RHIZOME DIGEST: 10.11.02

discussion

Posted Oct. 10 2002 20:00

RHIZOME DIGEST: 10.11.02

RHIZOME DIGEST: October 11, 2002 Content: +note from rhizome HQ+ 1. Rachel Greene and Francis Hwang: Help! + Rhizome Rare Launch +announcement+ 2. Kim Machan: MAAP - online and in Beijing +opportunity+ 3. Mark Amerkia: Job Announcement - University of Colorado, Boulder 4. juha huuskonen: Nifca New Media AiR residency program +report+ 5. Wilfried Hou Je bek: ALGORITHMIC NOISE AS FREE CULTURE +comment+ 6. Ken Jordan, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid: Freeze Frame [Part 2] + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 1. Date: 10.11.02 From: Rachel Greene (rachel@rhizome.org) and Francis Hwang (francis@rhizome.org) Subject: Help! + Rhizome Rare Launch A somber note: this week Rhizome found out we didn't get a grant we were expecting, and suddenly have to move to a new office. We find ourselves in a state of emergency. Please help keep Rhizome alive, and contribute at any level you can. All donors are recognized for their support: $10 = an email address @rhizome.org; $25 = a Yael Kanarek mousepad; $50 = a Rhizome.org T-shirt (Cary Peppermint-designed), and $250 = a Rhizome.org laptop backpack. Help keep Rhizome afloat with secure online credit card contributions or donations via PayPal at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/support/?dig10_11">http://rhizome.org/support/?dig10_11</a> . You can also send a check or money order to Rhizome.org, 115 Mercer Street, New York NY 10012. Money orders can be in any currency. - Rachel Greene This week, we relaunched Rhizome Rare as a single email list. Rare consists of selections from the high-volume Rhizome Raw list, as chosen by our Superusers. Our intention is to offer another list option, one that is less chatty than the free-for-all Raw and more active than the once-a-week distillation of Digest. We expect the volume to be about 10-20 posts a week. Subscribe at: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz">http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz</a>. (The site may ask you to login before taking you to that page.) - Francis Hwang + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ ARTMEDIA VIII CO-SPONSORED BY LEONARDO/OLATS in PARIS http:://www.olats.org From "Aesthetics of Communication" to Net Art November 29th - December 2nd 2002 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2. Date: 10.4.02 From: Kim Machan (kim.machan@maap.org.au) Subject: MAAP - online and in Beijing For details on contacting MAAP or list maintanance see information at bottom of this email. sincere apologies for any cross posting: ********************************************* MAAP in Beijing (MAAP -Multimedia Art Asia Pacific) MAAP Festival will be held in Beijing Official Opening 20 October 21 Oct- 3 November. Our new web sites English/Chinese www.maap.org.au MAAP 2002 in Beijing will encompass a range of new media art exhibits, Online projects, screenings and lectures addressing issues of audience awareness and critical engagement with works by artists using technologies and screen based media. MAAP will present the festival in 3 core venues in Beijing. The Art Museum of China Millennium Monument, The Central Academy of Fine Arts, The Loft New Media Art Space. Since MAAP's inaugural festival in 1998 it has been based in Brisbane, Australia and Online supported by a mix of government, corporate and educational sectors. MAAP presents a rigorous annual festival program of new media art and technology that has included work from China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Philippines, New Zealand Vietnam and Australia. Highlighting the China-Australia 30th Anniversary of relations, the MAAP Festival is preparing to move to Beijing, leaping into the region to create a unique cultural event and exchange. Artists include Zhang Peili (China), Wang Gongxin (China), Zhu Jia (China), YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (Korea), Candy Factory (Japan), Patricia Piccinini (Australia), Shilpa Gupta (India), Jeffrey Shaw (Australia/Germany), Craig Walsh (Australia) and many more … Major new media installations and commissioned works developed for the 31 metre video wall driven by 56 programmable monitors at the Art Museum of China Millenium Monument. The Central Academy of Fine Arts is hosting a one month residency with Australian artist Justine Cooper who will prepare work for this big screen. Artists projects are delivered through CDR, DVD, digital video, screening programs and program events include lectures, symposium, artists talks and interactive social events! This year's MAAP Festival theme "MOIST", is an evocative adjective, suggestive of conditions relating to life; growth; humidity; humanity. These loaded references unleash imaginative poetic associations as wide as a fine foggy mist, a first kiss or a sweaty palm. Art meets technology in a mix of emotion and wires! MAAP in Beijing has been collaboratively achieved with the generous support and advice of our partners; The China International Exhibitions Agency, The Gohua Group, The Art Museum of China Millennium Monument, The Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, the Australian Embassy in Beijing, The Loft New Media Art Space. MAAP in Beijing is assisted and supported by The Australia Council, Arts Qld, Macromedia, The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, The Australian Film Commission, Apple, e-translate, Brisbane City Council, QUT Creative Industries, Griffith University, Media Hotel, Beijing, Singapore Airlines. Program support from fineArtforum, Rhizome, ANAT, Experimenta, dLux, The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Art Center Nabi, Videotage, ISEA to unsub send an email with the word "unsub" [without the quotation marks] as the first word in the body of the email to contact MAAP email info@maap.org.au to talk to a human being about any concerns or difficulties with this list email jeff@dadaentry.net + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ Metamute is now running a specially commissioned article a week. In the last 3 weeks, we've published Ben Watson's in-depth review of The Philistine Controversy, Eugene Thacker's analysis of the state-endorsed biotech 'debate', and James Flint's urbanist reading of Glastonbury and Sonar festivals. