ecopolis

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

For Stelarc it is no longer meaningful to see the body as a site for the psyche or the social, but rather as a structure to be monitored and modified – the body not as a subject but as an object – NOT AN OBJECT OF DESIRE BUT AS AN OBJECT FOR DESIGNING. As an object, the body can be amplified and accelerated, attaining planetary escape velocity. It becomes a post-evolutionary projectile, departing and diversifying in form and function.

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/

ALYCE SANTORO Sonic Fabricis durable and strikingly beautiful looking as well being audible. The fabric contains magnetic tape woven in the weaving process, when a tape head (the little thingy inside the a tape deck that touches the fabric) is ran over it, sounds are generated this is because the tape retains its magnetic quality through the weaving process. The Sonic Fabric was inspired by Tibetan prayer flags inscribed with wind-activated blessings and cassette tape used as tell-tails on sailing boats. Sonic Fabric has been sewn into handbags and used in silkscreen flags that generate ambient sounds and other music.

Prayer flags are colorful panels or rectangular cloths often found strung along mountain ridges and peaks in the Himalayas to bless the surrounding countryside. Unknown in other branches of Buddhism, prayer flags are believed to have originated with Bön, which predated Buddhism in Tibet. Traditionally they are woodblock-printed with texts and images. By hanging flags in high places the “Wind Horse” will carry the blessings depicted on the flags to all beings. As wind passes over the surface of the flags which are sensitive to the slightest movement of the wind, the air is purified and sanctified by the Mantras.

Mark Rothko, No. 301 [Red and Blue over Red], 1959 – Moca Permanent Collection

During a study trip in the United States in the 1950’s I frequented the lively artistic scene that met at the Cedar Bar in Manhattan, where one often ran into de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Stamos, Gottlieb and Lichtenstein. I had never met Rothko however, of whom I had heard a great deal following his exhibition entitled 15 Americans, curated by Dorothy Miller, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952.

(…….)

A mutual friend happened to arrange for me to visit the artist’s studio, which, if I remember correctly, was on West 53rd Street. When I looked at the enormous canvas that Rothko had “unrolled” from its support (a kind of wooden cylinder), it was like a “revelation”: the gleaming luminous colours that covered the vast surface and faded from yellow to orange to red, and the oils (this was prior to the period in which he worked with acrylic) which were applied to create a continuity without any sharply-defined edges, immediately won my admiration. There were none of Pollock’s tangles or dripping, none of de Kooning’s complex and distorted figuration (his famous Women series), but there was, in a certain sense, a “return” to pure painting but, at the same time, Rothko achieved absolute abstraction

(…….)

I immediately thought of Goethe’s well-known definition in his Farbenlehre, concerning the “sinnlichsittliche Natur der Farben” in painting that “aus der Farbe heaus” (which I referred to in a text of 1958). Namely the “ethical”, and hence sensorial, but also “moral” quality that makes colour the protagonist of an artistic creation that is not removed from the reality of the world, indeed, it is directly linked to one’s own “cenesthesis”, to one’s own inner self.

Fifty years have passed since then and in the meantime, Rothko – who was almost unknown in the late fifties – has been rightly recognised as one of the most representative artists of his generation (possibly the most representative, the least influenced by informal trends and the first signs of pop art, and the most faithful to painting in which chromatic intensity was the true aim of each work).

(…….)

It was the explosive “tonalism” of colour that struck me most clearly then(I later had a different reaction to the series in the Beyeler Collection). The fundamental distinction between “timbric” and “tonal” colour (noted by Herbert Read), was embodied to the full in these works by Rothko. In fact, the same tonal quality of colour was already evident in his series of “surreal” paintings (such as the famous Tiresias of 1944 or Rites of Lilith of 1945), which were still marked by a figurativeness, albeit very distorted and antinaturalistic.

(…….)

I believe that Rothko – apart from his exceptional ethical quality and his independence from pashion and trends – was one of the most individual and inspired personalities of the last century. This is yet further evidence of how, once again, it was the “ethical-aesthetic maturity” of Old Europe (which manifested as a pronounced Jewish-Russian sensibility in Rothko) that actually gave fruit to the major artistic currents of the twentieth century.

