artintelligence

“Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream of things that never were and say, why not?” . George Bernard Shaw. (more…)

I would like to draw your attention to a new website for the Kikit Visuosonic project http://www.visuosonic.org/  I was involved with KikitVisuosonic in its early stages and hence have some particular insight into its mission. Two artists are involved: Maurice Owen  an Russell Richards. As with most significant art the founding idea was quite simple, to create an interaction between sound and interactive digital visualisation. From the beginning, however, this simple notion contained within itself the longstanding goal of attaining a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art. (more…)

The video footage provided below consists of an extract from a major presentation given by Toshio Iwai at Ars Electronica: Simplicity the Art of Complexity, in 2006. In this segment he gives insight into the inspiration for his remarkable visual-musical interfaces such as his gallery-based interactive visual music installations, his compilation of such ideas into Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS and his invention of a new visual based musical instrument the Tenori-On, which Iwai developed in conjunction with Yamaha (link 1 [uk] link 2 [global]). (more…)

Where do we draw the distinction between vision and sound? To those of us not endowed with the gift of synaesthesia (although more, or even all, of us may have aspects of this talent at the level of unconscious cognition) that question might seem easy to answer but the distinction is becoming blurred. Note how some of the most outstanding pieces of “sculpture” at the Munster Sculpture Project 07 were actually sound pieces. I refer to Suchan Kinoshita’s Chinese Whispers installation and Susan Philipsz’s The Lost Reflection. (more…)

Yoshimasa Kato and Yuichi Ito received honourable mention in the category interactive art for their work White Lives on Speaker, at Ars Electronica 2007. Remarkably the artists responsible for this fascinating work are 25 and 24 years old respectively. As the video (VIDEO CLIP) demonstrates the work entails hooking up a member of the audience to an electroencephalograph and feeding the subject’s brain waves into software (Max/Msp) that transposes them into audio frequency output that can power a heavy-duty loudspeaker.

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Susan Philipsz’s The Lost Reflection, 2007, is a sound installation under the Tormin Bridge (Torminbruecke) on Lake Aa that was commissioned by the Munster Sculpture Project 07. It was one of the most outstanding contributions to the 2007 Sculpture Project. The fact that another sound work by Suchan Kinochita, was also outstanding indicates that sculptural installation is beginning to lose its grip after over fifteen years of sharing aesthetic ascendancy with video art. Some of the weakest pieces in Munster this year were fag ends of endless sculptural installation variations on the Readymade theme. (more…)

As this blog was not in existence last year I will try to catch up on some of the most interesting things I saw at Ars Electronica 2006. One of the most outstanding works was Kaffe Matthews’ Sonic Bed. (more…)

Jan Michael Hanni and Denise Kratzer’s Klangcode, 2007, subtitled as ‘The word as sound poetry’ is an outstanding student project shown in the Campus 2.0 exhibition in the Kunstuniversitat, Linz on the occasion of Ars Electronica: Goodbye Privacy festival 2007. The creators describe Klangcode as ‘ dividing language into phonemes that are transformed into sound poetry by physical movement’. in a text accompanying the work they explain that ‘language consists of mixtures of tones and sounds such that a single word consists of many sounds’ (neoanalog).

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Ray Lee’s Siren is a remarkable work that possesses sculptural, performative, and musical dimensions. (more…)

Winner of an award for excellence in the Digital Musics category at the 2007 Ars Electronica Aaron Thall´s Grist Drumcorps gave a powerful, complex and energetic performance in the Brucknerhaus concert hall, Linz, Austria on the evening of 10 September. (SEE VIDEO). (more…)

Suchan Kinoshita’s sound installation was one of the most impressive pieces in the Munster Sculpture Project 07. One can quibble about whether it is actually sculpture, but what is more interesting is that as sculptural installation art gradually leaves the limelight, aesthetic uses of technology (in this case three-dimensional sound) move towards centre stage as the most significant contributors to contemporary artistic production. (more…)