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.metamute.com">http://www.metamute.com</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 3. Date: 10.8.02 From: Mark Amerkia (Mark.Amerika@Colorado.EDU) Subject: Job announcement - University of Colorado, Boulder The Department of Fine Arts at the University of Colorado, Boulder, seeks a full-time, tenure-track Assistant Professor in Digital Art to begin in August 2003. The successful applicant will help us strengthen a developing curriculum in digital art as part of an ethnically diverse, interdisciplinary art and art history program. Minimum requirements for all applicants include: MFA or equivalent degree; evidence of active artistic practice in the digital arts; and two years of teaching experience at the university level. Application materials should consist of a letter of application, curriculum vitae, names and contact information for three references, artist's statement, examples of work (CD, zip disk, URL), statement of teaching philosophy and commitment to multi-cultural pedagogy, and examples of student work. Salary commensurate with experience. Send materials to Mark Amerika, Search Committee Chair, University of Colorado Department of Fine Arts, UCB 318, Boulder, CO 80309-0318. Review of applications will begin January 15, 2003, and continue until the position is filled. Representatives from the Search Committee will be present at the CAA conference in New York. The University of Colorado at Boulder is committed to diversity and equality in education and employment. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 4. Date: 10.6.02 From: juha huuskonen (juhuu@juhuu.nu) Subject: Nifca New Media AiR residency program NIFCA - Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art introduces NEW MEDIA AiR, a residency program dedicated for new media artists. Themes for the residency program are: 1. Software art and software tools for artists - Art projects implemented as software, or art projects that have an essential software component - Projects dealing with the concept of software - Creative tools for artists 2. Sound/audiovisual performances and installations - New media art that manifests itself as a performance, event or installation and extends beyond the screen. – Following residencies are available for 2003 in Nordic/Baltic region: Estonia : Tallinn - E-Media Centre + Artists' Union Finland : Helsinki - Sibelius Academy CM&T + NIFCA Latvia : Riga - RIXC + Artists' Union Norway : Bergen - BEK + Hordaland Kunstsenter Sweden : Stockholm - Splintermind + Studio House Malongen and Gothenburg - Nätverkstan + Konstepidemin Russia : St. Petersburg - PRO ARTE Institute Nifca has also established an artist residency exchange program with following countries/organisations: Canada : Montreal - SAT Great Britain : Huddersfield - The Media Centre Portugal : Lisbon - ZDB – Artists from Nordic region (and from Estonia, Latvia and Russia) are eligible to apply for all the residencies. Artists from the residency exchange countries (Canada, Great Britain, Portugal) can apply to the residencies in Nordic/Baltic region. THE DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS IS 15 NOVEMBER 2002!!!! The application form and more information is available at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.nifca.org/new-media-air">http://www.nifca.org/new-media-air</a> The selections will be made before the end of November 2002 by an international panel: Atle Barcley (Atelier Nord, Norway), Alain Mongeau (MUTEK, Canada), Casey Reas (Interaction Design Institute IVREA, Italy), Olle Huge (Beeoff, Sweden). New Media AiR is a NIFCA program designed by Juha Huuskonen. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 5. Date: 10.7.02 From: Wilfried Hou Je bek (wilfriedhoujebek@yahoo.com) Subject: ALGORITHMIC NOISE AS FREE CULTURE The Hot Summer of Generative Psychogeography 2002 [as experienced by <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.socialfiction.org">http://www.socialfiction.org</a> ] On a Sunday afternoon like many others in a small Dutch university city a small group of people who might, or might not be, acquainted to each other gather, only to immediately disperse in their own separate ways as guided by an algorithm. In theory this walk might never run into an obstacle that forces the pedestrian to stop meandering. In reality cities should be redesigned from scratch & people should be made flawless by genetic modification to reach the situation where the human compliance to the complexities of an algorithm as a psychogeographical device is perfect. Participation in a generative psychogeographical experiment forces you to adopt to the characteristics of a machine, you are pushed through streets like an object in almost closed loops which are connected by sudden rushes straight forward. There is a sense of alienation involved in navigating in this manner but that feeling is never realized completely: the algorithm which should be able to produce a walk without navigational