prototype for an infinite array of semi-autonomous percussive devices is a group of small robotic sculptures, each connected to its immediate neighbors via wires, that together form a net of robotic life that spreads across the Garden at the Mattress Factory and over nearby structures. These twenty-five mechanical crickets fill the garden with sound as they listen to their neighbors and act accordingly during Pittsburgh's Robot250 festival. Using Dr. John Conway’s rules for The Game of Life, each robot activates when a preset number of his neighbors is active and deactivates if too few or too many of his neighbors are active.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

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The Basic Plan - On Sunday September 20 at 2pm, MTAA, Mike Koller and anyone else who wants to join us will set out a brightly colored blanket surround by a circle of chairs at McCarren Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They will have amplified iPhones on which they have downloaded touchscreen drum and bongo applications. They will have open amp jacks that you can plug into. For the next hour we will attempt to "jam."

As explained by Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead "The main objective (of a drum circle) is to share rhythm and get in tune with each other and themselves. To form a group consciousness. To entrain and resonate. By entrainment, I mean that a new voice, a collective voice, emerges from the group as they drum together."

As explained by M.River of MTAA "The main objective of the iPhone Drum Circle is to get a total stranger to do a little dance on our blanket. That and hopefully enjoying the last summer Sunday in the park this year for an hour."

-- FROM THE PROJECT SITE

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Michael Jackson’s iconic music video for “Thriller” stripped entirely of its dancers and music, instead the artist presents an emptied set, accompanied by an ambient soundtrack.

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But the whole discourse of noise-as-threat is bankrupt, positively inimical to the remnants of power that still cling to noise. Forget subversion. The point is self-subversion, overthrowing the power structure in your own head. The enemy is the mind's tendency to systematize, sew up experience, place a distance between itself and immediacy... The goal is OBLIVION. - Simon Reynolds, "Noise"

Replace the word OBLIVION with DE-EVOLUTION and you have encapsulated the essence of the strangest art-music project that ever emerged from Akron, Ohio. While a quintet of jerky ectomorphs in hazmat suits (seemingly) singing about sadomasochism breaching the Billboard Top 20 in 1980 seemed unlikely, the legacy of DEVO is fraught with such contradiction. Formed in 1973, DEVO began as a polemical performance project, became a major buzz band and then crumbled under the weight of the attention they had cultivated. Outside of influencing a generation of musicians and artists, a surface reading would suggest the band only registered a few blips on the broader pop culture radar—"Whip It", their pioneering music video work and a legendary Saturday Night Live performance—but tracing the dramatic arc of DEVO reveals a fascinating back story. While the group might be most easily read in relation to their 1970s Ohio peers Pere Ubu, The Dead Boys or Chi-Pig, more enduring points of reference may be found in the deadpan, dour and decidedly humorless synthpop of Telex, Gary Numan and Kraftwerk. Comparisons notwithstanding, DEVO defied categorization and their creative exploration of emerging technology, hermetic logic and contentious relationship with the mass market make them quite relevant to new media artists—they're just the band you want!

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Nowadays, those who want to display themselves do it on YouTube in the YouTube video format. What does this format offer to amateur dancers, strippers or porn actors? Several minutes of do-it-yourself footage, untouched by an editor or a camera operator. This last thing is even more important to us voyeurs than the feeling of authenticity that comes from the lack of editing: it gives us several seconds to look around in someone else’s room, a moment or two when the camera is already switched on, but the actor (who also doubles as a camera operator) hasn’t entered the frame yet. These are the sweetest moments.

In the summer of 2007, a German rapper and a debutant net artist Dennis Knopf opened a channel on YouTube that he named Bootyclipse. Every video broadcasted on that channel consists of those candid moments, prolonged to 40-60 seconds. Dennis has collected fragments from more than twenty videos where a girl who is going to shake her booty in front of a camera has not appeared in the frame yet, and looped these moments, leaving the music to play in real time.

-- EXCERPT FROM "An Infinite Séance 2" BY OLIA LIALINA

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Two online exhibitions from ongoing curatorial initiatives Why + Wherefore and Club Internet opened within the last week. See below for a quick summary of each, plus a few highlights.

"Sound" Curated by Bozidar Brazda (part of the 7 x 7 series) for Why + Wherefore

For the first installment of 7 x 7, Why + Wherefore (Summer Guthery, Lumi Tan, and Nicholas Weist) invited 7 organizations to produce an exhibition composed of 7 items around a theme. Rhizome was one contributor, and staff writer Brian Droitcour put together an exhibition of 7 vertical works that exceeded the browser frame. (Other guests included Sundays, iheartphotograph, Triple Canopy, The Highlights, VVORK, and Humble Arts Foundation.) Continuing with the 7 guests, 7 items format is the second round of 7 x 7, where individual curators were asked to contribute an exhibition. So far, João Ribas, Kate McNamara, Josh Kline and Mark Beasley have chimed in with exhibitions ranging from items made in Photoshop to men modeling the durability of their outerwear in advertisements from 1969. The second (the first was VVORK's) sound-specific theme in the 7 x 7 series went live this week, curated by artist Bozidar Brazda. Simply titled "Sound," the show's logo (above) resembles a CAPTCHA, and the works operate in a similar fashion, being both comprehensible and somewhat obscured. Ryan Foerster's Untitled (2009) assembles roughly 15 separate clips of (what I presume) is the Ramones counting off, "1,2,3,4" before launching into a song. The song is omitted, thus the listener is simply left with the lead up. Rich Alrdich's (The Lights Went Out In) Massachusetts (2009) is an acapella version of the Bee Gees' 1967 song and on first listen, it sounds like a late night, drunken recording of a group of ...

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The following is an excerpt of an ongoing correspondence between Seth Price and Boško Blagojević.

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Excepter - Shots Ring (Carter Tutti Remix) from Georgia on Vimeo.

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A year ago the Museum of Modern Art’s media galleries hosted “Looking at Music,” an exhibition of process-based work from the 1960s and 1970s that included music videos by pop icons like David Bowie and The Beatles (as well as cult favorites Captain Beefheart and Devo) amid works by Nam June Paik, Joan Jonas, and other avant-garde heroes. Caitlin Jones expanded on the inclusions and their mutual connections in a review on Rhizome; I also wrote about how it traced two paths in process art, which were exemplified by the music of John Cage and Steve Reich. Whatever a viewer brought to the show, it’s safe to say that everyone felt a thrill from the incongruity of watching Bowie’s Space Oddity in MoMA’s white boxes. The approach helped tear Cage, Paik, and their cohorts out of the textbook, and demonstrated that while ideas germinated in strongholds of the creative intellect like Darmstadt or E.A.T.’s “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering,” art did not exist in a vacuum. With “Looking at Music,” curator Barbara London set an agenda continued in an essay published in the March 2009 issue of Artforum, making a case for the study of music video in terms of process art in the late twentieth century.

Now “Looking at Music: Side 2,” on view through November 30, offers the flip side as it takes the exploration of the topic into the late 1970s and early ‘80s. If art-world favorites set the tone in last year’s exhibition, “Side 2” is dominated by album covers and concert posters. A sprawling mural of work by rock’n’roll photographer Bob Gruen overlooks a monitor showing a grainy video ...

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