Networked Derive is a collaborative performance that takes place simultaneously between two geographically-separate locations. Using mobile phones, twitter feeds and a simple mapping system, performers in both locations engage in a series of geographical occupations that coincide with the movements through the other city.

Participants follow a shared map that has a map of each city on one side. While the maps were printed on the same scale, they were placed slightly eskew and off by about 100 m. The derive starts when one team reports its location to the other.

The other team uses a pushpin to mark the location of the first team on the first team’s map, and then turns the map over and travels to the spot indicated. The second team then reports their location to the first team, who will repeat the same process, leading them to a different site.

The choreography of the piece will be created by the variations in the two maps, and the speed in which information is exchanged, (which is informed by how long it takes for each group to get to each point) and the piece will be documented by the patterns of holes that are created in the maps.

Twitter Feeds:

http://www.twitter.com/ntwrkderivewmr

http://www.twitter.com/ntwrkderivebuf

The Swinging Suitcase is a series of mobile sound pieces that generate and broadcast the sound of a flock of small birds in response to the act of swinging.  Each piece consists of a vintage American Tourister suitcase containing a speaker, accelerometer, and microprocessors.  When the suitcase is swung, the birds will begin to make noise, which calibrate to reflect the swinging, accelerating, and multiplying in response to the gesture of the user.

Citizen’s Band Radio is public frequency that enables short-distance radio communication between individuals. Citizenband is a collaborative performance that senses, intercepts, and rebroadcasts the ubiquitous frequencies that permeate our citizens within urban environments. Radio waves, microwaves, satellites, and cell phone signals will be reimagined through signal processing, handmade electronics and performantive improvisation.

Commissioned for the Deep Wireless Festival Toronto, 2009

Freestyle SoundKits are wearable sound pieces that generate and broadcast electronic beats as users move through the urban environment.Freestyle SoundHack is a collaborative performance in the form of a workshop. During the performance, the artist will give her project to the public by teaching workshop participants how to make their own Freestyle SoundKits, to distribute as they wish, using whatever sounds they choose. Freestyle SoundHack was produced through the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council.

Give it Up is a live breakdance battle that takes place between 2 geographically separated spaces linked through a live web stream.  Part performance art, part social experiment, the project explores hyper-socialized space of web-based performance through an open-source model of participation, and examines the complex relationship between relational practice, collaboration and the practice of art making.

Bike Hack Workshop + Soundride is a collaborative workshop and mobile sound performance. that enables participants to contribute to the acoustic ecology of the city through simple sonic experimentation. During the workshop, participants are invited to construct bicycle-mounted noisemakers made of contact microphones, playing cards and mini amplifiers and to take part in a large-scale soundride through the city.

Freestyle SoundKits are wearable sound pieces that generate and broadcast electronic beats as users move through the urban environment. When the piece is engaged, each step the wearer takes is broadcast as a single electronic dance beat. The piece enables people to create user-defined performative spaces that reference both the cinematic and the fantastic, where the acoustic ecology of public space is activated through collaboration, improvisation and one-upmanship.

SOUNDBIKES are a series of 6 portable sound pieces that use motion-based mini-generators mounted to an ordinary bicycle to broadcast the sound of laughter as the bike is pedaled through the urban environment.  The laughter is generated by playing sequences of short source clips that start when the bike reaches a cruising speed, and then responds to the bike’s velocity. When the piece is engaged, the rider simultaneously occupies the role of controller, performer and audience, creating a mobile performative broadcast that adds a human counterpoint to the acoustic ecology of the city.

walking machine is a portable audio piece designed to enable wearers to move through urban areas hearing the amplified sound of their own footsteps in real time. The piece consists of two lapel microphones modified to clip to low-cut shoes, a mini amplifier and a set of headphones. By broadcasting the sound directly as a result of his or her own motion and gesture, the wearer becomes controller, performer and audience, inhabiting a space which is both physical and virtual. The effect is that of a private game in public space, where movement and gesture become a means of articulating presence and the simple act of walking becomes both legitimized and liberated through technological intervention. walking machine was produced through the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council.

walking machine in Acoustic Territories by Brandon LaBelle

Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life offers an expansive reading of auditory life. It provides a careful consideration of the performative dynamics inherent to sound culture and acts of listening, and discusses how auditory studies may illuminate understandings of contemporary society. Combining research on urbanism, popular culture and auditory issues, Acoustic Territories opens up multiple perspectives – it challenges debates surrounding noise pollution and charts an “acoustic politics of space” by unfolding auditory experience as located within larger cultural histories and related ideologies.

