Helen Thorington writes about Sonification of You on Networked Music Review

Adam Hyde writes: Radio Tower Xchange (RTX) is a networked performance event, a DVD, and collaborative installation. At the same time, the RTX is also a closing activity of the “WAVES“ project, and it will be coordinated by the RIXC and co-organisers, and sound artists from all over the Europe and the globe.

RTX is intended as an global networked net.radio event using experimental networked performances from Xchange (global net.audio network) artists located at Radio Towers around the world. The aim is to have each Xchange representative streaming from a Radio Tower in their city.

As well as being architecturally significant, Radio Towers have played a remarkable role in history and a valuable role in the evolution of radio science since the beginning of last century.

However with the recent developments in wireless internet technologies these towers that were sites exclusively used for government and commerical broadcasts, are now largely symbols of frequency commodification. The stately towers and masts now are encircled by a multitude of self-organising public wifi networks. Thousands of wireless routers form chaotic meshs of public radio space around these huge broadcast icons similar to how rambling city markets surround the towering commerical buildings in many cities of the world. In these places public broadcasting takes on a new meaning, it is the public that broadcasts, nota broadcast provided FOR the public. Regulated broadcasts are monolithic, like the towers built to support them which require huge amounts of resources to sustain and generations to change. Unregulated space, the new public broadcast space, is infectous, it finds new ways to communicate new things, and broadcasting is becoming a behaviour which is daily and inevitable. Transmitting, is becoming part of the fabric of urban existence, it is perhaps now a more common practice to many than receiving…

In these unregulated spaces Xchange has been provoking cultural, artistic and theoretical practice and discourse since the advent of streaming media in the mid 90′s. Xchange reflected the new approach to collaborative, autonomous ad-hoc broadcasting. Network broadcasts were common place for the first years of Xchange, with each node in the network contributing to a online cacophony where no single node could be distinguished in the mix from another. Ownership was impossible to maintain and hence forgotten. Participation became the goal. The sharing of transmissions was more exciting than the simultaneous reception of the same transmission. The doors to the broadcast towers were not forced open by these pioneers but ignored, and the landmark symbols of one-to-many broadcasting was replaced by rambling a network of many-to-many net.casters.

RTX is both a homage and a criticque of the broadcasting philosophies and histories these towers represent, and an investigation into the evolving practice of unregulated online broadcasting.

The Eiffel Tower, in Paris France, home of the Xchange group TNC, has been used for radio transmission for over 100 years. For the first 50 years of last century long wave antennas ran from the top of the tower to the Champ de Mars. In 1909 the tower was to be demolished but was saved because of its role as a radio antenna. The Eiffel tower is also the first place that cosmic rays were detected in 1910 by Father Theodor Wulf. In 1920 radio pioneer Lee De Forest started broadcasting music using the tower as an antenna from Paris to America to demonstrate his belief that radio was the new media for entertainment in the 20th century. During WW2 the French cut the elevator cables to the tower so that Hitler would have to walk the nearly 2000 steps to the summit.

Berlin, home of well known Xchange practitioners Bootlab, and convex.tv, is also the home of many remarkable transmission towers including the European Unions highest structure – the Fernsehturm in Alexsanderplatz. The tower was built in the 60s by the reigning Socialist powers. Berlin also houses the Funkturm Berlin tower, which (in 1935) was the site where the first ever regular television broadcasts began.

Rigas “radio un televizijas tornis” (Radio and Television Tower) is the second highest radio tower on Europe, and Riga is of course the home of the Xchange founders RIXC. Perhaps more famously The RT32 parabolic antenna is located close to Riga and is where the Acoustic Space Lab experiments of 2000 occurred.

Budapest, where early Xchange net.radio contributers Pararadio are still located, is also where you will find the Radio tower of Lakihegy, which was the worlds tallest structure when it was built in 1933. At 314 metres it is probably the worlds largest inactive monument to radio.

Fakeshop (New York) contributed to the Xchange network from the beginning and was one of the few that also experimented with net.video. New York has many famous radio towers including of course the Empire State building, and Wardenclyffe on Long Island where Tesla wanted to build his “Radio City”.

Centerpoint Tower is Sydney’s tallest structure, and it is here we envision the House of Laudanum would contribute. The tallest structure in the Southern Hemisphere is the Sky Tower, which is used to house many major radio and television transmitters for New Zealand (where radioqualia originate).