friction repeatedly produces more confusion than certainty: the algorithm becomes chaos. In this sense a generative psychogeographical experiment must always fail, it's not pixel clean movement, it isn't a Flash animation come to flesh, its dirty, it's algorithmic noise & we love it. generative psychogeography is a pleasant state of displacement: it's the city-space cut-up. The technology will find uses for the street on it's own. In the summer of 2001 socialfiction.org performed the first experiment in algorithmic pedestrian culture as a new methodology in psychogeographical action research into all aspects of the urban condition. The initial results were powerful & suggested such a large field of possible research that we declared our algorithm to be 'open source'. To make clear that we were serious we announced the Hot Summer of Generative Psychogeography 2002 as the umbrella under which hundreds of psychogeographical swarms could operate, interact & in general make it more fun/worthwhile/surprising etc. Because we worked with an algorithm it seemed reasonable to borrow the concept of 'open source' from software development. To open something implies that it was closed beforehand, in our case the code was (literally) on the street from the start. But because the idea of people spontaneously cooperating on the same thing is such a powerful way of development, as it helps you to overcome the limits of your own skills & imagination, we adopted the term anyway. There is also a more philosophical implication involved in open source that goes beyond the scope of the collaboration of Linux geeks programming Bill Gates out of relevance. Open source has become a key value in the much larger issue of creative & educational freedom which are part of a free society. Stanford's Lawrence Lessig 'refrain' captures the political implications of open source best: 1)Creativity and innovation always built on the past . 2) The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. 3) Free societies enable the future by limiting the power of the past. 4) Ours is less and less a free society. Open source is necessary, progress implies it. Open source & psychogeography were connected from the start. Open source activists claim that every act of creativity should enter the public domain. Psychogeography has always been about open sourcing the city, to make all parts, all spaces, of the city available to everybody, to overcome your own habits imposed by social reality, to negate stratification. Practising psychogeography always implies the right of unrestrained mobility, of creating a public domain out of otherwise lost urban area's. The protection of the past from present day creativity does not need to be specifically enforced by legal actions like the ones the music business employs to crack down on sampling, P2P networks & bootleg culture. The prohibition of reinterpreting the past might also happen on the level of symbolic power. The situationists, well known for their scorn for everybody who didn't think exactly as they did, were the greatest enemies of the further development of psychogeography because of their dogmatism, the same dogmatism their legacy is defended with today by some obscurantist zealots: just like a musician can be inspired by Gary Glitter without borrowing anything from his style the post-freudian, post-surrealist psychogeography of the situationists has been glamrocked into oblivion by the international network of psychogeographers that emerged out of the Hot Summer. The goal of the Hot Summer was to generate creativity by being creative. We didn't want to protect our creativity for those unworthy like the situationists did, we want it to spread & we want it to be stolen because it proves to us that it's worthwhile. Anybody who steals our ideas inspires us to create something new that people want to steal as well. But stealing is the wrong word here, it was already yours to begin with. After the Hot Summer The Hot Summer has turned into a lukewarm autumn. Great experiments have been undertaken in several places, enthusiast people have taken the idea to new places & new conceptual grounds. Interesting discussions have enfolded on the mailinglist. New collaborators & new friendship have been made. This not a detailed list of what has happened in the Hot Summer, if anything this is a manifesto of the larger ideas behind a network of people dedicated to exploring their environment & the possibilities of algorithms in non-computational ways. The summer is over but the project endures, the network is still active & the invitation is still open: Wherever you are & whoever you are: have a look at all the different sites, join in on the further development of generative psychogeography, take these ideas as the jumping board for your own activities. Be creative. Countless people were important for the Hot Summer, let us conclude with a random 'shouts to' list as if socialfiction.org is a member of the Wu-Tang Clan: Christina Ray of Glowlab for all here shuffles & viruses, Ivan Pope peripatetic superstar, Evol for the quantum psychogeography, Antonio C. Pinto for his La Derive by Numbers, Nicholas Grindell for his Kleist story & Berlin experiment, Jeremy Wood for the GPS drawings, Kate Armstrong for the Vancouver airplane experience, Graeme of Monocular Times, the Urban Festival in Zagreb for the opportunity, Tara for the disco socialist server, the Dead Poets, Jeanne van Heeswijk for the Witte de With exploit, Petr Kazil for his talks & enthusiasm, Sandra Hou Je Bek, Conway for the game, the internet, the AAA which taught us all our tricks, yahoo (so long as they keep it free), generative artists everywhere, open