The Digital Music Ensemble is presenting its experimental theatrical take on the novel Huckleberry Finn tomorrow night, using John Cage's mesostic score CIRCUS ON to reinterpret the novel's text through chance procedures. The show's taking place in a barn. With a coffin. And a rocket. And thievery. And incarceration. And a bluegrass band. You should come. You can see the barn in the video above, with an early version of the DME Bluegrass Band's take on Amazing Grace.

For directions and to download an audio file of the first chapter of the performance, visit the event's website or join its Facebook event page!

The Game of Life Foundation's Wave Field Synthesis system, a 192-speaker surround sound system.

The last half of the Sonic Acts 2010 conference was just as jam-packed as the first. The third day focused primarily on field recording and music, beginning with one of the figureheads of contemporary R. Murray Schaeffer-influenced recording practice, Barry Truax, lecturing about his own work composing music with environmental sounds. I was particularly interested in his discussions of convolution and its application to the manipulation of the acoustic space of field recordings.

A presentation by Hildegard Westerkamp followed, discussing her long-standing interest in leading soundwalks. Some technical difficulties (see the above video), while unfortunate, actually enhanced the drama of her presentation, an interesting blend of lecture, listening exercises and recitations of quotes about the practice of soundwalks, spoken by people sitting amongst the audience and challenging those present to shift their listening attention to different acoustic spaces.

The interview with Annea Lockwood that followed focused on her return to the sonic spaces of rivers with her new project, A Sound Map of the Danube. Existing as both a stereo album recording and a 2.5 hour long 5.1 surround sound installation, Lockwood's new piece sees her exploring the sonic landscape surrounding the Danube River, her intention being to transport the listener to a specific place through sound. Lockwood initially made her reputation as a composer with a similar piece, A Sound Map of the Hudson River, another piece exploring the sonic mapping of a particular place.

Steven Connor reading "Secession"

The day ended with a panel entitled The Hot Space in Music, revisiting the artists who presented at STEIM a couple of days before but with one notable exception: the panel began with Steven Connor reading his essay Secession, a piece about sound, space, and his own struggles with the auditory affliction tinnitus. One of the highlights of the entire conference for me, his talk was incredibly inspiring in its heartfelt analysis of sound's relationship with space and how a phenomenon like tinnitus can make us question our notions of space.

The final day's presentations consisted of the keynote speech Representation of Space in the Brain by Michael J. Morgan was just as insightful about the way the mind perceives space as it was about how the current trend of 3-D movie technology will ultimately fail just like its predecessors. And the final panel I attended, Spatial Perception featured three very exciting sound installation artists: HC Gilje, Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag and Jakob Kirkegaard, who discussed their various uses of video and sound in space.

The concerts and film screenings the last two days were equally impressive. Jakob Kirkegaard's Sabulation (see above video) was shown amidst surround pieces by Barry truax, Hildegard Westerkamp and Annea Lockwood.

The Game of Life Foundation held a series of recitals of music composed for their Wave Field Synthesis system, a surround sound system consisting of 192 speakers and eight subwoofers.

The grand finale of the entire conference took place at the Artis Planetarium in the Amsterdam Zoo, where a series of sound performances were accompanied by laser lights (in sets by TeZ and Francisco Lopez) and video, as in the piece pictured above by Paul Prudence, whose video covered the entire planetarium dome and had the audience gasping. A fitting end to a conference about sound art: art that made its audience make sound in response.

Day 2 of Sonic Acts 2010: The Poetics of Space started off with the beginning of the conference proper, meeting up at the massive Café De Balie in the Leidseplein entertainment district of Amsterdam. De Balie seemed enormous, with its multiple rooms of café seating, a full bar, ticket office and two theater spaces on the ground floor alone; that was until the crowd for Sonic Acts decided to show up.

There were so many people, the atrium and café were shoulder-to-shoulder by 9:45am, fifteen minutes before the conference was scheduled to begin. Luckily I'd pre-ordered a festival and concert pass before I arrived, so I was one of the lucky ticket holders who had priority to sit in the theater where the conference was actually taking place; dozens of other people weren't so lucky, and were banished to the secondary theater to watch what was happening in the theater across the hall on a live internet stream. Keep in mind, this was an academic conference on sound art...I can't reiterate enough, the interest in sound art I witnessed in Amsterdam was truly unprecedented. I've never felt hipper wearing glasses, being bald, and carrying around a Zoom H2 than I did for those four days in Amsterdam.

