El viernes tras una intensa sesión de conferencias, de las que de primeras cabe destacar Derrick de Kerckhove o Christopher Salter, la jornada de la tarde en Paradiso estuvo centrada en una programación audiovisual presentada con un claro giro a la analógico, primitivista, en el que primaba a la manipulación directa del material que produce las sombras y los sonidos, todo ello debidamente amplificado.

La intensidad de algunas actuaciones, no hacía más que restar protagonismo a otras, por lo que sin animo de cualificar, aquí dejo las actuaciones más reseñables. Comenzando con Optical Machines (SHIFT) proyecto formado por Maarten Halmans como músico y Rikkert Brok manipulando su máquina de luces y sombras. Brok crea máquinas para proyecciones en directo, como podréis ver en su página, que bajo su pobre apariencia, generan un espectáculo redondo.

Tras ello Takashi Ito con Spacy fue, en mi opinión, el ejemplo más ilustrativo para entender muchos de los discursos teóricos y artísticos presentados en el festival. La obra exponía una concepción del espacio a partir de las peculiaridades de la representación cinematográfica, introduciéndose una y otra vez en planos y más planos y generando un espacio retranqueado sobre si mismo. Un acercamiento engañoso entre marcos.

La siguiente actuación altamente reseñable fue la de Bruce McClure con su PIE PELLICANE JESU DOMINAE: And After Several Rapid Strokes of Their Wings. Una manipulación del sonido de las bobinas, de la película misma al pasar por el proyector haciendo de esta proyection performance una manera de escuchar mediante el ruido, el cine y su mecanismo.

Cuando llegó la película pintada de Daïchi Saïto en colaboración con Malcolm Goldstein, Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis, los efectos de los brutales 45 minutos de la proyección amplificada de McClure todavía nos tenían algo extenuados, lo que no impidió disfrutar de esta pieza de gran belleza. De hecho fue precisamente por el contraste entre la crudeza de PIE PELLICANE JESU DOMINAE y los violines disonantes que acompañaban a pinturas de árboles lo que dió aún más sentido a ambas piezas.

Para cuando ya no podíamos más, comenzó Light Trap de Greg Pope & Gert-Jan Prins. En principio, debo reconocer que por cansancio físico y sensorial, poco parecía esperarnos en esta instalación-performance orquestada desde cuatro osciladores y cuatro proyectores. Un operario en cada uno de los proyectores, colocados en cada una de las esquinas del Paradiso, iba rayando en vivo la película, circundando un espacio central al que se dirigía también el equipo de sonido. Cuando decidimos internarnos en este espacio, súbitamente el volumen creciente convirtió el cuadrilátero virtual en un marco de sensaciones casi táctiles, donde la luz y la vibración extremas permitían, una vez más, tener la sensación de inmersión total.

Published by JL Espejo on Mediateletipos.net

Arie Altena is part of the Sonic Acts team. This edition, his works was mainly focused on the programming the Acoustic Spaces program on Saturday and the editing of the The Poetics Of Space book. Besides his work for Sonic Acts, Arie also writes about new media, art, internet-culture, media-theory, literature and works as an editor/researcher for V2_ in Rotterdam. I had the privilege to interview him after the conference on the last day of the Sonic Acts festival.

First of all, what did you enjoy most about this years edition of Sonic Acts, The Poetics Of Space?

Without a doubt the audience.
First of all, the program of the conference, that ran from 10 to 6, three days in a row, was incredibly packed. Although the speakers did not often speak past their scheduled time, some way or another, it seemed that there was almost no time for a proper lunch break at any of the conference days. The program was very full and the lectures just continuously followed each other. Even so, the public seemed very enthusiast and never complained.
During the night program in Paradiso, the audience was an even bigger, pleasant surprise. I was nervous, because you invite people to a pop-temple, where it is normal to order beer and socialize, and the Paradiso was packed. The performances however ask the audience to sit down. To be understood, they require the audience to surrender and to open their eyes and ears. The big public in Paradiso did just that, the whole night from 8 to 12 (or even 1), 3 nights in a row.
I was especially nervous for the Acoustic Spaces program, for which I was responsible for most of the programming. For this evening we had programmed 4 hours of tape music: field recordings with almost no images at all. This kind of performance forces the listening to take place within you. To listen to an inside space – and I think many people understood that. In the end there was no need for any kind of disciplining whatsoever. The audience was silent even during the very silent parts that were programmed.
It proved that a lineup that some people would refer to as highbrow or academically difficult, could actually be programmed and enjoyed by a big public. It was very satisfying that the public that we trusted would be there, was there.

I also enjoyed that the connections the programming team tried to make – connection between older and younger generations of artists and audience – succeeded. People, artist and audience alike, realized that they have similar approaches, or that they create overlapping work even though they have very different backgrounds. This shows that there are similarities between the ways people think about space and how sound and space can function, be approached and generated.
The festival created a dialogue between different disciplines: music, philosophy, art, architecture, music, literature and media theory. It questioned the way artists play with space, how they can be more aware of it and how they listen to it (inside of ourselves). The festival evolved a form of layered listening, or listening as a shifting definition.

Before the theme Poetics Of Space, Sonic Acts celebrated themes like The Cinematic Experience and The Anthology of Computer Art. Can you say anything about how these themes evolved, and how in particular the theme Poetics Of Space came to existence?
Also, do you think that researching the relations between sound and space is a new, popular trend or fashion, or something that has always existed?

A team of six people organizes the festival. The preparations for every festival start usually immediately after the last festival has finished. We come together and talk about things we feel we have learned from the last festival, and about artists and themes that we think deserve attention in a next edition. From this kind of conversations, that can take place through emailing and meet-ups, different concepts develop between us and we start collecting a long list of artists.
For the theme Poetics Of Space, I remember that Martijn came up with the book by Bachelard. I had read it when I was young, but to me it was more poetics and less about space. For Martijn the book was all about space and how space affects your being and technology effects culture. This seemed to connect very well to the interests that were reflected within our team.
Of course if you want to criticize the festival, you could say that many performances featured this year would have fitted as well under last editions theme The Cinematic Experience, but this is because the festival is really shaped by the teams interests, which only evolve slowly. We would never choose a theme for its popularity, but of course the things that happen around us also shape our interests. So in a way, Poetics of Space is chosen also because it has some kind of momentum; the artist within our team, Gideon Kiers, Lucas van der Velden and Nicky Assmann, seem to develop a growing interest for space in work. They have been working on immersive installations, instead of computer-screen based work. In computer arts in general, we can see a growing wish leave the screen, while more and more sound artists seem to develop interest in field recordings.
For a long time the scene of field recordings was a very inclusive scene, they have never been a big part of festivals, although they were part of the theory world. Lately magazines and festivals have picked up this branch. For example, the City Tunes festival in Berlin, which unfortunately nobody of our team visited, involved sound recordings and thinking about changes in sounds of the urban environment (including iPod culture and car radios). I found their documentation on the internet very interesting.

