The Rhizome Digest merged into the Rhizome News in November 2008. These pages serve as an archive for 6-years worth of discussions and happenings from when the Digest was simply a plain-text, weekly email.

Subject: RHIZOME DIGEST: 10.11.02
From: list@rhizome.org (RHIZOME)
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 18:15:42 -0400
Reply-to: digest@rhizome.org
Sender: owner-digest@rhizome.org
RHIZOME DIGEST: October 11, 2002

Content:

+note from rhizome HQ+
1. Rachel Greene and Francis Hwang: Help! + Rhizome Rare Launch

+announcement+
2. Kim Machan: MAAP - online and in Beijing

+opportunity+
3. Mark Amerkia: Job Announcement - University of Colorado, Boulder
4. juha huuskonen: Nifca New Media AiR residency program

+report+
5. Wilfried Hou Je bek: ALGORITHMIC NOISE AS FREE CULTURE

+comment+
6. Ken Jordan, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid: Freeze
Frame [Part 2]

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1.

Date: 10.11.02
From: Rachel Greene (rachel AT rhizome.org) and Francis Hwang
(francis AT rhizome.org)
Subject: Help! + Rhizome Rare Launch

A somber note: this week Rhizome found out we didn't get a grant we were
expecting, and suddenly have to move to a new office. We find ourselves
in a state of emergency. Please help keep Rhizome alive, and contribute
at any level you can. All donors are recognized for their support: $10 =
an email address AT rhizome.org; $25 = a Yael Kanarek mousepad; $50 = a
Rhizome.org T-shirt (Cary Peppermint-designed), and $250 = a Rhizome.org
laptop backpack. Help keep Rhizome afloat with secure online credit card
contributions or donations via PayPal at
http://rhizome.org/support/?dig10_11 . You can also send a check or
money order to Rhizome.org, 115 Mercer Street, New York NY 10012. Money
orders can be in any currency. - Rachel Greene

This week, we relaunched Rhizome Rare as a single email list. Rare
consists of selections from the high-volume Rhizome Raw list, as chosen
by our Superusers. Our intention is to offer another list option, one
that is less chatty than the free-for-all Raw and more active than the
once-a-week distillation of Digest. We expect the volume to be about
10-20 posts a week.

Subscribe at: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz.

(The site may ask you to login before taking you to that page.) -
Francis Hwang

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+ad+

ARTMEDIA VIII CO-SPONSORED BY LEONARDO/OLATS in PARIS
http:://www.olats.org From "Aesthetics of Communication" to Net Art
November 29th - December 2nd 2002

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2.

Date: 10.4.02
From: Kim Machan (kim.machan AT maap.org.au)
Subject: MAAP - online and in Beijing

For details on contacting MAAP or list maintanance see information at
bottom of this email.

sincere apologies for any cross posting:
*********************************************

MAAP in Beijing
(MAAP -Multimedia Art Asia Pacific)

MAAP Festival will be held in Beijing
Official Opening 20 October
21 Oct- 3 November.
Our new web sites English/Chinese
www.maap.org.au

MAAP 2002 in Beijing will encompass a range of new media art exhibits,
Online projects, screenings and lectures addressing issues of audience
awareness and critical engagement with works by artists using
technologies and screen based media. MAAP will present the festival in 3
core venues in Beijing. The Art Museum of China Millennium Monument, The
Central Academy of Fine Arts, The Loft New Media Art Space.

Since MAAP's inaugural festival in 1998 it has been based in Brisbane,
Australia and Online supported by a mix of government, corporate and
educational sectors. MAAP presents a rigorous annual festival program of
new media art and technology that has included work from China, Korea,
Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Philippines, New
Zealand Vietnam and Australia.

Highlighting the China-Australia 30th Anniversary of relations, the MAAP
Festival is preparing to move to Beijing, leaping into the region to
create a unique cultural event and exchange.

