I’ll be performing at this event in Cairns this Saturday as part of the On Edge festival.

Submerge#d
Arahmaiani (Indonesia), post (Syd), tako seijin (Sam Tupou), Zane Saunders, Unstrumenta Orchestra, Shannon O’Neill (syd), ReelDance – Australian & New Zealand Awards 2010, John Von Sturmer (Syd), Kris Keogh (Dar), Font featuring Tweak Bakini, Hanzard and lots more.
Submerge#d presents a diverse and eclectic night of short media and performance works from local and guest practitioners. Guest artist, Arahmaiani (Indonesia) is a key-figure in the current contemporary art scene in both Indonesia and South East Asia, and draws from community process and social/political issues in developing innovative performance art.
The Submerge#d program also includes Sydney group post presenting new work in progress, the ReelDance Australian and New Zealand Awards, and innovative artists Zane Saunders and Sam Tupou bringing contemporary indigenous and pacific island perspectives to the fore.
- Sat 10th July
- Old Hrvatski Klub Artspace, 240 Scott St
- Doors 6.00pm, Show 7.00pm
- Check web for full program/times.
Tickets: $10/ 7 at the door.

WIRED Lab DIY Wires Workshop, Web Launch & WIRED EAR Scheme
Over Saturday 17th & Sunday 18th July The WIRED Lab will be hosting its annual in situ DIY Wires: Construction & Recording Workshop. This workshop is your chance to learn how to build your own æolian instrument and custom recording techniques. The weekend will also include an evening of performances by Alan Lamb & WIRED Lab members, and the launch of our new website.
The WIRED Lab is located on a farm in regional NSW (between Gundagai and Cootamundra). The WIRED Lab is the site of the latest ‘Wire’ instruments built by Alan Lamb, along with collaborators Sarah Last, Dave Burraston, Garry Bradbury and Robin Fox.
WORKSHOP DETAILS
Saturday 17th & Sunday 18th July
The workshop is offered for free to 25 lucky participants and will give you the DIY skills to build your own wires and pickups, held over two days, the workshop will include:
* Alan Lamb, Dave Burraston & Sarah Last will teach people how to build their own wire system and demonstrate ways to interact with the wires (eg. bowing and singing into polystyrene boxes, which work as reverberant amplifiers!).
* Permanent WIRED Lab resident & electronics wizard Dave Burraston will discuss his observations of The Wires when recording and will demonstrate how to custom build and attach piezo pickups.
* Alan Lamb will demonstrate percussion, bowing and techniques with the wires.
* Opportunity to interact with and record the wires.
NOTE: workshop places are strictly limited, with a maximum capacity of 25 people. Places will need to be reserved ASAP, with bookings on a 1st come 1st served basis.
WIRED EARS (EMERGING ARTISTS RESIDENCY SCHEME)
The WIRED EAR Scheme will provide financial assistance for NSW based young and emerging artists to attend selected WIRED Lab workshops. For our annual DIY Wires workshop we will be offering $150 to assist 8 emerging artists with the costs to attend the workshop. Artists who consider themselves to be ‘young and emerging’ are invited to submit a brief (1 page maximum) expression of interest detailing their arts practice and how they feel they will benefit from being a WIRED EARS participant. WIRED EARS expressions of interest are due on Monday 28th June.
PERFORMANCE EVENING & WIRED LAB .ORG LAUNCH
On Saturday evening WIRED Lab will launch its new website wiredlab.org, with Alan Lamb, Dave Burraston and Special Guests presenting a concert open to the general public in Cootamundra’s Creative Arts & Cultural Centre (CCACC). The CCACC is a new facility; it is the 1st time Cootamundra has had a dedicated Arts infrastructure, the Centre was initiated by local volunteers and is located in what once was an Ugg boot factory!
ABOUT ALAN LAMB
You may already be familiar with Alan’s work, he has been working with wires since the 70′s. He originally started with disused spans of telegraph wires and evolved into building his own that spanned hundreds of metres across the desert and the open landscapes. During this time he developed a technique of attaching stereo contact microphones to record and listen to The Wires. These recordings expose an infinite and amplified universe of sound that sonically reflects the environment and things we cannot see. The Wires sonically reproduces environmental and human interactions with an enormous dynamic range of harmonics and frequencies, often to visceral effect. Whilst having traditional sonic qualities such as pitch, timbre, rhythm and key, the sounds produced are perhaps best described as a deep space atmosphere with earth hums and electro-pings, even insects can be heard as they collide or crawl up and down the wire.
ABOUT WIRED LAB
A primary objective of The WIRED Lab is to consolidate Alan’s work and create a permanent site for his instrument to be further developed by other artists, and for Alan to devolve his skills and knowledge to as many people as possible. Since its 2007 establishment The WIRED Lab has presented workshops, concerts, an open day and various publications documenting Alan Lamb and WIRED Lab collaborators.
Thus far The WIRED Lab has built several sets of wires, spanning kilometres across the landscape. We have been recording the wires with piezo pickups and we plan on setting the wires up so we can record visiting artists and their interactions. You will find some recordings and info here:http://wiredlab.ning.com/
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Further logistical details about the workshop can be found HERE
REMEMBER: this workshop has ***limited availability***
This is primarily for logistical reasons; BUT NOTE we plan on hosting more workshops and an open day, so if you miss out this time there will be opportunity for many more people to get WIRED in the future.
Any further questions?
Please email Sarah at: info@wiredlab.org
The WIRED Lab
W I R E D : Wire Integrative Research Education & Development
http://wiredlab.ning.com/ and http://www.wiredlab.org/

