From:
                    Nina Czegledy <czegledy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
 To:
                    rasa@xxxxxxxx 
 Date:
                    Sun, 12 Aug 2001 10:08:54 +0100
 Subject:
                    Acoustice Space Report.


 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 Xchange, 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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