Wearable Sound Tech:
Sonic Fabric, Sonic Dresses, NYC Dorkbot
Sampling, copyright and collage, these are the research fields of the Copyright Criminals: this is a sampling sport documentary, conceived as a work in progress, and shot by Benjamin Franzen, a Changing Image video-journalist, and Kembrew Mcleod, researcher in Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. They made more than fifty different interviews with musicians, artists, and people form the worldwide recording industry, trying to give a detailed picture of the sampling practice. What is described is the state of the art of it and its current discourse, actually in the eye of the storm, because of the flamming controversies carried on with copyright laws strokes. Thanks to that during recent years some of the most interesting works have been composed in the international music survey. The voices mostly belong to hip hop representatives, a historical sampling mainstay, and promote the creative sound transformations opposed to the slavish copy, claiming the right to use the freedom of expression. The clearly underline the actual legal restrictions as a mere economical interests protection tool, as well as a blind interpretation of the phenomenon. As a matter of fact if it's evident that "it's absurd pay for a James Brown's 'yeah'", as states Public Enemy's Harry Allen, the new imperative must be to research what does it mean to be creative in the digital era, when sometimes the mere technical reproducibility is disguised as a work of art.
// download
Erik Satie was possibly the most eccentric, innovative, and influential composer of the early 20th century. Of all his interesting works, two are of special interest here:
Musique d'Ameublement is often said to be the first piece of ambient music. Its first performance was given 1920 at a picture exhibition. The furnishing music, played on a piano, three clarinets, and a trombone, was performed in the gallery while people were looking at pictures.
"We beg you to take no notice of it and to behave (...) as if the music did not exist. This music ... claims to make its contribution to life in the same way as a private conversation, a picture, or the chair on which you may or may not be seated ..."
Vexations for piano was a forefather of Minimal music. The piece (embedded in Satie's Pages Mystiques) consists of two lines of chromatic, diminished triads. The resulting melody has to be played slowly and takes a minute or two to play. What makes it radical minimalist music is the performance instruction to play it 840 times which can easily result in a performance time of 24 hours. The first performance of Vexations which took the instruction seriously was given in 1963 by John Cage who had discovered the piece in Satie's heritage several years earlier.
Looper's Delight is a cultural and informational resource for musicians creating with audio loops of every sort. Loop based music essentially involves the repetition of audio samples, or loops. From that basic premise looping moves off in numerous directions, encompassing a wide range of techniques for building, manipulating, and using loops. The technique crosses many musical boundaries and appears in a wide range of musical styles and genres.
This reader collects the texts, videos, and computer programs--many of them now almost impossible to find--that chronicle the history and form the foundation of the still-emerging field of new media. General introductions by Janet Murray and Lev Manovich, along with short introductions to each of the texts, place the works in their historical context and explain their significance. The texts were originally published between World War II--when digital computing, cybernetic feedback, and early notions of hypertext and the Internet first appeared--and the emergence of the World Wide Web--when they entered the mainstream of public life.
The texts are by computer scientists, artists, architects, literary writers, interface designers, cultural critics, and individuals working across disciplines. The contributors include (chronologically) Jorge Luis Borges, Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Ivan Sutherland, William S. Burroughs, Ted Nelson, Italo Calvino, Marshall McLuhan, Billy Kl?Jean Baudrillard, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Bill Viola, Sherry Turkle, Richard Stallman, Brenda Laurel, Langdon Winner, Robert Coover, and Tim Berners-Lee. The CD accompanying the book contains examples of early games, digital art, independent literary efforts, software created at universities, and home-computer commercial software. Also on the CD is digitized video, documenting new media programs and artwork for which no operational version exists. One example is a video record of Douglas Engelbart's first presentation of the mouse, word processor, hyperlink, computer-supported cooperative work, video conferencing, and the dividing up of the screen we now call non-overlapping windows; another is documentation of Lynn Hershman's Lorna, the first interactive video art installation.
// newmediareader.com
The Drumtar is a wearable MIDI drum machine. It is a project that I began as part of the Despina Papadopolous' Wearable Technology class at ITP. It has four pads that trigger drum sounds, or any sound for that matter, on a MIDI enabled device. It was designed to be a portable performance instrument and musical composition tool.
From EverQuest to World of Warcraft, online games have evolved from the exclusive domain of computer geeks into an extraordinarily lucrative staple of the entertainment industry. People of all ages and from all walks of life now spend thousands of hours—and dollars—partaking in this popular new brand of escapism. But the line between fantasy and reality is starting to blur. Players have created virtual societies with governments and economies of their own whose currencies now trade against the dollar on eBay at rates higher than the yen. And the players who inhabit these synthetic worlds are starting to spend more time online than at their day jobs.
