Benga’s latest video was released early last month and made the blog rounds, but it’s worth considering as we continue our ongoing thread on visual music and how sound can go from invisible to tangible. A stunning video whets fans appetite for the upcoming Benga full-length Chapter 2, constructing a wave shape in physical form as a series of vinyl records. Using some 960 hand-cut vinyl records, the track’s waveform materializes in stop motion-filmed animation.

Physical as it may be, the inspiration, say the creative team, was SoundCloud. UK-based creative team Us, consisting of Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor, explain:

When we were asked to pitch on the promo they sent us the track as a ‘Soundcloud’ link, we usually get it sent as an MP3. For the first time we were not just listening to the track we were also watching it. There was something mesmerising about this in its simplicity. This ignited the idea to create a real life three dimensional waveform. We started to think about the fact that a vast amount of our music is consumed online and has lost a sense of physicality this lead us to the idea of using vinyl records. We also loved the way it related to Benga as an artist who’s background comes from using records as a DJ or producer.

The maths worked we would need 960 records to create 1 minute and 20 seconds worth of wave form. Each one had to be individually cut to a specific size, hand labeled, hand numbered and then finally polished. This prep took 7 full working days and then the animation process took around 30 hours.

No 3D printers here: the process of making the individual, differently-sized records sounds painstaking. Us tells Creative Review:

To animate the wave form, we built it and then carefully removed each individual record. This had to be done very gently as any shift in the position of the sculpture would result in the failure of the animation and as we had to literally destroy each piece of vinyl to get it off, there was only one chance to get it right. Once the sculpture was finally built, the animation process took about 30 hours.

As you can see in the behind-the-scenes photos, actually working those records onto the pipe involved removing the far end, making this still more challenging (though adding a great deal to the impact of the effect).

This is all quite similar to another radial, sample-by-sample waveform made of physical circles we saw earlier this year:
Voice Messages Become 3D Paper Waveform Sculptures: Paper Note

Making a waveform view in the digital realm is dead-simple. But something about going to physical media makes that decision more than just afterthought, as though these creators really are touching frozen sound.

Having Benga as your soundtrack doesn’t hurt, either. You can grab this single on iTunes.

Full credits:

Directors – Us
Producer – Liz Kessler
Line Producer – Connor Hollman
DoP – Matt Fox
Gaffer – Ben Fordesman
Editor – Vid Price
Grade – Mark Horrobin
Animation – Alice Dupre
Structural consultant – Jorge Betancor
Runners – Tayo Rapoport, Paul Mckelvie, Chaelyn Allcock
Production Company – A+
Commissioner – Dan Millar
Management – Phil Hutcheon / Andrew Foggin

Behind-the-scenes photos courtesy Us.

See the full project page for lots of additional images and details:

http://www.weareus.co.uk/projects/benga-i-will-never-change

Thanks, Andrew Cavette!

Tenori-On and iPad apps, hardware designs and visual creations: set against the beautifully-generative mind of Japanese/New York artist Yayoi Kusama, the flurries of dots and circles and patterns in musical interfaces take on a richer meaning. This video, from a workshop hosted at the Tate Modern alongside an exhibition of Kusama’s work, needs little introduction. Instead, the dizzying cuts of geometric abstraction, the array of visual ideas for musical interface begin to take on the same personality of her expansive creations. The galaxies produced out of the minds of musicians somehow overlap with this iconic artist. I hadn’t really made the connection before, even as a fan of her work, but with this workshop, the sympathetic vibrations – intentional or not – become clear. Description:

Sonic Kusama:
Workshop exploring connections between the work of Yayoi Kusama and creation and representation of new music & sound art through visual audio interfaces.
Presented by Simon Little and Kelvin Brown with Chase Lane.
Audio track by Capstone Music
Video production by Territory Studio

If you’re in London, Infinite Kusama is on view now at the Tate Modern.

“On lead synthesizer, a philodendron …” (And the crowd goes wild…)

Vegetation may not be the first association you have when thinking of electronic music. But two new albums, each released via Bandcamp, celebrate biological life of the green, leafy variety. One is a benefit compilation, with proceeds going to help trees and music inspired by that green goodness. The other uses plants as “performers,” generating its form from plant life in an installation and extended “live” release.

