The Thinkbox collective is based in and around Windsor, Ontario – across the river and border from Detroit – with all of its attendent musical history. The Detroit  based www.metrotimes.com predictably places Thinkbox in the context of Techno’s genesis, development and bifurcation as moving the techno/electronic aesthetic betond the club dance floors to the gallery and museum space.

Given the timing however (2003-2008) it would seem more likely that Thinkbox were rather more influenced by the increasingly ubiquity of (largely eurpoean) post glitch ambient electronica of the form popularised by the likes of Christopher Fennesz or the ‘Artic Ambience’ of Biosphere. That claim appears reinforced by the individual releases of Christopher Bissonnette one of the founding members of the collective.A sound and graphic designer, Bissonnette use of the guitar and field recordings recalls both Fennesz and perhaps Oren Ambarchi and fellow Canadian (Vancouver) Loscil. Other members of the collective include Mark Laliberte (http://www.marklaliberte.com/index2.html) - an independent curator , ‘project-based’ artist and experimental poet – who also performs ambient soundscape/design work – his Pillow Scenes Soundworks marked the first and only CD release for the collective. Mark has been heavily involved with the Zine culture and currently produces the design/pictorial magazine Carousel (http://www.carouselmagazine.ca/) while exhibiting a wide range of intermedia and installation works that are united by the kind of countercultural cool that belies their zine-culture influences. Chris McNamara is a Windsor based video artist who teaches new media at the University of Michigan. Chris also works with collaborator Dermot Wilson under the name Machydem Inc. – mostly producing film and digital video projects.  Steve Roy, Rob Theakston – an  electronic music producer working a similar vein to that of Bissonette -with a slightly more dissonant edge- and Bill van Loo –  an electronic music producer who also works with guitar to produce live ambient electronica (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGgsCV7gh88).

Daniel Woo is  also associated with the iCinema project at UNSW a large scale hemispherical ‘cave’ style immersive environment although his work tends to focus of speech and natural languages and interface design and usability research.

Woo was central in establishing a HCI education at UNSW and is considered a leader in the field of HCI education and research. He has published widely on interface design, formal usability testing, speech synthesis and interface, spatial audio interfaces amongst other research interests.

Helyer’s work is what his website describes as ‘actively interdisciplinary’- linking creative expression, scientific research and technical development. More specifically Helyer’s work is characterised by an interest in the potential for technical architectures to reveal otherwise unseen or marginalised dynamics that span and interweave the development of culture, environment, history and technology .

Installation is the most common vehicle for Helyer’s work which tends to employ elements of computer and mechanical interaction as the basis for an establishing and exploring the visceral relation between body and ecology that it potentialises.

Helyer’s most recent work has developed out of a collaboration with the Satellite Navigation and Positioning Group and Human Computer Interaction Lab of the University of New South Wales (Most notably with Daniel Woo and  Michael Lake of UNSW). That work is based on the Audio Nomad system that provides for the mapping of geo-tagged media and geospatial information in a interactive system that immerses the user in a sonified representation of the environment. That representation juxtaposes sonified meteorological and environmental data with recorded histories, cultural fragments, field recordings (both visual and sonic) making the relations between these ‘readings’ visceral. The user traverses this sonic topology  produced via an immersive multiscreen and surround sound system and the unique Audio Nomad interface  to explore the transitions and relations between the human, biological, and environmental systems.

The Audio Nomad system is the result of a project Helyer began in 1999 and which continued until 2001 called Sonic Landscapes and which employed the spatial audio systems developed by Lake Technology and the GPS systems developed by the SNAP lab of the University of New South Wales (and in collaboration with both Lake and UNSW). That project allowed for a fictive but nonetheless visceral 3D immersive soundscape to be accurately positioned and explored on/in a physical terrain. The subject and site for that work was the St Stephen’s Graveyard in Newtown, Sydney – a site rich with the kind of lost/invisible histories, that along with the invisible or marginalised dynamics of our ecology, constitute the other principle interest in Helyer’s work.

Two other interwoven streams are apparent in traversing Helyer’s catalogue. The first is an interest in oral and sonic histories that is expressed in the Wireless House (2009) and  GhosTrain (2008) projects both of which work on resounding the forgotten histories that are expressed in the sonic markers of a superceded or evicted heavy industry that once constituted Sydney’s inner city life or the oral histories that recount the human cultures to which it gave rise.

The other stream of Helyer’s catalogue is the design of mechanical and dynamic sculptures that harness wind or other environmental (or differential forces-electromagnetic force for example) forces as a means of modal ‘transduction’ – of converting wind to dynamic form (Zephyr 2010), or electromagnetic potential into sound (Swarm 2005), audio to tactile vibration (Adrift-2009, Transformer 2005), kinaesthetic potential into sound and form (Spinner 2005).

