Syndicate: Closing the Loop 2000 (CTL2000) - 1st Announcemen

[closing the loop hQ <honor@va.com.au>]

Time's Up, in association with BIOMACHINES and r a d i o q u a l i a present:


Closing the Loop 2000
CTL2000

http://www.timesup.org/closing/ctl2000.html

A laboratory on sound & gameplay across networks

Adelaide, Australia
February 2000


"When you work with digital sound, when you start to sample and you have
sound pieces that can recombine in several circumstances, you very fast get
this idea of a pluralistic space of possibilities. As soon as we entered
digital technology, we lost the position that we are in control of the
result." 
Gerfried Stocker, Director of Ars Electronica Festival.


Sound culture has begun a process of reflecting the permanent flux of the
new century. Because of the lower technological thresholds required to
manipulate and transmit sound, it has the ability to morph and mutate at
the pace of technological and cultural evolution, in a way that the
televisual image, can not as yet. On the internet, sound is being used as a
way of collapsing geographical boundaries, of extending musical
conversations across timezones and cultures, and catalysing new and complex
systems of collaboration.

An international research and performance project, set to take place in
Adelaide Australia, will examine how sound, technology and gameplay can
conspire to promote collaboration and inventiveness across networks.  

Why Adelaide? Over the past three years a small but uncompromising group of
sound artists and musicians have overcome the city's [sub]cultural inertia
to produce a series of inventive and enduring live performances, using a
variety of analogue and digital technologies, including the internet.
Unfortunately though, the micro-scale of these events, exemplified by the
mesm.eon <http://rorschach.test.at/mesmeon> performances staged by Matthew
Thomas and dj zyzx, the fledgling a p h a. S ia  series, and isolated live
episodes such as those organised by Zonar Recordings, has rendered this
tide of activity largely invisible.

These innovations have not, however escaped the attention of Austrian media
group, Time's Up <http://www.timesup.org>, internationally renowned for
their pioneering presentations of art and technology.  In association with
Australasian sound collaboration, r a d i o q u a l i a
<http://www.radioqualia.va.com.au>, and Adelaide Festival project
BIOMACHINES, Time's Up are siting the latest manifestation of their Closing
the Loop research series in the city.  A precursor to the multivariant
cultural activities taking place at the Telstra Adelaide Festival, Closing
the Loop 2000 will research sound experimentation on networks,
investigating the effectiveness of techniques for internet based
collaboration. The Loop involved is that between two or more active
participants, their vectors of transmission aimed at one another, the loop
involved leading to a collaborative process. 

Many techniques have been found to be appropriate in previous
investigations. At pivotal junctures such as the Net.Radio Days conference
in Berlin in June 1998, and OpenX at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria
September 1998, assumptions about technology and the hierarchies of
interaction were able to be examined. In these instances radio and audio
projects on the internet provided an excellent illustration of the
collaborative and networking potential of online working communities. As
Dutch critic Josephine Bosma observed, "What is most interesting about
these experiments is how they connect groups of people over large distances
and how they allow for collaboration between different 'scenes' during
performances or happenings that are open to an outside audience."

CTL2000 has amongst its goals the appraisal of such techniques and the
collection of these experiences into a coherent form; in some sense a "Net
Collaboration HOWTO." Using the twin mediums of sound experimentation and
game play, CTL2000 aims to provide a testing ground, research space and
performative arena to assess how we can work with the inherent frailties of
the format (error messages, buffering, lag, dial prefixes, crashing, busy
signals). Are there games that we can play that are not disturbed and
distorted by buffering and time delays?  

The realities of geographical distance, technological resourcing, tool
development and creative approaches to transcending technological problems
will be workshopped in the laboratory phase of Closing the Loop 2000.
Issues at stake here address the problems that are common to the network
collaborations outside large corporate or governmental structures. How can
significant collaboration be achieved without massive investment in up to
the minute hardware, software and connectivity? What tools are readily
available for experiments? How can technological hurdles be smoothed
without reducing the collaborator to a mere "user?"  Investigating answers
to these questions will require CTL2000 to examine the timing of
information flow and effect, to analyse the pace of time in virtual space
vs the pace of time in actual space, the mathematics of digital sound, and
the physics of the space it virtually crosses.   
The manifestations of this research will be presented at a series of
performances, beginning in mid-February, and concluding during the Adelaide
Festival in March. 

Persons interested in participating in the project are invited to contact
the organisers for further information.

CTL2000 is produced with the assistance of the South Australian Government
through Arts SA, the Western Australian Government through ArtsWA, with
additional support from the Australian Network for Art and Technology, and
PATU.  The organisers would like to thank the Media Resource Centre,
Ngapartji Multimedia Centre and Virtual Artists Pty Ltd.

Biomachines (March 9 - 12) is a co-production of The Performance Space,
Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and The Adelaide Festival supported by the
New Media Arts Fund of The Australia Council, Mawson Institute of TAFE,
Port Adelaide and Enfield Council and NSW Ministry for the Arts.



For more information on CTL2000, please contact:
Time's Up: 
tim@timesup.org
http://www.timesup.org

r a d i o q u a l i a:
honor@va.com.au
http://www.radioqualia.va.com.au


	~			+		~

			 in transit 
			 in 2000 

honor@va.com.au

presently:
http://www.timesup.org/closing/ctl2000.html
http://www.radioqualia.va.com.au
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