Artists include Zhang Peili (China), Wang Gongxin (China), Zhu Jia
(China), YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (Korea), Candy Factory
(Japan), Patricia Piccinini (Australia), Shilpa Gupta (India), Jeffrey
Shaw (Australia/Germany), Craig Walsh (Australia) and many more ...
Major new media installations and commissioned works developed for the
31 metre video wall driven by 56 programmable monitors at the Art Museum
of China Millenium Monument. The Central Academy of Fine Arts is hosting
a one month residency with Australian artist Justine Cooper who will
prepare work for this big screen. Artists projects are delivered through
CDR, DVD, digital video, screening programs and program events include
lectures, symposium, artists talks and interactive social events!

This year's MAAP Festival theme "MOIST", is an evocative adjective,
suggestive of conditions relating to life; growth; humidity; humanity.
These loaded references unleash imaginative poetic associations as wide
as a fine foggy mist, a first kiss or a sweaty palm. Art meets
technology in a mix of emotion and wires!

MAAP in Beijing has been collaboratively achieved with the generous
support and advice of our partners; The China International Exhibitions
Agency, The Gohua Group, The Art Museum of China Millennium Monument,
The Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, the Australian Embassy in
Beijing, The Loft New Media Art Space. MAAP in Beijing is assisted and
supported by The Australia Council, Arts Qld, Macromedia, The Department
of Foreign Affairs and Trade, The Australian Film Commission, Apple,
e-translate, Brisbane City Council, QUT Creative Industries, Griffith
University, Media Hotel, Beijing, Singapore Airlines. Program support
from fineArtforum, Rhizome, ANAT, Experimenta, dLux, The Australian
Centre for the Moving Image, Art Center Nabi, Videotage, ISEA

to unsub send an email with the word "unsub" [without the quotation
marks] as the first word in the body of the email

to contact MAAP email info AT maap.org.au

to talk to a human being about any concerns or difficulties with this
list email jeff AT dadaentry.net

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+ad+

Metamute is now running a specially commissioned article a week. In the
last 3 weeks, we've published Ben Watson's in-depth review of The
Philistine Controversy, Eugene Thacker's analysis of the state-endorsed
biotech 'debate', and James Flint's urbanist reading of Glastonbury and
Sonar festivals. http://www.metamute.com

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3.

Date: 10.8.02
From: Mark Amerkia (Mark.Amerika AT Colorado.EDU)
Subject: Job announcement - University of Colorado, Boulder

The Department of Fine Arts at the University of Colorado, Boulder,
seeks a full-time, tenure-track Assistant Professor in Digital Art to
begin in August 2003. The successful applicant will help us strengthen a
developing curriculum in digital art as part of an ethnically diverse,
interdisciplinary art and art history program. Minimum requirements for
all applicants include: MFA or equivalent degree; evidence of active
artistic practice in the digital arts; and two years of teaching
experience at the university level. Application materials should
consist of a letter of application, curriculum vitae, names and contact
information for three references, artist's statement, examples of work
(CD, zip disk, URL), statement of teaching philosophy and commitment to
multi-cultural pedagogy, and examples of student work. Salary
commensurate with experience. Send materials to Mark Amerika, Search
Committee Chair, University of Colorado Department of Fine Arts, UCB
318, Boulder, CO 80309-0318. Review of applications will begin January
15, 2003, and continue until the position is filled. Representatives
from the Search Committee will be present at the CAA conference in New
York. The University of Colorado at Boulder is committed to diversity
and equality in education and employment.

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4.

Date: 10.6.02
From: juha huuskonen (juhuu AT juhuu.nu)
Subject: Nifca New Media AiR residency program

NIFCA - Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art introduces NEW MEDIA AiR, a
residency program dedicated for new media artists.