In Synthetic Worlds, Edward Castronova offers the first comprehensive look at the online game industry, exploring its implications for business and culture alike. He starts with the players, giving us a revealing look into the everyday lives of the gamers—outlining what they do in their synthetic worlds and why. He then describes the economies inside these worlds to show how they might dramatically affect real world financial systems, from potential disruptions of markets to new business horizons. Ultimately, he explores the long-term social consequences of online games: If players can inhabit worlds that are more alluring and gratifying than reality, then how can the real world ever compete? Will a day ever come when we spend more time in these synthetic worlds than in our own? Or even more startling, will a day ever come when such questions no longer sound alarmist but instead seem obsolete?
With more than five million active players worldwide—and with Microsoft and Sony pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into video game development—online games have become too big to ignore. Synthetic Worlds spearheads our efforts to come to terms with this virtual reality and its concrete effects.
TransPose is an audiovisual performance instrument whose interface encourages dramatic movement. It was conceived to address the absence of physical human expression found in most electronic music based performances.
In TransPose, the performer's silhouette is projected in front of them along with noteboxes, which produce a sound when touched. The performer can change between instruments and record loops that can be turned on or off to create layered compositions.
Welcome to the official homepage of Little Sound Dj, the Game Boy/Game Boy Color tool of choice for amateur & professional musicians and composers!
Once it was just Mods and Rockers or Hippies and Skinheads. Now we have Riot Grrls and Rappers; Modern Primitives and Metalheads; Goths, Clubcultures and Fetishists; Urban Tribes, New Age Travellers and Internet fan groups. In a global society with a rapid proliferation of images, fashions and lifestyles, it is -unsurprisingly - becoming increasingly difficult to pinpoint what 'subculture' actually means. Enthusiastically adopted by the media and academia, 'subculture' may be a convenient way to describe more unconventional aspects of youth culture, but it does little to help us comprehend the diverse range of youth groups in today's so-called 'postmodern' world. How can we begin to rethink, reformulate and replace outdated notions of 'subcultures' to make them applicable to the experiences of youth in the twenty-first century? And to what extent does this involve the challenging of past orthodoxies about spectacular subcultural styles?
From Seattle anarchist punks to UK Asian underground music, Canadian female X-Files fans to Australian dance cultures, this groundbreaking book draws on a wide variety of international case studies to investigate the new relationships among youth subcultural music, politics and taste. Is it possible to work within the existing limitations of 'subculture', or has the concept exhausted its usefulness? Can attempts at re-conceptualization, such as neo-tribes, sub-streams and micro-networks, adequately capture the experience of fragmentation, flux and fluidity that is central to contemporary youth culture?
This timely book is the first to challenge and reconsider the use of 'subculture'. In doing so, it questions the possibility and relevance of what might be termed 'post-subcultural studies' and helps to chart the emergence of a new paradigm for the study of youth subculture.
This Reader in popular cultural studies meets the need for an up-to-date collection of readings on contemporary youth cultures and youth music. From Rave to Disco and House to Northern Soul, the material gathered in this volume helps to distinguish "popular cultural studies" from some aspects of the theoretical work of "contemporary cultural studies". In doing so, the important ethnographic work associated with contemporary cultural studies traditions of youth and popular culture research is consolidated, extended and applied to contemporary culture in the 1990s. Combining description and theory in a clear pedagogical framework, this will be essential reading for upper-level students following courses on population, culture, youth culture and popular music within the disciplines of Cultural Studies, Communication Studies, Sociology, and Media Studies.
This book is an attempt to subject the various youth-protest movements of Britain in the last 15 years to the sort of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic analytical techniques propagated by, above all, Roland Barthes. The book is recommended whole-heartedly to anyone who would like fresh ideas about some of the most stimulating music of the rock era.
Journalists Collin and Godfrey have written a fascinating, compelling account of youth culture in conservative Britain during the last decade. They begin with a brief history of the dual elements at the center of the culture: the spacy version of disco known as acid house and the drug Ecstasy. After setting the stage, they describe the migration of unemployed British youths to the island of Ibiza off Spain, where the culture began, and the transplanting of the Ibiza experience to British clubs. Chronicling the spread of acid house and Ecstasy through large parties called raves, the authors explain the movement as a reaction of disillusioned, lower-class youths against a conservative British mainstream. Collin and Godfrey examine the downfall of the drug-based counterculture owing to gang-police violence and Ecstasy-induced deaths and discuss the mainstream commercialization of the hedonistic dance culture into a $2.8 billion industry.