Sonic Acts shows the hybridity of space. The festival brings about 30 artists and speakers together, that, throughout the festival all present different or overlapping perspectives on space. In the last session Raviv Ganchrow stretched the lack of a nomenclature, a naming or characterization of the different spaces. As an example, he differentiated the sound in the room, the sound of the space, musical space, virtual space, the brains-pace, physical space, phased space, emotional space and neutral space.
The immaculate, neutral space however, does not exist. Space and the essence of a particular space is always related to who and where we are (except for when we put a device in it, that can measure its data – but than we would just have the data of that space and not its characteristics). I think it is good enough for now, that the visitors walk away from the festival and realize that space is something very complex.

While you say space is infinitely complex, I noticed that in the program book, the Sonic Acts actually tried to provide different handles, or divisions of space (there are panels called immersive space, utopian space, hybrid space, invisible space, etc.). Why is that?

These divisions are made up according to the people that we invited for the panels. They show the issues that we were hoping they would address during their talks.
The names are just handles; for a nomenclature I think there needs to be more research, but I wonder if we really need one.

Do you look back differently at this division of spaces now the festival is (almost) finished, i.e. did some spaces get more specific or crystallized than others?

No, to me it doesn’t work like that. We did a lot of research beforehand, we shaped the program, and I think the spaces got shaped accordingly. In hindsight I can however recall particular intersections between arts and theory, but it is to early, to soon after the round up to realize what spaces actually did come together, and which didn’t.

During the festival, I felt certain tensions develop between spaces. These tensions showed themselves not as breaking points, but as tipping points; only after we entered a new space, we realized that there was a transition, or an overlap between the two, but often we did not realize this at the moment of transition itself. Somebody in the last panel also referred to this as cracked planes of space. Is this maybe where poetics of space is located?

The poetics of space is culturally defined; as I said before, there is not something like a neutral space. I think that the cracked planes of space are very intriguing. This is what most artists are researching, intentionally or not. Right now, I recognize a lot of people thinking about this and I think there is a lot of space to do research in. This research is interesting right now, because our connections to space are changing, because of the technology we are using. Before, most people used to orient themselves in a 2d space or topography space. But today, they switch to Google earth and street view. We navigate through images. This is a very big shift, a change in mental make-up. But because of the lack of a terminology it is hard to bring this dynamic research into words; it almost becomes banal.

Are we exploring new spaces, maybe wild spaces?

No, our experience of space is changing. Exploration of space is more a 1960s kind of thing. Think about Gagarin for instance, he also explored space. Space was then very different, maybe as different as Pythagoras described space, or Saint Thomas Aquinas. That was maybe the most beautiful, the three references to Aquinas during a festival about technology and space. But you don’t have write that down.

Is there an end to space?
Ask Roger Malina, he will be able to give you a much better answer to this question than me. When I was a kid, I tried to imagine the end of the universe, what would this look like, what would be on the other side; was it rapped into something again? I forgot what I knew about string theory – but just like Derrick de Kerckhove mentioned in his talk, this could be one way to think about space. There is so much knowledge that we don’t know how to use when we think about space, and there are also so many ways to think about space that we have not researched yet. In the future we will have many opportunities to rethink space and I think this is really good.

It amusingly illustrates the contradictions often inherent to some critical and intellectual discourses on experiential and sensual matters, which sometimes might reveal as rather pointless or simply boring. It came back to my mind while sipping fastly a coffee in the hall of De Balie in reply to a friend heading out the conference hall who joked about the difficulties and confusion that talking ‘too much’ about sound might lead to.

The panel titled ‘The Hot Space in Music‘ was still taking place and we had just listened a while ago to the intervention of Steven Connor, who introduced that session. His name was unknown to my ears before the festival and actually resulted in another of the inspiring discoveries of this edition. Although his lecture: ‘Auscultations (Listening In) consisted in a nonstop discourse full of thoughts and words (no powerpoints, no actual audio examples, just his text, voice and gestuality) definitely it was not boring or pointless at all, but a rather poetic reflection on sound and listening.

Author of books about Joyce, Beckett, ventriloquism, skin or flies and currently preparing a book about the historical poetics of air, his presence in the program drew our attention and curiosity, making us remain in the Conference even though if the plan that afternoon was finally visiting the exhibition (the full schedule of the festival was making of it a difficult task to fulfill in the weekend).

He talked about the locus of listening, its nuances and the space(s) of sound and music, elaborating on those through tinnitus and other topics. Both dense and eloquent, it was inspiring to listen to this talk, which actually I hope to re-listen to soon. A visit to Steven´s site confirmed him as an accomplished orator, cultural critic and a prolific writer with an archive full of talks, writings and broadcasts ranging a variety of topics, many of them available as texts and in audio too. Specially interesting for us the ones classified under: ‘Seeing to Sound: On Sound, Music and Voice‘.

sound is unthinkable without space…
sound is always more than space…
sound and space never exactly coincide…
sound and space are consustantial but never exactly coexistant…

I am outisde the sound which is at the same time inside me…

music rarely happens in space, because music IS space.

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Photos: Chaja Hertog and Oxalis Atindriyaratri
Text: Pablo Sanz

The first half of the evening consisting of three performances induced some false memories of performances of the sixties and seventies that I never attended (Lester Bangs visiting Tangerine Dream at the New York planetarium if you will). TeZ Anharmonium, a direct combination of lasers and electronic sound was a beautiful sight. The resonation of a fluid base on which a laser was aimed created spectral sheets, somewhere between ectoplasm and star clouds. A nice, if somewhat, inconsequential opening.

Paul Prudence presented RynNTH, a piece which seemed tailor-made for the planetarium dome (it actually was.) It is pretty hard to describe. RynNTH starts like something straight out of science fiction, a vaguely mechanic star gate aiming straight up towards eternity. The pumping sound enhanced the psychedelic power of the piece. Very impressive although it did run a bit out of steam when the “construction” started to shift and rotate away from its original, upward aim (which I probably could have stared at for an hour.)