It seems a fitting time to think about trees and plants, as those of us in the Northern Hemisphere see the coming of summer. As I write this, outside my home office’s window, everything has become a calming canopy of maple leaves. And so, just as those trees have a chilling, soothing emotional impact, I confess that this is all really enjoyable music, gimmicks aside. The tree-themed compilation is not a bunch of aimless Earthy music; the plants are not, as you might assume, screechy noise. Instead, you get two full-length albums of terrific-quality ambient music.

Each also works to plant something living – literally. “Take to the Trees,” a compilation for Arbor Day, directs proceeds from sales to the Arbor Day Foundation for conservation and education. That means money from the release could protect and plant trees. The Data Garden Quartet is more literal: embracing the idea of “plantable music,” the ephemeral digital download code is printed on paper that can grow. For instance, on the recent “Cheap Dinosaurs” release, you get “hand-made seed paper with screen-printed album art and download code on reverse side.”

Download Cheap Dinosaurs, plant this art under a thin layer of soil in full sun to partial shade and add water. With proper care, blue lobelias will begin sprouting in the first two weeks and finally begin blooming about 4 weeks later.

Released on Sound for Good, a benefit label, “Take to the Trees” gives you four hours of music for a minimum of just US$1. The collection is eclectic, spanning fairly traditional ambient music to beats, breaks, and experiments. Some tracks sound influenced by the cadence of traditional Japanese music or Tibetan meditation. They evoke impressions of trees and forests, but often via electronic (even traditional analog) timbres, recalling the sensation of trees and experience as much as painting those scenes directly. There are epic, sprawling tracks and more compact, rhythmic compositions. Sometimes nature itself sneaks in, in jungles and mountain sojourns. More often, warm, fuzzy electronic pads glow like sunlight. Many, many artists participate, going far beyond the San Francisco scene, including our friend, technologist, blogger, and musician Mark Mosher. Jack Hertz, also a prolific blogger and performer, heads up the comp.

Artists:

John Koch-Northrup, Ian Boddy, Burning Artist, Chromasonic, Crystal Dreams, Todd Fletcher, Groupthink, HG Fortune and Inner Dreamer, inside/ outside, Oskar Menzel, Joe McMahon, Mesawzee Eagle, Mirada, Shane Morris, Mark Mosher, Mystified, redgreenblue, John Sherwood, Symatic Star and Tange.

http://sound4good.bandcamp.com/

If “Take to the Trees” is hours of human playing and human experience recalling the feeling of plant life, “Data Garden Quartet” turns to the plants to “generate” the score, in nearly two hours of extended listening. Blending minimalism and ambience, the product is a wash of sound, with waves of timbres crested by gentle buzzes, glitches, and hums, all in extended rhythms and cycles (sometimes recalling nothing so much as the occasional stroke of a Javanese gong).

The project looks to make natural phenomena audible, “information which we cannot perceive through our biological senses”:

The musical compositions you are about to listen to were generated by the electronic impulses produced by four tropical plants. This data, interpreted by humans with the help of computers, has been employed to organize sound into beauty perceivable by the human ear. While the means of producing this beauty can be described in technical terms, the natural creative force generating this experience is less apparent.

These 116 minutes were recorded during an installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in April, in a “quartet” of a philodendron, two schefflera plants, and a snake plant. (Images here are from that exhibition.) The team:

Sam Cusumano: electronics
Joe Patitucci: sound design
Alex Tyson: production, graphic design

More images, though I think my favorite of all is the wonder of the gawking young girl. It’s too easy for us to become jaded, and forget, sometimes, the magic of the things we make.

Quartet: Live at The Philadelphia Museum of Art [datagarden.org]
http://datagarden.org/about/

Data Garden also do an interview with Abigail Bruley for Creators Project:
Interacting With Plants To Create Polyphonic Music

Obsolescence: it seems inescapable, as generations of old gear are replaced with shiny, new ones. But one person’s discarded electronic trash can be an artist’s electronic treasure.