(…….)

Perhaps the diverse conditions in which the artist found himself and the existential problems he experienced during his last years were responsible for this undeniable chromatic metamorphosis: from brilliant reds, oranges and yellows, we witnessed a descent into hell with blue-green, grey and even black, when the sublime “cosmic” quality of his work had been suffocated and darkened by the rigours of everyday life.

Excerpts from : A Song without Words . . . An Encounter with Mark Rothko by Gillo Dorfles

curated by Oliver Wick

The works on display have been lent by leading international museums: Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Tate, London; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin; National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv.

Information : www.rothko.it, Email: rothko@arthemisia.it

Since 1995, Wollscheid has been working on the idea of a portable unit, the SOUND_BOX, able to monitor and record sounds from an environment, transform them according to a flexible compositional program and re-play them in real time, thus reworking sound in order to re-sound space.

SOUND_BOX was born with the conceptual intention of creating a sound void inside a non-delimited space, an intention which was technically unfeasible with current instruments; Wollscheid has therefore re-elaborated this idea into the construction of an object, capable of picking up and transform the actual sounds of an environment, generating a range of sounds stacked to the ones it receives and processes. The recent development of a new micro-IC has allowed the SOUND_BOX to be realized in a portable format, thus making it technically feasible according to the artist’s original idea. SOUND_BOX has been developed in collaboration with Dirk Witschke, who curated the C++ programming, and Thomas Baumgart, who conceived and designed the hardware.

SOUND_BOX is to raise people’s awareness of their environment, through the object’s influences on the space. Yesterday I met him in Rome, to do a little (audiovideo)interview where he briefly describes it:

Achim Wollscheid is a media artist whose work over the past 20 years has been at the forefront of experimental music. He has performed and presented installation projects internationally. His work in sound has led to an interest in the relation between sound, light and architectural space, which he pursues through public, interactive and electronic projects. He is a founding member of SELEKTION.

The first edition of the SOUND_BOX is now displayed in RAM – Rome until October 31st.

William Furlong (1944) belongs to the generation of British artists who developed a new concept of sculpture in the 1970’s and 80’s (Gilbert & George, Bruce McLean, Paul Richards etc.). Furlong’s special contribution has been in the area of “Sound Scuplture” and, with the founding of Audio Arts (together with Michael Archer) in 1973, he began a project of mapping the territory of contemporary art in a series of cassette editions.
Since its inception in 1972, Audio Arts has grown to become the world’s most comprehensive and coherently focused sound archive of artists’ voices as well as sound art but also contains documents of important exhibitions, symposia and festivals. The cassette-magazine has been in continuous and regular publication for thirty-five years, with over twenty-five volumes of four issues each.

A small part of the vast Audio Arts archive is currently showing at Tate Britain and for the first time in U.K until the 27th of August. Four hours of recorded clips of interviews with main artist from 1973 to 2006 can be accessed here online by clicking on…

Roma 16 October 2006. An interview with BILL FURLONG

Ilari Valbonesi: Audio art. Why recording?
William Furlong: It’s difficult to say why. Certainly natural curiosity moves you towards things. I bought my first recorder in the sixties before they got popular . A small “real to real”. Somehow I’ve always been fascinated by recording. Later I started thinking about “VOICE” and discourse. The seventies were the years of conceptual art with text adding value to the actual works. As an artist I was more interested in “discussion”, the idea of language and the people that already worked in conceptual fields in Great Britain. Soon I realised there weren’t magazines capable of reporting such material inspired by conversation, sounds and discussions. The evocative force of a voice is lost with the written word as it will only ever be a written voice. Audio tapes were already a radical form of communication but only for pre-recorded music. I asked myself if it would have been possible to create a spoken magazine. Recorded voice through a production of tapes to give out. The tape was also an economic form of production and distribution.