At raves and road protests, Britain's youth forge a new kind of politics. Collective youth up trees or down tunnels, protest camps and all-night raves across the land - these are the spectacular features of the politics and culture of nineties youth in Britain. DiY Culture lays to rest the myth of "Thatcher's Children," for the flags are flying again -- green, red and black. Editor George McKay, author of Senseless Acts of Beauty, claims that popular protest today is characterized by a culture of immediacy and direct action. Gathered together here for the first time is a collection of in-depth and reflective pieces by activists and other key figures in DiY culture, telling their own stories and histories. This, then, is a book of both celebration and self-criticism, written by realists and idealists alike. From the environmentalist to the video activist, the raver to the road protester, the neo-pagan to the anarcho-capitalist, the authors demonstrate how the counterculture of the nineties offers a vibrant, provocative and positive alternative to institutionalized unemployment and the restricted freedoms and legislated pleasures of UK plc.
This exciting new and original collection locates dance within the spectrum of urban life in late modernity, through a range of theoretical perspectives. It highlights a diversity of dance forms and styles that can be witnessed in and around contemporary urban spaces: from dance halls to raves and the club striptease; from set dancing to ballroom dancing, to hip hop and swing, and to ice dance shows; from the ballet class, to fitness aerobics; and 'art' dance which situates itself in a dynamic relation to the city.
What kind of cinema is appropriate for the age of Palm Pilot and Google? Automatic surveillance and self-guided missiles? Consumer profiling and CNN? To investigate this question, Lev Manovich, one of today's most influential thinkers in the fields of media arts and digital culture, paired with award-winning new media artist and designer Andreas Kratky. They have also invited contributions from leaders in other cultural fields: DJ Spooky, Scanner, George Lewis, and Johann Johannsson (music), servo (architecture), Schoenerwissen/OfCD (information visualization), and Ross Cooper Studios (media design).
The results of their three-year explorations are the three "films" presented on this DVD. Although the films resemble the familiar genres of cinema, the process by which they were created demonstrates the possibilities of soft(ware) cinema. A "cinema," that is, in which human subjectivity and the variable choices made by custom software combine to create films that can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the same image sequences, screen layouts and narratives.
Mission to Earth, a science fiction allegory of the immigrant experience, adopts the variable choices and multi-frame layout of the Soft Cinema system to represent "variable identity." Absences is a lyrical black and white narrative that relies on algorithms normally deployed in military and civilian surveillance applications to determine the editing of video and audio. Texas, a "database narrative," assembles its visuals, sounds, narratives, and even the identities of its characters, from multiple databases. The DVD was designed so that every viewing of each film generates a different version.
Focusing on youth cultures that revolve around dance clubs and raves in Great Britain and the U.S., Sarah Thornton highlights the values of authenticity and hipness and explores the complex hierarchies that emerge within the domain of popular culture. She portrays club cultures as "taste cultures" brought together by micro-media like flyers and listings, transformed into self-conscious "subcultures" by such niche media as the music and style press, and sometimes recast as "movements" with the aid of such mass media as tabloid newspaper front pages. She also traces changes in the recording medium from a marginal entertainment in the 50s to the clubs and raves of the 90s.
Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Thornton coins the term "subcultural capital" to make sense of distinctions made by "cool" youth, noting particularly their disparagement of the "mainstream" against which they measure their alternative cultural worth. Well supported with case studies, readable, and innovative, Club Cultures will become a key text in cultural and media studies and in the sociology of culture.
Experiencing disco, hip hop, house, techno, drum 'n' bass and garage, Discographies plots a course through the transatlantic dance scene of the last last twenty-five years. It discusses the problems posed by contemporary dance culture of both academic and cultural study and finds these origins in the history of opposition to music as a source of sensory pleasure.
Discussing such issues as technology, club space. drugs, the musical body, gender, sexuality and pleasure, Discographies explores the ecstatic experiences at the heart of contemporary dance culture. It suggests why politicians and agencies as diverse as the independent music press and public broadcasting should be so hostile to this cultural phenomenon.
The interaction between culture and economy was famously explored by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer by the term 'Kulturindustrie' (The Culture Industry) to describe the production of mass culture and power relations between capitalist producers and mass consumers. Their account is a bleak one, but one that appears to hold continuing relevance, despite being written in 1944. Today, the pervasiveness of network technologies has contributed to the further erosion of the rigid boundaries between high art, mass culture and the economy, resulting in new kinds of cultural production charged with contradictions. On the one hand, the culture industry appears to allow for resistant strategies using digital technologies, but on the other it operates in the service of capital in ever more complex ways. This publication, the first in the series, uses the concept of the culture industry as a point of departure, and tests its currency under newconditions.
//autonomedia
This one brings back memories.. In the late 90s and early 00s, young Japanese would throw outdoor rave parties every Sunday afternoon in Yoyogi Park. They’d start early, around noon, and finish around 9pm. The parties have since been shut down, I think due to ‘noise’, but the spirit lives on.. Here we see a winter afternoon rave just starting out. I mixed in some cosplay freaks for some fashion and color.
