Show us your . . . springboard | Chicago Reader
Published January 19, 2012 in the Chicago Reader’s “Show us your [____]” section, by Kevin Warwick.

Photo by Andrea Bauer
Published January 19, 2012 in the Chicago Reader’s “Show us your [____]” section, by Kevin Warwick.

Photo by Andrea Bauer
Interview on Vidos Island
Part of Kiki Karydi’s “A Week of Sound and Silence” project.
Kiki is a graduate student studying in the UK. She was among the many people met in Corfu for “Crossing Listening Paths” 2011 WFAE International Conference. Among the questions I respond to are, In the video I respond to four questions, “What feelings to the soundscapes in Corfu inspire in you?”, “What is ’silence’ for you?”, and “When a soundscape is mediatized, does it lose its naturalness?”
“A Week of Sound and Silence” will feature interviews with Christopher W. Clark, Katharine Norman, R. Murray Schafer, David Murphy, and Allen S. Weiss, and other participants in “Crossing Listening Paths.”
Among the work of over 150 artists my early efforts in the field of radio, art, and radio art were cited in a new book, Transmission Arts: Artists & Airwaves (PAJ Publications, 2011) by Galen Joseph-Hunter, Penny Duff, and Maria Papadomanolaki.
On Saturday, July 23 free103point9.org Transmission Arts and WGXC: Hands-on Radio (90.7-FM) will hold a book launch with radio art performances. If you are in or near The Spotty Dog in Hudson, New York (I won’t be there myself, but feel free to drop in and tune in).
Visit free103point9 for complete details.
Polly Ullrich was a new friend and Chicago art critic who died suddenly in a car accident on Wednesday, July 6. Her feature article about sound in art in Chicago, “Making Worlds: Chicago Sound As Sculpture,” in Sculpture Magazine, mentioned important figures and resources in our local community, including my work with Chicago Phonography. With publication of her article, Polly was given support to organize a panel discussion on sound art in Chicago for the annual Art Chicago exposition on Saturday, April 30. She moderated with featured speakers Andrea Polli, Shawn Decker, and Christopher Janney. We enjoyed a nice dinner afterward, and were looking forward to attending the Sound Art Theories Symposium at SAIC, in November. It would have been fun to continue the conversation on sound and its role in the arts. As Duncan McKenzie wrote, “Polly, we miss you already…”
Polly was amazing and her passing is a loss to our art world and local community. She was kind, thoughtful and often set an example that was so blindingly hopeful that it was hard not to follow. I will forever remember her curiosity, interest, enthusiasm, and commitment to fostering a critical community. She will be missed by all of us that knew her and by this community.
Read the rest of Duncan’s post and Polly’s obituary on the Bad At Sports blog: http://badatsports.com/2011/polly-we-miss-you-already/
Here is an Audioboo I recorded at Art Chicago of Polly introducing the panel discussion: http://audioboo.fm/boos/345584-panel-sound-art-in-an-era-of-flow
Presented by the International Sculpture Center
Polly Ullrich’s feature article about sound in art in Chicago comes out in the May issue of Sculpture Magazine. Read her full article online with audio and video, “Making Worlds: Chicago Sound As Sculpture.”
My work, titled “Feedback.mono” is on Explorations in Sound, Volume 4, The Sound of Live Performance, a net label release curated by Furthernoise editor Roger Mills. The release is a 23 track compilation of noisemakers responding to the theme of the incidental and unexpected audio consequences of live performance, and is free to download with printed sleeve from the February/March 2011 issue of Furthernoise.org.
This compilation on The Sound of Live Performance assembles those “sound failures, the misassigned patch, unintended playing outcomes, FX overloads, calibrations and pinnacles of performative exploration” that offer sources for eclectic new material.
My report about Listening for the Future, the first American Society for Acoustic Ecology (ASAE) symposium and retreat, has been published on the September/October World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) Online Newsletter.
In related news, within the next month I plan to have the proceedings (images, texts, and audio) from Listening for the Future published on the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology website. (more…)

Handheld Audio Art Devices, article published in June at http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/12_3/
eContact! is the Canadian Electroacoustic Community’s (CEC) online journal of electroacoustics launched in May 1998 as the successor to its print journal, Contact! …published four times a year in French and English. Guest editors have been invited to coordinate one issue per year. Articles, reviews, interviews, commentaries and analyses are featured in the journal, supported by audio and video files. All freely available to the public.
03.18.2010 post on Margaret Noble’s blog, a showcase for recordings of all types from around the world. Visit and listen…
Categories: Unusual Instruments & Gear
You can watch it here: http://vimeo.com/10216719
“one of the 87 videos on the accompanying DVD to the second edition of Nicolas Collins’s book, Handmade Electronic Music - The Art of Hardware Hacking, published by Routledge in 2009. This 1-minute video was shot and edited by Gretchen Hasse from the original Gearwire.com video interviews about the Springboard.”