Themes for the residency program are:

1. Software art and software tools for artists
- Art projects implemented as software, or art projects that have an
essential software component
- Projects dealing with the concept of software
- Creative tools for artists

2. Sound/audiovisual performances and installations
- New media art that manifests itself as a performance,
event or installation and extends beyond the screen.
--
Following residencies are available for 2003 in Nordic/Baltic region:

Estonia : Tallinn - E-Media Centre + Artists' Union
Finland : Helsinki - Sibelius Academy CM&T + NIFCA
Latvia : Riga - RIXC + Artists' Union
Norway : Bergen - BEK + Hordaland Kunstsenter
Sweden : Stockholm - Splintermind + Studio House Malongen
and Gothenburg - Nätverkstan + Konstepidemin
Russia : St. Petersburg - PRO ARTE Institute

Nifca has also established an artist residency exchange program with
following countries/organisations:

Canada : Montreal - SAT
Great Britain : Huddersfield - The Media Centre
Portugal : Lisbon - ZDB
--

Artists from Nordic region (and from Estonia, Latvia and Russia) are
eligible to apply for all the residencies. Artists from the residency
exchange countries (Canada, Great Britain, Portugal) can apply to the
residencies in Nordic/Baltic region.

THE DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS IS 15 NOVEMBER 2002!!!!

The application form and more information is available at
http://www.nifca.org/new-media-air

The selections will be made before the end of November 2002 by an
international panel: Atle Barcley (Atelier Nord, Norway), Alain Mongeau
(MUTEK, Canada), Casey Reas (Interaction Design Institute IVREA, Italy),
Olle Huge (Beeoff, Sweden).

New Media AiR is a NIFCA program designed by Juha Huuskonen.

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5.

Date: 10.7.02
From: Wilfried Hou Je bek (wilfriedhoujebek AT yahoo.com)
Subject: ALGORITHMIC NOISE AS FREE CULTURE

The Hot Summer of Generative Psychogeography 2002 [as experienced by
http://www.socialfiction.org ]

On a Sunday afternoon like many others in a small Dutch university city
a small group of people who might, or might not be, acquainted to each
other gather, only to immediately disperse in their own separate ways as
guided by an algorithm. In theory this walk might never run into an
obstacle that forces the pedestrian to stop meandering. In reality
cities should be redesigned from scratch & people should be made
flawless by genetic modification to reach the situation where the human
compliance to the complexities of an algorithm as a psychogeographical
device is perfect. Participation in a generative psychogeographical
experiment forces you to adopt to the characteristics of a machine, you
are pushed through streets like an object in almost closed loops which
are connected by sudden rushes straight forward. There is a sense of
alienation involved in navigating in this manner but that feeling is
never realized completely: the algorithm which should be able to produce
a walk without navigational friction repeatedly produces more confusion
than certainty: the algorithm becomes chaos. In this sense a generative
psychogeographical experiment must always fail, it's not pixel clean
movement, it isn't a Flash animation come to flesh, its dirty, it's
algorithmic noise & we love it. generative psychogeography is a pleasant
state of displacement: it's the city-space cut-up.

The technology will find uses for the street on it's own.

In the summer of 2001 socialfiction.org performed the first experiment
in algorithmic pedestrian culture as a new methodology in
psychogeographical action research into all aspects of the urban
condition. The initial results were powerful & suggested such a large
field of possible research that we declared our algorithm to be 'open
source'. To make clear that we were serious we announced the Hot Summer
of Generative Psychogeography 2002 as the umbrella under which hundreds
of psychogeographical swarms could operate, interact & in general make
it more fun/worthwhile/surprising etc.

Because we worked with an algorithm it seemed reasonable to borrow the
concept of 'open source' from software development. To open something
implies that it was closed beforehand, in our case the code was
(literally) on the street from the start. But because the idea of people
spontaneously cooperating on the same thing is such a powerful way of
development, as it helps you to overcome the limits of your own skills &
imagination, we adopted the term anyway. There is also a more
philosophical implication involved in open source that goes beyond the
scope of the collaboration of Linux geeks programming Bill Gates out of
relevance. Open source has become a key value in the much larger issue
of creative & educational freedom which are part of a free society.
Stanford's Lawrence Lessig 'refrain' captures the political
implications of open source best:

1)Creativity and innovation always built on the past . 2) The past
always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. 3) Free
societies enable the future by limiting the power of the past. 4) Ours
is less and less a free society.