IV: Recording as a way to distance the textuality of “art and language”. And also from Andy Warhol’s “interview” as you produced recordings.
WF: I’m glad you mentioned him. Andy Warhol, whom I interviewed and met, understood immediately the importance of recording . He recorded everything and called his recorder “my wife” . I recorded a lot to. Personally I prefer the word “conversation”. Conversing is a very creative process; it allows you to get to know the world through the people you are talking with. Therefore if you talk to someone it’s as if you are making a portrait of them: You understand their roots. Human voice is very rich, stratified, ethnic, sensual. You can talk without telling what you are thinking and vice versa…I can hold back my thoughts. For the roman exhibition I’m presenting a work called “conversation piece”. Duchamp is an other artist that understood. They knew that the voice is an important instrument to understand and communicate. It took a long time to make people understand this simple concept. We still live in an era where everything has to be documented as a will, but in the tones of a voice there are many more things than in a written page.

IV: Every body has it’s sound … does it mean that sound is a body?
WF: t’s correct to say we resonate in different ways. There is a deep truth in a voice that inspires stories, values and differences. This is why I started using voice as artistic material. A voice brings the story to the present, where we come from , what we have done , what we will do … because as we are doing this interview we are thinking of other things . voice is an expression of an entire identity. As for Joseph Beuys , voice is an “organic sculpture”.

IV: Is voice a deep material?
WF: Trough voice resonates thoughts and ideologies we carry with us .”Audio Arts” started simply as a reflection on voice as a stratified material . It started by chance, and now shows a intricate coherence . I started to use voices to unveil a complex space .

IV: How was the English audience response to audio arts in those years?
WF: The intellectual stream of “art and language” was spreading in Great Britain. But only a restricted group of art critics had understood its importance : Peter Townsend of Studio International Magazine, recently missing , the critic Caroline Tisdall, Richard Cork, or art dealers like Jack Wender and Richard Hamilton . few had understood and thought it was an important project . Acute people counting Lawrence Weiner with whom I did some recording projects in the late seventies.

IV: What type of exhibitions did you do in these years?
WF: I’m an artist with a classic and visual background. Not an “editor”. Therefore I’ve done some exhibitions where I presented my recordings , voices and combined works. The archive is a public art form. Dan Graham also has an archive. I’ve never seen the difference between an “audio arts” archive and a personal one. I don’t divide the practices . The space for “audio arts” is the same one of listening. Therefore I like the idea that sending a tape to Australia it may end up in a bedroom a museum a gallery . Sound acts on the space and needs space to be heard. To hear it’s self .

IV: Have you ever used radio as a medium ?
WF: This further extends the concept of audio as sound has no barriers it can be diffused by a small radio or an auditorium. I broadcasted in Vienna. With radio I’ve presented many of my works with sound. Interviews with artists as well as interviews with people on the street. It’s important to remember that my job is recording contemporary events , recording reality . I don’t enjoy manipulating sound , it’s identity , I’d call this recording Roma 16 October 2006, sound art museum , for ever.

IV: “Recording reality”. With a recording do you produce reality or listen to it ?
WF: A recording starts by listening to it, then I reproduce it to turn it into art.

IV: Does this imply there are different ways to listen?
WF: I’ll give you an example: when I record a conversation , I listen to it many times – when I first listen – I don’t hear everything. The human ear selects whilst the recorder holds all. Therefore listening more times is interesting because within a conversation, whilst you are talking you can only hear it once. This is the reason that I insert silence in a recording. This giving the opportunity to re listen to a conversation otherwise continuous . and it allows to produce a conversation as a “sound object”.