All three performances were quite hands-on, exploring a direct relation between sound and visuals. This hands-on approach was at its most “primitive” during 10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid, a collaboration between Evelina Domnitch & Dimitri Gelfand and Francisco López. The music of López was the most obvious cosmical of the evening, moving from the sounds of sacral spaceships taking off (Ligeti) towards cascading meteorites, fading away (such melancholic sound.)  Domnitch and Gelfland seemed to work with tools straight out of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: soap, light and water. The shapes thrown across the dome were at times breathtaking, again inhabiting a world between the grandest gestures (stars being born, suns appearing beyond planets) and the smallest (inter-cellular) events. Being something of an eavesdropper I caught some negative comments afterwards about the visuals but I loved the hands-on approach which at times seemed to stall but with one gesture could be transformed into a sublime sight. A most satisfying experience.

The program after the break consisted of just one piece, the first time performance of Maryanne Amacher’s PlayThing. I must admit I was a bit disappointed when I realized this would be a performance without visuals (our local “star maker” remained hidden and unused for the evening) although it actually was quite understandable: Amacher’s music was obviously chosen because of the dome-like structure, in keeping with her interest in specific sites for performing music. I think that Naut Humon in his very short introduction mentioned something like “our lady of the sky music” and thought this was the title of the piece when it evidently described Amacher. Perfectly, because a storm may have gathered above Amsterdam, its force was insignificant compared to the growing power of the music inside. Amacher wanted her music to be played at high volume, not to subject the listener to some bogus punishment but to seek special kind of tones using the body (and especially the ear) as a musical conduit. I wish I could have trusted her on this, but the volume did reach such levels that at times ears had to be covered, simply because high notes do hurt, although by playing with this and temporarily checking if the “coast was clear” one did hear a very rich and clear spectrum of sound full of detail. The sublime roar did eventually die down to a whisper, and after that it was obvious that Sonic Acts had finished.

Omar Muñoz Cremers

Reading the program of Sonic Acts I got intrigued about this 30min, B&W, silent film. Made in 1973, it is the first of McCall´s ‘solid light’ film series, an exploration on the sculptural qualities of light, using simple 16mm projections. He developed these series until the late 70s, only re-starting this practice more than twenty years later, this time using digital tools. This film is now a legendary example within the field of expanded cinema.

In McCall´s words: ‘The viewer watches the film by standing with his, or her, back towards what would normally be the screen, and looking along the beam towards the projector itself. The film beings as a coherent line of light, like a laser beam, adn develops through its 30-minute duration into a complete, hollow cone of light.’

That´s what we could see in the small hall of Paradiso, a dot describing a line, slowly becoming a physical conical volume. A minimal and elegant cinematic sculpture which turned also into a playful experience for the audience, who was quite amused interacting with the emerging light volume.

After experienced the film, I am now looking forward to catch up any of McCall´s new light installations.

Check also:

http://www.anthonymccall.com/

VIDEO: A ‘solid-light’ film by Anthony McCall
March 2007, Tate Modern, UK

Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works. Northwestern University Press. 2005

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Photos: Oxalis Atindriyaratri
Text: Pablo Sanz

UPIC (acronym of Unité Polyagogique Informatique du CEMAMu) is a ‘graphic input’ musical composition tool, devised by the composer Iannis Xenakis in the 70s.  He used the system to compose a couple of works, but also wanted to make of it an ‘universal’ interface. In Xenakis words: “Anybody, even myself or you, or children, can draw lines or graphics with an electromagnetic ballpoint, and they are transformed by computer directly into sound … “

Russell Haswell & Florian Hecker worked with the system during a residency at CCMIX in Paris in 2003, and since then they have been presenting electroacustic diffusion sessions based in the project, using a variable setup using surround sound and engulfing lasers, which altogether create a powerful multisensory experience. This session at Sonic Acts made the number #22.

As expected, it was a superb experience, with contrasting moments of minimal subtlety, piercing tones and intense baths of sound and light. Last time I was in one of their sessions the venue was fully-packed; the spaciousness of Paradiso and being able to walk a bit around in the hall made it nicer, giving the opportunity to appreciate the spectacle from within different perspectives.

Check also:

http://haswellhecker.blogspot.com/
(w/ excerpts of previous UPIC diffusion sessions)

Xenakis, UPIC, Continuum: Electroacoustic & Instrumental works from CCMIX Paris
(Mode Records, 2001) 2CD Album

Florian Hecker: SUN PANDÄMONIUM (Mego, 2003) CD Album

Russell Haswell: Wild Tracks (Mego, 2009)  CD Album

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Photos: Oxalis Atindriyaratri
Text: Pablo Sanz

Na dagen van lezingen over hi-tech en concepten van ruimte en ruimtelijkheid zijn de laatste dag de tuinmannen van de ruimte aan de beurt. Oftewel: ruimte in termen van het astronomische universum, levende ruimte en patronen in biologie versus mathematische modellen. Dit ter opmaat voor het slotakkoord dat in het Planetarium van de zoo die de natuur als leermeester van de kunsten benoemt. Artis Natura Magistra.

DE ANDERE RUIMTE
Roger Malina, astronoom te Marseille, bestudeert grote dingen, heel grote dingen. Niets minder dan het universum en dan ook nog vooral de niet zichtbare 95% daarvan die zwarte materie is. In plaats van zintuiglijk, zijn de waarnemingen die ons als mensheid kennis verschaffen van deze op onmenselijke maat aanwezige grootheden volledig afhankelijk van instrumenten. Malina bepleit dan ook een intimering van deze wetenschappelijke output zodat we op menselijke voet met deze data kunnen omgaan. Alleen op deze manier kan de almaar toenemende datastroom volgens Malina een plek krijgen in de internalisering door en voor de mensheid in de decennia aan toenemende informatiedichtheid die voor ons liggen. Het is deze intimisering van wetenschappelijke data die het onderzoekslab waar Malina werkt, vormgeeft door kunstenaars uit verschillende disciplines te “embedden” in de researchteams. Alleen al het ‘luisteren’ naar de sonificatie van de toestand ettelijke lichtjaren na de oerknal (die overigens geluidloos was) en de veranderingen in het geluid doorheen de ontwikkeling van het universum brengt de massief enorme schaal die het menselijke bevattingsvermogen nagenoeg overstijgt tot een behapbare vorm van zintuiglijke waarneming.