Open source is necessary, progress implies it.

Open source & psychogeography were connected from the start. Open source
activists claim that every act of creativity should enter the public
domain. Psychogeography has always been about open sourcing the city, to
make all parts, all spaces, of the city available to everybody, to
overcome your own habits imposed by social reality, to negate
stratification. Practising psychogeography always implies the right of
unrestrained mobility, of creating a public domain out of otherwise lost
urban area's.

The protection of the past from present day creativity does not need to
be specifically enforced by legal actions like the ones the music
business employs to crack down on sampling, P2P networks & bootleg
culture. The prohibition of reinterpreting the past might also happen on
the level of symbolic power. The situationists, well known for their
scorn for everybody who didn't think exactly as they did, were the
greatest enemies of the further development of psychogeography because
of their dogmatism, the same dogmatism their legacy is defended with
today by some obscurantist zealots: just like a musician can be inspired
by Gary Glitter without borrowing anything from his style the
post-freudian, post-surrealist psychogeography of the situationists has
been glamrocked into oblivion by the international network of
psychogeographers that emerged out of the Hot Summer.

The goal of the Hot Summer was to generate creativity by being creative.
We didn't want to protect our creativity for those unworthy like the
situationists did, we want it to spread & we want it to be stolen
because it proves to us that it's worthwhile. Anybody who steals our
ideas inspires us to create something new that people want to steal as
well. But stealing is the wrong word here, it was already yours to begin
with.

After the Hot Summer

The Hot Summer has turned into a lukewarm autumn. Great experiments have
been undertaken in several places, enthusiast people have taken the idea
to new places & new conceptual grounds. Interesting discussions have
enfolded on the mailinglist. New collaborators & new friendship have
been made. This not a detailed list of what has happened in the Hot
Summer, if anything this is a manifesto of the larger ideas behind a
network of people dedicated to exploring their environment & the
possibilities of algorithms in non-computational ways. The summer is
over but the project endures, the network is still active & the
invitation is still open: Wherever you are & whoever you are: have a
look at all the different sites, join in on the further development of
generative psychogeography, take these ideas as the jumping board for
your own activities. Be creative.

Countless people were important for the Hot Summer, let us conclude with
a random 'shouts to' list as if socialfiction.org is a member of the
Wu-Tang Clan: Christina Ray of Glowlab for all here shuffles & viruses,
Ivan Pope peripatetic superstar, Evol for the quantum psychogeography,
Antonio C. Pinto for his La Derive by Numbers, Nicholas Grindell for his
Kleist story & Berlin experiment, Jeremy Wood for the GPS drawings, Kate
Armstrong for the Vancouver airplane experience, Graeme of Monocular
Times, the Urban Festival in Zagreb for the opportunity, Tara for the
disco socialist server, the Dead Poets, Jeanne van Heeswijk for the
Witte de With exploit, Petr Kazil for his talks & enthusiasm, Sandra Hou
Je Bek, Conway for the game, the internet, the AAA which taught us all
our tricks, yahoo (so long as they keep it free), generative artists
everywhere, open source activists, William Burroughs for everything,
John Cage, the music{Jungle, 2 step, UK garage, Warp, Reich}, all road
menders, everybody on the mailinglist, everybody who has responded or
has contributed even the smallest bit to the project, everybody who
participated in an experiment, you know who you are.

Cheers,

Social Fiction

October 2002

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6.

