foundyou.online - Directory for New Media Art
Open Filters

Unsound focuses on a broad swath of contemporary music — emerging, experimental, and leftfield — whose sweep doesn't follow typical genre constraints. Influential, it has developed a reputation for identifying innovative scenes and radical sounds.[1]

Founded in 2003, Unsound wasn’t always the festival it is now. The very first edition ended with artists thrown out of a club for playing music that was too weird for regular patrons. Now, with the main festival still happening every year at a number of venues across Kraków, regular events also take place in New York, Adelaide, Toronto, and London. Between 2016 and 2018, Unsound also produced eleven festivals in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus, part of a long history of working with curators and artists in the post-Soviet region.[1]

As well as spotlighting emerging artists, Unsound also commissions new shows and encourages transborder collaborations, adapts and reimagines abandoned spaces for concerts and club nights, manages cutting-edge artists, and is known for its sound-inspired Ephemera perfume project. Unsound is also a platform, commissioning and releasing new music and books.[1]

Over 20+ years, CTM has been highlighting new strains of pop and fringe cultures that venture through the weird, the challenging, the cathartic, the esoteric, the contagious, and the ecstatic – simultaneously exploring sonic histories, contexts, and political and technological entanglements. Though international in its approach, CTM remains deeply rooted in and committed to Berlin’s DIY and club scenes, from which it emerged in 1999. [1]

Listening and dancing within the gaps between musics, communities, and scenes, CTM defies easy categorisation and tests the current possibilities and limits of sound and music. Programming supports a multitude of voices, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives – CTM is for all forms of music as long as they dare to experiment, question, and demonstrate conviction. Our work reaches out to all corners of the globe to explore and explode wildly different, experimental, mutating global scenes. [1]

CTM is an independent, non-profit initiative built, from the very start, on constant collaboration. We work closely with artists, guest curators, and researchers to support them in realising new projects and to produce and transmit new knowledge across performances, exhibitions, talks and artistic labs, writing, and more. Through a multi-perspective approach, we aim to respond to the diversity of an increasingly polycentric, polychromatic, and hybrid (music) world, always with empathy, openness, and a desire to counter global asymmetries. [1]

Because of CTM’s mutually collaborative nature, activities highlight a large and ever-expanding range of practices in and around sound. Through yearly themes, the festival experiments with formats, locations, technologies, and ways of listening, creating multiple entry points from which to engage with sound and their contexts. [1]

Music is not a parallel world, but rather a seismograph of our current societies, a powerful force with which to cope with uncertainty and change, and a medium through which to imagine different futures. [1]

Neural is a printed magazine established in 1993 dealing with new media art, electronic music and hacktivism. It was founded by Alessandro Ludovico and Minus Habens Records label owner Ivan Iusco in Bari (Italy). In its first issue (distributed in November 1993) there was the only translation in Italian of the William Gibson’s Agrippa (a book of the dead) book.[1]

The first topics covered were: cyberpunk (both as a literally and political movement), electronic music, networks and BBS, virtual reality, media, science fiction and UFO. The magazine’s mission was to be a magazine of ideas, becoming a node in a larger network of digital culture publishers. The magazine was also committed to give its topics a proper visual frame: focusing on graphic design and how it could have expressed the electronic culture in a sort of printed ‘interface’, exploiting at the same time the “sensorial” possibilities of the printed page. So, for example the page numbering was strictly in binary numbers for 3 years, then decimal figures were added aside. There was a department with stereogram pictures and the centerfold hosted a few optical art artworks. The graphic design included a fixed space in every article for contact and links, being inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog experiments.[1]

References: 1. http://neural.it/about/

Indexical is dedicated to experimentation in music. Indexical engages the public in radical and unfamiliar work through performance, publication, documentation, educational initiatives, and discussion. We work with historically, culturally, and institutionally underrepresented artists and build community through long-term collaborative projects.[1]

Indexical has presented concerts since 2011, beginning in a converted chapel in Brooklyn and relocating in 2015 to Santa Cruz, California. Since moving to Santa Cruz, Indexical has presented over 75 performances, artist talks, participatory workshops, and large-scale public art events.[1]

In 2018, Indexical formed a 501c3 nonprofit organization with the intention of creating a permanent home for experimental music and art in Santa Cruz. In 2021, Indexical opened a brick-and-mortar venue and gallery space at the Tannery Arts Center in Santa Cruz, and projects hosting upwards of 40 performances over the coming season.[1]

Indexical’s programming is supported in part by the Vincent J. Coates Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Arts Council of Santa Cruz County, the WHH Foundation, The Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, the City of Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz Arts Commission, as well as over 60 individual donors.[1]

Rewire
Rewire 2019: A Short Documentary

Rewire Festival is an annual international festival for adventurous music, held since 2011 in The Hague, Netherlands. The festival presents a broad program with a focus on contemporary electronic music, neo-classical, new jazz, experimental pop, sound art and multidisciplinary collaborations. It has featured artists such as Laurie Anderson, James Holden, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Ricardo Villalobos, Arca & Jesse Kanda, Nils Frahm, Animal Collective, Nina Kraviz, and The Field (the band). Venues differ from churches, old factories and abandoned spaces to the more institutional theatres and pop venues. According to Resident Advisor "[The festival] prides itself on musical diversity first and foremost."[1]

