tobias c. van Veen (curates Upgrade! Montréal), Trace Reddell and Jamie Allen performed and discussed their new audio works.

tobias poked his head into the aether of the airwaves to perform a short interpretation of AUTOSEVOCOM TACSAT and gave a taste of the as-yet unreleased audiowork FOIL. AUTOSEVOCOM TACSAT explores surveillance frequencies of encoded police channels against a backdrop of low-end sound composed from fragments of real and virtual war-torn landscapes. FOIL is a blend of urban recordings from a peaceful Western city with its modernist though unpeaceful counterpart in Beirut falls prey to explosive interventions in EA’s BattleField 2 online wargame, eventually detonating itself into the debris of alterity.

Trace performed his new live cinema work, “somaticosmos.” In the “somaticosmos,” cosmic dissonances intersect with bodily pulse and flow, situating human experience within a barometer of galactic conditions. Noisy space transmissions give way to lush and alien terrains, occasionally disrupted by streams of microscopic rhythms and staticky beats. The visual performance melds the techniques of live VJ projections and digital lumia with the cosmic cinema of Jordan Belson.

Jamie performed Circuit Music, a platform for improvisational audio circuit building using oscillators and amplifier components. During the performance, all audio is fed unprocessed (save a compressor) to a PA system (stereo), and a video feed of the minutia taking place at the circuit boards, via miniature camera, is relayed to a video mixer of various live and recorded footage – which is then projected for the audience.

Bios
tobias c. van Veen is doctoral candidate in Philosophy & Communication Studies at McGill University and a practitioner of the technology arts. He is contributing editor at FUSE [fusemagazine.org] and Concept Engineer at La Société des arts technologiques (SAT), where he curates Upgrade Montréal [upgrademtl.org]. Since 1993 he has disseminated work in sound, radio & net-art, performing and intervening with laptop and turntables, renegade soundsystems and interventions of inscription [controltochaos.ca]. His writing has been disseminated worldwide. He also mixes a mean absynthe martini.

Trace Reddell is a digital media artist and theorist exploring the interactions of multimedia production, networking technologies, media theory, literary criticism, space rock and ambient music, and the history of drug cultures. Over the past two years, Trace’s live cinema performances and video works have screened at over thirty international venues, and his net.art and audio projects have appeared regularly on the Web since 1999. Trace is Assistant Professor of Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver, and the graduate director of the M.A. in Digital Media Studies. He founded Denver’s first digital media festival, A:D:A:P:T, in Spring 2003 at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. He edits the “music/sound/noise” content at Electronic Book Review and is the producer of Alt-X Audio.

Jamie Allen makes interactive art and sound makers with his head and hands. He is interested in the facility technology gives people to distance themselves from traditional and hierarchical relationships to art and performance. His own work is about altering people’s impressions of technology and digital media – a starting point for work in design, music, performance and public art.

Related Links – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4vtSfT0gHw