One festival just over (Sonic Acts XIV), next one coming up (DEAF2012). For Sonic Acts I am curating/organising/editing/making-it-happen. I am involved in DEAF2012 in so far that I am working at V2_ where the DEAF-team is getting the festival together. That’s way more relaxed, psychologically; but we (read: the archive of V2_) might do a small thing too (to be confirmed). Website is here: www.deaf.nl. I am particularly curious what the symposium will be like.
Gisteren was de boekpresentatie van Rosa Menkman’s boek over glitch, en de opening van de tentoonstelling bij Planetart. (Ik was er even met R. die zich uitstekend vermaakte bij al die flikkerende schermen).
Get the book here: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publications/network-notebooks/no-04-the-glitch-momentum/ (free download).
Of via Rosa’s site: http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com.
gli.tc/H is hier: http://gli.tc/H/ (met ook werk van Karl Klomp).
Enz.
Op maandagavond is er een “Listening Session” met Douglas Kahn, met veel materiaal dat zelden te horen valt (ook in deze tijden waarin het soms lijkt dat je ‘alles’ in de spelonken van het Internet kunt vinden). Dat is een DNK-event, in samenwerking met STEIM. Aanvang 20:30 (& for ye regular DNK-people, this means it’s starting at 21:00 exactly, or latest, not 22:00!).
1966: Natural Electromagnetic Sounds, From Brainwaves to Outer Space
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Date: Monday, October 10

Venue: STEIM, Utrechtsedwarsstraat 134, Amsterdam
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Time: 20.30 hrs. 
Charge: 5 euros
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A special evening at STEIM, organised by Sonic Acts, DNK and STEIM on Monday 10 October 2011 at 20:30 hrs, following Douglas Kahn’s lecture at Stedelijk Museum on Sunday 9 October. 
Douglas Kahn, author of the acclaimed Noise, Water, Meat, a History of Sound in the Arts, and co-editor of the brand new Source, Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973, guides us through the fascinating history of art which uses natural radio, electromagnetic sound and brainwaves. It’s a listening session, so it includes many audio recordings and video material, some of it very rare.

In a 1966 preparatory note for Variations VII, John Cage wrote to David Tudor that they should include sounds of brainwaves and a radio astronomy telescope, and that they “give credit to Lucier for brain and outer space.†Alvin Lucier had already performed his “brainwave pieceâ€, Music for Solo Performer (1965) and Whistlers (1966), based on natural ionospheric and magnetospheric radio. For Lucier, both compositions used forms of “natural electromagnetic sound†and, in combination, they described a new type of spatial environment. Also, in 1966 the Swedish composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl created Altisonans, a nationally broadcasted television composition relating natural radio and satellite telemetry sounds to those of birds. These activities involved physicists, Rudy Kompfner, Billy Klüver, Edmond Dewan, Millett Morgan, and Ludwik Liszka to varying degrees, from non-cooperation to close collaboration. This session will include ! these audio and visual compositions, as well as background recordings from the period, some of them very rare.
Met een langere bio:

Douglas Kahn is a Research Professor at the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), College of Fine Arts, at University of New South Wales, in Sydney. He is a historian and theoretician of the media arts and music, with a focus on sound, electromagnetism, and natural media. His books include Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999), the newly published Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973, a rich documentary source of experimental music, edited with Larry Austin, and the forthcoming Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, edited with Hannah Higgins. His major project, Earth Sound Earth Signal, is the product of a decade of research into natural electromagnetic and acoustical phenomena occurring at a geophysical scale in the arts, media, science and military from the late 19th century to the present, and includes an attempt to theorize media in terms of nature.