Paul Beesley’s ingewikkelde en levende architecturen zijn per se man-made en op menselijk formaat. Ergens in het proces van het bouwen en in de ontwikkeling van de constructies echter speelt Beesley voor scheppende God alsof hij met zijn uit vrij simpele bouwsteenelementen opgetrokken delen inerte materie leven inblaast en zo een architectonische Golem voortbrengt. Franksteintaferelen leveren zijn zelfs ademende sculpturale immersieve leef- en levende omgevingen niet op. Futuristische netwerkgebouwen des te meer.

Die doen trouwens ook weer denken aan het werk Rechnender Raum van Ralf Baecker dat in het NIMk tentoongesteld wordt. Een neuronetwerk aan draden, actuators en sensoren is open en doorzichtig, maar bestaat slechts voor zichzelf. De rode middenvorm beïnvloed de input op de omgeving die deze inputs weer teruggeeft aan het nucleus-volume door dit van vorm te doen veranderen. De registratie van de spanning die zo weer op een draad komt te staan, leidt vervolgens tot een voortzetting van deze cyclus. Baecker’s werk bevraagt in alle openheid zo de kip of ei-kwestie die wanneer het netwerk eenmaal ‘aan staat’ direct en de facto van retorische aard is. Het werk ‘leeft’ en bestaat slechts voor en in zichzelf; het proces is zichtbaar en hoorbaar, maar schept niets dan de wederzijdse afhankelijkheid van en tussen input en output.

Beesley’s werken spelen zich af op precies hetzelfde terrein. Hij voegt er echter een dimensie aan toe die een visionair vista lijkt te openen richting een wereld waarin deze levende omgevingen een eigen functie kunnen gaan opeisen in de menselijke ruimte.

Ook zonder menselijk ingrijpen immers werkt de natuur ogenschijnlijk volgens strikte patronen die opvallende parallellen vertonen met wiskundige modellen. Hoe kristallen groeien of zandduinen afkalven; generatieve ruimten in de natuur volgen de regels van het berekenbare spel van formules. Zo ook geluid in wat cymatics genoemd wordt. De herkennig en erkenning van deze patronen en het generatieve aspect ervan inzetten in scheppend werk in de vorm van kunstwerken slaat op haar beurt weer een brug met de intimering van wetenschappelijke data zoals door Malina besproken. Het over- en doordenken van de scheppende kracht die uitgaat van in werking gezette processen volgens door de mens uitgevonden formules en regels levert bovendien existentiële en psychologische dimensies op die Paul Prudence nog slechts (be)noemt en niet nader uitwerkt, maar waarin wel de kern van het betoog van deze middag lijkt te liggen. Immers: in het niet alleen als tuinman de ruimte om ons heen beheren, maar deze als ander deel van het werk van een tuinman ook herscheppen of zelfs laten ontkiemen naar nieuwe kruisbestuivingen en vormen.

Ter afsluiting van het conferentiedeel van Sonic Acts XIII vat keynotespeaker Derrick de Kerckhove de vele opgeworpen vragen samen in een pleidooi voor een voortgaande discussie tussen de vele invalshoeken aan disciplines die de poetics of space de afgelopen dagen bevraagt of gedefinieerd hebben. Alleen door wetenschap en kunst (en het genieten ervan zoals in het avondprogramma) in onderling respect in wederzijds discours de ruimte te bieden, kan ruimte voorzien worden van handvatten tot tast- of maakbaarheid; figuurlijk of letterlijk. Dit eloquente statement detoneert nogal met het volgende vrij zelfpijperige vertoog van een dissenting opinion dat vooral persoonlijke en betweterige persoonlijke en ongefundeerde aanvallen bevat op eerdere sprekers. Het is echter de gezwollen taal en het apert gebrek aan het door De Kerckhove benoemde respect, iets dat het kwartet Sonic Acts XIII-dagen sowieso glansrijk kenschetste, dat niet minder dan briljant wordt gepareerd door Robert Whitman in zijn reactie.

ANEKDOTISCH SLOTAKKOORD
Als een soort “opa/Tom Waits”-vertelt monoloog, tekent Whitman hoe hij op vijfjarige leeftijd naar het circus ging en daar een clown zag die de cirkel die een volgspot voor zijn voeten op de grond wierp probeerde te pakken. Steeds ontglipte de witte vlek hem. Ten slotte van de voorstelling bezemt de clown de vlek onder een kleedje; licht uit, duisternis. En Whitman had God gezien. De tweede anekdote verhaalt van een uitstapje naar het theater in zijn junior high schooldagen. Een klasgenoot naast hem zakt onderuit in de stoel en legt zijn voeten op de schouders van de dame in de rij ervoor. Welk schouwspel was nu interessanter? Dit of het drama op het toneel? De derde scene beschrijft een man die een restaurant verlaat om een sigaret te roken, die uittrapt op de grond en vervolgens met veger en blik netjes opruimt.

De verraste Whitman stelt zich de vraag of hij net een toneelstukje gezien heeft of gewoon een doodnormale feitelijke opeenvolging van handelingen? Whitman antwoordt niet, brengt de drie verhalen nieteens samen in één conclusie. Het is wel duidelijk hoe fraai Whitman de waard en kracht van de keuze voor een eigen perspectief zonder veroordeling maar met een open blik die verrassing toelaat of -staat heeft neergezet. Het kwartje valt en een luid applaus valt nieteens zozeer Whitman ten deel, maar vooral de organisatie van de conferentie van Sonic Acts XIII die precies volgens Whitman’s anekdotisch geschetste openheid van denken op vele terreinen en over een onwaarschijnlijk breed spectrum aan invalshoeken voor resonerende inspiratie heeft gezorgd in de presentaties gedurende het dagprogramma.

BEYOND SPACE
Nog één keer is het tijd voor het avondprogramma en wel in het Artis Planetarium, als wil Sonic Acts XIII de naam of het motto van deze historische zoo wellicht wel onbewust tot Leitmotiv in omzien voor deze hele editie maken. De natuur als leermeester voor de kunsten immers. Met de slotavond opent Sonic Acts XIII ook de deuren voor mensen die niet op eerdere dagen of de volledigheid van het viertal aanwezig zijn geweest. Uitverkocht met wachtlijst zelfs. Wie wel heel Sonic Acts XIII tot zich genomen heeft, ziet en hoort puzzelstukken op hun plaats terecht komen. Anderen ondergaan in misschien wel verbijstering het visuele en sonische schouwspel onder de koepel.

