[Nettime-nl] Navigating the Space of the Future

[Marieke Istha <istha@nimk.nl>]

Navigating the Space of the Future

Netherlands Media Art Institute
April 15
Start 20.30 hour

LIVE STREAM: http://www.montevideo.nl/st/player.php

Seminar with presentations by: Yolande Harris, David Dunn and Atau Tanaka

What does it mean to navigate? What is the importance of location 
specificity? What does it mean to get lost? The increasing accuracy of 
satellite navigation strives to eliminate the possibility of human 
error, but it also produces a sense of dislocation from one's immediate 
environment by abstracting location as the coordinates of longitude and 
latitude. What place is there for one's body, one's senses, one's 
conscious and unconscious awareness of space, if this knowledge is so 
apparently made redundant by GPS? What, if any, role can historical 
skills of navigation at sea, of observation, choice, intuition and 
improvisation play in navigating the spaces of the future? The symposium 
'Navigating the Space of the Future' will take these questions as its 
starting point to see if we can find our way within the dense 
environment of global positioning technologies. The field is open but 
the practice is just starting to form itself by looking at ways to 
counter locative media strategies where geographical walks are organised 
that use the city and the street as a playing field negating the 
relation between space, architecture, time, body and mind. The 
presentations will focus on new ways of interpreting data of location 
and navigation by relating these directly to the physical (space) 
through the use of sound.

Yolande Harris – Sun Run Sun (Artist in Residence NIMk)
Sun Run Sun explores the individual experience of current location 
technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to 
(re)establish a sense of personal connectedness to one's environment, 
and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future 
and animal navigation using sound. Sun Run Sun investigates the split 
between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of 
position. A series of portable personal instruments “satellite sounders” 
developed for the residency, transform satellite data directly into a 
sonic composition. This composition constantly varies in response to the 
changing location of the player as they move through their physical 
environment. 'The experience of sound is internal, as a process that 
influences the relationship between the self and the environment. True 
navigation consists of a continuously coherent relationship between the 
two.'
http://sunrunsun.nimk.nl/
http://www.yolandeharris.net

David Dunn
David Dunn takes his research into the bioacoustics of bark beetles and 
entomogenic climate change, and on ultrasonic audio phenomena in both 
human and non-human environment as starting points to talk about 
Acoustic Ecologies. He wants to bring forth the sonic presence of these 
worlds for human contemplation of their inherent aesthetic beauty and to 
show the amazing continuity of life, with its capacity for infinite 
variation in audible communication. “Given the superabundance of how 
music as a human activity has been used, I believe that music has 
simultaneously been a strategy to evolve our capacity to 
structurally-couple with our environment through our aural perception, 
and a significant force for defining the boundaries of group affiliation 
and for the affirmation of cultural status, giving voice to an 
evolutionary heritage of an abundance of other coupling modes that are 
greater than the rational mind alone.”
http://www.davidddunn.com
http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5399

Atau Tanaka
Atau Tanaka bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and 
research. He creates music for sensor instruments, wireless network 
infrastructures, and democratized digital forms. Tanaka is best known 
for his performances where he uses physical gestures to articulate music 
and sound synthesis and real-time image transformation. For the past 
years, inspired by the ever-changing social, geographic, ecological, 
emotional context of using mobile technology for creative ends Tanaka 
focusses his attention towards mobile media projects. He is exploring 
the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. “My 
interest is to take interactive music practice off the stage and outside 
the concert hall into the urban sphere. Mobile communications devices 
are meant to connect groups of people. Musical concerts, similarly, are 
situations that bring people together for a common purpose. Can we 
elicit commonalities to make a community-based musical process, creating 
a shared experience among users?” In his presentation he will pay 
attention to the description of the architecture of an audio-visual 
hard- and software framework that was developed for the realization of a 
series of locative media artworks, and eliciting from this, he brings 
afore fundamental issues and questions that can be generalized and 
applicable to the growing practice of locative media.
http://www.xmira.com/atau

Start 20.30 h.
Entrance 3,50 (2,50 students)
Please make reservations 020 6237101 info@nimk.nl


Netherlands Media Art Institute
Keizersgracht 264
1016 EV Amsterdam
http://www.nimk.nl
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