ReFunct Media is a collaborative to make something out of all that used junk. In parades of strange, twitching machines and orchestras of electronic noise, gear goes from landfill fodder to art stars. The collective effort has made its way from Ireland (Imoca, RuaRed) to France (Gaité Lyrique) to, most recently, Berlin and the LEAP gallery, where we catch up with it in the form of some raucous video documentation. The artists themselves are known experimental creators and musicians and hackers – known, at least, in these parts: Benjamin Gaulon (IE/FR), Niklas Roy (DE), Karl Klomp (NL), Tom Verbruggen (NL) and Gijs Gieskes (NL).

You can see the whole lineup at top, and in the video below – a procession of glitchy gear. The installation was joined in Berlin recently by a series of performances from these artists.

Here’s another view of the ReFunct Media installation.

These works can become performative. TokTek, aka Dutch visual and musical artist Tom Verbruggen, makes twitchy, spastic music, constructing collisions of sound and rhythm from rapid-fire gestures on repurposed joysticks. (I’ve also gotten to enjoy his work at STEIM. Somehow, in this video, it loses something – it’s a crowd-pleasure in person, something about sharing a room with all this nervous sonic energy.)

Tom’s art installation works take on a distinct, but related, character. The whimsical, engaging “Crackle Canvas” is described as part painting, part instrument. It seems something out of Willy Wonka’s studio, an interconnected sound toy that whistles and clicks and sucks up recorded sound, chattering and conversing with itself.

A crackle-canvas is a painting that produces sound. It contains a circuitboad, speaker, knobs, switches, wood and canvas. Each one makes sounds by itself but can be connected through cables (patchedd) with other crackle-canvasses. This way the paintings start to reach to each other.

The artists’ description:

“ReFunct Media” is a multimedia installation that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). These devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact” in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.

Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media” isn’t proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores
unchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.

ReFunct Catalog [PDF]

Well, it certainly keeps the toxic e-waste out of the landfill — good — though I suppose you can’t call it quite green. LEAP tells me that when they switched on this giant assemblage of gear, it did suck up a lot of electricity. But while the artists claim they aren’t making a direct statement about e-waste, the revelation that things can be used and don’t have to be tossed is a profound one. “Awareness” is an overused words and doesn’t always solve problems, but it could transform this one.

Here’s another view of the installation and gallery opening:

And in another instance of repurposing gear, performances by “The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits” engaged in their own form of up-cycled musicality, a bit like the adventures of various Handmade Music evenings around the world – and many of the other artists we’ve written up here on CDM.

LEAP presents a performance evening from The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits (Alberto de Campo, Hannes Hoelzl, and students, alumni and associates of the class Generative Art / Computational Art at UdK Berlin, and others) explore the possibility of spaces of complex systems for experimental performance. They freely combine repurposed elements like analog synthesizers, game controllers, sensors and software with self-built/designed/written hard and soft components.

More from the artists – many with extensive galleries and showcases of work in which you could easily lose yourself…

http://karlklomp.nl/
http://www.toktek.org/
http://gieskes.nl/
http://www.niklasroy.com/
http://www.recyclism.com/ (Benjamin Gaulon)

If you’re heading out into the wilderness to find a record store, why not actually head out into the wilderness – the one with trees – and find music there?

Today, a you’ve no doubt heard, is Record Store Day. The official site is a useful resource, today and around the year. Today brings a number of special physical releases, favoring vinyl but also including CDs. A mobile app download will help you locate record stores in your city, both in the US and other countries around the world.

All of this does raise some deeper issues. Record stores can be terrific places, supporting artists with in-store events and introducing listeners to their music. But, more generally, is it meaningful to find ways of making music physical, and then finding a place to go hear it?

That question was asked compellingly this year by Really. Really itself is more than a conventional record label; it’s an inter-media arts collective (design, coding, visual arts, and the like included). Its charter sets out the goal between releases “to focus on the live aspect of music, on the fact that it is made first to be interpreted, by the musician and the audience.”

In a project called “Out of the Woods,” Really took a music release and made it truly locative in the physical sense. Playing with the digital intervention of placing physical USB drops in locations, the artists sent would-be listeners into the woods of the Grunewald. (I’m reminded of my dear friend Dave Karpf, with whom I worked at the Sierra Club, whose favorite motto was “get the f*** outdoors.”)

