http://www.sonicacts.com/portal/index.php/jan-peter-e-r-sonntag-raum-arbeiten-the-space-of-sound-and-acoustic-architectures/ Sonic Acts is a biannual festival at the intersection of arts, science, music & technology Since the Renaissance the visual sense in our Western civilisation dominates our orientation, and since the geometrization of the world Euclidian space comes first. Even in the notation of sound and music we can see this priority. When in the middle of the 20th century space became again important as a parameter of music like for example in Stockhausens Kugelauditorium in Osaka 1970 which had more than 40 channels and speakers, space as an acoustic parameter was, and still is, limited to directions where the sounds comes from. In the late 1980s, working on the philosophy of the perception of space, models of space and on acoustic phenomena in composition, I started to create non-Euclidean spaces out of interference-fields of dozens of high tuned sinus sounding units. In the beginning of the 1990s I started to work on the physicality of the sound itself: standing sinus-pressure waves created an amorphous sonic architecture inside the Euclidean architecture where the audience could walk or better dive through. In 1993 I realized, on an IRCAM Workstation, together with programmer Jörg Spix, the first endlessly rising and falling movements in noise to create a paradoxical situation of perception by a simulated volume movement in the space. The main problem of talking about the acoustic space is, that what we call hearing happens in our brain and not only with the ears, with the space of our body too, and also combined with all the other senses. Sonntag will talk about the theoretical background and the development of his raum-Arbeiten and sonic architectures. Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag (DE) has an academic background in instrumental music, fine art, art history (new media), music theory, composition, philosophy and cognitive science. He has mostly focused on site-specific installations based on sound and biomass but also specifically on monochrome gas discharge light. This presentation was part of "Session 8: Spatial Perception".

http://www.sonicacts.com/portal/index.php/robert-whitman-on-experiments-in-art-and-technology/ Sonic Acts is a biannual festival at the intersection of arts, science, music & technology. In his lecture Robert Whitman discusses the way that he has used space as part of the vocabulary of his installation and performance pieces. In 1966 Whitman was one of the New York artists who worked with Billy Klüver and more than 30 engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories to create works for the now legendary 9 Evenings. Whitman was also one of the co-founders of Experiments in Art and Technology along with Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer and Robert Rauschenberg. And he was one of the core artists for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70, in Osaka, a project administered by E.A.T. One of the main features of the interior of the Pavilion was the central performance space in a 90 feet diameter 120 degree spherical mirror made of aluminized reflective PET film, which produced real images of the visitors hanging upside down in space. Robert Whitman (US) is best known for the more than forty seminal theatre pieces he produced during the early 1960s that combined audio, actors, film, slides and evocative props in environments of his own making. Since the late 1960s he has collaborated with engineers, scientists and artists on installations and works that incorporate new technology: laser sculptures, optical reflector systems, and more recently, cell phones. http://www.whitmanlocalreport.net/sub_whitman.htm This lecture was part of Sonic Acts XIII within a session called Utopian Spectacles. This session was about the following: The connection of the arts and technology in the 1950s and 1960s spawned many events that by now are legendary, beginning with the Vortex Concerts of Jacobs and Belson, and ‘culminating’ in the Pepsi Pavilion of 1970. The radical approach to space and the utopian spirit of these events and works continues to inspire artists to this very day.