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Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Articon: navigation pathAudio
 
nebula.m81; Autonomous (Nezvanova, Netochka), 1999
 
 
 

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performers communicated using amongst other things audio, MIDI and HTML via ISDN, radio station transmission paths, normal telephone lines and Internet connections. Listeners could play sounds into the two independent concerts by telephone and trigger off sound occurrences in the concert halls while navigating in the Internet through websites on the topic of ‹migration.›[63] It was impossible for either the listeners or the performers to identify all of the different sub-actions. It was also uncertain in how far one's own actions were integrated into the context at the remote location. So it could not be a matter of synchronizing individual occurrences. The system had to be coordinated in its entirety via stimulation and correction of sub-systems.

«nebula.m81» by Netochka Nezvanova is a network for the Internet and a single user. The software constructs audiovisual output out of found material, the player merely sets it going. HTML codes and other data formats found in the Net are transformed into sound, sound is transformed into a visual form. Text, graphics and sound have equal status. The user influences the automatic mechanisms, can listen into individual audio particles and trigger off vaguely defined transformation processes. However, the

 

dynamics and aesthetics of music, image and text arise primarily from the interaction between the program, the data and technical processes in the network. Nezvanova takes Gregory Bateson literally: «All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.»[64] All three examples of dehierarchized networks are not limited to the production of new aesthetics. They also serve to depict unseizable technical processes in a sensory way and to represent and criticize the social and political significance of these communicative processes as well as to develop alternative models thereof.

Audio Art as a phenomenon of the modern age

Music did not first begin being shaped by media in the twentieth century, but centuries before that. Musical instruments and the written notation of music determine as media how it is made, how it is heard and thus: what makes up music. However, it was not until the emergence of mechanical musical instruments that music could be conveyed completely by media, as it was now no longer bound to its being concretisized by a human being.

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