buffering

black clouds

In this installation at the Kuenstlerhaus Schloß Wiepersdorf designed Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier two ‘black clouds’ out of 420 small loudspeaker to display 6 discrete audio channels.

As a topic, clouds trigger manifold associations and are a largely known cultural phenomenon. ‘As-Sahab’, the name of the alleged media production unit of Al-Qaeda means “The Cloud” in Arabic. In the old testament it is reported, that god liked to hide his appearance behind a cloud when calling Moses on the seventh day of the creation of the earth. The cloud also serves as an analogy for radio and the more recent phenomenon of wifi and wireless culture. It describes how the reception area is spread out. As well, it leads to the first days of the radio, when people experienced radio as a god-like appearance – a disembodied voice addressed to them directly.

Radio, today, is on one hand a synonym for popular culture and mass distribution. On the other hand, it can be tagged with politics of territory and strategic warfare. It may be surprising, but to a certain degree radio is culturally and technologically rooted in war and military invention – similar to the Internet.

Along with this installation, a series of soundtracks shall follow: Love is in the Air is the initiation and first issue of the series of soundtracks dedicated to the Black Clouds installation.

Love is in the Air is composed of bits and fragments of recordings of the Lebanese radio dial during a stay in Beirut, and an audio collage of sound bits of popular love songs, that wildly and at certain points desperately spin between the right and the left channel of the audio-signal.

Love is in the Air – soundtrack, excerpt 04’30”:

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photo credit: Elina Julin

Tags: aesthetic, art, buffering, contemporary, love is in the air, music, play, sound love, soundscape, voice, waves

pingfm.org

From 2000 – 2006 Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier has been founding member and one of the driving forces of the webcast band pingfm

pingfm.org has been a web based platform for audio/video experiments with impetus on live production of audio and video.

Working with streaming and networked media the members of pingfm have been fascinating by three core aspects: their low-bandwidth aesthetic, their global interaction and their potential to hybridise different media and spaces like club, theatre, concert, installation, radio, cinema and performance.

Back in those early days of live Internet radio and audio/video live streaming it felt a bit strangely anachronistic in the light of the overall trend in digital production because it meant to:
a.) to lower and reduce the sound and video quality and not to increase it and
b.) to face the fact of “electronic loneliness” as online audiences are more diverse and at that time more or less global but still rather marginal.

In order to compensate that pingfm organised events, festivals and conferences like the ping-in-progress-festival in Weimar (2001). It prepared and participated in the NO BORDER-Camp Radio in Strasbourg (2002). It received the Bauhaus University Award and participated in the online event series ‘Fusion’ organised by Jill Scott (aside others). It performed at the Webcastlounge at the ART Frankfurt (2001) organised by Station R.O.S.E. pingfm hosted together with Theaterhaus Weimar the Sleep-Camp at the Kunstfest Weimar (2001). And together with the artist-duo radioqualia pingfm was topic of discussion on the empyre-mailinglist. In 2004 it participated in the Ars Electronica’s long night of radio-art, organised by the ORF Kunstradio.

pingfm has been a member of the Dutch webcast station DFM rtv International, the British webcaster pirate TV and Radio Kinesonus, the Japanese platform for experimental sound. pingfm hosted a weekly 2hrs live show on DFM rtv International as well as 1 hr programme slot on the local FM radio.

In the active days of pingfm the following members were contributing to it:
Zsolt Barat (tech dep & sound), Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier (sound & pr), Mirko Kubein (video), Lars Mai (sound), Lorenz Schmeier (sound in the early days), Sebastian Seidel (first video than sound) and Ute Waldhausen (video & noise)

Tags: buffering, collaborations, independent, interactive, internet, media activism, music, video, webcast

>|< pause ‘n’ play

pingfm Solo-Exhibition at the CCBA Recife (BR)

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The exhibition was dedicated to the idiosyncratic aesthetic of streaming video.

It showed 35 prints (A0) and short video-clips of internet transmissions by the artist collective pingfm.

Live-Streaming means the live transmission of audio and video data via the Internet. For the sake of global accessibility the volume of the data has to be kept as low as possible. To achieve this the video and audio data has to undergo heavy compression. This causes a vivid deformation of the original data.

In the work of pingfm the members has been fascinated by streaming media because of its particular aesthetic, the global interaction and the intersections to other media and locations.

Italian article on www.Neural.it

Tags: aesthetics, buffering, experimental, internet, low bandwidth, media activism, webcast