source activists, William Burroughs for everything, John Cage, the music{Jungle, 2 step, UK garage, Warp, Reich}, all road menders, everybody on the mailinglist, everybody who has responded or has contributed even the smallest bit to the project, everybody who participated in an experiment, you know who you are. Cheers, Social Fiction October 2002 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 6. Date: 10.1.02 From: Ken Jordan (ken@kenjordan.tv) Subject: Freeze Frame [Part 2] [Editors Note: The entire essay was written by Jordan and Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid for the "virtual music" issue of New Music Box (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.newmusicbox.org">http://www.newmusicbox.org</a>)] Freeze Frame: Audio, Aesthetics, Sampling, and Contemporary Multimedia by Ken Jordan and Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid 2. Composing With Software When the software conditions the experience, it conditions the music. One thing that many people notice when they start making music online is that the Web is a powerful vortex; it doesn't let you go. There is no single way to end a session; rather, there are many ways. There are bootlegs of everything that has ever made it onto the Net. Multiplicity is an unwavering factor in the online experience. Look at sites like Afternapster.com. You will find hundreds of peer-to-peer networks, each of which is the private preserve of a file sharing community. These can be seen as the operational mode of a culture of distributed networks, held together by a common thread: each represents a particular taste as distributed through the system. As Artaud said (in an incredible pre-cognition of the digital era's constant stream of information guiding any creative act): "All true alchemists know that the alchemical symbol is a mirage as the theater is a mirage… [It's] the expression of an identity existing between the world in which the characters, objects, images, and in a general way all that constitutes the virtual reality of the theater develops…" In a way, collaborative music making on the Net requires an interaction of people and software that turns almost all normal contact between musicians into a mediated experiment with the hypothetical. Is there a human on the other side of the screen? The sounds can only give you a hint. The software is a window onto a realm governed only by the uncertainty of that fact. The connections displace physicality in a way that leaves you a victim of context. This is the experience of tele-composing. It makes the creative act become a cog in the abstract machines of the software that mediate it. Using online studio software, such as Rocket, Pro Tools, or Reason, allows you to mix equally with either musicians or found sounds. Through the software interface, there is a certain equivalency. Collaboration can take place in real time between people, or between the remnants of creativity that people leave behind – the Net is full of such suggestive debris. In this context, the only limitation comes from the bottleneck that bandwidth places on file exchanges. The quicker the speed, the richer the environment. Another effect of software is to dematerialize the musical instrument. It does this by distributing the qualities of an instrument across the various peripherals that control the sounds that the software generates. Algorithm displaces rhythm and becomes the environment in which to create. MAX/MSP is an open ended software environment that lets you create templates for virtual instruments – it allows you to make an aggregate of whatever sounds you run through its parameters. Almost all process oriented software behaves like this. Editing environments such as Pro Tools or Digital Performer function as dissecting tables of sound; they allow the musician to compose material from multiple layers of tracks and files, and to then condition the total output. It's like building music out of Lego blocks. That is, either Lego blocks or samples. Online, everything is a sample. Every audio element becomes a potential fragment for manipulation and recontextualization. Sampling follows the logic of the abstract machinery of a culture where there are no bodies - just simulations of bodies. The fragment speaks for the whole; the whole is only a single track drifting through a vast database. The basic structure of "assemblage," the method of collage, holds sway here. Think of this terrain as object-oriented programming with beats. Take the file, edit it: import/export/MIDI/SMTP. Time code synchronizes the fragments, and makes it work wherever you are… FTP controls the data exchange as a basic source of file exchange… Lee Perry popularized the term "versioning" by using a series of vocal tracks that were taken out of context and de-familiarized through sound effects programming. This can be done either as a live process or improvised on a virtual "mixing board." Software that allows real time online jamming is appearing from every corner of the globe. But is your online collaborator a person or a bot? Or a combination of the two? On the Web, collaborators can come in all guises. The White Stripes have no bass player. Steve McDonald, the bass player for Red Kross, felt that the White Stripes tunes could use more bottom. So each week he adds a bass guitar part to one or two White Stripes songs, and makes them available as "bootleg" MP3s. Jack White, the White Stripes' front man, has apparently given these remixes his blessing. 