You need GPS to find the spot, and then, espionage-style, you pick up music from a log. Instructions read, charmingly, like this:

You will find Verspätete Erinnerung close to a path crossing almost the whole forest.
The dead tree, laying on the ground, is burnt from the inside, but blossoms on the outside. Have a look at its heart, we tried to bring our own kind of life there as well!

GPS: 52.486442,13.243954

look carefully for a black cable
inside the tree

We’ve seen other locative works, of course – most recently, a virtual piece employed GPS in locations like Central Park. But here, much like that expedition to your record store, you travel to a location on a quest to get music that you can’t find via other means. You acquire, hunter-gatherer style.

It’s worth considering that the recording itself is an anomaly in the history of music. “Old-timers” talk about recordings as though these strange objects are music, and as such, the perceived assault on their physical distribution and attack on the value of music itself. Yet, travel back in time just a couple of centuries in the millennia-long saga of human music making, and the recorded music object would seem like some dark art, a captured moment in time freezing something that is normally live, in-person, and human.

This is not to say that these strange inventions we’ve created that store frozen time are a bad thing. But, then, maybe that explains the record store: it treats them as something sacred, and restores the sense of place. It requires that you experience music with other human beings.

And while I admire Record Store Day, there is a certain throwback quality to the entire event – Android and iPhone apps notwithstanding. Even the graphic design of the site, complete with retro records, and the contests, with historically-styled record players and commemorative Queen drums, seems tinged with nostalgia.

Nostalgia is one of the things that music can make us feel, but music can also send us out into the wilderness. And if the record industry grew out of absurd ideas – Edison and his imagined technology for recording business memos – maybe music can take on more absurd and wonderful ideas yet.

It’s enough to make you want to wander out in the woods, and off the beaten path. Record store today, wilderness tomorrow.

Really used a collaborative team to make their project (below). How will you figure out how to distribute your next album? Will you try to get it in the hands of lots of people – or make just one, and give it to someone you love?

— Lorenzo Cercelletta – organization, installation, design process & video editing
— Valentina Ciarapica – video shooting & editing
— Katrin Dathe – installation support
— Wiley Hoard – photographs
— Matthieu Pons – organization, installation, design process & coding
— Gino Ruggeri – backstage video shooting & editing
— Juliane Teitge – organization, drawings & installation

http://rreeaallllyy.com/map.php

Music in the woods, as seen on The Creators Project and Sugarhigh

Record Store Day, as seen many places, including our friends at Synthtopia

One perhaps unexpected impact of technology has been to change the way we think about ourselves and our experience. Recording equipment – from photography to phonograph – has given us a new sense that memory itself might be fixed, unchanging, an accurate record of an unmoving truth.

Except, of course, neither the recorded object nor the thing it is recording ever quite seems to work out that way. (Ask your local theoretical physicist, or for a more localized, humanized, sociological view, any loved one.)

UNRAVEL is an installation that uses just those sorts of technologies to construct a narrative, and push and tug at that narrative. And if you don’t like it, well, that’ll impact the video, too. (Just complain via Twitter, and you’ll make the narrator “increasingly insecure.” As a blogger, I can relate.)

Combining record playback, a robotic band contributing incidental music, and a set of interactive dials, the installation recounts a story with mechanically-reproduced soundtrack, as the audience adjusts what happens. It’s all clear in the extended video:

More information:

UNRAVEL opens to the public on 20 April – 7 May as part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art at Arch 24/ SWG3.

UNRAVEL is a collection of devices making up a gallery-based, reactive sound installation, through which the audience will attempt to unravel the truth about The Narrator’s life by playing records from his collection.

When we tell the story of a memory, how much of it is true and how much is shaped by who we are talking to? Once we’ve told the story many times, how do we even know what is true any more – what is constructed and what actually happened?

The installation is the work of Edinburgh based arts collective / experimental pop band FOUND, whose members include Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby and Tommy Perman and Glasgow-based author and musician, Aidan Moffat best known as one half of the band Arab Strap. FOUND and Aidan Moffat are signed to Glasgow record label Chemikal Underground.