Robot Music Robot Music
Machine vs Man vs Machine
Dr. Step

Robot music is an ongoing robotic research project between Goto80 and Jacob Remin, centered around automation, creation and loss of control. The project was initiated in 2017 and has been shown in various forms at Illutron (Copenhagen), Algomech Festival (Sheffield), Internetdagarna (Stockholm), 34C3 (Leipzig), among others.[1]

Central to robot music, is robotic arms that play music on a Commodore 64 and other sound machines. The robot remixes pre-made songs, or makes its own. While the robot performs, the artists sit next to it to talk to people about robots being “creative” and “stealing our jobs”. [1]

Babycastles mission is to amplify the diversity of voices in videogame culture by providing artists support to actualize ideas and expose that work to new audiences.[1]

Drawing values from our history in New York’s DIY scene, Babycastles provides an open, accessible and collaborative platform for sharing experimental work across a broad community of artists, musicians, writers, technologists, gamemakers, students, organizers, activists, researchers, chefs, scientists, teachers, animators, zinemakers, filmmakers, moms, modders, curators, speedrunners, builders, journalists, storytellers, comedians, poets, dancers, LARPers, playwrights, Wikipedia editors, botmakers, programmers, performers, algorithms, AI…[1]

The Babycastles art collective began in 2010, roaming between locations throughout New York but usually showcasing events and exhibits at Silent Barn in Brooklyn. After settling into a permanent Chelsea home in 2014, the collective could host musical performances as well as more frequent revolving art shows.[2]

The concerts included all genres—lots of electronic and chiptune acts, but sometimes more obscure, self-proclaimed “nerdy” acts like The Doubleclicks too. It’s not just music either. The venue puts on poetry readings and live theater as well, like the immersive fantasy musical The Universe is a Small Hat. To top it off, Babycastles functions as a coworking space during daytime hours.[2]

Alexei Shulgin, born in 1963 in Moscow. Since mid 80’s e has been working in the fields of photography, media and contemporary arts. In the 90’s he was one of the pioneers of Net Art. His cyberpunk rock band, 386 DX has toured extensively all over the world. Alexei has participated in numerous exhibitions, media art and music festivals in Russia and internationally. He was teaching at Proarte Institute in St. Petersburg in 2000-2001 and performed as a guest teacher at a number of art schools in Europe and the US. Alexei has curated several exhibitions; in 2001-2004 he was a co-organizer of Readme software art festival (Moscow-Helsinki-Aarhus-Dortmund). He is a co-admin of Runme.org software art repository on the Internet. In 2004 he has co-founded Electroboutique gallery in Moscow. At present, he teaches at Rodchenko school of Photography and Media Art in Moscow. Alexei Shulgin lives and works in Moscow.[1]

Particularly involved with software art and internet art, he is a part of the readme culture and uses code as a form of art. In 1997, he released his first interactive work, Form Art, in which only minimum factors are programmed in the form of HTML. Shulgin describes this page as a "formalistic" aesthetic art site - a play on words taking into account the clean composition as well as the tools of its creation. Navigating this site requires aimless click-throughs of blank boxes and links, which lead the viewer through 19 pages of "form art" animations. Behavioral expectations are subverted by frequently overriding default functionality of basic form elements such as radio buttons and list boxes.[2]

Many links on his site are now 404, selected online works:

New Forms Media Society (NFMS) is a non-profit society and media arts organization founded in 2000 that exists to unite creative communities, push artistic and conceptual boundaries, and explore digital media as an art form. By producing the annual New Forms Festival (NFF) as well as a growing schedule of year-round public presentations, we aim to raise the profile of Canadian artists, media arts, underground and subversive arts movements and practices both in Canada and abroad. NFMS is dedicated to showcasing innovative media works that generate a critical and creative discourse within the public sphere.

By promoting Canadian artists in collaboration with the international arts and technology world, New Forms facilitates multimodal art works and engages in discussion on their role in our cultural environment. Since its inception, an integral element of New Forms is the recognition of independent and groundbreaking artists. The New Forms Festival aims to showcase and increase awareness of these artists and their work within our community and beyond by promoting them within a larger milieu.

New Forms Festival is part of a larger, international, multi-media festival movement, which explores the ever changing and evolving world of art and creates a platform for artistic growth. The Society’s goal is to make new media art, music, film, technology-based installation and performance accessible to a wider audience. [1]

Sonic Acts was founded in 1994. Over the years, it has established itself as a thematic festival with a strong focus on contemporary and historical developments at the intersections of art, technology, music and science. Each festival edition explores the chosen theme by means of an international conference, a wide range of concerts and performances, exhibitions and screenings, and embraces a broad spectrum of fields, practices and disciplines.

Sonic Acts has developed into an organisation for the research, development and production of works at the intersection of art, science and theory. It also commissions and co-produces new works, often in collaboration with international festivals, arts organisations, funders and other partners. Recent projects include the three-year art, research & commissioning project Dark Ecology, predominantly taking place in the Arctic region, and its globally touring programme Vertical Cinema. [1]