Ook hier:
sonicacts.com/…/dnk-sonic-acts-steim-present-douglas-kahn-listening-session/
Ik kan hier wat vaker vertellen wat ik zoal doe… Voor Kontraste (festival in Krems, Oostenrijk) hebben we (Sonic Acts) Douglas Kahn naar Europa gehaald. Hij heeft een mooi essay geschreven voor de publicatie (The Aelectrosonic), en doet de keynote op het festival. Douglas Kahn is nu in Amsterdam en geeft op zondagmiddag 9 oktober om 15:00 een lezing in het auditorium van het Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Hier de blurb & info:
The Arts of Sound in a Natural History of Media

A lecture about the connections between a new media theory historically based on 19th century telecommunications, and the practice of artists and composers who since the 1960s have used the sounds of physical forces at the scale of the earth as their raw material. Communications technologies have never been about communications; they have also been used to scientifically and aesthetically sense natural energetic systems like the wind and radio. Ancient music was heard in telegraph lines as they became unwitting Aeolian harps playing what Henry David Thoreau called Sphere Music. The Aelectrosonic, the new electrical sounds and music of nature, was first heard by Thomas Watson when the first telephone line acted as an antenna. These are the acoustical roots of artists and composers who, beginning in the 1960s, conceived of physical forces at the scale of the earth as their raw material. Artists and musicians increasingly work this way, now that climate change means that what we call Nature begins at the global level.
Douglas Kahn is Professor at the National Institute for Experimental Arts at University of New South Wales in Sydney, and author of Noise, Water, 
Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts.
… writes Regine Debatty:
“This week, i’ve been watching Volume 16: Lo-tech and Volume 17: Hi-Tech. The first presents nine artists who work with basic, or in some cases antiquated technology. As its name indicates, its ‘hi-tech’ counterpart features ten artists working at the intersection of new ideas in art and technology.
There were only a few names that were familiar to me in Lo-tech and Hi-tech and that’s good, I’m all for discovering new artists. One of the reasons of my ignorance might be that i tend to be a little too enwrapped in Europe and most of the artists and commentators in both volumes are North Americans (one notable exception is Arie Altena presenting with his delightful Dutch accent Marnix De Nijs’s Beijing Accelerator.)”
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2011/06/aspect-the-chronicle-of-new-me.php
Vanavond – donderdag 14 april – mag ik wat zeggen op de feestelijke presentatie van het nieuwe boek van Josephine Bosma: Nettitudes. Let’s Talk Net Art. Een (flink) deel heb ik in manuscript gelezen. De presentatie is vanaf 20.30 uur in de Balie, Amsterdam.
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Ja, ik heb een Facebook-account, en ja zo nu en dan kijk ik uit nieuwsgierigheid wat mijn netwerk er aan berichtjes achterlaat. Verder doe ik er weinig – zo nu en dan klik ik op “bevestig” als iemand “vrienden” wil worden. Ik moet altijd de neiging onderdrukken om dat voor alle nog hangende verzoeken te doen – of ik de personen in kwestie nu ken of niet – meestal zijn het instellingen. Facebook-resistance. Je kunt niet alles doen. Dat ik door mijn Facebook-resistance ook vanalles misloop, het zij zo.
Het zou al een stuk beter worden als je Facebook kunt “aanpassen”. Dat kan – om het te leren kun je terecht bij een Mediamatic-workshop: http://www.mediamatic.net/page/210947/en.
On tuesday I interviewed Cesar Harada – I’m editting the text now, it will be published on the V2_website. Cesar Harada is working with his team on Protei, an unmanned sailing boat for cleaning up oil spills. He’s an energetic, humble guy who’s doing impressive work.
Protei is project of the day on Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cesarminoru/protei-open-hardware-oil-spill-cleaning-sailing-ro/.
Consider to fund it….
More on Protei here: http://protei.org.
Cesar was at V2_ for 2 weeks and developed a new model for the boat – it was tested on the Maas: http://www.v2.nl/files/2011/lab/protei-test-model.
Just out: Herbie Sykes’ history of the Giro d’Italia, Maglia Rosa. I read his earlier book The Eagle of the Canavese, a biography of Balmamion, and was positively impressed. This one is published by the most ‘chique’ of all cycling publishers Rouleur: http://www.rouleur.cc/maglia-rosa. Should be very beautiful.
Image gallery at http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/photos/maglia-rosa-triumph-and-tragedy-at-the-giro-ditalia
(Photo: © Maglia Rosa – Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia)
Was net op de opening van Filtering Failure, bij Planet Art – voor mij om de hoek – tentoonstelling met glitch art, samengesteld door Rosa Menkman & Julian van Aalderen. Met werk van o.a. Benjamin Gaulon en Karl Klomp. Meer hier: http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/2011/02/filtering-failure-exhibition-catalogue.html en hier http://www.planetart.nl/now.htm