Amanda Gutierrez

Flâneuse>La Caminanta (2019)

Flâneuse>La caminanta is a 360 video documentary of soundwalks with female identified participants in the public space. The title emphasizes a missing word in the French and Spanish language of women as wanderers. This lost world also represents the lack of inclusiveness in which the female-identifying bodies can safely perceive their autonomy as walkers.

The artist will guide the VR experiences from 7:00-8:00 during the exhibition and performance times.

Justin Bennetts

Filters from Multiplicity (2017)

"Multiplicity is a research project investigating the sonic environment of cites. As part of the project, Bennett has found and made acoustic filters, which he uses to listen to, or record the city. He sees the soundscape of the city as an ecology where humans, machines and animals all occupy and use part of the sonic spectrum. These filters which cut out some sounds, and emphasise others, are intended to focus on a particular part of the spectrum. They interfere with our normal way of listening so that we can perhaps hear things that we wouldn't normally notice. The audio is a collection of recordings made through different filters in Brussels."

Leena Lee (Lena Ortega Atristain)

Environments in the Air 002 (2019)

Reinterpretation of an urban soundscape that involves the morning chorus of birds of a specific place in Mexico City. This piece seeks to question contemporary anthropocentrism and its consideration of the world as an exclusively human space from the perspective of the adaptation and construction of the significant sonorous environments of birds.

Iris Garrelfs

Listening Wall (2017)

The Listening Wall is a wall of curated scores for listening and sound related instruction scores. Take one of the scores provided here. Listen with it to this environment. Or make some sound yourself in tune with your chosen score, say, kicking a wall or a stone. When’ you’re done, feel free to add your own listening suggestions on the back and tack it onto the wall. Or take one home with you and do it later.

Angélica Piedrahita

Stereo Nostalgia and Telematic Rides Along the Caribbean (2017)

Through 3 video essays the author explores the sense of temporal depth achieved through the interaction between 3D stereoscopic photographs and the places in Barranquilla Colombia where they were shot a century ago. While visiting the place and showing locals the archival material, observers tried to locate the images in coherent narrations. In the process, they unfold different historical layers of the city as well as contemporary issues about tourism and urban planning. The technique seems to bring up strong experiences of the city, in constant dialogue with the landscape.

Anna Walker

Six Fragments (2015-2017)

"Six Fragments is a series of six interconnected sound and video interactions about my experience of the events that took place in New York on September 11, 2001. The artwork formed part of PhD research and examined the consistency of my belief, throughout that time, and the years that followed, that the day’s events had unfolded silently. In the process of researching the place where trauma and memory meet, noise began to bleed into the threshold of the visual, and through this permeation the forgotten or unheard sounds of the falling Twin Towers began to emerge. The work begins with ‘These Are My Mountains’ a layered sound work that bridges personal memories of a song my mother used to sing to us as children, with the voices of air traffic controllers on duty on the day of 9/11. ‘Falling’ follows, and is my interpretation of the violent explosion of the Twin Towers Falling. ‘Walk II’ is a sound piece in which the ghosts of 9/11 start to take form. The echoing voice, repetition of language and word games explore the concept of flashbacks and anchor the fragile position of those early stages in traversing the traumatic past. ‘Ghost Walk’ is made up of sound and moving imagery is about the representation of traumatic traces. ‘Briefcase’ is the story of an event within an event. And finally, ‘Ghost II,’ travels back the beginning to the building of the Twin Towers. The aim, in making the work was to further question the inaccessibility of the traumatic memory using sound and moving imagery to navigate and interrupt the dissociative space. It was an investigation of the potential for a ‘full’ remembering, and the establishment of an 'atmosphere' to resonate and transfer the affect to viewers."

Ian Costabile

Sound Graffiti (2019)

Sound Graffiti is a series of installations of interactive sonic networks in urban areas. Walls are sprayed with sound and sensors, where multiple loudspeakers interact to express statements and harmonise with city and machinery sounds.