TeZ bespeelt in Anharmonium met een wisselwerking tussen lage dronetonen en high pitched noise niet alleen het gehoor maar vooral water dat door een transducer eronder  tot golving gebracht wordt. De refracties van een laserstraal die door dit water heengaat, worden geprojecteerd en leveren een enigmatisch en etherisch schouwspel op waarin direct de gevolgen van interferentie en de verschillen in golflengte zichtbaar worden. Synesthetisch op een zeker niveau, want wat je ziet hoor je ook en vice versa. Met enige vertraging overigens, want het is fascinerend om te zien hoe snel water op de variatie naar één bepaalde frequentie reageert en meteen een stabiel patroon vormt en hoe lang het op een ander moment nodig heeft om een bepaald instabiel “evenwicht” te bereiken.

Spreker Paul Prudence uit de middagsessies presenteert met Son Lattice en RyNTH een visueel en sonisch overrompelend werk waarin beeld en geluid in afhankelijk van en op elkaar bestaan. Het geluid volgt de permutaties van algoritmische formules die de zelfgeneratief zijn en die als input dienen voor de visuele representatie die in oppervlaktespanning en modulatie vormkrijgt in geometrische, ruimtelijke vormen die de hele koepel beschrijven. Midden in het surroundgeluid omgeeft zo ook de projectie de bezoeker, terwijl de afhankelijke ruimte tussen geluid en beeld nauwkeurig samenhangend wordt berekend door een computer, maar nu juist, ondanks de oren- en ogenschijnlijke niet-organische oorsprong en presentatievorm van beide, als niet-mechanisch “levend” zintuiglijk waarneembaar gemaakt wordt; normaliter immers zijn deze interne processen van generatieve afhankelijkheidsrelaties niet zicht- of kenbaar.

Wat je wel al van kindsbeen af aan kent, is bellenblaas. Evelina Domnitch en Dmitry Gelfand zijn er gewoon nooit mee gestopt. Zij hebben de textuur van het zeepsop tot kunst verheven. Vreemd genoeg is de verwachting voor de refractieprojectie van zeepbelclusters en hun texturen in de Planetriumkoepel groter dan het duo met rare drakenhoofdtooi kan waarmaken. Bij vlagen schittert de textuur als een enorm krioelend petrischaaltje vol eencelligen over het doek. Soms duikt een schittering op die doet denken aan Yoko Seyama’s Light Work #6: In Soil in het NIMk. Dat werk echter koppelt de sereniteit van de zachte etherische balsbewegingen van lichtsluiers aan zachtzoemdende ambient en detoneert zodoende nooit, versterkt de wisselwerking tussen sonisch en visueel tot intense en tegelijk nooit “overstated” schoonheid.

Zo gelukkig is Franisco López niet. Zijn sonische uitvoering neemt field recordings bij de kladden en zet deze als delen van een symfonieorkest in om te komen tot een overweldigende verdichting van geluid die steeds ook open en wijds is en ruimte biedt in massaliteit, beklemt in minimalisme. Zijn werk lijkt te ontstaan, groeien, ter plekke. Zijn werk is een sonische exploratie van ruimte en schepping in en met ruimte in één van de meest optima forma’s van Sonic Acts XIII. Helaas echter komt de paring aan de bellenblaasbeelden niet uit de conceptuele startblokken, maar gelukkig kun je je ogen sluiten en het geluid over je laten heenwalsen. De ruimte die López dan opent in een sonisch universum dat zijn weerga nauwelijks kent, doet de knulligheid van het zeepbelschimmenspel op slag vergeten.

Wie voor velen altijd in herinnering blijft, is de vorig jaar overleden Maryanne Amacher; grootheid in het gebied van de sonische ruimte en de beleving ervan, beroemd om haar otoakoestische experimenten en composities. Jarenlang werkte ze aan en 40-kanaals stuk dat zoals bij vele componisten niet afgemaakt bleef op het moment van haar overlijden. Mahler’s Tiende had beter met rust gelaten gebleven. Een Victory Boogie Woogie schilder je ook niet af volgens inkleuren-op-nummertjes.

Amachers collega’s hebben gedacht goed te doen door met archiefopnamen van delen van haar laatste en wellicht meest ambitieuze werk een tribuut in elkaar te zetten. Voor acht kanalen. Zonder visuele ondersteuning. Dat op tournee moet kunnen gaan. In verschillende zalen dus, met dito PA’s. In concertsetting. En, om kort te gaan, zoals menige artiest zich in zijn of haar graf omdraait om de vele tributebands of -albums die om nog even snel een graantje mee te pikken de markt overspoelen spoedig na de dood van de “bewierookte”, zo mag PlayThing niet gezien worden als een beleving van de artistieke kracht en pracht van de werken van Amacher.

Amacher gaf zelden concerten en was zeer kieskeurig voor wat betreft de akoestische ruimte voor een opvoering en speakerplaatsing. Ze vertelde narratieven met haar geluid en positioneerde luidsprekers doorheen de ruimte. Je kon als bezoeker wandelen door en tussen het geluid en zo de verschillende karakters van de klanken leren kennen; er vriendschap mee sluiten of juist niet. Dichtbij het ene prettige geluid bleef een irritante piep zo op afstand, misschien wel bijna onhoorbaar. Amacher stuurde zelf bij vanachter haar mengpaneel en voerde zo de ruimtelijkheid van haar compositie in een bijkans levende vorm naar een organisch geheel waarin zij als een regisseur haar narratief bewaakte en opvoerde, vertelde.

Het mag dan zo zijn dat de otoakoestische sensatie de meest beangstigende geluiden opwekt (je binnenoor maakt zélf geluid dat je hoort doordat bepaalde tonen delen van het binnenoor doen trillen) en mensen doet besluiten tot vertrek, vele mensen overigens; de presentatie wordt echter zeker in het tweede gedeelte uitgestuurd op veel te hoog volume. Bovendien is separatie van de klanken, ondanks de meerkanaalsuitvoering in de koepelvorm nauwelijks mogelijk. De verschillende sporen vormen al snel een dikke geleiachtige brij waarin zeker in concertsetting zonder de beweging door de ruimte in de vorm van rondlopen tussen de geluiden de spatialisering die Amacher zelf zo precies neerzette, bewaakte en zelfs live ook nog bestuurde, niet bestaat.

