A teaser from guest curator Joshua Noble for the forthcoming Vague Terrain 16: Architecture/Action - the issue will be published in early 2010.

[Gordan Savicic / Constraint City / 2007]

What does it mean for computing to be embodied? What does it mean for living or working spaces to be computationally enabled? It seems that these two concepts are tied together in important ways that shape the emerging answers to both. Architecture/Action is an exploration of the body in architectural computing, that amorphous territory where cybernetics, phenomenology, physiology, and architecture come together to create functional and controllable spaces organized around the human body. Inevitably, when technology changes, the relationship of the human body to the space of action that we experience as our environment changes as well. From agriculture, to industry, to computing, a shift in how and where we act, work, and communicate alters our perceptions of our bodies and of the spaces around them. The now near-ubiquity of computing and networking and the explosion of interest in the body and gesture in interaction design has created an array of new areas for exploration in designing, altering, and questioning the way we relate to the world. The points of intersection between physicality, architecture, and computation seem to multiply almost daily. Networks of tiny devices enable rooms, appliances, buildings, personal devices, and systems to communicate seamlessly. Techniques for computer vision enable the creation of reliable, consistent, and robust systems to detect gesture, combine live images in live time, and perform complex motion detection are open source and available. The beginnings of the tools to integrate movement, space, computing, and communication are available, so the questions now become: how are we tying spaces, devices, and bodies together? Where is the boundary that separates space from computation or action from communicative action and data? What will a truly reactive and intelligent architecture and environment look like and how will it shape the way that we interact with our world? What modes of artistic expression and inquiry will arise from the attendant sociological shift? In Architecture/Action we examine some of the implications of working this territory for the designers and artists that approach it, examining projects in critical design, interaction research, installation art, and architecture that are creating spaces for play, work, contemplation, and communication. We’ll be including contributions from Usman Haque, Andres Ramirez Gaviria, Mark Shepard, Carolina Vallejo, Patrick Grizzard, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, and many others.

In its eighth year, Kingston’s unique festival of adventurous sound performance TONE DEAF presents a special focus on the eminent American composer of experimental music and sound installations Alvin Lucier (pictured above). Since the mid-1960s, Lucier has been a pioneering force in music and sound art, whether working with a brainwave-activated percussion orchestra or traditional chamber ensembles. His recent works include a series of sound installations and works for solo instruments, ensembles, and orchestra in which, by means of close tunings with pure tones, sound waves are caused to spin through space.

Tone Deaf 8 will feature a week-long exhibition of two Lucier sound installation works at Modern Fuel, with an opening reception to mark the start of the weekend’s program of concerts at the Artel and Sydenham Street United Church, and a day of discussion at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Tone Deaf 8 affords a great opportunity to encounter one of the masters of contemporary music.

Also performing in Tone Deaf 8 are two former students of Alvin Lucier, well known as experimental composers in their own right. Nicolas Collins (Chicago) is widely known for his electronic music, developed around homemade devices and hacking of everyday electronics such as CD players. Ben Manley (New York City) creates intense improvised performances exploring the natural variability of wind, amplified small vibrations, and resonating objects to generate dynamic musical environments

Tone Deaf 8 is supported by Modern Fuel Gallery, Queen's University, and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Alvin Lucier's appearance is made possible through the Queen's University Visiting Artist Program.

Alvin Lucier was born in 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire. Since 1970 he has taught at Wesleyan University where he is the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music.

Nicolas Collins studied composition with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University, worked for many years with electronic music pioneer David Tudor, and has collaborated with numerous soloist and ensembles around the world.  He is currently Chair of the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ben Manley studied music at Wesleyan University with Alvin Lucier and Ron Kuivila. He presents electroacoustic performances and installations that call attention to interests in sonic potential and the imagination of sound energy.

Schedule of Events:

October 23-31 at Modern Fuel Gallery, 21 Queen Street
Alvin Lucier: Installation Works
Music On A Long Thin Wire,
The Queen Of The South
realized by Ben Manley
Reception 10/23, 6PM

October 23 at The Artel, 205 Sydenham Street 
Nicolas Collins & Ben Manley: A Really Live Electronics Concert, 9PM
$5 for students, $10 general

October 24 at Sydenham St. United Church, 82 Sydenham Street
Alvin Lucier: Two Portrait Concerts with Anne Bourne (cello) and Michel Sczcesniak (piano), 4 & 7PM. Reception and Q&A with Alvin Lucier following the 4PM concert.
Each concert: $5 for students, $10 general

October 25 at Agnes Etherington Art Centre , University Ave. at Bader Lane
A day of discussion about the work of Alvin Lucier
A talk by Alvin Lucier, 11AM
A talk by Nicolas Collins, 2PM
Panel discussion with Alvin Lucier, Nicolas Collins, Ben Manley, Anne Bourne, Clive Robertson, and
others, 3:30PM