Helyer’s work is extensively and generously documented on the Artist’s web site (http://www.sonicobjects.com/) and farexceeds this rather cursory account of his contribution to media art both nationally in Australia and and internationally – The rise of ubiquitous computing and cheap portable, and embeddable, systems of playback has seen sound art move to the forefront of media and interactive art – Helyer has become a central protagonist in this ongoing exploration.

Run Silent, Run Deep is the 2008 Singapore Iteration of the series and involved a mapping of the Marine environment of Singapore harbour onto an immersive and interactive sonic topology that the user can explore via a projected visual interface.

The Audio Nomad project involves the representation of geo-tagged, recorded, media including images, video, sound, juxtaposed with the sonification of geo-spatial information. This reconstitution of this collected data in a sonic topology allows a user to navigate a soundscape in which recorded histories, unseen ecological dynamics, and visceral field recordings are evocatively juxtaposed to reveal otherwise forgotten, marginalised, or assumed networks of relation.

Eco Located began with a  maiden collaborative residency aboard the MARIN (Media Art Research Interdiciplinary Network) catamaran.

The project took water quality and meteorological readings, geotagged information, made field recordings, and recorded interviews with scientists and the community in and around Belfast Port and during their voyage across the North Sea- concentrating on the ‘Littoral cultures’ – the cultures that develop at the transition or boundaries of (in this case) land and sea.

The information gathered becomes the basis for an immersive surround sound installation that uses the Audio Nomad system to allow a user to enter and navigate an abstract soundscape – a kind of sonic topology constituted of and juxtaposing (sonifying) the information and media recorded during the vessel’s progress across the North Sea.

The Eco-Located project continues a common theme in Helyer’s work that explores the potential for audio to make audible that which be forgotten or unseen – this extends beyond the post modern desire to reveal an underlying or marginalised structure and  to explore the way we might use audio in both new and old technology to realise new networks of relation and remembering between individuals, the communities of which they are part,their ecology, and their histories.

Hellyer’s Wireless House project aims to reclaim, or rather ‘resound’ the structure. In the process the Wireless House project reclaims the potential for sound to produce a communal space within the park as public space. There is an intriguing differential evoked here  between the communal and the public.

The installation reacts to people who approach the structure calling on a substantial archive of audio, in part contributed by the National Sound and Music Archives and supplemented by an open call for local citizens to record their own recollections of Glebe’s past. This audio recollections are played back at a level that invites engagement without disturbing the park.

In an interesting twist the Wireless House becomes more than simply a memorial to a media passed. Equipped with an Unwired wireless internet node the site also becomes Sydney’s first (official) free outdoor hotspot. The wireless of today and the forms of sociality, communality, interaction into which it folds begs comparison to yesterdays community gathered around the radio transmitter.

The Wireless House project is supported by the City of Sydney Council and Unwired.

He developed and administers runme.org, an online repository for software art, which has given rise to works like dot_matrix_synth, where a dot matrix printer is reprogrammed to play music while it prints its own notations in patterns as it is performed. He forms part of slub, a trio of coders who develop their own software for the creation and performance of process-based improvisations and live generative music. In the same vein, he is also a member of TOPLAP, a group of highly improvisatory programmers who write software while it is being executed to generate music and live visuals during a performance.

She has performed audio/visual work with artists like Chris Caines, Shannon O’Neill and Ben Byrne. She has curated collaborative performance events like Semaphore and is also Co-Director of the Firstdraft Gallery.

NRPA was founded in 1981 with the purpose of supporting and developing radio art, a cultural movement encompassing experimental sound-based practices conceived to operate within the specific parameters associated with broadcast radio. The organization was considered to lie at the international forefront of radio art distribution between 1987 and 1998, during which over 300 works for public radio were commissioned and disseminated via the weekly program series New American Radio.

Taking heed of significant cultural shifts resulting from the expansion and proliferation of wireless and digital modes of communication, the NRPA extended its mandate in 1996 to support the then burgeoning practice of net art by launching Turbulence. The project and its associated website currently remains dedicated to commissioning and exhibiting the work of artists who either use existing applications and technologies or develop new ones to create innovative, hybrid or networked art forms that use the Internet as a primary medium. The organisation’s key channels for facilitating the creation and reception of new works are its Artists’ Studios, Guest Curator, Spotlight and Events programs. Importantly, the Turbulence website houses an online archive of over 160 projects commissioned by the body throughout its 13 year life.

Other NRPA supported projects affiliated with Turbulence include the Networked_Performance research blog (2004 -), a valuable resource that chronicles the wide range of issues and perspectives linked with various network-enabled practices, and the Networked_Music_Review blog (2007 -), which accommodates the present legacy of New American Radio by gathering data on projects, performances, composers, musicians and software tools related with emerging networked musical explorations made possible by computers, the Internet and mobile technologies.