3. Interacting With Intelligent Networks Once, every sound had a distinct source. A door slammed shut, a horn was blown, a guitar string was strummed. Audio came from a discrete event, it was tied to a discernable action. Networked music challenges this notion by displacing sound from its origin, moving audio freely from one location to another, giving it a presence in and of itself. John Cage brought this quality into modern music with his 1939 piece, Imaginary Landscape. A performance that combined turntables and radio broadcasts, this work introduced networked interactivity into music making. Cage mixed into his performance various transmissions that came over the airwaves, and with them created an entirely new composition. Sound separated from its source in this manner becomes a "free floating signifier," to borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes. The musical elements are liberated from a specific time and place, allowing them to be recontextualized in the final composition. Robert Rauschenberg pursued something similar in the mid-1960s with his interactive, sound-emitting sculpture, Oracle. Rauschenberg's collaborator on the project, Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver, described Oracle as "a sound environment made up of five AM radios, where the sounds from each radio emanates from one of the five sculptures. The viewer can play the sculpture as an orchestra from the controls on one of the pieces, by varying the volume and the rate of scanning through the frequency band. But they can not stop the scanning at any given station. The impression was that of walking down the Lower East Side on a summer evening and hearing the radios from open windows of the apartment buildings." By the early 1970s, as the technology became more accessible, more artists began to explore the potential of networked media – both audio and video – to create unique forms of interactive expression. These artworks grew from the notion that meaning would emerge from media as it circulates freely within a network – and that meaning can be enhanced through strategic interventions by the artist or audience. Douglas Davis' 1971 performance, Electronic Hokkadim, produced at the Corcoran Gallery, was based on the interactions between telephone callers and broadcast television. Nam June Paik pursued what he referred to as a "cybernated art," based on the transmission of information through video and audio networks. Paik's 1973 television broadcast, Global Groove, stands as a landmark event in this trajectory. Fragments of performances by artists of various traditions – Western and Eastern, popular and elitist, traditional and modern – were strung together in a frenetic, continuous flow across the screen. Paik himself "performed" the broadcast as a live mix, choosing his streams as a DJ does today, manipulating images through a video synthesizer, using rhythm as the underlying principle of composition. Enabling and manipulating the continuous flow of information was a principal concern behind the design of the networked personal computer. But before the mid-1980s, bandwidth constraints and limited processing power made the use of these tools prohibitively expensive for artists. However, it was long apparent to the pioneers of networked media – such as Davis, Paik, and Roy Ascott – that their artistic explorations with satellites and local wired networks would lead to computer-based work, once the technology had caught up to their vision. Among the earliest musicians to dedicate themselves to the potential of networked computing were The Hub, perhaps the world's first "computer network band," which was founded at Mills College in 1985. One of the members describes their method as follows: "Six individual composer/performers connect separate computer-controlled music synthesizers into a network. Individual composers design pieces for the network, in most cases just specifying the nature of the data which is to be exchanged between players in the piece, but leaving implementation details to the individual players, and leaving the actual sequence of music to the emergent behavior of the network. Each player writes a computer program which make musical decisions in keeping with the character of the piece, in response to messages from the other computers in the network and control actions of the player himself. The result is a kind of enhanced improvisation, wherein players and computers share the responsibility for the music's evolution, with no one able to determine the exact outcome, but everyone having influence in setting the direction. The Javanese think of their gamelan orchestras as being one musical instrument with many parts; this is probably also a good way to think of The Hub ensemble, with all its many computers and synthesizers interconnected to form one complex musical instrument. In essence, each piece is a reconfiguration of this network into a new instrument." Implicit in this approach is the idea that, within the network, a kind of intelligence is in circulation. David Wessel, at the University of California at Berkeley, has been working with his colleagues along these lines since the late 1980s, bringing together the fields of computer music and neural networks. Could an instrument become intelligent, and adapt to in an automated manner to a musician's playing style? Could it learn the preferences of a particular musician, and modify itself in response to what it learns? Using the MAX programming environment, Wessel began to experiment with musicians in a network context. "We have obtained reliable recognition of complex guitar strumming gestures and limited numbers of spatial gestures," he wrote. "With such procedures and much more research, we might conceivably move towards adaptive, personalizable instruments…. one will have to decide when to standardize