News

Re-New and IMAC

The Re-New digital arts festival took place 19-22 November 2012 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The event was attended by composers, visual artists, musicians, media artists, performers, and others working in digital art. The goal of Re-New is "to present groundbreaking works in combinations of digitally enhanced music, video, and installations in collaborative, distributed and site-specific art," and the festival places special emphasis on non-traditional genres. Re-New 2012 took place in conjunction with the Interactive Media Arts Conference (IMAC), an annual interdisciplinary conference involving artists as well as researchers, engineers, and art curators.

The theme of Re-New and IMAC 2012 was "Cybernetics Revisited: Towards a Third Order?" According to the event Web site, this theme was chosen out of the desire to "take the early cybernetics' vision of an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation further into the interactive media art field, for artistic considerations, discussions and novel experimentation."

Re-New presented a number of musical performances featuring live coding, collaborative electronic-instrumental improvisation, acousmatic music, and a Bach cello performance in which sounds of the performer's body—measured with sensors—were amplified and added to the music. Re-New also included interactive installations, among them an adaptive music videogame and a sound installation based on a Russian shortwave radio station.

A number of papers on digital music and art were presented in conjunction with IMAC 2012. Topics included performance with gestural and wearable interfaces, interactive composition, self-organizing music, philosophical discussions of cybernetic art, field recording in urban sonic experiences, and merging sound, movement, and architecture.

As part of the festival, the Leonardo Education and Art Forum led a workshop focused on developing a sample curriculum for teaching art and science online and "in the cloud." Building on the efforts of past workshops, the goal of the forum is to make such a curriculum available online for use by educators.

Web: re-new.org/archive/re-new-org-2012-pages/digital-arts-festival2012

Net-Music 2013

The Net-Music 2013 symposium took place 16-17 January 2013 in

Figure 1.

Cellist Kirstine Elise Pedersen performs Allegoria at Re-New 2012. A Project of the Quiet Ensemble, Allegoria mixes string music by Bach with sounds of the performer's breath and heartbeat. (Photo: Jeppe Hvirvelkjær.)

locations around the world and on the Internet. Sponsored by the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music of the National University of Singapore and the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, the symposium featured presentations and performances focused on the use of the Internet as a creative resource in music. Presenters, performers, and other participants joined the event from locations in Singapore and Baltimore, as well as from Stanford University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the USA, McGill University and Humber College in Canada, and Queen's University Belfast in the UK. The event was also streamed live over the Internet.

The first day of the symposium began with a keynote address by Chris Chafe of Stanford University. The second day began with a keynote presentation and performance led by Pauline Oliveros of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in collaboration with Chris Chafe and with Ang Mo Faux of the National University of Singapore. Symposium talks dealt with topics such as scoring systems for networkedmusic, telematic opera, emerging Web technologies and sonic arts, networked classrooms, and reactive environments for networked music performance. Slides from each of the presentations are available for download at the event Web site. Talks were interspersed with concerts featuring geographically distributed performers playing electroacoustic music as well as jazz. The first day of the symposium ended with a moderated group discussion of technical issues in networked performance, and the second day ended with a discussion of creative issues.

Web: netmusic2013.wordpress.com

IMATRONIC Extended

IMATRONIC Extended is one of the largest festivals in Germany devoted to contemporary developments in electronic music. The 2012 edition of the festival took place 21 November-2 December 2012 at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) [Center for Art and Media] in Karlsruhe, Germany. The festival included 14...