cry of his patient, from the neighbouring room, as the current arrives to him. Meucci’s words were “I thought I heard this sound more distinctly than natural. I then put this copper of my instrument to my ear, and heard the sound of his voice through the wire. This was my first impression, and the origin of my idea of the transmission of the human voice by electricity”. He continues his experiment untill, in 1850, he settles inj the United States, and in the city of New York.

In New Yorh Meucci establishes a candle factory. Here he mets Giuseppe Garibaldi, which will work with Meucci; the two shares a long lasting important friendship. The collaboration between these two famous italians is proved in the New York museum “Garibaldi – Meucci”.

In 1854, Meucci’s wife Ester gets a crippling rheumatical arthritis which will oblige her to bed for the rest of her life, which will occur in 1884. Meucci realizes then the first true telephone link connecting his lab, nearby his cottage, with his wife’s bedroom. In a note dated 1857 Meucci describes his telephone: “it consists in a vibrating diaphragm and in a magnet electrified by a wire wounded around it. When the diaphragm vibrates the magnet modifies the wire curren. These modifications, once they reach the other end of the wire, impresses similar vibrations to the receiving diaphragm, which reproduces the words.”

Meucci ideas are clear, but he lacks the economic means to sustain his research. The candle factory goes bankrupt and Meucci seeks funding with rich italians but without luck. Soon he lacks also mony for his own living and he will survive thanks to his friends’ help.

(Western Electric Model 1317)

Meucci holds on and, in 1871 establishes e company and files in for a paptent, he names his invention “telettrofono”. The “Telettrophone Company,” has, as main scope, as the contract states, that of “carrying on all the necessary experiments to realize the ‘Telettrofono,’ that is the transmission of words (human voice) along electrical wires, as invented by Antonio Meucci”. There is still a money problem: with his $20 Meucci cannot afford to pay the cost of a patent, which sums up to $250 for a complete patent. As an alternative he files in for a “temporary” patent, or caveat, which lasts one year and can be renewed, the cost for each year being $10 dollari. Meucci will be able to pay this sum only up to year 1873.

In this same period, carrying with him much documentation on his researches, Meucci resorts to the powerfull American District Telegraph Company in New York, asking permission to use their lines for his experiments. The Company does not foresee the implication of the project and dismisses Meucci, causing him yet another failure.

In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell files in for a patent for his telephone. The following years will be spent by Meucci in an endless trial to obtain recognition of the paternity of the invention. Meucci is sponsored by the Globe Company, which suits Bell Company.
The lawsuit ends on July 19, 1887 with a decision which, even if it recognizes som merits to Antonio Meucci, is positive for Bell. “Nothing shows – says the decision – that Meucci really obtained any practical results, besides that of conducting, mechanically, the word along a cable. He surely used a mechanical conductor and he supposed that, by electrifying the conductor, he could have obtained better results”. In a nutshell the sentence states that Meucci had invented the telephone, but not the electrical one.

Antonio Meucci dies, aged 81, on Octover 18, 1889, shortly before that the Globe Company appeals against the sentence. After long lawsuits the Supreme Court of the United States will archive the case.

For more than a century, except in Italy, Bell has been considered the inventor of the telephone. On June 11, 2002, the Congress of the United States finally recognized officially that Antonio Meucci is the original inventor of the electrical telephone.

http://meucci.ing.unifi.it/

Overheated Symphony is all-women directed interactive mobile phone film. This cinematic symphony of women’s voices from around the world is part of the Birds Eye View film festival taking place in London next month which showcases the work of female film-makers.

Women across the world are being asked to make a short film -a “quick flick” – between 40 seconds and four minutes long on a mobile phone and then send it via the internet to a London-based film director who will edit all together.

“If it’s hot, we’d like to see it,” the project’s Web site declares: “Ladies, wherever you are, whoever you are, we want you to join in.”

The inspiration for “Overheated Symphony” was the 1927 film by German filmmaker Walter Ruttmann called “Berlin – Symphony of a Great City,” which used a montage of still pictures from many sources to document city life.

Rachel Millward, director of the Birds Eye View festival, which is now in its third year, says via Reuters the film is as much about new technology as it is about women and heat … Making a film from all these female voices around the world is quite a beautiful thing, but also it’s about shooting down the idea that women are not up to date with technology.”

Contributors are being asked on www.birds-eye-view.co.uk to upload their cinematic efforts onto the festival’s own YouTube channel to be edited.

LIVE EDIT

On Sunday March 9th, between 12noon and 5pm, celebrated artist and film director Sarah Turner (see also her feature screening of Ecology at the festival) and sound designer Annabelle Pangborn will use the structure of a symphony to edit your work. Films submitted by women from around the world will be sampled into one fiery flick, LIVE in London, in the ICA bar, and later published on this website and on youtube.

DEADLINE

Films must be submitted by Sunday 2nd March.

