SoundWalk 2011
…in which we prepare our statement for posterity.
The following was cross-posted to the SoundWalk 2011 artists’ pages.
WIKIGONG
wikiGong is a collective dedicated to cataloging the sounds of large public structures for creative purposes such as assembling virtual instruments. Our guiding metaphor is the large Indonesian gamelan ensemble—the gong gede—each of which is tuned around its own unique, stationary, and finely crafted gong ageng—the large gong, which provides the communal heartbeat. Our leap of faith: civil engineering produces artifacts akin to the gong gede, reflecting both the scale of our collective will and our sense of culture, community, and history, a glimpse of the Zeitgeist. Our ongoing mission: to mine and expose the timbral content of these structures as data sets, presenting it in the guise of musical instruments for re-use, improvisation, enjoyment, and evolution.
wikiGong is an ongoing collaboration devoted to performance as an artifact of exploration and discovery: an event you stumble on at the intersection of music, art, and technology; a found instrument hundreds of strangers can play at once; a script written in ice, turning to fog halfway through Act II. Our offering for SoundWalk 2011, Mission Control/imaginary voices, is an interactive performance inspired by humanity’s first fifty years in space, our soon-to-be bygone Space Age. Audience contributions will be solicited for live broadcast, providing the Gods of Internet Technology can be propitiated in proper season.
wikiGong is…
- Dave Ayer—situational architecture
Prior to launching wikiGong.com in 2009, Dave built sound sculpture and helped found and retire the 1980’s DIY band The Potato Engineers. - Rebecca Ayer—virtuosic musical gestures, melody, and memorabilia
Rebecca is a music educator and performer who frequently collaborates on works by sound artist Dave Ayer. - Jacob Dickinson—navigation, narrative, daguerreotypes
Jacob’s search for a digital/physical media sweet spot in photography and printmaking informs his contributions to wikiGong.com and ccMixter.org. He is CTO of Ecologico-Logic and founding partner of Sprezza Consulting.
wikiGong sounds like:
- The Dream West
An excerpt from studio sessions preparatory to our SoundWalk 2010 exhibit, the Dream West is the third section of So No Gram, an audio portrait of California. - Song 02 for Joseph B Strauss
This song is a bit of serendipity that occurred during a break from the tedious work of extracting sound samples to load into the Roland V-Synth. Three one-minute samples from Golden Gate Bridge Assay 2 were used to generate the MIDI tracks, which were applied as loops to the studio synths with different voicings. There are two takes of three MIDI voices mixed to stereo. The four resulting tracks were then aligned and bounced to a single stereo track. - Raga for Joseph B Strauss
The sampled rolling thunder sound of the Golden Gate Bridge main cable is juxtaposed with a Yamaha S80 gamelan ostinato and run through Reason’s Thor, also triggering NN19 synths.
wikiGong is on the web at:
- Flickr
- Vimeo
- SoundCloud
- Our project site
[Update 2020-04-23: Link has been removed as our wiki space is being retired.]
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an epic day | wikiGong
2011/09/11[…] countdown continues. SoundWalk, here we come! This entry was posted in blog, projects, tools, video, wikiGong and tagged NASA, […]