Het hier gepresenteerde PlayThing is dan ook slechts een zwak aftreksel van wat Amachers ware kunstenaarschap omvatte. Dat mag de makers zeer aangewreven worden. Je blijft als schilder een een Mondriaan die niet af is af. Je componeert geen Mahler tot een slot. Maar als je een dierbare collega verliest en heel bekend bent met haar werk en nauwgezette methoden, dan kom je toch niet af met een productie die juist de meest relevante artistieke elementen van de essentie van haar sonische visie teniet doet? En die voer je dan toch zeker niet uit over een installatie die niet geschikt is voor de geluiden die je erdoorheen probeert te “proppen”? En je zorgt dan toch op z’n minst voor een wandelbare ruimte?

PlayThing is een mislukking van wereldformaat waarvan de impact in de nogal voelbare verbijstering na afloop tergend in de lucht hangt in het Planetarium.  Een piepklein inkijkje in het werk van Amacher misschien, maar niet meer dan dat. Een volledige reconstructie van één van haar zelf neergezette installaties had Amacher naar alle waarschijnlijkheid eer aangedaan.

De enige eer die Naut Humon en co die zich met PlayThing aan Amachers archiefopnamen vergrepen hebben haar bewijzen is de jammerlijke constatering dat wat ooit was toen zij nog onder de levenden was, nooit meer zo zal terugkeren. Dat haar meesterwerken tot een tijd en ruimte behoren die we door haar overlijden helaas nooit meer kunnen horen. Ook niet in de vorm van deze patchworkdeken die ongetwijfeld met goede bedoelingen gemaakt is, maar los van haar eigen meesterhand beter in “quietness” had gebleven; onafgespeelde archiefopnamen. Van een wereld in tijd, ruimte en geluid die voorgoed onhoorbaar is. Die onhoorbaarheid was een waardig tribuut aan Maryanne Amacher geweest.

INSPIRERENDE EXPLORATIES
In navolging van vele sprekers tijdens de conferentie echter, moet gezegd worden dat de organisatie met Sonic Acts XIII een gedurfde programmering over een diep en breed spectrum heeft gepresenteerd, daarmee in vier dagen het thema van deze editie glansrijk handen en voeten gevend. Het op de slotavond ruimte bieden aan de allereerste uitvoering ooit van PlayThing getuigt van lef en visie. Ook al loop je het risico dat de voor het onderwerp van deze conferentie en dit festival zo relevante Maryanne Amacher helaas weinig eer wordt betoond, qed.

Door grenzen op te zoeken en te verleggen of overschrijden heeft Sonic Acts XIII zich bewezen als een bijzonder inspirerende verzameling exploraties langs de lijnen van de poetics of space. Het is die resonerende energie die na afloop in een ontastbaarheid rondwaart, die blijft en in enige vorm, tijd of ruimte zal weerklinken.

De tweede volledige dag aan lezingen in de conferentiezaal van De Balie presenteert een waaier aan onderwerpen langs soundwalks, field recordings, de muzikale ruimte en onzichtbare architecturen. ‘s Avonds is Paradiso het Mekka voor liefhebbers die eerder de oren dan de ogen de broodnodige kost willen gunnen. Veelal mogen de ogen gesloten blijven en rollen klanken in breed stereo of surround formaat doorheen heel de voormalige kerk; de akoestiek van ruimte staat dan ook centraal en die hoor je, die zie je immers niet.

MILIEU
Dat Pauline Oliveros het met haar pleidooi voor “deep listening” niet helemaal bij het rechte eind heeft komt deze conferentiemiddag meermalen naar voren. Dat betekent voor Hildegard Westerkamp niet dat je dus niet mag proberen een beter en dieper luisterbesef van je omgeving te vinden. Een methode die zij daartoe toepast in vivo is de zogenaamde soundwalk. In stilte loopt een groep mensen onder aanvoering van een gids/leider door bijvoorbeeld een stad. Zonder gesprekken te voeren, richt de luisteraandacht zich op klanken in het milieu die normaliter wellicht niet waargenomen worden. Of terzijde gelegd, willekeurig of onwillekeurig zelfs. Geluid, locatie en ruimte en de dwarsverbanden ertussen komen zo aan een niet slechts hoorbare, maar ook luisterbare oppervlakte te liggen. De ruimtelijkheid van de waarneming van geluid benadrukt Westerkamp ook door met aandacht naar de akoestiek van de zaal te luisteren en nog veel meer doordat haar lezing met twee helpers aan weerzijden van de zaal in het publiek ook letterlijk ruimte krijgt wanneer die twee delen van de lezing weg van het katheder brengen.

Edward Shanken en Yolande Harris werken ook nadrukkelijk met het milieu als bron van hun werk. Walvisgezang bijvoorbeeld, maar ook het rumoer van plezierjachten, opgenomen met hydrofoons in ondiep water. Met dat laatste legt Harris een wereld bloot die wij mensen orenschijnlijk niet kennen, maar die de akoestische milieuvervuiling onder de waterspiegel hoorbaar maakt. En bevraagt. En misschien ook wel be- of veroordeelt.

Opvallend genoeg heeft het field recordings gebied van de geluidskunst, waarin overigens ook verrassend genoeg, zonder enig seksisme bedoeld, meer dames actief zijn dan in menig andere niche, een sterke politiek getinte missie. Of het nu ligt in het documenteren van verloren gaande geluiden ten gevolge van het verdwijnen van natuur, zoals bijvoorbeeld smeltend poolijs of oerwoudkap, in de symfonie van walvissen die met uitsterven bedreigt worden of, bij Annea Lockwood, in de juxtapositionering van hedendaags New York en Libanese herinneringen met nadrukkelijk een anti-terrorisme waarschuwing die in het Grand Central Station over de omroepinstallatie weerklonk.

Net als een dag eerder bij Robert Whitman is Annea Lockwood een en al pretogen en creatieve energie van meerdere decennia. Namedropping? Ach, het kan en ja ze werkte samen met en in dezelfde tijd als vele (andere) “Grote Namen”. Maar met Whitman concludeert ook zij dat het ging en gaat om het maken, het doen. Geen geld, geen droog brood, maar wel componeren, wel zoeken naar nieuwe geluiden en experimenteren met prille elektronica. Weer die intens diepgevoelde noodzakelijkheid tot creatie.