Date: 10.1.02
From: Ken Jordan (ken AT kenjordan.tv)
Subject: Freeze Frame [Part 2]

[Editors Note: The entire essay was written by Jordan and Paul D. Miller
aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid for the "virtual music" issue of New
Music Box (http://www.newmusicbox.org)]

Freeze Frame: Audio, Aesthetics, Sampling, and Contemporary Multimedia
by Ken Jordan and Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

2. Composing With Software

When the software conditions the experience, it conditions the music.
One thing that many people notice when they start making music online is
that the Web is a powerful vortex; it doesn't let you go. There is no
single way to end a session; rather, there are many ways. There are
bootlegs of everything that has ever made it onto the Net. Multiplicity
is an unwavering factor in the online experience. Look at sites like
Afternapster.com. You will find hundreds of peer-to-peer networks, each
of which is the private preserve of a file sharing community. These can
be seen as the operational mode of a culture of distributed networks,
held together by a common thread: each represents a particular taste as
distributed through the system.

As Artaud said (in an incredible pre-cognition of the digital era's
constant stream of information guiding any creative act): "All true
alchemists know that the alchemical symbol is a mirage as the theater is
a mirage... [It's] the expression of an identity existing between the
world in which the characters, objects, images, and in a general way all
that constitutes the virtual reality of the theater develops..." In a
way, collaborative music making on the Net requires an interaction of
people and software that turns almost all normal contact between
musicians into a mediated experiment with the hypothetical. Is there a
human on the other side of the screen? The sounds can only give you a
hint. The software is a window onto a realm governed only by the
uncertainty of that fact. The connections displace physicality in a way
that leaves you a victim of context. This is the experience of
tele-composing. It makes the creative act become a cog in the abstract
machines of the software that mediate it.

Using online studio software, such as Rocket, Pro Tools, or Reason,
allows you to mix equally with either musicians or found sounds. Through
the software interface, there is a certain equivalency. Collaboration
can take place in real time between people, or between the remnants of
creativity that people leave behind -- the Net is full of such
suggestive debris. In this context, the only limitation comes from the
bottleneck that bandwidth places on file exchanges. The quicker the
speed, the richer the environment.

Another effect of software is to dematerialize the musical instrument.
It does this by distributing the qualities of an instrument across the
various peripherals that control the sounds that the software generates.
Algorithm displaces rhythm and becomes the environment in which to
create. MAX/MSP is an open ended software environment that lets you
create templates for virtual instruments -- it allows you to make an
aggregate of whatever sounds you run through its parameters. Almost all
process oriented software behaves like this. Editing environments such
as Pro Tools or Digital Performer function as dissecting tables of
sound; they allow the musician to compose material from multiple layers
of tracks and files, and to then condition the total output. It's like
building music out of Lego blocks.

That is, either Lego blocks or samples. Online, everything is a sample.
Every audio element becomes a potential fragment for manipulation and
recontextualization. Sampling follows the logic of the abstract
machinery of a culture where there are no bodies - just simulations of
bodies. The fragment speaks for the whole; the whole is only a single
track drifting through a vast database. The basic structure of
"assemblage," the method of collage, holds sway here. Think of this
terrain as object-oriented programming with beats. Take the file, edit
it: import/export/MIDI/SMTP.

Time code synchronizes the fragments, and makes it work wherever you
are... FTP controls the data exchange as a basic source of file
exchange... Lee Perry popularized the term "versioning" by using a
series of vocal tracks that were taken out of context and
de-familiarized through sound effects programming. This can be done
either as a live process or improvised on a virtual "mixing board."
Software that allows real time online jamming is appearing from every
corner of the globe. But is your online collaborator a person or a bot?
Or a combination of the two?

On the Web, collaborators can come in all guises. The White Stripes have
no bass player. Steve McDonald, the bass player for Red Kross, felt that
the White Stripes tunes could use more bottom. So each week he adds a
bass guitar part to one or two White Stripes songs, and makes them
available as "bootleg" MP3s. Jack White, the White Stripes' front man,
has apparently given these remixes his blessing.

3. Interacting With Intelligent Networks

Once, every sound had a distinct source. A door slammed shut, a horn was
blown, a guitar string was strummed. Audio came from a discrete event,
it was tied to a discernable action.