IV: What is the difference between a conversation on the street and with an artist ?
WF: When I conduct an interview on the street I’m interested in building a particular image, of a group of people and the atmosphere surrounding. The construction of a place and a space and those inhabiting it. That’s why I don’t ask complex questions : where are you going? where are you coming from? what do you like to eat? what are you doing tonight? and I receive answers . The voices transmit their emotional state , where they come from , their worries, their passions. Simple questions that give you a lot of material . On the other hand when I interview an artist it’s to go in depth on a study. Two are the directions of my studies . Recording is the common denominator …

“conservation pieces” is a work including recordings . Sections of conversations with Marchel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, John Cage e Andy Wahrol, edited to recreate a single conversation. I like making impossible things happen . Unpredictable . Cage wants unpredictability . A conversation is unpredictable . Duchamp talking to Beuys … it makes sense because you start believing it. There is another “pieces” where I work with sound in space entitled “what are you doing in taping?” It’s a sequence recorded in Dublin whist some kids sell newspapers on the street . A kid turns round and asks me “what” I was recording as if I was committing an appropriation : are you observing me…

IV: There is therefore a communication between time and different spaces.
WF: It refers to belief , listening is believing. a perceptive faith.

IV: Audioarts Is A Social Organism?
WF: It’s a social sculpture . That’s how the art critic Mel Gooding described theoretically this involvement of different people as a part of a sound sculpture which embodies the people I meet. An Organism which becomes a corporation of sounds.

°the italian translation of this interview was published on Teknemedia

credit photo: Paula Court

Played back on a 5.1 surround sound system, Steven Vitiello Night Chatter is multi-channel work composed of an analog synth track that rumbles under natural sounds recorded in the James River State Park and Cypress Bridge Forest, both in Virginia. The piece plays with the abstraction of night voices of animals as the artist states: “When I’m out in the field at night recording, there is a feeling of chatter, insect and animal voices that are communicating outside of my translation skills.”

“I try to make people think about their surroundings with my work, to slow them down”. And last month he staged – in the heart of London at Broadgate Arena – an environment of sound built on field recordings of bird and moth wings from locations including the Amazon, upstate New York and Virginia.

Stereo composite mix of Smallest of Wings (excerpt) as presented at Broadgate Arena, London, May 2007 (4.5 mb) and stereo mix of Night Chatter, installation at the Weatherspoon Museum, 2007 (9.1 mb)
at stephenvitiello.com

Vitiello is also interested in connecting sound experience to the concepts of surveillance and chatter, a term which, since 9-11, often refers to communications picked up by U.S. government surveillance to track potential terrorist threats.

Plato, Phaedrus

>[258e] You ask if we want to question them? What else should one live for, so to speak, but for such pleasures? Certainly not for those which cannot be enjoyed without previous pain, which is the case with nearly all bodily pleasures and causes them to be justly called slavish.

Socrates

We have plenty of time, apparently; and besides, the locusts seem to be looking down upon us as they sing and talk with each other in the heat.

[259b] perhaps they will be pleased and give us the gift which the gods bestowed on them to give to men.

Phaedrus

What is this gift? I don’t seem to have heard of it.

Socrates

It is quite improper for a lover of the Muses never to have heard of such things. The story goes that these locusts were once men, before the birth of the Muses, and when the Muses were born and song appeared, some of the men were so overcome with delight

[259c] that they sang and sang, forgetting food and drink, until at last unconsciously they died. From them the locust tribe afterwards arose, and they have this gift from the Muses, that from the time of their birth they need no sustenance, but sing continually, without food or drink, until they die, when they go to the Muses and report who honors each of them on earth. They tell Terpsichore of those who have honored her in dances, and make them dearer to her;

[259d] they gain the favor of Erato for the poets of love, and that of the other Muses for their votaries, according to their various ways of honoring them; and to Calliope, the eldest of the Muses, and to Urania who is next to her, they make report of those who pass their lives in philosophy and who worship these Muses who are most concerned with heaven and with thought divine and human and whose music is the sweetest. So for many reasons we ought to talk and not sleep in the noontime.

Phaedrus

Yes, we ought to talk.

American Minimal Music, or “repetitive music,” frequently refers to the compositions of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who all began their careers in the early 1960s. Minimal music focuses on the audible transformation of small musical phrases through repetition and the execution of processes determined by the composer.
All Minimal music lacks narrative structure. The music discards traditional harmonic schemes of tension and relaxation, and formal structures of cause and effect. Minimal music is inherently performative. It is about the process of experiencing sounds as they transform in the moment. Thus, the listener must discard regular listening habits if one is to experience the ecstatic effect of the music.