The Newington Armory Gallery, the Centre for Media Arts Innovation (UTS) and New Media Curation invite you to the Memory Flows Public Programme:
Curator Led Tour and Moderated Artists’ Forum
Saturday 12 June 2010 | 11am-3pm Newington Armory Gallery | Buildings 18 & 22
Curator Led Tour @ 11am | Building 18
Join Sophia Kouyoumdjian on an exhibition tour as she discusses the works and concepts explored within Memory Flows.
Artists’ Forum @ 1pm | Building 22
Join selected artists from Memory Flows and Daniel Brine, Director of Performance Space for a panel discussion about collaborative and iterative media art practice in Australia. Panelists will explore ways that this practice can re-engage with ideas of water, ecology and the aesthetic metaphors these concepts generate. The Panelists are: Chris Caines, Shannon O’Neill, Greg Shapley, Megan Heyward, Jacqueline Gothe, Sherre DeLys and Nigel Helyer.


Memory Flows is an ongoing and distributed media art project of the Centre for Media Arts Innovation (CMAI) UTS. As elsewhere around the globe, Australian rivers are conduits that are emblematic of networking systems, travel systems and survival systems. Memories and stories – both actual and fictional – will flow and stream from Australians’ intense and varied relationships with water. Artists belonging to this group have tapped into the specific memory that rivers and waterways retain, streaming their enquiry back to the group and out to a larger public audience via exhibition.
http://memoryflows.net/
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Ian Andrews | Chris Bowman | Chris Caines | Damian Castaldi | Sherre DeLys | Clement Girault | Jacqueline Gothe | Ian Gwilt | Megan Heyward | Nigel Helyer | Neil Jenkins | Solange Kershaw | Roger Mills | Maria Miranda | Norie Neumark | Shannon O’Neill | Greg Shapley | Victor Steffensen | Jen Teo | Jes Tyrrell
15 MAY – 20 JUNE 2010 | open weekends only 10am – 4pm
Armory Gallery, Newington Armory Jamieson Street (off Holker Street), Sydney Olympic Park NSW 2127
LAUNCH EVENT AT THE ARMORY
Friday 14 May 2010 @ 6pm
Talks @ 7pm to be opened by Judith Blackall, Head of Artistic Programmes at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Headwater performance @ 8pm by The Field
There will be a charter bus leaving from the Art Gallery of NSW (5:45pm) and stopping at UTS (6pm) before heading out to the Armory (arrival @ 6:45pm). Return charter service to Central Station departs from the Blaxland Riverside parking lot @ 9pm.
FREE parking at Blaxland Riverside Park car park


