Russian proto-electronic music from 1930-s and beyond

"Sound out of Paper" with Andrei Smirnov
May 21 at NK Berlin, Elsenstr. 52 2HH, 2Etage Entrance: Free starting at 21:00

Russian proto-electronic music from 1930-s and beyond, A presentation and film viewing session of synthesized sound from light called Graphical (Drawn) Sound technique produced in the 1930s recently discovered at the Russian State Film Archive. The technology of synthesizing sound from light called Graphical (Drawn) Sound technique which was invented in Soviet Russia in 1929 as a consequence of the newly invented sound-on-film technology. At exactly the same time similar efforts were being undertaken in Germany by Rudolf Pfenninger in Munich and, somewhat later, by Oscar Fischinger in Berlin. This invention came at least twenty years too early while the World War II was already at the threshold. As a result by late 1930-s the work in this domain effectively came to a halt. Although there were several short articles published in USA by V. Solev (1935), most publications about research and developments in the USSR were in Russian. At the same time the most important documents were never published at all and were circulating in manuscript form. Fortunately many unique archives survived and are collected now at the Theremin Center in Moscow. Over two hours of synthesized music produced in 1930s twenty years before the foundation of electronic music were discovered recently at the Russian State Film Archive.

Ars Electronica 2009: Human Nature

Ars Electronica announced the topic for its next festival:
http://www.aec.at/humannature/index_en.html

The festival will take place in Linz, Austria, from Thursday Sept. 3rd to Tuesday Sept. 8th, 2009.

This year is the 30th anniversary of Ars Electronica. The festival started in 1979, from 1980 to 1986 it was held biannually, from 1987 on yearly.

Wolfram|Alpha

on may 18th, 2009, Wolfram|Alpha has been launched. in contrast to search engines such as google, it is called an "answer engine", a growing knowledge base of structured data. users are welcomed to contribute by submitting specific facts, a whole set of structured data as well as algorithms (http://www.wolframalpha.com/participate/participate.html)

"Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries." (http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html)
these sources can be accessed at the bottom of every query result.

at the moment, wolfram alpha "contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—Wolfram|Alpha's core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica."


blog: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/
website: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

archive 2020

a conference about archiving and sustainability of born digital content. unfortunately it already took place (today, may 18th, 2009) in amsterdam.

http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/en/#2489


talks by:
Lev Manovich (on cultural analytics)
Olga Goriunova (runme.org)
Eric Kluitenberg (the living archive)
Alessandro Ludovico (neural.it)
Aymeric Mansoux (goto10)
Christiane Paul (the whitney artport)
Esther Weltevrede (archiving web dynamics)
Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss (netzspannung.org)

virtueel platform (nl)

http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/en/

mission statement:

"Virtual Platform defines e-culture as new developments in the cultural sector arising from cross-pollination between technology and society. Virtueel Platform firmly believes that e-culture makes an essential contribution to cultural, social and economic innovation, and works to strengthen and develop Dutch e-culture at home and abroad."

latest post on CTHEORY

CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 32, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
RT 004 05/13/2009 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter:

Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism

"Amidst the current convulsions, global capitalism has one consolation
left for its increasingly desperate subjects: you may have lost your
job (or will never be able to retire from it), you can't afford to go
out, but you can always stay home (if you still have one) and play a
video game. As Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns and Merrill Lynch fell
and General Motors, Ford and Chrysler reeled round the edge of their
grave, North American sales of game hardware and software hit
all-time highs in 2008. Forecasters claimed virtual play was
recession-proof; a maturing audience of stay-at-home gamers would
cocoon around the Wii, Xbox360 or PS3, or migrate to ~World of
Warcraft~ or ~Second Life~, to enjoy a diversion from economic
disaster. Such estimates of game-business resilience may prove
optimistic: by 2009 job losses were hitting industry behemoths such
as Sony and Electronic Arts (EA). But this latest iteration of
bread-and-circuses culture-theory nevertheless provides a timely
entry for a discussion of digital games as exemplary media of
contemporary Empire."

warm recommendation

Tag ties & affective spies is a critical approach on the social media of our times. What happens when we are “tagging” , “posting” and “sharing” our experiences and opinions in platforms such as those of Facebook, YouTube, flickr or del.icio.us? Are we really connecting and interacting or are we also forming the content and the structure of the social web itself? curated by Daphne Dragona
+interview