The keynote speaker was Derrick de Kerckhove, a collaborator of Marshall McLuhan's who spoke about the 21st century's move past traditional renaissance perspectival representation into a post-visual, tactile perspectival realm dominated by the advent of electricity, with the "point of being" replacing the "point of view" as the commonly accepted referent to one's position in space.

Daniel Terrugi, Director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, and Raviv Ganchrow, a sonology expert and installation artist, comprised the speakers for the second session, Architectures of Sound. Terrugi discussed the positioning of sound sources in space (ie surround sound systems) and their impact on contemporary musical composition, while Ganchrow discussed his work with wave field synthesis in order to redefine acoustic spaces. Ganchrow's wave field synthesis system, a 192-channel surround sound system, was on the schedule to appear at the concerts in the Paradiso club the night after his speech, something I was really looking forward to experiencing.

Christopher Salter was the highlight of the Exercises in Immersion panel. His lecture, "The Question of Thresholds: Immersion, Absorption and Dissolution in Cross-modal Environments" was fascinating, covering James Turell and Robert Irwin's 1968 of the effects on consciousness of extreme sensory input reduction -- basically an analysis of the effects of minimalist art on the audience's consciousness. I was really interested in his discussion of enactive cognition (how our environment arises out of the loop between action and perception) and enactive perception (how perception is achieved because of our bodies' sensorimotor system, and all perception equals action). Salter's new book, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance is definitely on my to read list.

A panel on Utopian Spectacles was up next, with Branden W. Joseph (author of Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage) and Trace Reddell (Director of Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver) gave presentations about John Cage and Lejaren Hiller's HPSCHD and the Vortex concerts of Henry Jacobs and Jordan Belson. Renowned theater artist Robert Whitman was up next, discussing his use of space in non-traditional theatrical venues (see the above video), as well as debunking some myths about the legendary 1966 performance event Nine Evenings: Theatre & Engineering he participated in along with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer, and Deborah Hay among others.

The final panel of the day, The Poetics of Hybrid Space, featured Eric Kluitenberg (head of the media program at De Balie, the conference's venue; Duncan Speakman, a locative media artist who premiered a new guided soundwalk which took place immediately after the panel; Peter Westenberg, a visual artist who specializes in open source practices; Elizabeth Sikiaridi, a professor of urban landscape design at the University of Duisberg-Essen who spoke about the breakdown of Cartesian space as the ruling system of perspective and its replacement by the speed of electricity's power to control the rate at which we experience space; and Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat, Dutch artists who presented their wearable art project Tele_Trust via webcam from Vancouver. But that's not all...there were five more hours of concerts to go to.

The theme of the second night of performances was Expanded Space, and the bill focused heavily on experimental cinema. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's only abstract film, Lichtspiel Schwarz-Weiß-Grau from 1930 was up first. Projected on film rather than video, this was as close as we were going to get to experiencing the piece as it was originally presented; not to mention that beginning a five hour stretch of concerts with a six minute silent film from 1930 was a bold move, and the audience continued to amaze me by attentively (and silently) watching while crushed shoulder to shoulder in a standing-room-only crowd.

Gill Eatherley's three channel film Hand Grenade (featuring a soundtrack by legendary Krautrock band Neu!) was a definite highlight. Again projected on film, this abstract work was made in 1971 with a series of still images of light drawings which were extended, looped and altered via painstaking optical printing.

A performance entitled (SHIFT) by Dutch duo Optical Machines featured live sound and mesmerizing video generated via a series of mechanical devices and metal plates being filmed and processed in real time.

My favorite film of the evening was "Spacy" (1981) by Takashi Ito. I was amazed by its multiple layers of space folding in upon themselves...I'd love to pick up a copy of this compilation DVD of Ito's works. There was so much amazing work shown that night, it's impossible to write about it all here...works by Paul Sharits, Bruce McClure, Greg Pope & Gert-Jan Prins and many others were all so inspiring...another day of information overload! And Sonic Acts 2010 was only half over...

Last week I travelled to Amsterdam for a four day conference on sound art, Sonic Acts XIII: The Poetics of Space, a densely-packed series of lectures, exhibitions and performances dedicated to 21st century notions of sound's relationship to space, using Gaston Bachelard's 1958 philosophical text on the architecture of the imagination, in which he phenomenologically analyzed poetic notions of space and place. The conference was a four day crash-course in contemporary sound art theory and practice, and one of the most exciting and inspirational art events I've ever attended!