At the heart of the installation is a vinyl record player and ten 7” records of familiar singles from pop music’s heyday. Visitors to the gallery are encouraged to select a record from the collection to be played. As soon as they drop the needle on to the record the installation springs to life. The vinyl controls a series of acoustic, self-playing musical instruments positioned throughout the gallery which soundtrack the story as the narrator recounts a memory he associates with that record. Each 7” record represents a different memory, but unlike conventional vinyl recordings they sound different each time they are played.

Just as a real narrator alters the way they tell a story depending on their mood, audience and context, the memories embodied in the installation will distort, evolve and warp depending on external influences: the time of day, the size of #UNRAVEL’s audience, the local weather, and what people are writing about the installation on twitter from moment to moment.

A year in the making, #UNRAVEL is the first collaboration between FOUND and Aidan Moffat and represents a major new body of work for both. The project required Aidan to write 10 short stories with multiple variations of each, to be soundtracked by a total of 160 new musical compositions by FOUND.

With Investment from Creative Scotland’s Vital Spark programme and New Media Scotland‘s Alt-w Fund with the support of the Centre for Design Informatics, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, SWG3 and the University of Edinburgh.

Funny side note: I recall some evenings out drinking with Scottish people that also questioned the boundaries of what is real and not real and the imperfection of memory, though more in a performative, real-time sense than in an interactive installation. (I was a willing and active participant, so I’ll not hold this experience against the fine countrymen and women of Scotland. Indeed, I hope to toast with these chaps next time I’m in Glasgow. I, of course, do not condone such behavior, and you will find that by contrast, this particular interactive installation has no ill health effects that I know of.)

For something completely different, here’s a beautiful set of instrument robotic solos incorporating acoustic instruments, plants, and bamboo:

A composition for plants, yangqin, bamboo robot and robotic chimes, Three Pieces is designed as a collaboration between robots, traditional instruments, and living things, housed in Victorian Palm House of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. A traditional Chinese dulcimer is played by a robot with many bamboo fingers while the surrounding foliage hides an ensemble of robotic chimes. Despite being separate individuals, the robots communicate and perform together. The robot performers are conducted by all the living things in the Palm House. The moisture content of the soil changes slowly as the plants absorb water, while on a much faster timescale, the temperature changes in the building as animals, including humans, move about. The installation detects this living presence in the Palm House and the music changes accordingly. The robots react to humans, but their mood alters with the plants. For more info visit… foundcollective.com

Previously:

Plant-Reactive Robots Play Bamboo, Chinese Instruments at Royal Botanic Garden, Scotland

Reconceived Acoustic Music on an Interactive Table: Etiquette in Edinburgh

Speaking of making the ephemeral tangible, as artist Andrew Spitz tells us, “it’s a fun process to map something that is so fleeting as a sound to a physical object.”

That’s what he does in a new collaboration with Andrew Nip of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design in Denmark. It’s a simple process – and that’s a good thing, as it means anyone with access to a laser cutter can get in on the fun. Using software written in the open source, design-friendly coding language Processing, your voice message becomes a waveform, and then that waveform becomes a series of discs in paper, which, strung together, produce a three-dimensional sculptural object.

The results are quite elegant; I suddenly want to string these around my flat. From the project description:

Paper Note creates a tangible waveform from laser cut disks of paper. The user records a message, a sound or loads up music, and the system analyses the sound to map each moment to a corresponding slice.

This project was made with Andrew Nip at CIID. We programmed it using Processing. Each Paper Note is made up of around 450 stacked disks of paper. The louder the volume at a specific moment, the bigger the disk. Our algorithm samples the right amount of information from the recording to scale the physical waveform to the size of around 14cm.

Paper Note ~ A Tangible Paper Waveform {+ generative}

By the way, Andrew Spitz has over a dozen terrific videos on this sort of physical computing and sound and vision projects on his Vimeo account:
https://vimeo.com/soundplusdesign

Music, ephemeral and fleeting, to many of us wants tangible embodiment, some physical sense of the tug we feel from its unseen vibrations. We’ve regularly featured the image of the circle as a sequence; even as music software prefers left-to-right piano rolls and scores and tracks, it’s a logical shape. Here, Finnish sound artist Martin Bircher looks to a last-century invention to build a mechanical expression of the sequencer.

