Heidi Grundmann, Editor: Sound Drifting. I Silenzi Parlando Tra Loro (review)

The Ars Electronica symposium and exhibition, now in its 20th year, aims to present artworks that traverse boundaries through digital technologies used as an implement, a medium, and as subject matter. The theme for the 1999 event held in Linz, Austria, was "Life Science." It focused on the crossover between biological and digital life forms.

Sound Drifting was run as part of Ars Electronica, and involved networking 16 interdependent sub-projects including 50 artists from locations in Australia, Europe, and North America. It was conceived as "an experimental non-biological organism: a network or community of generative algorithms constituting a virtual autonomous organism living, interacting, breeding and ultimately dying in the matrix of the internet" (p. 3).

The 16 sub-projects interacted together to create a sound installation communicating "on line," "on site," and "on air" in various configurations, running continuously for nine days. The "on line" aspect involved each sub-project being linked through the Internet, creating a montage from collated audio information. This montage could be streamed back to sub-projects, and the output at each sub-project could also include recycled material from other sub-projects. The "on site" aspect meant that some sub-projects were also physical locations where installations were open to the public. Others existed only in cyberspace. "On air" meant that radio stations around the world could tune in to the online installation of Sound Drifting, and could broadcast what they thought appropriate. In this way, the event could have different versions depending on the sites visited and the segments chosen for radio broadcast.

The booklet briefly summarizes the philosophical background to the project. This is followed by commentary and images from each subproject showing how the installations address the central themes of the project. The first audio CD in the publication includes extracts from most of the contributing sub-projects. The second disc is a recording of the output of Sound Drifter, the generative software system from the Linz version of the project. This software allows sounds to interact and mix themselves within dynamic parameters and borders, input being provided by the incoming Internet streams of the various subprojects, each produced by a generative algorithm.

The philosophical basis for the project begins from I Silenzi Parlando Tra Loro (The Silences Speak to Each Other), where Filippo Marinetti defines silence in binary opposition to a broad definition of sound. The booklet argues that his work "suggests that he would not have been especially surprised by machines speaking silently to each other, across the world, in binary code" (p. 3). The text maintains that Sound Drifting existed not in the production or shared experience but "in the placeless space of the Internet, where silence is transformed into one of the many metaphors for that which we can neither perceive nor imagine" (p. 3). The sounds at each sub-project source were encoded and decoded to and from digital form, and the listener to this silent language was the central generative algorithm. Once various projects were plugged in, Sound Drifting was then "a silent instrument, alive and interacting across the world" (p. 3).

The intention was not to produce music conceived for the concert hall, nor to provide a showcase or gallery space for the works of individual artists. This project was

about networking, communication and collaboration; and about control-sharing between artists, users and machines; about letting go of one's own art and making ecological use of existing things; about listening to the world without adding to it; about the different concepts of duration and evolving processes at work in the material and immaterial realities of which we are part; about the aesthetics of different but connectable sounds, images, texts appearing on line–on air–on site as fugitive interfaces to a complex, invisible and not yet...