Willard Van De Bogart & Lemon DeGeorge

Language of Life (2019)
21 Aug (Wednesday) @ 22:45 pm | Musikken Hus (Upper Foyer Stage)

The “Language of Life” composition is an original electronic music score which incorporates the sonification of the molecular wave dynamics of proteins. The Eigenprot protein synthesizer, developed at MIT by Zhao Qin and Markus Buehler, will be mixed with other electronic sounds produced from various synthesizers and modular effects generators. The goal is to provide the listener with a musical expression that represents the creation of life represented by all the information that is communicated with the unique wave dynamics of protein creation so as to give the audience an experience of the creative vibrations which exist in the universe. Our technology and understanding has reached a level whereby we can now create with the basic building blocks of nature which affects our consciousness and is part of our consciousness within the universe.

Ether Ship

Ether Ship is a multimedia space performance group created by Willard Van De Bogart in the late 1960s in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with partner and cofounder Michael Lemon DeGeorge. They took an experimental approach to live entertainment—a live performing lab of image and sound, utilizing then-exotic technologies of expressive physical constructs, laser shows, video art, and light-form art; while playing live electronic synthesizers with radically altered instruments from mouth harp to Hammond organ, electronic cello, and classical screwdriver guitar.

Luz María Sánchez

Vis.[un]necessary force_4 | V.[u]nf_4 (2018-2019)

V. [u]nf_4 addresses one of the most painful problems resulting from violence in contemporary Mexico: forced disappearance. Given the inefficiency of the authorities to provide certainty about missing people whereabouts and conduct legal processes, civil society has organized independently to undertake the search for family and friends. V. [u]nf_4 is part of a long process of collaboration between the artist and the group Las Rastreadoras de El Fuerte, from Los Mochis, Sinaloa, in northern Mexico. This collective frequently makes expeditions to the areas surrounding the city of Los Mochis to look for signs of human remains or clandestine graves. From 2006 to 2019 numbers are around 250,000 casualties—violent death—and 50,000 civilians disappeared, some of the victims of forced disappearance, and a limitless number of displacements. “Officially, the Mexican government acknowledges the disappearances of more than 30,000 people—men, women, and children trapped in liminal abyss neither dead nor alive, silent victims of the drug war. But the truth is no one knows how many people are missing in Mexico” (The New York Times: Nov. 20, 2017). V. [u]nf_4 had its origin in another collaborative work in process, Vis. [un]necessary force_3, whose objective is to offer the collective a digital tool from which to build a cybercartography that allows The Trackers of El Fuerte to systematize different types of data thrown in the searches. The platform has practical purposes, such as the audiovisual documentation of their expeditions; however, it also seeks to be a memory space. V. [u]nf_3 is a project that starts with Las Rastreadoras as a pilot group, and that will eventually be extended to other groups that carry out the same type of search in Mexico. On the other hand, V. [u]nf_4 displays, through a multi-layered staging, a series of records taken by the artist in the expeditions carried out by the El Fuerte Trackers in the desert (February 2019). The strata allude to different moments of this experience. In them appears the relationship that women engage with each other in the common search for justice and truth. The conversations contrast with other registers that document the metallic sound of the tools: shovels and picks used to dig at the points where human remains are thought to exist. At a third level, the two questions that guide the work of the collective appear: where? And why? The work seeks for the viewer to approach this reality through active listening, through the deconstructive strategy used by the artist. From a non-narrative perspective, through V. [u]nf_4 Sánchez persists in creating a space of silence for listening through the fragmentation and superposition of the sounds and documentary records. Of these aural vestiges, the impulse of the collective stands out at the same time as the cruelty of the search in symbolic and material terms. Fraternity in the face of tragedy takes place as the last refuge from the destruction provoked by terror and narco-machine, the machinery of death.

Emmanuel Madan

Freedom Highway (2001-2004)
20 Aug (Tuesday) @ 21:00pm | Musikken Hus (Upper Foyer Stage)