Een drive die Lockwood nog steeds in elke vezel mee- en uitdraagt. Het zichtbare genot waarmee ze verhaalt over haar field recordings aan de Donaudelta is nergens aandoenlijk, maar volledig ontroerend in de uit haar stem en non-verbale communicatie sprekende enthousiasme in het ophalen van de herinneringen aan haar opnamen. En, om terug te komen op de politieke missie: Lockwood laat er geen misverstand over bestaan hoe haar recente werk in het teken staat van een reactie op het juk van de “Jaren Bush” waaraan ze met welgemeende passie uitgedrukt duidelijk ettelijke broertjes dood heeft.

CUTTING EDGE ARCHITECTURE
Onzichtbare architectuur; geluid als architectuur? Kan dat? Materialiseren van geluid bijvoorbeeld? Marcos Novak doet in een diepgravend onderzoeksproject een zeer goed gooi in die richting door in 3D modellen in de ruimte stilgezet geluid te ‘animeren’, te bestuderen en vervolgens aan een aantal parameters aan inputs te onderwerpen waarin het niet om reactiviteit gaat, maar om wederzijdsheid of transactiviteit. Met behulp van complexe computermodellen komt hij met zijn researchteam zo tot modellen die zelfs een eigen leven kunnen leiden, een soort oersoep die zich in transactiviteit ontwikkelt. Makkelijke kost is het niet, inspirerend en vol potentieel en belofte des te meer.

Dat geldt ook voor Dirk Hebel en Jörg Stollmann; twee jonge architecten die met gewaagde concepten vooral “misbruik” van bestaande noties van ruimte en instrumentarium van de architect/designer bevragen. Misschien wel hun meest tot de verbeelding sprekende project is een wolk als gebouw, letterlijk. Ingediend als voorstel voor de Zwisterse nationale tentoonstelling, zonder enig idee van realiseerbaarheid te hebben, werd, na uitverkiezing, daadwerkelijk uitvoer een hoofdbrekens kostend avontuur. Maar: de wolk werd gerealiseerd en een immens populair succes. Vele miljoenen bezochten het gebouw dat letterlijk alleen uit waterdruppels bestond.  Ruimte en het waarnemen daarvan, architectuur en de idee van een gebouw wordt zo bevraagt én in praxis tastbaar gemaakt.

HOREN EN LUISTEREN
Hoe presenteer je muziek in een ruimte? Surround, stereo en meer. HD of minder? Componeren voor een ruimte specifiek. Langs deze thema’s presenteert STEIM een panel met daarin een hoofdrol voor de zeer belezen en eloquente academische “homo universalis” of sorts, Steve Connor. Immers: als je boeken geschreven hebt over uiteenlopende onderwerpen van Joyce en Dickens tot buikspreken en tinnitus en bovendien uit je losse pols citaten uit de literaire en filosofische wereldgeschiedenis in het rond strooit én ook nog een welhaast encyclopedische kennis bezit die je vaardig en in vloeiende argumentatie inzet, dan ben je wel van heel veel markten thuis. Of: op z’n minst wek je knap de indruk dat te zijn.

Connor bevraagt in zijn lezing ruimte en geluid en hun afhankelijkheid. Geen geluid zonder ruimte. Geen ruimte zonder geluid. Ze hebben elkaar nodig, maar scheppen elkaar niet. Horen als extern gegeven. Immers: geluid wordt van buiten waargenomen. Toch? Maar hoe zit dat dan als het oor zelf geluid maakt of denkt te maken? Zoals bij tinnitus. Of, anders, zoals in de Labyrinthitis installatie van Kirkegaard in het NIMk? Hoor je dan? Of denkt je brein te horen? En wat is luisteren eigenlijk? En hoe discrimineer je onwillekeurig tussen alle geluiden die je omringen? Als je alles zou horen, werd je knettergek.

Hier komt ook Christopher Salter boven in de herinnering aan een dag eerder. Hij benoemde namelijk al JND; Just Notable Difference. Als het verschil tussen zintuiglijke inputs te klein is, zul je die shift niet waarnemen. En als het niet opvalt, dan hoor je wel, maar luister je niet. Daarvoor is focus nodig immers. Met die gegevens werken ook componisten Yutaka Makino en Hans W. Koch. De laatste vooral in spiegeling van geluid én in het luisterbaar tonen van de wereld achter de “spiegel”. Iets dat optisch niet kan, maar sonisch wel. Zoals te merken is in STEIM.

LUISTER / WATER
In een zeer geslaagde conferentie en festival als dit is het eigenlijk nauwelijks nodig zou je zeggen om nog verdere luister bij te zetten aan een toch al glansrijk programma. Dat minder meer is én wel degelijk luister brengt, bewijst het avondprogramma in Paradiso. Een lange rij artiesten presenteert sound art in veelal haar meest pure vorm: geluid alleen over de fabelachtige installatie en onder de gekromde plafonds van de voormalige kerk aan de Weteringschans.

Lockwoods Thrist heeft Servisch gezang als rode draad die Grand Central Station, NYC en herinneringen van de Libanese kunstenares Simone Fattal verbindt. Toen, nu, vredige memorie en hedendaagse angst zo samen in nevenschikking die spontaan barst van de onderhuidse spanning. Ook letterlijk uit het leven gegrepen is Hildegard Westerkamps exploratieve tocht tussen droom en realiteit in klanken van alledag die in wisselwerking en contrast een bevreemdend duel aangaan.

Waar deze beide werken thuis te brengen geluiden gebruiken, brengt Barry Truax in een overrompelende expositie van de klanken uit een put en grotachtige gewelven klanken naar de luisteraar die deze normaliter nooit hoort of kan horen.  Yolande Harris begeeft zich op eender terrein met haar Fishing for Sound. Dataverkeer omgezet in klank, onderwateropnamen en PTSS/EMDR-clicks komen samen in een ‘ballet’ waarin voor de verandering (het overgrote deel van de avond baadt Paradiso in lichtloos zwart) visuals ingezet worden. Die hebben een zeggingskracht die aan Les Nymphéas van Monet doet denken. Het is de schittering op het water tegenover de ten diepste larmoyante toestand van akoestische milieuvervuiling die tot een indrukwekkend statement wordt gebald zonder propagandistisch te zijn of worden.

Beeld is ook aan de orde tijdens Sabulation van Jacob Kirkegaard. De zingende duinen van Oman razen, donderden, doen Paradiso op zijn grondvesten schudden en scheppen een monumentaliteit die als een mokerslag klap op dreun verkoopt. Monumentaliteit zelfs die bijvoorbeeld de zwarte schilderijen en tekeningen van Richard Serra in herinnering oproept. Of ‘s mans enorme staalsculpturen. Maar dan voortkomend uit lawineachtig (ver)schuivend zand; vloeiend als water dit silicium, de grondstof van de chips in de apparatuur waarmee Kirkegaard de grondstofgeluiden bewerkt, verdraaid, regisseert en versterkt.