These towers are examples of some of the places Xchange participants will site themselves to participate in the RTX performance. Although the participants will use spaces like the Sky Tower, Wardenclyffe, and the radio tower of Lakihegy as a physical platforms for their performances, the carrier medium for their broadcasts will be the many pervasive public wireless networks than radiate through and around these towers.

Sonification of You live at TakeAway Festival 2007, at London’s Science Museum.

Sonification of You ascended to Rhizome ArtBase

Sonification of You at Sound:Space 2007

Sound:Space – A day of artist talks, demonstrations and performances exploring contemporary artistic use of sound and environment. This event provides an opportunity to absorb a wealth of the latest developments in audio research and the field of Sound Art and experience a series of fascinating sonic exhibitions.

Sonification of You ran live for an hour as part of NOMUSIC Festival X (live transmission / 24 hour performance):

-< 48 Participants >-
-< 24h Continuous Streaming Audio Festival >-
-< Realtime Simultaneous Dual Live >-
-< Audio Live Performing only via Internet >-
-< Creative Commons Audio License - No Archivz >-
-< Stream Live Audio - Double/Split Channel >-

[GMT+0 - Greenwich Time] * lasting 24 hours forming a terrestrial revolution completes online without interruption between 48 participants.
START : the 13th, December, 2006 (00h00 / 00:00am) [GMT+0 - Greenwich Time]
END : the 13th, December, 2006 (23h59 / 11:59pm) [GMT+0 - Greenwich Time]

PRESENTATION :

(((NOMUSIC))) started on June 2001, according to the principle that a diffusion site on Internet should correspond to the representation of the singular performances of a new generation of artists, musicians, performers and other actors of the electronic scene. The creation of this open diffusion site proved to be necessary because of today’s difficulty to perform disembodied concerts of electronic music on stage, in a classical frontal (actor/audience) representation space.
Nowadays, these emerging new multimedia performances allow everybody to approach music in a more singular way, with a different listening practice and on a more sharing scene.

Every year since 2001, (((NOMUSIC))) offers one or more festivals which programming is geographically variable and which function is to relay in a coordinated way a 24 hours earth revolution of no-musicians @ home. This virtual earth revolution materializes a world wide sound cover of 24 time zones according to the universal time [GMT 0]. This gives to participants who are scattered all over the world the opportunity to take part in the festival. The participation is free of charge and the recruitment is made exclusively on Internet through diffusion lists. The selection is not made according to practices and genres criterion but rather according to the approaches and artistic positions which should echo the logic of the festival.

(((NOMUSIC))) platform offers two types of live. In its classical form, the participant plays alone at home for one hour. He can also play in dual. Dual is a live in which two geographical sites are linked via Internet and mixed together in stereo (participant 1 on the left channel and participant 2 on the right one).

(((NOMUSIC))) wishes to generate improbable duals and gatherings between two participants during one hour time in a web audio performance. We make no storage because we think that Internet is a huge database which conveys already a great amount of dead informations and we don’t want to pollute it further. We are thus in favour of instant access to a selective event. The mechanism of the programming is not automated; it is relayed manually for 24 hours without any interruption by laboiteblanche and Carl.Y., two real human routers who are at the service of continuous audio stream and who endure technical difficulties and give rapid formation on the technologies of streaming to all the participants.

(((NOMUSIC))) stands between musical negation and anti-bruitism, in a non-silent interstice of audio manifestation. It allows the composer-performer to be his own auditor, in a place where nothing should be heard but just felt as a new entity to observe.

FOUNDERS :

From 1999 on, laboiteblanche and Carl.Y, have both experimented streaming through series of interconnected web concerts and programming via the site NOWEB thus creating a form of festival which dimension is tailor-made for the web.

The support of the late CICV Pierre Schaeffer ’s residence at Hérimoncourt [Fr] gave more opportunity for further development of the interface system; it allowed also an access to a bandwidth of great capacity, which is essential to bear the year after year rising load of the connections. Technically speaking, (((NOMUSIC))) is now autonomous and provides its own lodging on Internet since the creation of the NOHOST platform.

