The Fragmented Orchestra, conceived by artist Jane Grant, physicist, musician and composer John Matthias and composer Nick Ryan, is a huge distributed musical structure modelled on the firing of the human brain’s neurons. The Fragmented Orchestra connects 24 public sites across the UK to form a tiny networked cortex, which will adapt, evolve and trigger site-specific sounds via FACT in Liverpool.

Each of the sites has a soundbox installed, which will stream human-made and elemental sounds from the site via an artificial neuron to one of 24 speakers in FACT. The sound will only be transmitted when the neuron fires. A firing event will cause fragments of sound to be relayed to the gallery and will also be communicated to the cortex as a whole. The combined sound of the 24 speakers at the gallery will be continuously transmitted back to the sites and to each of the 24 sites.

The sounds of The Fragmented Orchestra will vary according to location; wind over Black Fell, inner city traffic, chanting from sports stadia and the chatter of migrating birds arriving for the winter will be combined with incidental and performed sounds from members of the public. The public, invited to play the instrument at the 24 sites, will be able to hear the effect their playing has on the overall composition of the piece at each site and at FACT. As members of the public use the instrument they will become both player and audience of a vast and evolving musical composition extended across the UK.

The SCAN PROCESSOR STUDIES are a collection of works by Woody Vasulka & Brian O’Reilly.  The full work is of total approximate duration of 45 minutes, with sections of various lengths, textures, and dynamic qualities.

The source materials were generated by Woody using a Rutt-Etra Scan Processor from the 1970’s that had been sitting on a shelf for years, and had recently been digitized. Woody came into Brian’s studio one day and asked him if he would be interested in using them to work on a collaboration, and the project began from there …

The works use sources excavated directly from the output of the Scan Processor, as well as further manipulations using Tom Demeyer’s ImX software. Extensive editing and layering and additional augmentations were done using Phil Mortons IP. The Sound was generated (mostly) by custom software developed by Chandrasekhar Ramakrishnan and Brian, called NETHER GENERATOR, which sets up a number of complex real time feedback networks filtered and processed by various means.

The white forms in these photographs are the sculptural manifestations of audio footage that was recorded along the border between Russia and Finland. Here the unique old-growth forests stand, The Green Belt of Fennoscandia. Recently these ancient trees are being logged for their valuable timber. There are only few remaining areas of ancient forest in Europe with the vast majority of the vanishing old-growth forests remaining are in the North of European Russia.

The soundwaves  created by Russian artist, Tviga Vasilyeva, are actual objects, each is 6 metres high, reminiscent of the height of a tree, despite looking like digital intervention. I recorded them when the forest was still there. Then, when the trees had gone, she put the ‘sounds’ back to where they used to exist, sounds that look like trees that will never be heard again.

Time Lapse Video of Kiel Johnson’s Cardboard Sculpture of a Twin Lens Reflex Camera made strictly from cardboard, hot glue, and tape.

Later the sculpture was made  into a pinhole camera and they actually shot pictures with it.

After working on a simulation for the Advanced Beauty Project, directing collective Minivegas had the idea to create a virtual gallery in which the user can interact with sound driven interactive sculptures. The space is modeled after the Vegas gallery. The album artwork of the MP3s cover the gallery walls and each MP3 creates its own sculpture.

Long before making sculpture, Arthur Ganson dreamed of being a surgeon. The challenge of working so carefully with his hands was satisfied by the creation of very fragile machines. A machine with no utilitarian purpose, this is as close to drawing or painting as he can get. After giving himself a starting point, the machine grew organically. The actions and movement of parts are meaningfully trivial.

A Life Well Wasted is a podcast about video games and the people who love them, produced by freelance journalist and aspiring radio producer, Robert Ashley. The episode posters were created for the show by artist Olly Moss.

THE THING Quarterly is a periodical in the form of an object. Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors (Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan) to create an everyday object that somehow incorporates text. This object will be reproduced and hand wrapped at a wrapping party and then mailed to the homes of the subscribers.

THE THING’s current year of subscriptions (issues 9-12) will begin with an issue by visual artist Ryan Gander; and continue with issues by writer/radio personality (most notably from This American Life) Starlee Kine; visual artist Chris Johanson; and end with an issue by the clothing design collaborative DOO.RI.

What if you watch a film and whenever you pause it, you face a painting? This idea inspired Reza Dolatabadi to make Khoda. Over 6000 paintings were painstakingly produced during two years to create a five minutes film that would meet high personal standards. Khoda is a psychological thriller; a student project which was seen as a ‘mission impossible’ by many people but eventually proved possible!

Khoda will be shown at the onedotzero festival at London’s BFI Southbank from September 9th to 13th. 

Written and directed by Chris Cairns, Neurosonics Audiomedical, is a wicked film about “the kingdom of the unreal but also a higher state of being, ultimately free of the limitations of the material world through the agency of science, technology, and imagination.”

Make sure to drop by their website to check out the stills.