or fix the instrument and let the musician learn the appropriate gesture and when to let the instrument adapt to the specialized approach of a player. How to rig the training harnesses on ourselves as players and on our instruments as expressively responsive musical tools will be a question of scientific, aesthetic, and social concern." Once meaningful information is circulating within a computer network, the opportunity emerges for a relevant interaction. As Wessel suggests, networked computer tools will lead musicians into making choices about aspects of their performance that had previously never had to be asked, such as: how "smart" do I want my instrument to be? The notion that music can emerge from an intelligent, interactive environment has drawn some composers to compositional forms that would be inconceivable without telecommunications technology. One example is Atau Tanaka's 1998 installation, Global String. The work consists of a physical string, 15 meters long, that stretches from a floor diagonally to the ceiling of a room. At the ceiling, the string is connected to the Internet. "It is a musical instrument wherein the network is the resonating body of the instrument through the use of a real-time sound-synthesis server," writes Tanaka. "The concept is to create a musical string (like the string of a guitar or violin) that spans the world. Its resonance circles the globe, allowing musical communication and collaboration among the people at each connected site." Ping, a site-specific sound installation by Chris Chafe and Greg Niemeyer, takes a similar approach. Ping has been described as "a sonic adaptation of a network tool commonly used for timing data transmission over the Internet. As installed in the outdoor atrium of SFMOMA," for the millennial exhibition 010101, "Ping functions as a sonar-like detector whose echoes sound out the paths traversed by data flowing on the Internet. At any given moment, several sites are concurrently active, and the tones that are heard in Ping make audible the time lag that occurs while moving information from one site to another between networked computers." In effect, Ping makes music out of the data flow of the Net – the constant motion of digitized fragments in real time is given an aesthetic form. The composer and theorist Randall Packer has explored this line of telematic composition in a number of pioneering collaborative installations. For Mori, an "Internet based earthwork" first mounted in 1999 by Packer with Ken Goldberg, Wojciech Matusik, and Gregory Kuhn, the trembling movements of California's Hayward Fault are picked up by a seismograph, converted into digital signals, and sent over the Internet to the installation. This data stream triggers a series of low frequency sounds that vibrate through the installation, viscerally connecting the visitor to the moment-by-moment fluctuations of the earth's actual movement. In what he has referred to as "artistic research projects," Packer has further explored the possibilities of interactive, telematic musical works. One such installation, Telemusic, was staged by Packer and his collaborators Steve Bradley and John P. Young at the Sonic Circuits VIII International Festival of Electronic Music and Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota, in November, 2000. Telemusic brought together live performers, audio processing of their performances, and real time participation from the public through a Web site, www.telemusic.org. As the performers read from a script, their delivery was effected by audio processing triggered by the mouse clicks of visitors to the Web site. The final mix in the room was then streamed to the Web site, so a visitor could hear the final musical composition that she had contributed to by clicking a mouse. In order to create this direct form of interactivity, Packer's team had to develop an interface between impulses captured over the Internet and a server hosting MAX software. This circular experience, in which listener is also a participant in the making of a musical work, is indicative of the direction where the Internet is suggesting that music should go – as the distinction between "artist" and "audience" begins to slip away, and we find ourselves dipping into the data flow, listening to the music that it makes, and that we make with it. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization. If you value this free publication, please consider making a contribution within your means at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/support">http://rhizome.org/support</a>. Checks and money orders may be sent to Rhizome.org, 115 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law and are gratefully acknowledged at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/10.php">http://rhizome.org/info/10.php</a>. Our financial statement is available upon request. Rhizome Digest is supported by grants from The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome Digest is filtered by Rachel Greene (rachel@rhizome.org). ISSN: 1525-9110. Volume 7, number 41. Article submissions to list@rhizome.org are encouraged. Submissions should relate to the theme of new media art and be less than 1500 words. For information on advertising in Rhizome Digest, please contact info@rhizome.org. To unsubscribe from this list, visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/subscribe">http://rhizome.org/subscribe</a>. Subscribers to Rhizome Digest are subject to the terms set out in the Member Agreement available online at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/29.php">http://rhizome.org/info/29.php</a>. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +