- Digital Music with a History -
The Prix Ars competition at Ars Electronica was create nearly 20 years ago in 1987. For artists, the computer became an important tool, and Prix Ars was born with the mission of showing all the computer art created at once. The first categories in the competition included computer animation, computer graphics, and computer music. The first winner of the computer music's Golden Nica will always be remembered as Peter Gabriel.
... Kiyoshi's eye AAL003

- Cultural Giga Mix -
Last time AAL's introduction of Ho Ho Do ended with them laughing. Our guests this time range from Ho Ho Do to Okuno-san, Abo-san, and Sudou-san from the group Cultural Giga Mix Party "Drill".
This trio when you first meet them seem a bit sketchy - they'd be Xylitol if they were a chewing gum, a concealed Frisk if they were a mint, they'd be giving lip service only to the latest warnings; but their work! You can see that they are dead serious. In reality, they really know their music - conceptual, technical, music that creates mood - and they love it all. Just listening them explain about music and I come away learning something. Although, it's supposed to be the other way around...

A naked, vibrating light bulb coil creates a sound. This installation is as simple as that.
The exhibit space was divided into two. One was the Day Room into which daylight poured, the other pitch black. I didn't really understand the Day Room, but the dark one was had beautiful electric coils set up, and they gave off a frizzling sound. Light bulbs placed in high positions had a high pitch, the ones on the ground had a low one.

Once you step into the dark room and look into the soft light, you are hit by an exotic feeling, like you have just traveled back in time to the ancient Tigris-Euphrates Civilization. Then, sitting in a slightly hard sofa, the bulbs don't just make noise, they begin to play music. This is quite Arabian. By just hanging naked light bulbs in a dark room, the space turns from shabby to cosmic. And sometimes a certain melancholy, like an old street lamp, hangs in the air. The experience is of the light bulb's multifaceted expressiveness.

The team that created this installation, artificial, has been displaying their light bulb works for a while now. Of the 100 or so light bulbs that they found and purchased in a market, perhaps 80 have been used already. With only a few left, after seeing these images, you may want to become French! Check out their website and hurry to an exhibition!

artificiel's Site
http://www.artificiel.org/

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On a silver platform sits an unremarkable mass-produced looking piece of equipment. What looks like an amplifier or maybe a CD player at first glance is actually a G-Player. It's function is no different from an ordinary record or CD player in that it is used to listen to sounds. Put what is played back on the G-Player is not a record or CD, it is the Earth. It's slogan: "The Earth is a disk. The Earth is a record."

A geographical database made up of data from cities, the undulation of mountain ranges and the orbit of an artificial satellite as it circles the Earth are all calculated to produce the Sound of the Earth. What you really hear though is the noise of an enormous amount of data being loaded. But it sounded so much like what the Earth should sound like that it gave me the chills.

Like tuning a radio, if you turn the knob on the player, you can "tune" in to some 1000 satellites - geographical satellites, military satellites... the player has a number of genres to choose from. The satellite's name, present longitude and latitude, and its distance from the earth are displayed. Looking at the longitude and latitude, you can see that the satellites are continually moving, and as it moves the subtle changes that you hear really does sound like the scratches of the earth. The noise produced by cities and mountain ranges are very loud, while the oceans are silent having no data to produce. In the event space, a map was also hung so that you can have fun locating the satellites you listen to.

The artist, Jens Bland, is active in Cologne, Germany. In his white shirt, slacks and glasses, he looks like your stereotypical salesman. The exhibit space also looks like a showroom with flyers and a flat-panel monitor, even a decorative plant! One reason for the setup is that his own name is Bland, but in all seriousness, the G-Player allows you to hear a sound that can't be heard, the sound of the Earth as if it were an ordinary thing, and the room reflects this making it sound even more like the real thing. I love geography, so this sound is just absolutely amazing.

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Four bird cages were placed in the stairwell on the 2nd floor of the OK Center. Inside is a sparrow, but before long the sparrow is replaced by a flame, and if you listen carefully a voice emerges. As I wondered who was speaking, what I heard next from the flame was the excited voice of Hitler. Finally I understood, the owners of these voices were Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mussolini, Stalin... Their radio speeches from World War II were emerging from the flame.

What Paul Demarinis, the artist, was interested in was the history of radio. Although it became the first form of broadcast media, it seems the radio was first developed as a scientific way of communicating with the spirits of the dead, and later became a way for people to communicate over distances.

In the 1920s, the radio as transmitted media became a powerful tool for politics. Political voices were heard in homes for the first time and people accepted the ideas and criticism presented to them. In 1935, the public gathered in front of the radio instead of the fireplace and Roosevelt called his radio broadcasts "Fireside Chats".

A Fireside Chat transmitted in 1935 about reconsidering the savings system was the speech featured in this installation. Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini all used the radio effectively.

Okay, what about the flame? According to Demarinis, the fire is a metaphor for the political speeches, what lit the world on fire. The other mystery of this installation is that the fire becomes the speaker. It is not well known, but when you apply voltage to fire, it is sucked inward acquiring the property of electrical conductivity. Sound is transmitted by vibrations in the air, and since the air vibrates due to the heat of the flame, it becomes a producer of sound.

Graham Bell's little brother Mervil was the first to discover that fire conducts electricity. It seems that the audio device he created consisted of two wires and fire according to the patent.

There's a lot of history packed into this small installation. Demarinis spend a long time researching radios and fire, and that time spent on this subject is trapped in the bird cage. Light bulbs and the sound of the Earth were definitely interesting, but this exhibit certainly surpasses all in its experimentation and new expressiveness.

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