Speakers for the home theater can get frighteningly expensive. The first time I saw speakers that sold for tens of thousands of dollars I figured there couldn’t be that much work put into the things. One of those crazy expensive sets of speakers was the Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus, which served as the inspiration for Alfonso de Rojas to build his own a few years back.
n-cha(n)t is an audio visual installation that allows participants to eavesdrop on or infiltrate the conversational patterns of a networked community of computers. Inspiration for the work came from a strong and somewhat inexplicable desire to hear a community of computers speaking together: chattering amongst themselves, musing, intoning chants. n-cha(n)t was exhibited as part of Prix Selection at Eyebeam Atelier.
Noisefields uses a Video Sequencer to switch between two video sources to create flickering effects in a self-reflexive interplay of visual input. The imagery presented refers to its detecting of electronic signals and does not carry any other information, except that the Colorizer is used for variation. The circular form introduces a simple division into an inner and an outer field of interrelated pulsation, so that on the whole, the "content" of this work is an audiovisual modulation of "video noise." This piece was exhibited at Eyebeam Atelier as part of the What Sound Does a Color Make? exhibition.
Wireless Imagination addresses perhaps the most conspicuous silence in contemporary theory and art criticism, the silence that surrounds the polyphonous histories of audio art. Composed of both original essays and several newly translated documents, this book provides a close audition to some of the most telling and soundful moments in the "deaf century," conceived and performed by such artists as Raymond Roussel, Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, John Cage, Hugo Ball, Kurt Weill, and William Burroughs.
From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage's silences and indeterminacies, to Paik's often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval.
Victoria Estok and Steve Lambert, Uncommon Ground. Photo: Christine A. Butler courtesy of Eyebeam.
Uncommon Ground is a sound installation created in collaboration by Steve Lambert and Victoria Estok. Using stethoscopes against a five by five foot planter box, people can hear the plants commentary, discussions, and inner thoughts – which are normally inaudible to human beings.
The plants are voiced by comedians and neighbors, including; Reggie Watts, James Bewley, Cathleen Carr, Maria Del Piano, Courtney Robinson, Jonathan Shahn, Steve Trevelise, Kenya Robinson, Stefanie Connell, Maya Connell, and Larry Bogad.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is ... a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. Requesters, the human beings that write these programs, are able to pose tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers ... can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester.via wikipedia
Crowded is an as-yet unreleased radio show/podcast that is made up of segments of audio recorded by Mechanical Turk workers. Each episode has a mechanism, such as:
New Media Collaborative was an artist group composed of students from the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex led by teaching artist Daniel Perlin in 2005. The work focused on an autobiographical recount using the everyday environment as context. The students collected sounds defining the boundaries and intersections of personal and collective experiences which were geo-tracked to their place of origin. The outcome of this educational initiative culminated in a work titled Sound and the City which was exhibited as part of Summer 2006 - New Work from Eyebeam's Studios.
