Syndicate: Acoustice Space Report.

[Nina Czegledy <czegledy@interlog.com>]

http://acoustic,space.re-lab.net/lab
http://ozone.re-lab.net/live.ram

ACOUSTIC SPACE LAB LIVE STREAMING
Sunday, August 12, 2001
18:00 h Riga Time

LIVE PRESENTATIONS FROM RIGA
AS WELL AS REMOTE PARTICIPANTS


Including: Adam Hyde Rasa Smite Raitis Smits Derek Holzer
Adam Willits Zina Kaye Fee Plumley Zita Joyce Borja Jelic
Aljosa Abrahamsbe Susan Kennard Elaine Bomberry,
Clausthome + Riga Sound, Francis Hunger Nina Czegledy Honor Harger
Recordings from Remote Participants: Joe Banks (Disinformation)
Stefan Beck Remote participants: August Black & Manfred Soellner, Peteris
Kimelis, and X-Change, Contour.net live from Garage Festival, Strahlsund,
Kunstradio live from Vienna.



Acoustice Space Report.
Nina Czegledy


In the first days of August, the Irbene radio telescope -deeply hidden in
the Latvian pine forests- became an experimental site for the activities of
the thirty-five Acoustic Space Workshop participants.  The giant instrument
built two decades ago by the soviet military, was only revealed to the
general public in 1993. It took three years after the withdrawal of the
army, to remove metal pieces thrown into mechanical devices (by the
departing forces), to repair drive-electronics drenched in sulfuric acid,
to dislodge nails from the cables, locate pierced cables and so on.
Finally, in 1996 the telescope became once more operational. Currently  it
is used for research, educational purposes and (due to lack of state
funding) occasionally rented to various groups.

Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits of re-lab, Riga,  found out four years ago
about the
telescope. While they were aware of some local art projects, using the
dish as an aesthetic construct, they became intrigued with the possibilities
of utilizing this powerful acoustic receiver for purposes other than
aesthetic or strict scientific observations. As a result of this
speculation and following careful workshop planning with Derek Holzer,
workshop participants had this amazing opportunity to visit and work in
Irbene. Sound and media artists from all over the globe were scaling for
three days the steep steel ladders with recorders, cameras, navigated the
inner surface of the immense dish with a variety  of devices while
underneath in the bowels of the building, instruments hummed, networked
computers buzzed, synthesizers whizzed and Dmitry Bezrukov custodian of the
telescope, expertly directed the movements of the Big Dish.

Workshop participants began to arrive on Friday, August 3 to Riga. The
westbound journey began on Saturday by minibuses with our first stop in
Karosta, Today seaside Karosta consists of a mix of dilapidated block
buildings, cottages, deserted stone houses, an amazing orthodox cathedral
and concrete remnants of the Russian military harbour which was originally
established in 1896. During soviet times Karosta was a closed city, with a
mostly Russian population which is still at 75%. The army moved out in
1994. Most of the remaining inhabitants have only "non-citizen" status and
the unemployment rate is close to 20%.  In 1997, two artists, Kristine
Briede and Carl  Biorsmark in the course of organizing a touring exhibition
visited Karosta. They became so fascinated with this unusual place that in
2000 they moved here and last year started to renovate the "Admiral's
House", a huge  old building, where they established the Open Culture and
Information Center K@2.

"In this area information has a special meaning, as it is a very isolated
place and basic info was unavailable for the longest time to the people
living here  -said Kristine- when we  organized  a large art show in one of
the empty block buildings we got to know the local kids. We included their
artwork in the exhibition and began working with them. From language
courses to painting to singing to information on the naturalization
process, we are trying to offer a broad range of courses with encouraging
results. We began the training of local people with the intent that
eventually they take over this place and then maybe we can return to our
filmmaking."  The group of activists including Kristine and Carl, currently
working at K@2 became known in Latvia and beyond through their "Locomotive"
produced films, especially Borderlands.

Following a great outdoor dinner at K@2 we proceeded to the Down the
Tunnels drum and base party at the seaside defense tunnels (dating back to
World War I.) The event with invited DJ-s  -including our own Francis-  was
organized by Rigasound.org and Biocodes for a large appreciative crowd, and
lasted till the morning.  After an overnight stay, the acoustic space
caravan continued to the campgrounds of Liepene  - our base for the next
few days. Next morning we proceeded to Irbene. The unmarked side road leads
between deserted block buildings through the pines to the giant telescope.
Formerly 2000 people lived in this  now abandoned military compound.