Iannis Xenakis's UPIC

UPIC is a computerised musical composition tool, devised by the composer Iannis Xenakis. It was developed at the Centre d'Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu) in Paris, and was completed in 1977.
more info

you can download an OSC poly-temporal meta-sequencer version based on the UPIC here http://iannix.la-kitchen.fr/

Olia Lialina and New Media Art Histories of the (so-called) net.art, Net Art and Web Art moments

My colleague Bruce Jenkins (formerly the curator of the Harvard Film Archive and currently on faculty with me in the Film, Video & New Media department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago) asked me to recommend Web Art that could be included in his upcoming "Presenting and Preserving Moving-Image Media" course. I suggested he include a discussion of the work of Olia Lialina. In particular, her Last Real Net Art Museum project:

http://myboyfriendcamebackfromth.ewar.ru

which in part hosts remixes of her MY BOYFRIEND CAME BACK FROM THE WAR project from 1996. The remixes function as a form of archiving and preservation in that they extend the life of the work by reworking this now historical New Media Art project. As such, this series constitutes a significantly dynamic and vital artistic use of archives and archiving.

Her FIRST AND THE ONLY REAL NET ART GALLERY:

http://art.teleportacia.org/

directly addresses web-based exhibition of New Media Art as well as the legendary death or historical status of net.art. In particular, this issues are addressed through the online exhibition MINIATURES OF THE HEROIC PERIOD from 1998:

http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/miniatures/


Her collection of texts in the "Texts on net.art, new media and digital folklore" section:

http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/

provides important views into these histories. From that section, her text "Vernacular Web" originally from 2005:


http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/

which was then updated and reversioned in 2007:


http://www.contemporary-home-computing.org/vernacular-web-2/

also considers New Media Art Histories and issues of historicity by unlocking ways in which artists and those who do not identify as artists have used the internet and the web over the last 15 or so years...

// jonCates

the troubled history of computer art 1963-1989

I came across a very interesting 2005 PhD thesis by Taylor, Grant D., "The machine that made science art: the troubled history of computer art 1963-1989"

abstract: This thesis represents an historical account of the reception and criticism of computer art from its emergence in 1963 to its crisis in 1989, when aesthetic and ideological differences polarise and eventually fragment the art form. Throughout its history, static-pictorial computer art has been extensively maligned. In fact, no other twentieth-century art form has elicited such a negative and often hostile response. In locating the destabilising forces that affect and shape computer art, this thesis identifies a complex interplay of ideological and discursive forces that influence the way computer art has been and is received by the mainstream artworld and the cultural community at large. One of the central factors that contributed to computer art’s marginality was its emergence in that precarious zone between science and art, at a time when the perceived division between the humanistic and scientific cultures was reaching its apogee. The polarising force inherent in the “two cultures” debate framed much of the prejudice towards early computer art. For many of its critics, computer art was the product of the same discursive assumptions, methodologies and vocabulary as science. Moreover, it invested heavily in the metaphors and mythologies of science, especially logic and mathematics. This close relationship with science continued as computer art looked to scientific disciplines and emergent techno-science paradigms for inspiration and insight. While recourse to science was a major impediment to computer art’s acceptance by the artworld orthodoxy, it was the sustained hostility towards the computer that persistently wore away at the computer art enterprise. The anticomputer response came from several sources, both humanist and anti-humanist. The first originated with mainstream critics whose strong humanist tendencies led them to reproach computerised art for its mechanical sterility. A comparison with aesthetically and theoretically similar art forms of the era reveals that the criticism of computer art is motivated by the romantic fear that a computerised surrogate had replaced the artist. Such usurpation undermined some of the keystones of modern Western art, such as notions of artistic “genius” and “creativity”. Any attempt to rationalise the human creative faculty, as many of the scientists and technologists were claiming to do, would for the humanist critics have transgressed what they considered the primordial mystique of art. Criticism of computer art also came from other quarters. Dystopianism gained popularity in the 1970s within the reactive counter-culture and avant-garde movements. Influenced by the pessimistic and cynical sentiment of anti-humanist writings, many within the arts viewed the computer as an emblem of rationalisation, a powerful instrument in the overall subordination of the individual to the emerging technocracy.