The first day of the event began with a mini-conference and exhibition at STEIM, one of the world's premier studio/research facilities dedicated to electronic performance arts. Talks were given by artists-in-residence Hans W. Koch, whose "Two Rooms, Flipped" installation connected two of STEIM's studio rooms with sonically mirrored microphones which broadcast inverted pitches of sounds from one room to the other, and Yutaka Makino, whose "Conflux" installation of chemical fog and wave field synthesis created a simulated whiteout condition.

After the artists presented, a panel discussion of alternative venue curators discussed current trends in artistic curation and distribution. Daniele Balit of Birdcage discussed his inspirations for creating a "gallery without walls" dedicated to showing challenging works of art whose exhibition spaces are a part of the actual artwork, a concept influenced by works like Brian O'Doherty's "Inside the White Cube". Hamish and Keiko, the founders and curators of London's newest venue dedicated to experimental music Café Oto, discussed the joys and difficulties of running a world class music venue and café on a shoestring budget seven days a week for the past two years. Finally, Rotterdam-based collective WORM presented highlights from their activities of supporting and showcasing experimental art and music both online and in physical venues during their decade plus of existence.

From STEIM the activities moved to NIMk, the Netherlands Media Art Institute, which housed a group exhibition including Jakob Kirkegaard's Labyrinthitis installation (which broadcasts two tones into the spectator's ears, creating a third tone only audible inside the ears of the listener, as well as HC Gilje's "Blink", a video installation using the gallery space's architecture to generate colored patterns projected back into the space. This show was the lead-in to the actual opening of the Sonic Acts festival, US artist and sound art theorist Brandon LaBelle's "Q+A", a multichannel sound performance presenting the artist interviewing himself in surround sound. As you can (sort of) see from the video I shot from all the way in the back of the performance space, LaBelle's reputation in Europe drew a rock star-sized crowd -- not exactly what i was expecting, considering the comparatively dismal attendance at nearly every sound art event I've attended in the US (with the exception of Long Beach's excellent Soundwalk annual festival).

The next venue of the day was Paradiso, a gorgeous music club created from the remnants of an abandoned church in Amsterdam's Leidseplein entertainment district, where the first of three nights' worth of five hour long sessions of performances and film screenings began with seminal UK improviser Keith Rowe joined by the Nordic saxophone improv duo Streifenjunko and video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen for a beautiful set of quiet improvised sound translated into flickering analog television static.

Haswell and Hecker followed with a viscerally intense sound and laser light performance that filled the Paradiso with touchable light and sound so thick you could cut it with a bread knife.

Robert Henke, aka Monolake, ended the night with a live surround sound performance of thick dub-inspired electronica, perfectly synched to Jitter visuals by the Netherlands' Tarik Barri. As composer and Cycling '74 employee Gregory Taylor said at the show, "Tarik's Jitter work looks like no one else's", and he wasn't kidding.

Such an insane amount of information to process, and this was only day one! I'll be posting summaries of the rest of the conference soon, so stay tuned...

Photos from the Yes No Maybe opening reception.

The first year MFA cohort recently finished installing a group show to exhibit work made during our first few months in the program here at UM. By far one of our best experiences yet as a class, the show came together organically and culminated with a well-attended opening reception on February 12.

Getting ten artists in a room together to show off their work isn't always easy (at one point someone made a reference to herding cats, which wasn't too far from the truth!), but we somehow managed to elegantly cram a lot of work into that space.

Transmogrification from Emilia Javanica on Vimeo.

Looking around the show during the reception, it was really impressive that our class has such diverse interests and works in such a wide variety of media. We've got Lea's painting, James' photo triptychs, and Amanda's and my prints covering the 2-D field, with Meghan's sculptures and Reed's interactive drawing and cutting installation working the third dimension. You want time-based work? We've got that too: Jessica and Yuan both installed video installations, while Emilia, Collin and I are showing video pieces on small screens. I've got a short, in-progress sound piece.

But most of the action at the opening involved Emilia's performance/installation, which included a karaoke machine that was open for everyone's use, and still is.

Make sure to catch the "Yes No Maybe" show before it closes at the end of the month, and feel free to put the karaoke machine through its paces.

Following the Huron from Collin McRae on Vimeo.

Emma McNally creates beautiful graphite drawings whose intricate lines evoke maps, networks, and many other forms of data representation in their stark complexity. A 2008 essay by Ana Balona de Oliveira discusses some of the theoretical underpinnings of McNally's work, and includes some insight from the artist herself.