On site,  we learned from Juris Zagars, professor of astronomy, that the
telescope was constructed at the end of the seventies, the supporting
structure was built by naval engineers in St. Petersburg and the extremely
high accuracy surface is due to the parabolic shape of the dish. 800m2
surface with 0.5 mm accuracy. The telescope was originally built for
multipurpose operation including space mission control, but it was mostly
used for surveillance and interpretation of millions of phone calls and
faxes.

How was this enormous telescope used by the workshop? As the detailed list
of participants is beyond the scope of this travelogue, I will resort to
describing our activities beginning with Captain Derek Holzer, workshop
coordinator's summary: "Our intention was to use the dish in the radio
astronomical capacity - using the existing receivers on the dish to listen
to the radio emissions of various cosmic sources including Mars, Jupiter,
Venus and the Sun. In addition to acoustic recordings which were made of
these sources data was also collected by the computers at the dish which we
hope can be converted into midi data. The second project was to fit the
antenna with a special feed brought by Marko Peljhan and to tune into the
weaker outer edges of directional satellite signals from various networks.
These experiments produced the bulk of our audio material. The third
experiment was to use the dish as an enormous parabolic acoustic receiver
by fitting it with a microphone and panning across the horizon to collect
sounds from the immediate terrestrial environment and the 'groaning' of the
dish itself."

In practice some people were actively involved in using various instruments
and collecting data, others were documenting with photos, videos, taking notes
for future articles or simply enjoying the experience of being in contact
with such a historical scientific monument.  Aljosa, Marko and Borja
collected signals from satellite communications. They have used this
material as a tactical tool rather than signal processing for other
purposes. Shane intends to use some of the satellite recordings in his
broadcasts for his Sik Sika radio station in Canada. Honor and Derek
organized the group dealing with galactic observations. The data from
planets, ended up mostly as white noise, even when stepped down it was
mostly hiss. "But some of this hiss might be actually from a planet! " said
Derek. The  Latvian musicians Voldemar, Girts, Gonzalez and Lauris worked
tirelessly on synthesizing recorded sources from the dish, filtering some
of the galactic data etc., Adam H, Fee and Adam H. were collecting acoustic
samples,  "We received a considerable amount of wind noise, some man-made
noise (people talking walking) and a lot of almost silence, reflecting the
strange
surrounding environment, whereby such a gigantic technological structure
is placed in the middle of an unpopulated Nordic forest." Zina was
processing collected data to trigger events and collected samples to make
sounds. Snow has been working using Java 3D language on 3D interpretation
of raw numerical data of the observations as part of a larger project.
Additional interests were also fueled by experiencing the  "big dish" and
its environment. Steve took amazing  portraits with his little digital
camera,  Elaine explored the surrounding, documenting the sounds and images
both on and around the telescope. Francis composed a new sound piece based
on "Kislaty dj" a Russian top hit and gave an intriguing presentation on
Black Holes.  The expedition to the 2 km long tunnels built to connect
auxiliary telescopes was yet another amazing excursion.
Of course the most amazing experience was watching the "Big Dish" tilt and
rotate. This could be watched from a distance outside, however sitting in
the so called "submarine" level one was able to see the movements in
extreme close-up.

Each day after brief interludes at the beach,  activities continued far
into the night. The site of several laptops exchanging info, pictures,
sounds  - crammed into the small bedrooms was astonishing.As an ongoing
promotion between Monday and Friday the Kunstradio of Vienna broadcasted
for ten minutes reports on the spacelabs activities.

For the last two days everybody has been feverishly processing data,
documentation back in Riga. Part of this is presented nightly at the
Casablanca venue and we are also getting ready for the marathon streaming
tomorrow with the participation of all the remaining "spacers".

This, however is not the end of this project. On September 8, Marko Peljhan
will give a performance based on material collected here and other sources,
Between September 9-14, a workshop is scheduled to process the collected
and new audiovisual data as well as working with real time mixing and
incorporating this into a live performance. Furthermore between September
26 and 30 the Riga/Rotterdam Xchange related to these workshop will take
place in Rotterdam. The material of all of these workshops will be
available on an
audio CD. Finally on September 30 a discussion is scheduled within the
framework of a Wiretap Sunday evening event to focus on theoretical
and conceptual issues of acoustic space with a view of publishing a book
on these topics.



















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