PERTH: 30th – 31st October 2009
The 2009 Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference
Douglas Kahn Keynote Address Sat 31st October, 9.30am

Keynote Topic: The Nature of Music and Media
An absence of nature common to communications technologies and electronic music has allowed them to remain as vestiges  of an ineluctable march of modernity driven by technology, continuing to move forward where other spheres of life have been required to respond to the degradation of the environment. The formative history of electronic music has been written as a parade of devices and inventors, as has the history of communications technologies, with an addition of patent disputes, business models, social diffusion, and as an a priori of what it once was to be human. The lost nature of both electronic music and communications technologies can be found along the telegraph and telephone lines of the 19th Century, when the Aeolian moved into the electromagnetic, and music began to move into media.

Enquiries and Payments
http://createc.ea.ecu.edu.au/conferences/oct_2009/
www.tura.com.au

BRISBANE: Saturday 7th – Sunday 8th November
Wireless Imagination: Noise Electromagnetism Geophysics Dada Cinema Performance

2 day festival celebrating the work of American sound theorist Douglas Kahn. Featuring discussions by Kahn, film screenings of work by Semiconductor, Ken Jacobs, Jeanne Liotta and Karl-Birger Blomdahl, and a tribute to Russolo's 'noise-macines' in the form of a sculptural orchestra with work by Rod Cooper, Anthony Magen, Michael Prior, Dale Chapman, Ross Manning, Joel Stern, Dylan Martorell, Gugg and more.
Saturday 7th Nov 5pm - 7pm Talk & Screening The Cinema Of Turbulent Transmissions, State Library of Queensland Auditorium 2
Sunday 8th Nov 5pm-7pm Talk by Douglas Kahn In The Redbox State Library of Queensland Red Box.  All Brisbane events are free.

Program details - www.otherfilm.org/wireless.html

http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/whats-on/events/other#cinema/

CANBERRA:  Tuesday 17th November, 7.00pm
Lecture: Natural Electromagnetic Sounds in the Arts
The word “nature” is foreign to discussions of communications technologies and electronic music. Yet, throughout the 19th Century communications technologies were put “in-circuit” with the earth and the noises of natural radio were heard for pleasure long before radio was invented. In the mid-1960s the American composer Alvin Lucier began using “natural electromagnetic sounds” in his work, an electronic music missing the great divide between nature and technology, underscoring a move from music to media over the last 150 years. The evening will be moderated by Mitchell Whitelaw.

National Film and Sound Archive, McCoy Circuit, Acton, Canberra  http://www.nfsa.gov.au/

SYDNEY: Thursday 19 November, 6.30 – 8.00pm
Lecture: Nature, Art and Communications
Since the mid-1960s, artists and musicians have begun setting up shop along parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, from natural radio and brainwaves, to the gamma of nuclear radiation. Even visible light. To account for this surge in artistic energies, it is necessary to go back to the 19th Century and rewrite the history of communications technologies in terms of nature.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Circular Quay, Sydney
http://www.mca.com.au/

MELBOURNE: Friday 27th November, 6.30pm
Douglas Kahn key note address at re:live Third International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology

Far out:  Brainwaves in inner space and outer space.
Imagine:  John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Chuck Berry, David Rosenboom on the television studio floor of the Mike Douglas Show in 1972, electrode wires dripping from their heads, making music with their brains. Draw the historical curtain back and find Norbert Wiener and John Cage at the controls and lack thereof. They were mentors of the physicist Edmond Dewan and the composer Alvin Lucier, respectively. Dewan had already performed his brainwaves on CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in 1964, and Lucier composed his "brainwave piece", Music for Solo Performer the following year. For each, brainwaves formed but one flank of an audible and naturally-occurring electromagnetic spatiality, the other being on a geophysical scale, with the intervening space caught somewhere between Cold War and Counter-Culture. A similar energetic and political space sparks between voltage differences on the motherboard and the global communications infrastructure, with brainwave game control devices and a degrading environment.

BMW Edge Building @ Federation Square, Melbourne
Entry: Free  http://www.mediaarthistory.org/

Websites

http://createc.ea.ecu.edu.au/conferences/oct_2009/
www.otherfilm.org/wireless.html
http://www.mca.com.au/
http://www.mediaarthistory.org/
www.tura.com.au
http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/whats-on/events/other#cinema
http://www.nfsa.gov.au/