Are Online Galleries A Better Home For Crowdsourced Digital Art?

Rajeev Basu is an English artist currently residing in Boulder, Colorado where he works at a work as a creative at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. PSFK covered his EEP EEP EEP EP project last year, where he and his community created audio tracks that convert noisy alarm sounds into a harmonious listening experience. In his artist statement, he asserts that:

These days, most alarms are just false alarms. They’re everywhere. They go off all the time. And they’re often left unattended. (We’ve all had that car alarm outside, that just won’t stop.) Alarms are a nuisance. This is an experiment to see if we can turn that on its head. Can we turn alarm sounds into music that people will actually like listening to?

Since we last covered Rajeev’s work, his show is planned to exhibition online Fach & Asendorf, an online exhibition gallery for net.art, media art, digital experiments. We strongly encourage you to give it a listen and check out the tracks for yourself here. In describing the style, Rajeev writes that:

The project’s musical style can be described as ‘Musique concrète’ (French for “concrete music”). It is a form of electroacoustic music that uses elements not traditionally thought of as “musical.” The theory behind this musical aesthetic was developed by the French composer Pierre Schaeffer in the late 1940′s. The project’s experimental direction is also influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose groundbreaking approach to electronic music inspired many artists to break out of traditional forms

It will be interesting to see on which platform Rajeev’s unique brand of social art will get more recognition and response — online or off?

Fach & Asendorf