CrossFade

On March 5, 2001, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA; USA), the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes, ZKM⎥Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA, will jointly launch »CrossFade«. Sound Travels on the Web, an online initiative that focuses on the Internet as a performance and distribution space for sound art. As it unfolds throughout the year, »CrossFade« will act as a base for access to sophisticated, sound-related artist projects and thought-provoking media essays and critical writings - in English and German - by prominent experts in the field. It will be available on the Web site of each of the co-organizing institutions.

Two projects will go online March 5: »Ping« by Chris Chafe and Greg Niemeyer, a Web interface to the artists' installation in the exhibition »010101: Art in Technological Times« [which opens on March 3 in the SFMOMA galleries], and an essay by German musician and cultural critic Golo Foellmer, which will include a series of links and streaming media interviews with musicians who are breaking new ground in sound experiments.
Launching on March 10, a 100-day project with artist and musician Yoko Ono, »SonicFlux«: Yoko Ono, will allow online visitors the chance to interact with an Ono score. In April these works will be joined by a second essay, »Music and the Net: Musaic«, by Dutch sound artist and theorist Josephine Bosma, an expansion of a lecture on the state of the field that includes links to many current sound projects. Projects planned for May include works by composer Anthony Moore and San Francisco–based artist Chris Salter with the art-and-research collective Sponge.

Curatorial flexibility is a hallmark of the »CrossFade« initiative; certain projects are being put together by a single institution while others are organized collaboratively by curators Steve Dietz (director of New Media Initiatives, Walker Art Center), Kathleen Forde (curatorial associate, SFMOMA), Johannes Goebel (director of the ZKM⎥Institute for Music and Acoustics), Dieta Sixt (director of the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes, San Francisco) and Benjamin Weil (curator of media arts, SFMOMA).