----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Dear Empyreans, I have two more days left as a Canada Research Chair in Telemedia Arts at the University of Calgary. My five year research project there involved live artistic performance over high-speed networks. We operated the studio under the name of Syneme and have reported/summarized our activities over the last few years in a special issue of Organised Sound, Networked Electroacoustic Music, Vol. 17.1.
I return full-time to Beijing at the Central Conservatory of Music where we have started a similar studio - Syneme-Asia. A Ph.D. in Network Music has been approved and will officially be on the books this Fall 2013. I originally started at the Central Conservatory soon after a Ph.D. in Media Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000. Being involved in the early electronic arts scene in China, I also remember becoming acquainted with my new Austral-Asian colleagues at the Unesco-Sarai meeting in New Delhi in 2003. Ironically, after five years of honing the most sophisticated infrastructure and practices in network arts performance, the administration of networked professing was ill prepared to go along with the program and consider the future of the networked academic institution - or teaching at a distance. As I proposed, it is essential to teach network arts techniques in-situ, on the network and not in the simulated networked environment of a computer lab classroom, where when the students get in a bind, they can just yell for help, rather than negotiate the solution through the network. The result of this research project has had a profound effect on my practice. Real-time music collaboration across a significant span of the space-time continuum, accentuates the physical delay in communication that we have had the luxury of ignoring due to its infinitesimal influence in localized practices. What now of the new auditory forms that take a zig-zag path around the planet at the speed of light and return imprinted with experience, transformation and the scars of packet loss. Beijing is again my home, where the infinite emergent varieties of traffic formations caused by the one simple/elegant rule (me first!), inspires my poetics. And the light!… filtered though the dense 2.5 nano particle network that continually inundates the city. Ken Fields Central Conservatory of Music Beijing, China. http://syneme-asia.ccom.edu.cn _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