Open Fields is an interdisciplinary event occurring this week at UTS and Serial Space. I’ll be participating in two performances:
- Thursday April 29, 5:30pm at the Bon Marche Studio – an open rehearsal by The Field (Chris Caines, Jessica Tyrrell and myself) of Headwater, an audiovisual work that we’re developing for the forthcoming Memory Flows exhibition at Newington Armory.
- Friday April 30, 7pm at Serial Space – the debut performance of Monika Brooks‘ Stifle / Send composition for laptop ensemble and voices.
There are lots of interesting sessions in the program, so come along if you can.


Today I had the pleasure of participating in the GET RHYTHM! event at the Powerhouse Museum, with Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky & Annie K. Kwon, Andrew Johnston & Ben Marks and Jon Drummond. I gave a presentation about the Sound a Day project, as well as Alias Frequencies and Memory Flows. The drinks afterwards were full of interesting conversation.
Sound a Day will be taking a break over the holiday period. I had hoped to continue it, but I’m moving house and will be without a studio and possibly internet over the next few weeks. Once things have settled down I’ll be back with more sounds.
Have a great new year!


Download
SAD013 – Chamber of Secrets 0:17 700 KB
The photo above is of the toilet at Jinnah’s.
The sound is of a toilet flushing, played backwards and slowed down, which is a technique often worth trying. The dynamics were enhanced with volume graphing in Wave Editor. I also got some interesting drones from the same recording which I might post later.
Chamber of Secrets could work well in an electroacoustic or musique concrète piece.


Download
SAD012 – Jinnah’s 0:56 2.15 MB
Jinnah’s is a crazy Pakistani restaurant in Dulwich Hill. Going there is always an adventure, but I wasn’t prepared for what greeted us when we arrived tonight.
SAD012 is a recording of the entrance at Jinnah’s. I made it using FiRe on my iPhone. I don’t know why the sound is so strange – possibly a faulty radio transmitter? Staff walked past apparently without noticing! I just wish there’d been a strobe light to go with it.
Btw, the (rather expensive) food was great when we last ate there about a year ago, but tonight was very disappointing. The food tasted old, the restaurant was empty and they’d replaced the previously warm lighting with a few cold white CFLs. This was sort of a farewell as we’re moving away from the area, but we won’t be missing Jinnah’s as much as we thought we would.


Download
Sound a Day 011 – Korg Study 002 0:08 312 KB
One thing I like about the MS-20 is that you pick up where you left off. There’s no saving and recalling patches. Today’s sound is based on yesterday’s patch, but the input signal has been removed. The repeating notes are played by hand. The built-in ‘modulation generator’ or LFO is set to a descending sawtooth wave, influencing the oscillators and filters, while some envelope modulation gives the notes more presence.
A fairly simple sound, SAD011 could be used as either a one-off effect or a loop. It could also be good slowed down &/or backwards. I might play around with it some more…


Download
Sound a Day 010 – Korg Study 001 0:25 998 KB
For several years I’ve had the idea of doing a collection of ‘Korg Studies’ – short pieces that explore a particular sound or technique on the Korg MS-20 synth (and also the Korg mini-KP Kaoss Pad). Here is as good a place as any to start.
KS001 demonstrates my usual technique of using an external input to drive the control voltages. In this case it’s a random song playing on my iPhone. There are two square wave oscillators an octave apart, their pitches mapped to the mod wheel. One is modulated by the amplitude and the other by the frequency of the incoming signal. The low-pass filter is also being heavily modulated. When the incoming sound hits a certain level it triggers the envelope generators, which have a percussive shape. Continuous tweaking of parameters is done to shape the sound into something interesting.
These are techniques that I’ve developed and refined over the past few years of working with the Splinter Orchestra. I was also very impressed by Asmus Tietchens‘ performance at Liquid Architecture this year, and I think his approach to the synthesiser may have influenced me recently.

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Welcome This is the web site of Shannon O'Neill, an artist, academic and curator based in Sydney, Australia. (more...)
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