Networked music challenges this notion by displacing sound from its
origin, moving audio freely from one location to another, giving it a
presence in and of itself. John Cage brought this quality into modern
music with his 1939 piece, Imaginary Landscape. A performance that
combined turntables and radio broadcasts, this work introduced networked
interactivity into music making. Cage mixed into his performance various
transmissions that came over the airwaves, and with them created an
entirely new composition. Sound separated from its source in this manner
becomes a "free floating signifier," to borrow a phrase from Roland
Barthes. The musical elements are liberated from a specific time and
place, allowing them to be recontextualized in the final composition.

Robert Rauschenberg pursued something similar in the mid-1960s with his
interactive, sound-emitting sculpture, Oracle. Rauschenberg's
collaborator on the project, Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver, described
Oracle as "a sound environment made up of five AM radios, where the
sounds from each radio emanates from one of the five sculptures. The
viewer can play the sculpture as an orchestra from the controls on one
of the pieces, by varying the volume and the rate of scanning through
the frequency band. But they can not stop the scanning at any given
station. The impression was that of walking down the Lower East Side on
a summer evening and hearing the radios from open windows of the
apartment buildings."

By the early 1970s, as the technology became more accessible, more
artists began to explore the potential of networked media -- both audio
and video -- to create unique forms of interactive expression. These
artworks grew from the notion that meaning would emerge from media as it
circulates freely within a network -- and that meaning can be enhanced
through strategic interventions by the artist or audience. Douglas
Davis' 1971 performance, Electronic Hokkadim, produced at the Corcoran
Gallery, was based on the interactions between telephone callers and
broadcast television. Nam June Paik pursued what he referred to as a
"cybernated art," based on the transmission of information through video
and audio networks. Paik's 1973 television broadcast, Global Groove,
stands as a landmark event in this trajectory. Fragments of performances
by artists of various traditions -- Western and Eastern, popular and
elitist, traditional and modern -- were strung together in a frenetic,
continuous flow across the screen. Paik himself "performed" the
broadcast as a live mix, choosing his streams as a DJ does today,
manipulating images through a video synthesizer, using rhythm as the
underlying principle of composition.

Enabling and manipulating the continuous flow of information was a
principal concern behind the design of the networked personal computer.
But before the mid-1980s, bandwidth constraints and limited processing
power made the use of these tools prohibitively expensive for artists.
However, it was long apparent to the pioneers of networked media -- such
as Davis, Paik, and Roy Ascott -- that their artistic explorations with
satellites and local wired networks would lead to computer-based work,
once the technology had caught up to their vision.

Among the earliest musicians to dedicate themselves to the potential of
networked computing were The Hub, perhaps the world's first "computer
network band," which was founded at Mills College in 1985. One of the
members describes their method as follows: "Six individual
composer/performers connect separate computer-controlled music
synthesizers into a network. Individual composers design pieces for the
network, in most cases just specifying the nature of the data which is
to be exchanged between players in the piece, but leaving implementation
details to the individual players, and leaving the actual sequence of
music to the emergent behavior of the network. Each player writes a
computer program which make musical decisions in keeping with the
character of the piece, in response to messages from the other computers
in the network and control actions of the player himself. The result is
a kind of enhanced improvisation, wherein players and computers share
the responsibility for the music's evolution, with no one able to
determine the exact outcome, but everyone having influence in setting
the direction. The Javanese think of their gamelan orchestras as being
one musical instrument with many parts; this is probably also a good way
to think of The Hub ensemble, with all its many computers and
synthesizers interconnected to form one complex musical instrument. In
essence, each piece is a reconfiguration of this network into a new
instrument."

