March 2009
Pictured above is a still related to?Mattia Casalegno & Michael Langeder's Disturbed City project which will be featured soon here on Vague Terrain. We are hard at work putting together the citySCENE issue and plan on launching it on Monday - we are very excited about the work we've collected. So hold tight! In the meantime two urban-tech links for your perusal:
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CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR MUSICWORKS WINTER 2009: THE ?IDEA OF CONTEXT? ISSUE Musicworks, the magazine for curious ears, is now accepting proposals for content for its Winter 2009 issue. Musicworks is about the craft of experimenting with music and sound with feature articles that focus on the intentions and works of the artists. We?re looking for thought-provoking pieces that explore the boundaries that today?s creators are pushing. DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF PROPOSALS: March 31, 2009. Final drafts due by June 30, 2009. The issue will be published in October 2009. Please submit proposals of no more than 300 words. If you have not written for us before, a short CV and example of previously published work would be helpful. (You are also welcome to submit if you are unpublished.) CONTACT: send your proposals to editor@musicworks.ca with the subject line ?Proposal for Musicworks Winter 2009.? Please forward this call to other writers, mailing lists and artists. THE ?IDEA OF CONTEXT? ISSUE It has been over fifty years since the term ?experimental music? has been in use. Since then, commonly held perceptions of what music is has been challenged, resulting in a multiplicity of new forms and genres. In issue 105, Musicworks is looking for profiles of musicians?individuals and groups?who are experimenting with the idea of context.
You can propose content for any of these Musicworks sections: Commentaries?1000 to 1500 words Shorter features or essays that examine sound exploration from a technical perspective, commentary on music and its implications, social and cultural issues, or essays by artists about their own work. Profiles?1500 to 2000 words?Shorter pieces examining an artist or group of artists or a particular work. Sonic Geographies?800 to 1000 words?Pieces examining the sonic character or experimental music or sound art scene in a specific city or region. Features?2000 to 3000 words?Longer pieces delving deeply into the work of an artist or group of artists. Visions of Sound?300 words?Our back-page feature, a short expos? of a work that blurs the boundaries between or explores the interrelation of audio and visual art. Reviews Events?1000 words?only multi-day festivals or major events (no single concerts, please). Books?300-500 words Recordings?200 words?Roughly in these categories: acoustic new music, electronic and electroacoustic, experimental jazz, and new visions/pop avant. For a list of recordings available for review, please contact the Musicworks office; we also accept proposals for reviews of recordings that are not on the list. If you are unfamiliar with Musicworks, please have a look at our website and the magazine to see if your idea would find a good home with us. We?re available in large bookstores throughout North America and in most university libraries. If you can?t find us, ask for us! |
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The French philosopher Paul Virilio argued that every new technology comes complete with its own unique catastrophe; the invention of the aeroplane, for instance, was also the invention of the plane crash. The corollary of the sample epiphany is what I call the "sample stain". Simon Reynolds waxes poetic on sampling and Massive Attack for The Guardian. |
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[Tori Foster / The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of a Torontonian - still] We are excited to announce the launch of Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE, the latest edition of our online digital arts publication. Curated by Greg J. Smith, the issue indexes a wide range of strategies for representing and visualizing urban space. Drawing on the collective talent of an international pool of new media artists and scholars, citySCENE catalogs how cartography, infrastructure and locative media shape perception in the contemporary city. Many submissions also explore more subjective urban experiences and consider notions of vision, acoustic ecology, movement and agency through experiments and interventions staged in a number of global cities. Contributors: Abinadi Meza, Andrea Rojas, Mattia Casalegno & Michael Langeder, Michael Chen & Jason J. Lee, Conor McGarrigle, David Drury, Franke Dresme, Greg Giannis, Hector Centeno, Katharine S. Willis, Michael Surtees, Mitchell Whitelaw, Olga Mink, Ivan Safrin & Christian Marc Schmidt, Thomas Dreher, Tori Foster and Yukiko Bowman. To view the issue please visit http://vagueterrain.net/journal13 |
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[photo: jb] In keeping with our current theme of urban representation, I'm going to make a point of using the Vague Terrain blog to share related content over the coming weeks and months. First on the agenda is the Bureau for Unstable Urbanism (BUU). We received an email about this project (and related conference in Oslo this May) from Jeremy Welsh at the?Bergen National Academy of Arts. The newfound BUU describes itself as "as a trans-national network of individuals and groups involved in a variety of practices that engage in different ways with contemporary urban space, actually or conceptually". Poking through their blog archives yielded some interesting musings on urban readymades and speculation on?shotgun architecture - I guess it is safe to assume this spirit of experimentation will be the driving force behind their conference this spring. Take a look at the BUU website for more info on the project, they've got quite the team of bloggers/artists hard at work examining urban space throughout the EU and beyond. |
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Two notable links from the last few days:
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If there is a genealogy of urban visualization projects, there is certainly a category invested in reading the city as a text. CityMurmur?was developed by?Writing Academic English at the VISUALIZAR'08 workshop held at Medialab-Prado last fall. The project functions as a geo-aggregator and produces maps and semantic representations of Madrid based off RSS feeds. Mixing both mass media and blog commentary, the project provides a flexible interface for reading the city "through the eyes of the media". Some additional technical notes are available at a related VisualComplexity post?but the best way to get a sense of the project is to take it for a spin yourself. |
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[Paul Prudence / sonLattice / photo: watz] As noted by Generator.x on twitter - Videos from the?NODE 08 Forum For Digital Arts are now available online. Be sure to check out?the archived lectures and presentations by top shelf art and design thinkers that include C.E.B. Reas, Régine Debatty, and Paul Prudence. |
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Just a quick note that may be of interest to some of our readers. I'll be in Los Angeles this week at the Postopolis! LA architecture/art/urbanism conference organized by the Storefront for Art and Architecture. The event features five days of guest speakers as programmed by?ArchDaily/Plataforma Arquitectura, BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, Subtopia, Mudd Up! and?We Make Money Not Art. I've be posting about and summarizing the proceedings on Serial Consign and via my twitter account - so feel free to tune into those channels if you want a window into the conference. You can get full schedule information here - the lineup of participants ranges from critical theorists, to sound artists to a representative of the LAPD. The event will be taking place on the schmoozetastic rooftop of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles tomorrow through the end of Saturday. I'll be representing Vague Terrain and Serial Consign on a media panel on Saturday afternoon. Given the range of participants in that discussion it should be quite engaging - perhaps we can make it through the panel without mentioning Clay Shirky? |
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