Brandon LaBelle traces auditory life through a topographic structure: beginning with underground territories, through to the home as a site, and then further, to streets and neighborhoods, and finally to the sky itself. This structure follows sound as it appears in specific auditory designs, as it is mobilized within various cultural projects, and queries how it comes to circulate through everyday life as a medium for social transformation. Acoustic Territories uncovers the embedded tensions and potentiality inherent to sound as it exists in the everyday spaces around us.

Beyond/In Western New York 2010: Alternating Currents

Squeaky Wheel Gallery: Geoffrey Alan Rhoades, Barbara Lattanzi, Jessica Thompson

This international contemporary art exhibition—the product of a unique curatorial collaboration between twelve of Western New York’s museums and galleries—will showcase the work of over 100 extraordinary artists from the region and beyond. Works in an expansive range of media, all connected under a common theme, Alternating Currents, will be on display beginning with the Beyond | In WNY Opening Weekend September 24–26, and extending through the end of 2010. Installations by featured international artists will also become permanent parts of the region’s landscape, serving as lasting impressions of the biennial.

mobile performance device at Conflux Festival, NYC

mobile performance device is a flexible broadcast unit designed to facilitate performative situations in public spaces.  The project consists of four umbrellas that generate and broadcast sound in response to architectural, electromagnetic and social stimuli.  Each umbrella contains a simple analogue oscillator that calibrates to body capacitance. The piece generates sound in response to its proximity to other performers,  members of the public and electromagnetic frequencies such as power lines, wifi networks, and cell phone towers. The mobile performance device transforms ordinary experience into a performative situation that places the user in a space that is both cinematic and fantastic and transforms the urban environment into a fluid interface of shifting sonic potentialities.  The embodied actions of the user, which both contributes to and interrupts the acoustic ecology of the space, becomes a form of drawing.  During the festival, audience members will be receive a set of directions to a location outside of Conflux Headquarters where they will be invited to participate in one of two parallel performances that use the devices as a starting point.

Interview with Trevor Howell, Fast Forward Calgary

Video Documentation of Bike Hack + Soundride, M:ST 4.5 Calgary

Residency — M:ST and Truck Gallery, Calgary

TR:AFICC ONE: RIDE ON
Jessica Thompson (Toronto, ON)
Runs from July 1, 2009 through to July 31, 2009
Reception: Wednesday, July 1 at 8:00 PM

TR:AFICC (Temporary Resident: Artists for Innovative Contemporary Culture)

This summer TRUCK is proud to introduce our new residency program, Temporary Resident: Artists for Innovative Contemporary Culture (TR:AFICC) that will be run out of CAMPER, TRUCK’s Contemporary Art Mobile Public Exhibition Rig. After three successful years of The Patch Project, CAMPER has been reinvented as a home away from home for artists, hosting three thematic residencies, with each lasting one month. During the summer months these residencies will provide a space for artistic exploration and public engagement by three contemporary artists.

Citizenband at Deep Wireless Festival — May 2009

May 29 and 30 @ 8pm $15/10
Deep Wireless Ensemble performance 1 and 2
+ Performance by Kristen Roos
The West Space, Artscape Wychwood Barns
601 Christie Street #170, Toronto

Internationally renowned performance artist Brandon LaBelle, multi-discipline artist Lisa Pijuan-Nomura, and sound artists François Girouard and Jessica Thompson collaborate together to create multi-media performance experiences using their various areas of expertise in performance and new media art responding to the theme Ecology: Water, Air, Sound and will be presented alongside works commissioned by CBC Radio’s Outfront by Hélène Prévost, Iain Reid, Paolo Pietropaolo and Andra McCartney.