Festival Pass for all 3 concerts: $12 for students, $20 general.  All October 25 discussions are free admission

For further information, contact:

Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre
21A Queen St, Kingston, ON K7K 1A1 | info@tone-deaf.org
(613) 548-4883 | www.modernfuel.org | www.tone-deaf.org

[Tim O'Reilly / Web 2.0 Meme Map / 2005]

Web 2.0: before, during and after the event: An issue of the Fibreculture Journal critically exploring the ontogenesis of Web 2.0

Featuring contributions from: Aden Evens, Ben Roberts, Ien Ang and Nayantara Pothen, Ganaele Langlois, Fenwick McKelvey, Greg Elmer, and Kenneth Werbin, Geert Lovink, Ned Rossiter and Ippolita, Michel Bauwens and Juan Martin Prada

From the Editorial:

Although Tim O'Reilly famously declared in 2005 that 'Web 2.0 is not a technology, it is an attitude', in 2009 it's clear he's grammatically incorrect (O'Reilly, 2005). Web 2.0 is not an "is", or not only this. Web 2.0 is also a verb or, as they taught us in primary school, it's a doing word. Here's a list of some web 2.0 things to do: apping, blogging, mapping, mashing, geocaching, tagging, searching, shopping, sharing, socialising and wikkiing. And the list goes on. Yet as the list goes on it becomes apparent that part of what web 2.0 does, while doing all the things on this list and more, is colonise everything in the network. It seems that there is no part of networked thought, activity or life that is not now web 2.0. To draw up another kind of list, a list of 'things' that have been done over by web 2.0, we find: Gov 2.0, Identity 2.0, XHTML™ 2.0, Classroom 2.0, and publish2 ...and the list goes on. Anything can become or be 2.0 as long as it demonstrates or is affiliated with a certain set of qualities. A list of typical Qualities 2.0 might look something like this: dynamic, participatory, engaged, interoperable, user-centred, open, collectively intelligent and so on. Clearly an 'attitude' can go a long way.

What, then, do we call something that sits somewhere between doing, being and qualifying? That systematises, indexes and categorises, on the one hand, and yet, on the other, willfully overruns categories and enthusiastically keeps adding to its own lists of things, activities and characteristics? That is poised between what has just happened (web 1.0) and what will be about to happen in a minute, soon, or later (web 3.0, the semantic web, next web)? That seems ineffable, not quite there (attitude) yet is also everywhere (lists, lists and more lists)?

In light of the strange space and odd temporal dimension it inhabits, it seems appropriate to call web 2.0 an 'event'. Something has certainly happened to the web as we knew it circa 2001 and that something is both a new technical infrastructure for online ICTs – what is now referred to as 'an architecture of participation' (O'Reilly, 2004) – and a change in attitude, a change in the ways we think about doing, communicating and inhabiting networks. The web 2.0 event moves the technical infrastructure of networks even closer to the transitive, to the nature of event itself. Events are things that happen to things, aren't they? Perhaps not, especially when we are dealing with phenomena that are truly dynamic, where change, hence unpredictability and fuzziness, is their immanent modality. When we start to flesh out what the event 'web 2.0' comprises, it is not some thing (a technology, an attitude) happening to some thing (web 1.0, information-based networks) already existing. Rather, with its dynamic apping of education for example, web 2.0 as event also opens up the question of the event itself: when and where is it?

In this issue of FCJ, Web 2.0: before, during and after the event, we are as much interested in opening up a space for thinking how networked events might look, feel and impart themselves as we are in adding to critical thinking about particular web 2.0 phenomena. We want to put forward a proposition that goes something like this: web to the nth dimension could be a contemporary and collective movement, an event in research and thought creation, and web 2.0 might just be a version, one extended duration within that larger movement. By this, we mean that critical thinking, researching and writing about networks has entered the space and time of a phenomenal, explosive and singular event, web to the 'n'. We want to think with/in this milieu. Web 2.0 may only be part of that broader movement in thought but it certainly presents an opportunity, perhaps a vital and critical one, to both grasp, and pause during, the event that is networked thinking. Thinking right now about web 2.0, thinking about it in critical and inventive ways, as the essays published in this issue do, is part of participating with this broader event—and of thinking networked events beyond the buzz of the immediacy of new apps, social media or service platforms.

Read on at http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/

The Ambient Ping presents SPUTNiK 2 Launching LAiKA featuring Beta Cloud, NAW & The Sales Department - Tues. Nov. 3rd 200 
Supermarket 268 Augusta Ave. Kensington Market - just south of College, Toronto, ON
doors open at 8pm / $6