laboiteblanche & Carl.Y play regularly together in concerts or on the net, from Berlin to Fournos via Paris or other cities. At the same time, each of them develops different projects related to the new technologies:
Radio WNE
[Self Radio]
Radio WNE concentrate his programs on diffusion of new emergent musics and musicians, performers and the broadcasting of stranges audio-contents, events retransmissions and acoustics phenomena, on a collaborative open-plateform online
Audiotrace
[Installation / Performance / Website]
Random listening system of the radio frequencies of police, airports, trains, emergency services…
StreamYourself
[Workshop]
Workshop on the techniques of audio and video streaming in Art schools
DM-NOMUSIC
[Audio 3D Map / Performance]
Audio 3D environnement mixed on web

STATS :
5 years and 10 festivals
226 participants during 212 hours
More than 8000 listeners from 25 countries over 4 continents

Review at Ecrans:

24 heures de « Nomusic » non stop
par Marie Lechner
tag : musique

La dixième édition du Nomusic festival, marathon du streaming orchestré depuis cinq ans par Carl Y. et La boîte blanche, débute ce soir à minuit pour 24 heures de musique non stop (le 13 décembre de 0h à 23h59) around the globe.

Pour cette nouvelle session, diffusée exclusivement sur le net, ils seront 48 musiciens dispersés aux quatre coins de la planète (Suède, Italie, Russie, Allemagne, France, Japon, Royaume-Uni, Autriche, Québec, Belgique, ou encore Pérou, Hongrie, Pologne…) à se relayer. Dans les premières éditions, les solos se succédaient, chaque musicien jouant tout seul depuis sa chambre pendant une heure, désormais c’est le duo qui prime. Les duettistes, tirés au sort, émettent l’un sur le canal de gauche, l’autre sur le canal de droite, recréant une stéréo artificielle. Ils jouent chez eux à distance, et « Nomusic » les réunit sur le réseau, suscitant d’improbables rencontres audio par exemple entre Kaffe Matthews (Londres) et Erik Minkkinen (Paris), entre les noiseurs alsaco-roumains Sun Plexus (Cluj) et le suédois Jon Eriksen (Malmö), entre Carl Stone (Tokyo), pionnier de la musique live sur ordi, et Neil Kaczor (Londres) ou encore Cat Hope (Singapour) et Davidly (Berlin).

Nomusic, qui dit se situer entre « la négation musicale et l’anti-bruitisme », propose une instantané du réseau en matière d’expérimentation sonore, offrant une plate forme de diffusion et de création adaptée à une génération d’artistes, musiciens, performeurs aux pratiques singulières.

Nomusic privilégie l’instantanéité du live et refuse l’archivage. « Nous n’archivons pas parce que nous pensons qu’Internet stocke déjà une quantité énorme d’informations mortes, nous ne voulons pas le polluer davantage. » C’est donc ce soir ou jamais…

Sonification of You live at Trampoline Festival, Broadway Media Centre, Nottingham, November 2006

Trampoline is dedicated to the promotion of new technology art and artists and aims to present cutting edge art in an informal atmosphere; encouraging new artists to exhibit work to a real audience, whilst providing a platform for established artists working in new directions.

Trampoline began life in 1997 as Nottingham’s first ever platform event for new media art. In 2001, founders Miles Chalcraft and Anette Schäfer moved to Berlin and expanded Trampoline to Germany. Co-founder Gareth Howell continued Trampoline Nottingham throughout 2001 and 2002. Since then Trampoline has been left in the capable hands of a series of guest curators including Sharmila Cogger and Lizzy Whirrity, Nottingham art based collective, REACTOR and now Emma Lewis.

Sonification of You live as part of Paraflows06 in Vienna, Austria, September 2006, at Blumberg Gallery.

paraflows 06 focusses on the idea of a ‚net behind the net’ which can mean both the digital behind the social net, and the social behind the digital net. paraflows (the Greek prefix ‘para’ meaning: beside, near, moreover) emanates from the main motors of freedom of the net and its para-experts, the wikipedias and slashdots of all areas within which consumers help each other voluntarily to become and remain critical users and experts in their fields.

Sonification of You live on Resonance FM as part of FRAMED, a Node.London event.

Resonance 104.4 fm is the world’s first radio art station, established by London Musicians’ Collective. It started broadcasting on May 1st 2002. Its brief? To provide a radical alternative to the universal formulae of mainstream broadcasting. Resonance 104.4 fm features programmes made by musicians, artists and critics who represent the diversity of London’s arts scenes, with regular weekly contributions from nearly two hundred musicians, artists, thinkers, critics, activists and instigators; plus numerous unique broadcasts by artists on the weekday “Clear Spot”.