"My Life in the Bush of Ghosts"

This project is multi-layered, but in essence is an excuse to do some audio work within a limited compositional domain. Brian Eno and David Byrne collaborated with a large number of electronic and fusion based music stalwarts to produce what is still a remarkable album. Its techniques and sound have proven influential to this day. And yes, it is highly repetitive.  In conjunction with the reissue, they have opened all the base material of two tracks for public domain remixing.  The remix site can be found here. I'm not a well seasoned veteran when it comes to Talking Heads admiration, but the general spirit of the contest is captivating. Also, I did actually enjoy the album when I heard it for the first time, even if it did get subsumed during a time of new-music inundation. Seems like a perfect opportunity to rediscover the material. They are claiming that this is a first of a kind in opening full mastertrack material for remix on the internet and it's great to see such a high profile artist as Eno embracing the Creative Commons licensing scheme. At first I recalled the David Bowie remix/mashup competition held in 2004 as possible prior art, but this was nowhere near as open, and retained content ownership of all remixes/mashups submitted.  Also, no original mastertrack material was released. Regardless, the opportunity to work in a collaborative way with material from what is considered an electronic/world-music/fusion classic is too enticing to pass up. 

designing the loop network

This project is a collector for all issues and releases related to building a soundscape system. What is a soundscape system? In the context of looplog it is the studio based computer system used for experimenting with the notions of the loop network. In other words, the studio within which all composition work can take place. This includes issues concerning both the software and hardware used in building the loop network. It is distinct from but closely related to the composition project, mainly along lines of technicality and aesthetics.

looplog : a practice network

a project plan for the development of this site as an operational base for the looplog project.

searching the loop network

With the release of Custom Search Engines at Google Co-op comes the possibility of building a search engine limited to a community-maintained list of sites directly related to Acoustic Ecology and Soundscape Studies.  The benfit of this is that search results will be more relevant as they will only include sites that the Acoustic Ecology community deems to have direct relevance.  The downside is that there will be a loss in randomness that lends to those unitended discoveries, like when you find a book in the elibrary that is sitting on a desk that happens to be interesting but you never would have found otherwise.  This project is to monitor progress of this endeavour.  To kick-start this, I'll be setting up a CSE to include the sites I've collated in my tasks database from the last three or four years of web trawling.

WFAE 2006 Presentation

This is the project page for attendance at the upcoming World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, to be held in Hirosaki in Japan in November 2006.  The conference site can be found here.

The abstract, accepted as of July 2006, outlines the content of the project more explicitly, and is reproduced below.

Networking Practice for Sound Environments - Modes of the Loop Network

My aim is to relate an understanding of the place of being, of body, of spirit and spirituality, of beauty and most importantly, the place of the listening subject. Presented as a journal based narrative set against field recordings taken from daily life - relating my experiences as an Australian teacher and student in Korea ( both a colonizer and colonised ) - I intend to present a map of my own research and the general acoustic ecology of the Internet, as well as a map of my daily life in South Korea as it relates to the acoustic ecology I find myself immersed in.

This paper emerges from my PhD project and proposes a revolutionary practice, not in the traditional economic or political sense, but in the sense that we should be striving for revolution as the insistence or repetition of difference as the unifying composition of being. By examining the soundscape through the filter of acoustic art and the Internet, I intend to trace acoustic practice, culture and place through the circular categories In The Loop, Oscillation, Circulation, Feedback, Spin, Cycles and ultimately Revolution.

Revolutionary teleology can be rightly criticised as utopian and naive of material realities. In a practical sense, what is it that we can be doing in the meantime to counter such criticism? The final category I propose is Loopholes, which is the active practice of finding legitimate holes and gaps in the systems and institutes that form the basis of the colonisation of everyday time. Ultimately these loopholes form the spaces of freedom and collaboration in which we find ourselves and each other, and provide a clue to the communal revolution long promised by the Internet.