BURN STATION is a mobile copying station which - as it travels through suburban spaces - supports the free distribution music and audio. It is software as well as a local network. But above all BURN STATION is a social event which congregates people together to listen, select and copy net label and net radio audio files with a Copyleft Licence. BURN STATION is an open source and a non-commercial project involving the new means of free networked distribution. It is based on the BURN STATION software which was developed by Platoniq and Rama as a 100% Free software. BURN STATION aims to establish links between the media space and the physical space of the city.
The Game Design Reader is a one-of-a-kind collection on game design and criticism, from classic scholarly essays to cutting-edge case studies. A companion work to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's textbook Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, The Game Design Reader is a classroom sourcebook, a reference for working game developers, and a great read for game fans and players.
Thirty-two essays by game designers, game critics, game fans, philosophers, anthropologists, media theorists, and others consider fundamental questions: What are games and how are they designed? How do games interact with culture at large? What critical approaches can game designers take to create game stories, game spaces, game communities, and new forms of play?
Salen and Zimmerman have collected seminal writings that span 50 years to offer a stunning array of perspectives. Game journalists express the rhythms of game play, sociologists tackle topics such as role-playing in vast virtual worlds, players rant and rave, and game designers describe the sweat and tears of bringing a game to market. Each text acts as a springboard for discussion, a potential class assignment, and a source of inspiration. The book is organized around fourteen topics, from The Player Experience to The Game Design Process, from Games and Narrative to Cultural Representation. Each topic, introduced with a short essay by Salen and Zimmerman, covers ideas and research fundamental to the study of games, and points to relevant texts within the Reader. Visual essays between book sections act as counterpoint to the writings.
Like Rules of Play, The Game Design Reader is an intelligent and playful book. An invaluable resource for professionals and a unique introduction for those new to the field, The Game Design Reader is essential reading for anyone who takes games seriously.
Tel Aviv-based designer and programmer Ariel Malka enjoys exploring the relationship between text, space and time. Chronotext is where he gathers together his strange textual experiments.
In this book Lev Manovich offers the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses new media's reliance on conventions of old media, such as the rectangular frame and mobile camera, and shows how new media works create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space. He also analyzes categories and forms unique to new media, such as interface and database.
Manovich uses concepts from film theory, art history, literary theory, and computer science and also develops new theoretical constructs, such as cultural interface, spatial montage, and cinegratography. The theory and history of cinema play a particularly important role in the book. Among other topics, Manovich discusses parallels between the histories of cinema and of new media, digital cinema, screen and montage in cinema and in new media, and historical ties between avant-garde film and new media.
The Agrippa Files is a scholarly site that presents selected pages from the original art book (with the permission of the publisher); a unique archive of materials dating from the book’s creation and early reception; a simulation of what the book’s intended “fading images” might have looked like; a video of the 1992 “transmission” of the work; a “virtual lightbox” for comparing and studying pages from the book; commentary by the book’s publisher and scholars; an annotated bibliography of scholarship, press coverage, interviews, and other material; a detailed bibliographic description of the book; and a discussion forum.
These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)--known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky--as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology. Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.
These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)—known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky—as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology.
Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much more powerful is a visual projection of 24 to 30 pictures per second? Now, add those projections to the performance of your favorite DJ or band, and the results can be awe-inspiring. The VJ, or visual artist, is the silent hero who creates these visuals and mixes them on the fly. Done well, the visuals can elevate the meaning and feeling of music.
Optical Poetry is the first critical biography of the painter and experimental filmmaker Oskar Fischinger. Active in avant-garde art circles in Germany between the two world wars, Fischinger and his family would emigrate to Los Angeles just ahead of the Nazis' denunciation of degenerate art. Fischinger's pioneering experiments in Visual Music and the melding of graphic arts, abstract design, and sound were instrumental in shaping animation into an art and cinematic form and inspiring animators to pursue its aesthetic potential. An accomplished representational animator who eventually worked uneasily under contract for Paramount, MGM, and Disney, Fischinger produced numerous abstract animated films over his lifetime, invented machines such as the "Wax Machine" and the "Lumigraph" for creating images, and became an accomplished and influential abstract painter. A labor of love for author William Moritz and the product of decades of research, Optical Poetry also includes an extensive filmography and testimonials from those who knew or were influenced by Fischinger.
The MAWZER is the only MIDI controller on the market allowing an infinite customizable combination of controls.
May you work in the Audio field or as a VJ, the MAWZER will help you do the job faster and easier. Simply plug *MODULES* in the Backplane, assign midi controls in your favorite software, and you’re ready to play.
0xFF is an email discussion list for topics relating to REAL-TIME VIDEO and digital image processing. the focus is the artistic use of digital imaging tools.
0xFF is for anyone who is interested in experimenting with video.
it is an open forum for all subscribers to ask questions, give opinions, and participate in a global exchange of ideas concerning experimental video practices.
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