FREEDOM HIGHWAY is a transmission art work initially created from 2001-2004, which the artist is currently revisiting in the contemporary political and social climate. In the lead-up to the invation of Iraq (2002-2003), I made numerous road trips across the United States during which I recorded radio programming in the format known as talk radio. Talk radio in the US is heavily skewed towards the right wing; dominated by ultra- conservatives politically and evangelical Christians religiously. Since the 1990’s, the culture of talk radio has been at the vanguard of legitimizing and mainstreaming the ideological beliefs and policy priorities that now hold sway in the current US administration. In the present political moment, this normalization of vehement nativism and xenophobia seems increasingly overwhelming. This is why for the past two years I have been revisiting the work, which I first performed extensively in the US, Canada and Europe from 2004-2008. In North America, the roots of xenophobia and nativism run very deep. The widespread glorification of these destructive tendencies which we are witnessing today are not without precedent. Understanding the current episode in American public discourse and media requires a renewed examination of the politics of the spoken word. FREEDOM HIGHWAY is an audio composition constructed around a multi-voiced spoken narrative, composited from hundreds of speakers recorded in about twenty American states: right-wing call-in hosts, radio preachers, shock jocks and sports commentators as well as their guests and callers. Radio interference and static are also used extensively throughout the piece to create additional spaces besides the ones (radio studio and telephone) inherent in the programming itself. The resulting audio footage is then assembled into an audio performance and a gallery installation, a deeply troubling “audio self-portrait” of America as rendered by the nation’s political and religious radio broadcasters, and as overheard or intercepted by a listener who is not the intended audience of these broadcasts. FREEDOM HIGHWAY has been performed, broadcast, and exhibited in gallery installation form regularly since 2004. It has been heard in the US, Canada, and Europe.

SENSORIMETRICA (Rocío Calvo y Fernando Vega)

EVOCARE (2017)

Many times writing is remembering what has never existed. How will I get to know what I do not even know? So: as if I remembered. With an effort of 'memory', as if I had never been born. I've never been born, I've never lived: but I remember, and that memory is raw. ( Clarise Lispector) Through a documentary dramaturgy, Evocare draws with sounds a mosaic of a private life that amalgamates memory and fiction.

JO Kazuhiro and Paul DeMarinis

The Edison Effect Revisited

“Groovular Synthesis – the Edison Effect reVisited” - Paul DeMarinis (2019), was developed as part of the collective project “Life in the Groove” conducted by Paul DeMarinis and Kazuhiro Jo during the years 2018-19. The work is a combine of two contraptions that center on playing a single text as sounds. A spoken voice track is accompanied by another rendition in Morse-code. The Morse code groove was engraved on a brown wax Edison cylinder by a 15-watt blue laser controlled by an Arduino+MaxMSP patch. It is played back, with reference to my earlier work The Edison Effect (1989-1993), by scanning the groove with a small red leaser dot and using analog photo-pickups to decode the reflections into sounds. The plaintext itself resides on a black wax cylinder that is scanned by a small video camera and synchronized with a manipulated vocal recording of the same text. The black wax cylinder stands alone as an editioned work that may optionally be combined into the current configuration. As with all the parts of the collaboration “Life in the Groove,” “Groovular Synthesis” was conceived to make maximal use of contemporary DIY and digital-craft platforms and manufacturing techniques, including Arduino and Raspberry Pi, 3D Printing, Laser cutting, Form2 resin printing as well as traditional techniques of mold making, wax casting, hand painting and soldering.
The central text, “Odes and Ditties on T.A.Edison” is a poetic fantasia in open-verse that ponders the history and nature of sound recording, and recording media in general, by imagining a series of scenes and interactions between T(homas) A(lva) Edison and a constellation of historical and fictional characters including his daughter Marion (aka Dot) Edison, Albert Einstein, Ettore Bellini, Daniel Paul Schreber, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Rodolfo Tonetti and Santa Claus, among others. In keeping with the band-limited nature of sound recording in general, and with specific reference to sounds engraved in wax, the entire poetic text is constructed, in Lettriste “OuLiPo” fashion: each word is formed only from the letters TAEDISON. These eight letters must suffice to deliberate historical questions, convey disagreement and surprise, purvey jokes, allusions and the occasional pun, as well as to sustain the flow of breath and to foster prosodic expression and support vowel harmony. Something like a high energy protein bar made almost entirely from mashed peanuts, it is tastiest when one has driven oneself through an arduous climb to the top of a mountain peak and pauses to appease one’s hunger while surveying vast and ever-expanding vistas.