UPLOAD

Once you’ve completed your phone-film please follow instructions (here) and upload it to www.youtube.com with the tag: OVERHEATED SYMPHONY, being sure to put your name and contact information in the descriptions box so that we can credit you and keep in touch.

Oleg Marakov Islands
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Mario Klingemann Flickeur
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Islands of Consciousness

The result of this fusion – Islands of Consciousness – is not a simple combination of the two concepts but a great advancement. Sound and Images enter a very close relationship in which the randomly arranged musical phrases are taking direct influence on the visual outcome. So when you look at this piece keep in mind that all the visuals are assembled in realtime using photos downloaded from Flickr.com. All the transitions and effects are entirely random and only happening on you screen. Other people will see a movie and hear a soundtrack that is totally different from yours.

The infinite soundtrack is built upon Oleg Marakov’s idea to run multiple mp3 players parallel in shuffle mode just like musicians playing different instruments. In this case the instruments are not only pianos or synths but also natural atmospheres and sound effects. Islands of Consciousness consists of four parallel layers: Layer one plays synth background pads, layer two is the piano track, layer three holds ambient atmospheres and layer four contains all kinds of different sounds and effects. Just like in a regular composition the sounds vary in length and in fidelity and a very important part is also the space in between the notes – the pauses of different duration.

After being raised in the cornfields of Indiana and brought up on Midwest house & techno (Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills, Derrick Carter, D-Wynn), in 1994 Troy moved to New York to study photography and blew the remainder of his cash on a pair of turntables. His flatmate was also the manager of Temple Records: an endless supply of quality tunes on hand from labels like Perlon.

Troy hooked up with Magda at the Detroit Music Festival in 2001, who in turn introduced him to Mark Houle six months later. An immediate chemistry developed between the three of them and although Magda was now in Berlin, Mark in Windsor and Troy in New York they started swapping music files over the net. By the time the Run Stop Restore project finally crystallised into their debut release in early 2003, Troy had already moved to Berlin.

The release of the Minimise to Maximise compilation in 2005 and the accompanying tour left a lasting impression on clubbers.
Minimalism lines developed for a dance floor allows him to work in between. The resulting hybrid sound exploits the fractal space between the beats and push out into the hearing dimension.

Troy is a strong advocate of cutting edge technology like Ableton Live, Final Scratch and sample tools like Cyloop. The ability to shift between these sound sources offers him spontaneous improvisation. The result is a montage of scratchy subliminal textures and grinding beats driven by dark funky acid bass riffs.

His new album is entitled Gone Astray released with Label M_nus , Catalog#: MINUS 52 CD
6 Aug 2007. Cover album and artwork design by Jason Patterson. Photography by Gibby Miller. Remix – Konrad Black (tracks: , Louderbach (tracks: 10). Vocals – Gibby Miller (tracks: 5, 10)

Troy Pierce - Turin
WHEN: nov 10 Troy Pierce in Italy
WHAT: Club to Club Festival
WHERE: Club to Club Festival

THE EXTRA EAR (OR AN EAR ON AN ARM)

What characterises all the projects and performances is the notion of the prosthetic. The prosthesis seen not as a sign of lack, but as a symptom of excess. Rather than replacing a missing or malfunctioning part of the body, these interfaces and devices augment or amplify the body’s form and functions. The THIRD HAND (technology attached), the STOMACH SCULPTURE (technology inserted) and EXOSKELETON (technology extending) are different approaches to prosthetic augmentation. The EXTRA EAR is a soft prosthesis, constructed not out of hard materials and technologies, but out of soft tissue and flexible cartilage. And disconnected from the face, the EAR ON AN ARM could be guided and pointed in different directions…

Constructing the Extra Ear involves a number of procedures, over approximately 8-10 months. Techniques from Cosmetic, Re-constructive and Orthopedic surgery are necessary. But the problem is that it goes beyond mere Cosmetic Surgery. It is not simply about the modifying or the adjusting of existing anatomical features (now sanctioned in our society), but rather what’s perceived as the more monstrous pursuit of constructing an additional feature that conjures up either some congenital defect, an extreme body modification or even perhaps a radical genetic intervention.

Imagine an ear that cannot hear but emits sounds. With an implanted sound chip and a proximity sensor it would speak to anyone who would get close to it. (Or if no-one got close it would whisper sweet nothings to the other ear anyway). Also, connected to a modem and a wearable computer it could broadcast RealAudio sounds to augment the local sounds that the actual ears hear. The EXTRA EAR becomes a kind of Internet antenna that telematically and acoustically scales up one of the body’s senses. But these functional possibilities are not what justifies or authenticates the project. It would be interesting even without any utilitarian use. Why construct an ear? The ear is a beautiful and complex structure. In acupuncture, the ear is the site for the stimulation of body organs. The ear not only hears, but is also the organ of balance. To have an extra ear points to more than mere visual and anatomical excess…

Images and Text Excerpts from http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/