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International Symposium on Electronic Art

The 2017 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) took place 11–18 June 2017 in Manizales, Colombia. Hosted by the University of Caldas, the symposium was held jointly with the 16th International Image Festival. ISEA 2017 included oral presentations of original research, posters presentations, roundtable discussions, workshops, installations, performances, film screenings, and other creative works. The conference's theme was "Biocreation and Peace," focusing on the contributions of art, design, and technology to drive social development, ecological preservation, and peaceful coexistence within global society. An extensive array of keynote talks featured Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London; critic Dominique Moulon; musician and artist Alba Triana; composer and sound artist Pedro Rebelo; Martha de Francisco, Associate Professor of Sound Recording at McGill University; media studies scholar Jens Hauser; writer, curator, and researcher Bronac Ferran; retired European Union official Alain Ruche; audiovisual artist and researcher Lance Putnam; Anne-Marie Duguet, writer, critic, and Professor of Arts at University of Paris 1; Raymond Bellour, critic and theoretician of cinema and literature; and media artist Masaki Fujihata.

Figure 1.

Alba Triana's Music on a bound string #2. Photo: Martín Vélez.

Installation works presented at ISEA 2017 included Ko Rangi, Ko Papa, Ka Puta Ko Rongo, an installation produced by sonifying a number of individuals' sequenced DNA; Googled Sculpture Series, in which three classical sculptures were recreated from the results of Google image searches and rendered using a three-dimensional printer; and Flores Sonicas, viaje a la intimidad del sonido, comprising field recordings from the Manizales area and from Finland played back through custom-made loudspeakers. Musical works focused on a variety of approaches to the symposium's theme, including Luca Forcucci's Bodyscape, assembled from audio and video field recordings from a variety of locations around the world, and Alex Augier's nybble, which fluctuated between mechanical and biologically inspired aesthetics. One concert was dedicated to performing early electroacoustic works of Latin American origin. Paper presentations at ISEA 2017 covered the use of sound art to preserve indigenous oral cultures, large-scale brain-controlled concert works, and sonification as a means to represent the complexities of modern technology-mediated societies. The symposium's workshops focused on public policy and digital culture, interdisciplinary arts collaboration for social impact, media archaeology of present-day digital works, audiovisual works incorporating biosensory input, and the history and practice of soundwalks. Additional workshops covered low-cost electronics prototyping, data visualization in the context of political activism, and the use of sound and biosensory data in dance performance.

Web: isea2017.disenovisual.com

Next Generation 7.0

The Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (ZKM) held the Next Generation 7.0 festival on 14–18 June 2017 in Karlsruhe, Germany, focusing on young composers who work with technology in their musical practice. The festival brought together composers from a number of German musical institutions and comprised research presentations, sound installations, and ten concerts of music from students of the 23 participating institutions. The theme of Next Generation was "Sensors." Among the works presented at the festival were Natalia Gurevich and Marco Bidin's Studio Sincretico II for video and electronics, Guido Pedicone's Stomatopod for nine-string electric guitar and live computer, and Junyu Guo's April Lake for four-channel fixed media. Talks included topics such as real-time music generation with Common Lisp, aesthetic concerns of three-dimensional audio, and the relationship between performance and composition in electroacoustic music.

Web: zkm.de/en/event/2017/06/nextgeneration-70

International Conference on Semantic Audio

The 2017 Audio Engineering Society (AES) International Conference on Semantic Audio took place on 22–24 June 2017 at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen, Germany. The organizers describe semantic audio broadly as the extraction of meaning from audio signals and the development of applications that use this information to support user interactions with these audio signals. Topics of the conference included content-based audio recommendation and retrieval, Web-based music services, source separation, automatic music transcription, audio classification, audio segmentation, intelligent audio effects, and musical structure...