Au Clair de la Lune on Gramophone For Édouard-Léon Scott and László Moholy-Nagy

“I have suggested to change the gramophone from a reproductive instrument to a productive one, so that on a record without prior acoustic information, the acoustic information, the acoustic phenomenon itself originates by engraving the necessary Ritchriftreihen (etched grooves).” [Moholy-Nagy, 1923] In 1923, Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy made the above proposal to produce a record without inputting acoustic information. At the time, it was simply a provocative idea. Nine decades later, the idea of “a record without prior acoustic information” can be realized on several materials, including paper, wood, and acrylic, owing to mature vinyl audio recording technology and current personal fabrication tools. “Au Clair de la Lune on Gramophone - For Édouard- Léon Scott and László Moholy- Nagy -(1860/1923/2015)” is one such realization. In this work, a French folk song, the oldest recorded music by Léon Scott, “Au Clair de la Lune,” was reproduced with the form of a record for a gramophone. Instead of using a recording of the music, a waveform was computationally drawn with a vector graphics application, namely, Adobe Illustrator, by calculating the frequency of every note of the music. After a thorough examination of the materials aimed at overcoming the weight of the soundbox of a gramophone, a lacquered anodized aluminum plate horizontally engraved by a laser cutter was used. The outcome of sine wave like sounds could be played on a traditional gramophone in 78 rpm without electricity.

Mary Had a Little Lamb (2019)

The basic principle of printing is to put inks on paper or other materials. Through history, people invented printing technologies in diverse ways. To realize the work "Mary had a Little Lamb," we combined the printing technology with a physical phenomenon, electromagnetic induction. According to Fleming's right-hand rule, when a magnetic field moves with a conductor such as a coil, an electric current is induced in the wire of coil due to Faraday's law of induction. Following this principle, we actuate one of the strongest type of permanent magnet, neodymium, with calculated gaps of postscript print with a laser printer. We converted a waveform of PCM audio data into a 1-bit format with the help of BTc Sound Encoder, to produce a series of black and white stripes in a circular shape with Adobe Illustrator. Then we print the result with a Postscript laser printer. As the sound source, we selected a voice as a particular case of sound. We encoded the renowned phrase of the Edison, "Mary had a Little Lamb," with WaveNet, a deep neural network for generating raw audio waveforms and transform the waveform into graphical representation printed on a paper. Even with this resounding sound of various contacts, we cannot avoid discerning the voice of a non-existent person.

seah (Chelsea Heikes)

About

seah (Chelsea Heikes) investigates relational techniques for posthuman articulations of the landscape within the structures of video, sound, and performance. Current “techno-natural-body” experiments involve wearing multiple cameras and contact mic’s on the body while physically interacting with the immediate environment. The movement language has evolved from decades long research in Butoh, Body Weather Laboratory, Noguchi Taiso, and Somatic Movement, as well as extended periods of time spent in remote wilderness areas. seah spends a great deal of time tracing waterways. The ongoing body of work titled “Fluvial Traces” follows rivers using feet, bike, or paddleboat and has included the Mae Nam Ping in Chiang Mai, Thailand as well as the Detroit River, and a river in Saas-Fee, Switzerland whose name is currently unknown. The larger arc of “Water Tracings” includes sites such as various waterways in San Francisco/Oakland, Venice, Italy, and the Finnish Archipelago. From September 2019-2020, seah will be working on the Danube River. The project is currently funded by the Bridge Guard Residency in Slovakia. Use of technology references the conundrum of being housed in a body that is already made to sense the world, while also playing host to myriad technologies created to “enhance” our ability to interface with it. seah’s particular scope and vision embraces a posthuman experience that simultaneously acknowledges both this growing desire for technological interface/stimulation AND the innate intelligence of materiality (raw matter), which includes human and nonhuman bodies. As of August 2019, seah will have received her MA from the European Graduate School in Philsophy, Art, and Critical Thought. Her MA thesis, “AnthropoThing”, is supervised by Elie During.

Andreas Kratky

About

Andreas Kratky is a media artist and Associate Professor in the Interactive Media and Games Division and the Media Arts and Practice Division of the School for Cinematic Arts of the University of Southern California. Kratky’s work focuses on new forms of cinema and the poetics of the database. It spans the arts, human computer interaction and digital humanities and comprises several award winning media art projects like “That’s Kyogen”, the interactive installation and DVD “Bleeding Through – Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986”, the algorithmic cinema system “Soft Cinema”, and the interactive costume projection in the opera “The Jew of Malta”. Kratky’s work has been shown internationally in Europe, USA, Japan, and Korea in institutions like the ICA in London, ICC in Tokyo, HDKW in Berlin, Centre George Pompidou in Paris, and REDCAT in Los Angeles.

Renée Thérèse Coulombe

Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities
22 Aug (Thursday) @ 20:00pm | Musikkens Hus (Intimiscenen)