From an antique music box, comes MIDI, as in the video above. And if that’s too discordant for you, have a look at the original video below. Even in comparison to our analog electronics, there’s something beautiful about seeing the mechanical inner workings of a musical expression.

Official description:

“Digital Enhancement” is an interactive sound installation consisting of an electrified Symphonion Brevet No. 28, a synthesizer, an amplifier and four headphones. The Symphonion musical box dates back to the beginning of the last century and its mechanical workings are combined with digital technology to convert it into a MIDI sequencer. The original music, embossed on steel plates, can be played on the synthesizer, which is programmed to mimic the sounds of the Symphonion. In order to operate the sequencer, a hand-cranked dynamo serves as a remote control.

And the original Symphonion in action:

Martin tells CDM some more about the music box in question and how he converted it to a new, digital life:

The modified musical box Symphonion Brevet No. 28 was produced in the beginning of the last century. The used hand-cranked Style 28 was the simplest and therefore cheapest available model from a broad product range. It plays steel discs with 14.5 cm (5¾”) diameter.

To convert the musical box to a MIDI sequencer, parts of the Symphonion’s base plate were machined to clear space for the stepper motor, replacing the hand crank. A custom etched and with flexible wires extended contact plate replaced the metal comb, whose 40 teeth were originally plucked to generate the sound.

The conversion of the voltage from the contact plate into MIDI messages is done by a microprocessor. A second circuit is controlling the motors speed. The added control panel holds DC input socket, an input for the remote control or footswitch and the MIDI output. Further there are controls for play/pause, tempo, and gate-time. An antique wooden cassette serves as the new housing of the sequencer.

More information:
Project website: mar.li/digital_enhancement.php
Facebook: facebook.com/Bircher.Martin

In the meanwhile, we have the pleasure of getting to gaze at high-resolution images of the setup, courtesy the artist. (Click for the big versions…)

Alex Nowitz for BodyControlled #2 from CDM on Vimeo.

Electronic media artist Mario de Vega (Mexico City/Berlin) says his work plays with the creation of “unstable systems.” As part of the official Vorspiel, or lead-up, to Berlin’s massive Transmediale festival, here we get to visit two artists working with the materiality of live performance, drawing from the festival theme of “in/compatible.” The sonic environments they create seem poised on the brink of sonic chaos, a dance at the edge of entropy.

CDM will again be editorial co-presenter of BodyControlled; you can see the show for free (donation suggested) in Berlin at LEAP, or tune into the live video stream from anywhere in the world, and we’ll be bringing you details of the artwork. We’re a ticket to Alexanderplatz that’s even cheaper than easyJet, in other words. The performances start at 20h CET Thursday, 26 January. (That’s 2p East Coast time / 11a Pacific, so scare your office mates and turn it up loud.) Full details below.

At top, composer/singer Alex Nowitz demonstrates his gestural performance techniques. I got to see his work for the first time at the Patterns + Pleasure Festival in the fall at Amsterdam’s STEIM research center. While at STEIM, Nowitz built on previous work with the Wii remote, and augmented his gestures with a new instrument, entitled the “Strophonion.” You can see that creation in the video above.

With each contortion of his body, Nowitz rips apart sounds, all while sputtering non-lingual utterances with his gymnastic voice. In the Amsterdam performance, one had the sense of following him into the Schwarzwald (Black Forest), an operatic odyssey echoing with forboding birdsong. But the system can also be dynamic and even, at moments, whimsical.

steim.org/projectblog/?p=3715
nowitz.de/

For his part, Mario de Vega’s “unstable systems” flirt even more with this notion of engineered incompatibility, with sounds that seem like they will explode in an earthquake-like tremor.

Mario de Vega for BodyControlled #2 from CDM on Vimeo.

mariodevega.info/

Films by João Pais, co-curator of the series; edited by CDM.

