August Black
The Audio Composting app is an engine used for decomposing existing acoustic and sonic waste into new organic material to fertilize and improve the sonic imagination. Humans from different backgrounds, identities, and natural habitats speak into their portable microphones (aka mobile phones) to simultaneously feed the system with acoustic content. The incoming sonic material, fed remotely through the network from near and far, is mixed together into an ongoing frippertronic mulching process that is synchronized across all devices. The result is a sometimes rhythmic, sometimes cacaphonic, assemblage of hoots, howls, whistles, stomps, bomps, and thwamps.
https://compost.listen.center/
August Black is a hybrid practitioner of art, design and engineering. He makes experimental spatial and acoustic situations, often by building his own technological artifacts and instruments in hardware and software. His past work focused on live networked audio, mixing FM radio with user input through online software. His current interests span the fields of the philosophy of technology, software studies, techno-politics, peer-to-peer networking and AI/machine learning. In the past, he’s been a member of arts organizations such as the ORF Kunstradio and the Ars Electronica Futurelab, as well as a former member of the engineering team at Cycling ‘74, makers of Max/MSP. He has shown works at festivals and venues such as Ars Electronica Festival, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, Wave Farm, Transmediale, Pixelache, LA Freewaves, Piksel Festival, Polar Circuit and the Tasmanian Museum of Art, among others.He earned a BFA at Syracuse University and was an NSF IGERT Fellow at UC Santa Barbara, where he completed an MS and PhD. He’s taught media and art classes at UC Santa Barbara, University of San Francisco and CU Boulder, where he serves as Assistant Professor of Critical Media Practices.