Soundscapes Be)for(e 2000 (review)

338 Leonardo Reviews Brassetts’s Cyber-Desire as a cyborg model of disruption or modification of today’s normal body structures. Contending that body mutilation is a way of opening the nerve endings to get connected to the cyborg of tomorrow , Brassetts’s slide presentation depicted variations of piercings and bindings. Helio Carvalho’s Virtualma— the Issue of Self-Representation in Electronic Media hailed a more intimate transformation of the body. The choreographed animation sequences of his dismembered body parts illustrated his notion of identity as a process of constant remodeling. Fortunately , Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau showed us, with their latest exploratory-evolutionary image process, how to join the body members . Their text-to-form editor recapitulates text (including E-mail) into genetic code that assembles these parts, leading to the formation of a new “creature.” Jenny Marketou suggested another form of body reconstruction: her “Bot,” Chris, in the Web-based work Smell bytes, appropriates facial profiles of unsuspecting CU-SeeMe users to analyze for chemical traits of odor. This process led us to Marketou’s question: will data traces eventually determine our identities? Through Judy Malloy’s on-line hook-up from Berkeley, California to Sao Paulo, Brazil , the conference was connected through an array of womens’ self-profiles , another issue among the dissolving distinctions of identity in cyberspace. In Stephen Wilson’s panel, Art at the Frontiers of Scientific and Technological Research, panelist Diane Dominques’s video presentation of exotic Amazonian dance ritual gave a shamanist twist to the connectivity of cyberspace. The rhythmic thread of the dance continued as Jack Ox described how she builds habitats for virtual environments from transposed musical scores. The musical cyborg again surfaced in Yvonne Spielmann’s timely “How Do We Reconsider Theories of Representation?” reminding us of Steina Vasulka’s way of envisioning art as an open-ended musical movement. Ernestine Daubner invoked Duchamp’s Large Glass as continuously constructing links and signs that shift beyond framed boundaries. The open-ended hermetic vessels at Invenção were visible through “the glass” and connected to cyberspace. SOUNDSCAPES BE)FOR(E 2000 Amsterdam, Holland, 19–26 November 1999. Reviewed by Rahma Khazam, 3 Rue Poliveau, 75005, Paris, France. E-mail: . What does sound have to do with ecology ? Can soundscapes, which use environmental sounds as their source material , help to combat noise pollution? Can soundscape compositions be evaluated solely by aesthetic and musical standards? These were some of the questions raised during the week-long Soundscapes be)for(e 2000 Festival, held in Amsterdam in November 1999. Composed of concerts, presentations by members of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and lectures by a variety of other speakers, the festival highlighted the growing importance and numerous issues raised by this new electro-acoustic genre. The term “soundscape” was coined by Canadian acoustic ecology pioneer R. Murray Schafer, who suggested that man is responsible for the composition of his acoustic environment. The speakers at the festival included composer and WFAE founding member Hildegard Westerkamp, who worked as Schafer’s assistant for a number of years. In her remarks, she defined the soundscape as an artistic expression that encompasses social and cultural contexts and meanings of place and which, consequently, cannot be evaluated in the same way as abstract electroacoustic or instrumental compositions. She also referred to the need to understand and open up to the sound environment as a means of reducing the growing encroachment of “noise.” Yet her views elicited little support among the majority of the participants, who consider their work as a purely aesthetic activity. Klaus Schoning, of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, presented extracts from a series of soundscapes he had commissioned from composers and sound artists such as Pierre Henry and Klarenz Barlow. His presentation took the form of an impressionistic voyage that transported the listener from Argentina to India and from Italy to Australia. Likewise, the piece Far-West News, which opened the series of evening concerts, was a dramatic and highly personal account of a journey across the United States by electro-acoustic pioneer Luc Ferrari. Composer and radio journalist Michael Rusenberg drove the point home in his lecture: he stressed that ecology is best left...