[-empyre-] final questions for Patrick and Jason: the visual and indexing networked information

[Jim Andrews]

here is a page of links i maintain to works of interactive audio on the web 
plus links to writings on the subject and a few links to other sources of 
news where you sometimes read of new works of this kind. if you have any 
suggestions concerning further links, please send them to me.

http://vispo.com/misc/ia.htm

i should say that several of the artists linked to here have interactive 
sonic works on turbulence.org (including jason and myself). turbulence has 
been as supportive of interactive work for the net as was the earlier 
project called new american radio, which helen also produced, concerning 
radio art. not too many have been able to make the transition from 
radio/sound of the eighties and nineties to interactive audio for the 
net--or off the net. helen has, as a producer, and truly that has been 
crucial to the development of...well, calling it a 'field' brings up images 
to me of relatively small but beautiful fields of waving long grass. not so 
much the "tallgrass" christine alludes to, on the prairies, as erm something 
smaller. so, many thanks, helen and jo! well done! keep it up!

interactive audio works can fascinate me and give me an art experience that 
i value very much. one of the things about audio more generally--and 
particularly concerning the small-screen environment of the net browser--is 
the dramatic extent of its ability for both the worldly and otherworldly. 
audio is invisible and extrordinarily suggestive. we can be immersed in 
audio over the net in ways that it is harder to do visually, on the small 
screen. partly that's a matter of space. the audio space is as large as 
you'd like--or as the wreader has speakers to hear it with. but there's also 
the world-space of it conceptually. just the sounds of rain and cars on a 
wet street can immerse us in a place or situation, sensually, in a way that 
it's hard to do with pictures on a small screen. that's immersion in the 
worldly. but audio--and in particular, interactive audio--can also deal in 
very compelling ways with the other-worldly, as you will certainly 
experience in many of the works linked from http://vispo.com/misc/ia.htm . 
the small screen is often more compelling concerning abstract visual work 
than more traditionally representative imagery. so the cross product of the 
conceptual richness of audio, as art dimension, with the interactive and 
also the visual, can make for heady experience of influence, construction, 
appreciation, decision, meditation, wonder, immersion, and meaningful 
alternatives.

if we were to seriously inquire into the future health of art on the net, 
four of the most important metrics, methinks, would be, in this order :

1) the richness of the experience transmissable via net art and
2) whether net art is doing anything that isn't essentially being done 
elsewhere--i.e., whether forms of art specific to the net develop and
3) the adaptation by artists to the specific characteristics of both the 
net, as media/um, and interactive sound, as combinatorium supremum;
4) and whether an audience coalesces for the work across the net.

one of the disadvantages of interactive audio over the net versus in 
installations is that the wreader is working only with the mouse and/or 
keyboard and possibly the microphone. compared with offline systems that 
integrate into non-virtual spaces that do not anchor the wreader at a 
computer. and i follow the argument. but that argument discounts the 
conceptual importance of the actions the artist requests of the wreader. are 
we just clicking a mouse and tapping at a keyboard and just triggering 
sounds, or are we creating the universe, building a visual and sonic 
sculpture, directing the creation of an instance of an artwork knowable as a 
game is known: in its repeated playings as a combinatorium the entirety of 
which constitutes the work but of which we sample representationally.

if the actions the artist requests the wreader to engage in have meaning 
beyond simply the audio API command to which they might correspond, then 
they can engage not solely in the audio as purely sonic construction but in 
the process of interactivity as one that contains a certain narrativity and 
worldly/other-worldly meaning in its sequencing and cumulative impression. 
this is true whether we're talking about online or offline art experience, 
of course. and it's something that interactive audio for the net has to 
exploit specially strongly because of the neuraesthetics of the small-screen 
environment versus installation environments. and that'd be a big part of 
the art dimension, in either case.

interactive audio for the net versus interactive offline audio is sort of 
like the book versus the movie or the book versus the theatrical adaptation. 
the book has to work hard to get the reader's imagination flowing but does 
have at its disposal the meditative environment of reading and its 
spontaneous, meaningful breaks in reading for imagining. net-based browser 
works are there to be experienced whenever you pick them up, whereas you 
gotta be there for an installation.

and part of the challenge of net-based interactive audio is to make a world 
spring from the small screen and its speakers and the wreader's imaginative 
engagement with and surely creation of that world. to say nothing of the 
challenge of getting it to work on millions of machines around the world 
rather than a few dedicated machines. but also, the challenge is to do 
something new in a small-screen environment where the wreader normally has 
seen and heard a great deal of media. and part of the reward is that the 
audience--like the truth, or so we hear in the X Files (and I believe 
them)--is out there. distribution of work on the net is amazing. more 
importantly, perhaps, is the value of creating a new form of publication 
art.

to address the topic of the network and audio more deeply than simply 
concerning audience and distribution, there's the whole aspect of sampling 
the huge databases of sonic material amassing--like the corresponding 
textual, still image, and video databases we routinely search--and making 
some sort of art and 'sense' of it. plus the whole dimension of sonic 
communication between people over the net--tapping into that and intervening 
meaningfully in personal communications (i don't mean surveillance). among 
other challenges and promises.

have been enjoying the discussion this month. thanks!

ja
http://vispo.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "naxsmash" <naxsmash at mac.com>
To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 11:24 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] final questions for Patrick and Jason: the visual 
and indexing networked information


no, i think that the sound space/ sonification field is far from
narrow-- it's not obscured by the visual-- sound cuts 'below'
vision... thanks for sharing the links here for turbulence's sound
projects.
I had a strange and powerful 'turning away 'from the visual experience
in working with carbon sink data on the tallgrass prairie in 2002--the
most rich and interesting expression of the datafields was through
sound using an extra layer of
meaning/ stealing-- from John Cage-- This was slipstreamkonza which I
made with the wonderful and amusing help of Henry Warwick (mister H W
of -empyre- postings). For my part I feel the most interesting  issues
in sonficiation have
to do with poetics and syntax (as usual in my world)!Rather than
'visualize' the data I just put together a slide show of the
microclimate instrumentation on the prairie. To contextualize the
sound.  In no way was the sonification intended to
directly represent the carbon data; rather Henry and I worked with
three layers of sound-meaning -- a recasting of Cage's HPSCHD, local
ambient sound recorded as the microclimate 'autochamber' machine
worked in the field, and aleatory noise
patterns coming out of Henry's crunching of the excell spread sheets
and assigning arbitrary audio values to numerical patterns.  Published
for COSIGN, SCALE (USCD) and YLEM in 2004.


http://www.christinamcphee.net/slipkonza/autochamber.html