Also on this program, more works engage the idea of what the curatorial statement terms “hidden acoustics”:

Echo Ho (Canada/Cologne, DE)

Tuned to Site #26012012
This title is from a series of concerts, called “Tuned to Site #…”. As a whole, the series formulates the idea of “musification of urban landscapes”.
In the first performance of this series in 2012 Echo Ho will play a set of instruments: a self-fabricated hybrid semblance of the ancient Qin from China, which combines traditional acoustic and digital interfaces in one unique transparent plexiglas body. Like a sensor box, it will enable Echo Ho to make field recordings of inaudible hidden sounds within
the city environment, such as electro-magnetic fields, variation and wind movements. The performance thus marks the process of generating action by outlining situations in which sounds may occur.

http://www.echoho.net/

Ignaz Schick (DE)
Turntablist, sound artist, performer & composer Schick promises, through motors and objects, genuine accidents:

Site-specific performance with transducers, wireless controllers, feedback systems and back tape
Through accidents and their outcomes, actions, processes and objects that conceptually connect with acoustic information, the work of Mario de Vega researches the value of vulnerability, exploring the causes and effects that determine the construction of realities. In this site-specific performance with transducers, wireless controllers, feedback systems and back tape, de Vega is investigating aesthetic and social realms through a multiplicity of mediums.

http://www.zangimusic.de

Co-curator João Pais tells CDM that this installment, in keeping with Transmediale’s theme, will “give the performers a room where they can show their ways of working with the dissociation of matter (through sound, in this case) and expression.” Pais co-curates the event with Daniel Franke of LEAP.

This episode includes two self-made instruments that expand on existing practice, he says, in the case of Nowitz and Ho, and the hacked and modulated machines of Schick and Vega.

More information; where to see the show

26 January 2012, 20h (free/donation)

Show details

Anywhere in the world – all performances will be available from 20.00 CET via live stream:
http://bit.ly/uXRgyq

Facebook: on.fb.me/AmEtO9

LEAP
Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance
(Berlin Carré, 1. Stock)
Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 13
10178 Berlin

How to find LEAP

Revealing a deeper understanding of what sound means in our world, how it works as “currency” and “ghost,” Performance Artist Christine Sun Kim explores sonic media without the benefit of hearing. She finds how to make its presence more physical, to find greater dimensions of movement, and to make a personal connection beyond what most of us might find in the everyday sense. As she describes it to NOWNESS:

There are social norms surrounding sound that form our speech development and our way of handling sound with care. They’re so deeply ingrained that, in a sense, our identities cannot be complete without sound.

In a beautiful short film, you can watch her process in her studio, thanks to filmmaker Todd Selby:

Cult photographer and filmmaker Todd Selby’s latest short is a revealing portrait of performance artist Christine Sun Kim. Deaf from birth, Kim turned to using sound as a medium during an artist residency in Berlin in 2008, and has since developed a practice of lo-fi experimentation that aims to re-appropriate sound by translating it into movement and vision. “It’s a lot more interesting to explore a medium that I don’t have direct access to and yet has the most direct connection to society at large,” says the artist. “Social norms surrounding sound are so deeply ingrained that, in a sense, our identities cannot be complete without it.” Selby filmed an exclusive performance from Kim in a Brooklyn studio as the artist played with field recordings of the street sounds of her Chinatown neighborhood, feedback and helium balloons, and made “seismic calligraphy” drawings from ink- and powder-drenched quills, nails and cogs dancing across paper to the vibrations of subwoofers beneath. Working with sound designer Arrow Kleeman, Selby carefully choreographed the film’s ambient score to reveal the Orange County native’s unique relationship with sound. “Her work deals with reclaiming sound because it’s a foreign world to her and one she’s not comfortable in,” explains Selby. “I wanted the film to act as an artistic conduit for her to tell her story to the world.”

Interview, via NOWNESS Facebook Page

Via our friend Rucyl on Saturn Never Sleeps, by way of Rashid Zakat’s The Awesome Farm.

Todd Selby x Christine Sun Kim [Nowness.com]

I was once a speaker at DEAF, which stands for Dublin Electronic Arts Festival. Not thinking, I told the customs officer in Ireland that I was a musician attending the DEAF Festival. He had some cheeky comment. In this context, of course, what he took for granted can take on an entirely different meaning. If you have background in understanding accessibility and design, for people with different sense capabilities in vision and sound alike, I’d love to hear them. The world of sound technology most of us inhabit describes a very narrow range of expectations for vision and sight.