OPEN CALL: Papers for Sonorities Festival

The upcoming edition of Two Thousand + SEVEN will once again run in parallel to the Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music (www.sonorities.org.uk), hosted by the Sonic Arts Research Center, Queen's University Belfast (www.sarc.qub.ac.uk). The festival is the longest-running new music festival in Ireland that presents cutting-edge new music and features some of the most thought-provoking and controversial musicians.

Call for papers/presentations:

The "object is no longer to compare humans and machines in order to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, the possible or impossible substitutions of the one for the other, but to bring them into communication in order to show how humans are a component part of the machine, or combine with something else to constitute a machine. The other thing can be a tool, or even an animal, or other humans" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1995).1

Machinic performance, in Deleuze's and Guattari's sense, happens at multiple sites through multiple agents, both human and technological, and "to research a machinic performance implies to become part of it" (McKenzie, 2005).2

A multi-site networked music performance for example can range from performing a notated score with another musician in a remote location, improvising with other performers in different virtual spaces, playing with algorithms (the other performer could be a machine), to staging a performance in a virtual world (such as the online multi-player gaming environment Second Life). Considerations of physical and virtual space are central to any technological construct that promotes social engagement, and as music performance is a field where physical, time-based, subjective and inter-personal concerns are most apparent, it is a highly suitable activity for exploring networked environments. The questions that arise in virtual performance environments are of practical as well as of cultural nature:
• What is the performer's and audience's experience of performances in virtual environments?
• What type of language between performer and audience will (or will have to) develop in a virtual performance?
• How do instrumental/ensemble feedback performance strategies (such as breathing, eye contact or body movements) manifest themselves in virtual environments?
• How can we better understand a phenomenology of virtual performance environments?
• How do virtual music exchanges redefine ideas and definitions of the performative?
• How do virtual performance environments change our ideas of the body/instrument 'relation'?
• What are the implications for the erotics of the body in an environment that is so often characterised by an absence of tactile behaviours?
For this one-day event we invite proposals for performative and theoretical papers that elucidate issues in networked performance environments.

A maximum of 8 papers of 20 minutes duration (plus question time) will be accepted. Abstracts (max. 350 words) are due in electronic format by the 15th of December 2006. Presenters of accepted papers/presentations will be informed by the 15th of January 2007. All accepted papers will be published on the SARC site. Submissions and all queries should be directed to: f r a n z i s k a s c h r o e d e r franzisk[at]lautnet[dot]net