Implicit in this approach is the idea that, within the network, a kind
of intelligence is in circulation. David Wessel, at the University of
California at Berkeley, has been working with his colleagues along these
lines since the late 1980s, bringing together the fields of computer
music and neural networks. Could an instrument become intelligent, and
adapt to in an automated manner to a musician's playing style? Could it
learn the preferences of a particular musician, and modify itself in
response to what it learns? Using the MAX programming environment,
Wessel began to experiment with musicians in a network context. "We have
obtained reliable recognition of complex guitar strumming gestures and
limited numbers of spatial gestures," he wrote. "With such procedures
and much more research, we might conceivably move towards adaptive,
personalizable instruments.... one will have to decide when to
standardize or fix the instrument and let the musician learn the
appropriate gesture and when to let the instrument adapt to the
specialized approach of a player. How to rig the training harnesses on
ourselves as players and on our instruments as expressively responsive
musical tools will be a question of scientific, aesthetic, and social
concern." Once meaningful information is circulating within a computer
network, the opportunity emerges for a relevant interaction. As Wessel
suggests, networked computer tools will lead musicians into making
choices about aspects of their performance that had previously never had
to be asked, such as: how "smart" do I want my instrument to be?

The notion that music can emerge from an intelligent, interactive
environment has drawn some composers to compositional forms that would
be inconceivable without telecommunications technology. One example is
Atau Tanaka's 1998 installation, Global String. The work consists of a
physical string, 15 meters long, that stretches from a floor diagonally
to the ceiling of a room. At the ceiling, the string is connected to the
Internet. "It is a musical instrument wherein the network is the
resonating body of the instrument through the use of a real-time
sound-synthesis server," writes Tanaka. "The concept is to create a
musical string (like the string of a guitar or violin) that spans the
world. Its resonance circles the globe, allowing musical communication
and collaboration among the people at each connected site."

Ping, a site-specific sound installation by Chris Chafe and Greg
Niemeyer, takes a similar approach. Ping has been described as "a sonic
adaptation of a network tool commonly used for timing data transmission
over the Internet. As installed in the outdoor atrium of SFMOMA," for
the millennial exhibition 010101, "Ping functions as a sonar-like
detector whose echoes sound out the paths traversed by data flowing on
the Internet. At any given moment, several sites are concurrently
active, and the tones that are heard in Ping make audible the time lag
that occurs while moving information from one site to another between
networked computers." In effect, Ping makes music out of the data flow
of the Net -- the constant motion of digitized fragments in real time is
given an aesthetic form.

The composer and theorist Randall Packer has explored this line of
telematic composition in a number of pioneering collaborative
installations. For Mori, an "Internet based earthwork" first mounted in
1999 by Packer with Ken Goldberg, Wojciech Matusik, and Gregory Kuhn,
the trembling movements of California's Hayward Fault are picked up by a
seismograph, converted into digital signals, and sent over the Internet
to the installation. This data stream triggers a series of low frequency
sounds that vibrate through the installation, viscerally connecting the
visitor to the moment-by-moment fluctuations of the earth's actual
movement.

In what he has referred to as "artistic research projects," Packer has
further explored the possibilities of interactive, telematic musical
works. One such installation, Telemusic, was staged by Packer and his
collaborators Steve Bradley and John P. Young at the Sonic Circuits VIII
International Festival of Electronic Music and Arts in St. Paul,
Minnesota, in November, 2000. Telemusic brought together live
performers, audio processing of their performances, and real time
participation from the public through a Web site, www.telemusic.org. As
the performers read from a script, their delivery was effected by audio
processing triggered by the mouse clicks of visitors to the Web site.
The final mix in the room was then streamed to the Web site, so a
visitor could hear the final musical composition that she had
contributed to by clicking a mouse. In order to create this direct form
of interactivity, Packer's team had to develop an interface between
impulses captured over the Internet and a server hosting MAX software.
This circular experience, in which listener is also a participant in the
making of a musical work, is indicative of the direction where the
Internet is suggesting that music should go -- as the distinction
between "artist" and "audience" begins to slip away, and we find
ourselves dipping into the data flow, listening to the music that it
makes, and that we make with it.

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Rhizome Digest is filtered by Rachel Greene (rachel AT rhizome.org). ISSN:
1525-9110. Volume 7, number 41. Article submissions to list AT rhizome.org
are encouraged. Submissions should relate to the theme of new media art
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