In contrast met Lockwood en Westerkamp staat ook de overdonderende compositie van Gilles Aubry die vliegveldklanken door zijn creatieve en visionaire mangel gehaald heeft om zodoende uit te komen bij een vrijwel abstracte geluidschildering waarin slechts bij sporadische vlagen een loeiende turbine of een flapperende rotor te ontwaren is.

Dan is het slotstuk van de avond qua “jaw-dropping” impact van de hand van BJ Nilsen heel wat makkelijker te herleiden tot de bron. De oerkracht van donder en bliksem rolt meedogenloos door Paradiso, compleet met een verbijsterend verrassende dreun die je stijf doet staan van schrik. Hierna past slechts stilte en de realisatie van het opgelopen hebben van een “natural contact-high” aan euforische stemming na een aaneenschakeling van werkelijk topklasse pure sound art; Paradiso als waar “Luisterrijk”.

Ten slotte zij nog opgemerkt dat de invloed van Drip en de watervoorliefde van Fluxus nog steeds veel opgeld doet in de hedendaagse sound art. Slagregens, onweer, druppels, golven, boven of onderwater en wat dies nattig meer zij voeren de boventoon vanavond. Natuurlijk is er meer, niet alleen bij bijvoorbeeld de niet op Sonic Acts XIII aanwezige Chris Watson, maar vooral in de wel gepresenteerde artiesten. Slechts een feitelijke vaststelling van orde. Of zou het zo zijn dat de fluïde natuur van geluid, compleet met haar eigen (interferentie)golven als van nature per se en dus nagenoeg an sich “gegeven” annex of analoog is aan de evenzo inherent-eigen karakteristieken van water?

Barry Truax opened the session at De Balie on Saturday, a whole day devoted specially to soundscape, phonography and the exploration of the acoustic qualities of our environment.

Truax´s career has been combining academic computer and electroacoustic music with social and ecological concerns. Since the 70s, as part of the World Soundscape Project and at the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, he has been developing academic and artistically the fields of music composition with environmental sounds and acoustic ecology.

His compositions explore the field between two extremes of the  world: the micro structure and inner complexities of sound itself and the external world of complexity present in the soundscape. Drawing upon elements taken from the world we live in, combining computer tools such as convolution or granulation and multichannel diffusion techniques, his compositions aim to immerse the listener into sonic journeys and imaginary narratives, suggesting  moments of profound listening.

The keynote at Sonic Acts contained  instructive examples of his compositions, which are extensively documented, partly available online and compiled in two published dvd-roms. We learned about the narratives and compositional techniques underlying works such as PendlerdrØm, Island, Basilica, Temple and The Shaman Ascending, listening to sound examples of the original and processed materials aswell as to excerpts of the compositions in a nice multichannel setup.

Barry also presented Chalice Well, one of his latest works, which we will listen to later in Paradiso, as part of the Acoustic Spaces evening.

Video of another lecture of Barry Truax a few months ago at The Vancouver Computer Music Meetings (VCMM).

Truax´s Handbook for Acoustic Ecology

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Text: Pablo Sanz

In De Balie start op de conferentievrijdag een uitgebreid programma aan lezingen. Thematisch gegroepeerd onderzoekt Sonic Acts XIII zo onder andere immersieve ruimte, historische vista’s op ruimtelijke utopia’s en het actuele en futuristische concept van hybrid space(s). Het avondprogramma in Paradiso staat vervolgens in het teken van de verruiming van de visuele geest en ruimte in cinematografische werken.

ZINTUIGEN
Naut Humon is één brok energie en enthousiasme wanneer hij via een historisch exposé verhaalt van de praktijk in het door hem opgerichte Recombinant Media Labs. Surround geluid en beeld, tot en met transducers in de vloer worden tegenwoordig in high tech omgevingen ingezet om ogen en oren over een zo breed mogelijk spectrum simultaan te stimuleren. Dit in contrast met installaties en ‘happenings’ waaraan Humon vele jaren geleden meewerkte, waarin juist het uitschakelen van bijvoorbeeld de visuele input en een overlading met tactiele prikkels centraal stond. Denk hierbij aan het in houten kisten opsluiten van bezoekers, de kisten vervolgens door een fabricageproces sturen over lopende banden en van buiten op timmeren en ten slotte transporteren naar een totaal andere ruimte om daar weer geopend te worden aan een copieus banket.

Christopher Salter behandelt dezelfde materie vanuit het oogpunt van de “treshold”. Conceptueel-academischer van aard dan het praxisgestuurde werk van Humon zoekt hij naar de gevolgen van extreme uitsluiting van zintuiglijke waarneming en de gevolgen van de net waarneembare verandering van input. In plaats van een dramatisch shockeffect tussen ‘stilte’ en keiharde uitbarstingen van noise bijvoorbeeld, ligt in die net waarneembare verschuiving in waarneming voor Salter de uitdaging in het onderzoeken van het concept van de “sensing self”. Tussen beide sprekers ligt een wereld aan mogelijkheden langs de binaire tegenstelling tussen de negatie van zintuiglijke input en de volledige overlading in visuele en auditieve waarnemingen.

UTOPIA
Met het overvoeren van de zintuigen van bezoekers, die overigens wel zelf de sleutel in handen kregen te bepalen op welk kruispunt van muzikale en visuele input ze de voorstelling ondergingen, hielden John Cage en Lejaren Hiller zich onledig in hun HPSCHD performances. Verre van consequent in zijn formeel-conceptuele rationaliteit begaven de heren zich op een emanicaptoire weg waarin het gepresenteerde werk door de bezoeker zelf mede gemaakt werd, als ware zij mobiele mixers van de diverse inputkanalen. De plaats in de zaal immers bepaalde wat je meekreeg en in welke mate. De lichtelijk utopische vrijheidsgedachte die hierachter stak, stond tegelijk op enigszins gespannen voet met de politieke connotaties die Cage en Hiller willens en wetens presenteerden in de gebruikte projecties. Je mocht als bezoeker namelijk wel kiezen, maar dan slechts uit een palet aan input dat Cage en Hiller zelf nadrukkelijk één richting op geregisseerd hadden door het gebruik van beelden die de utopische vista’s van bijna science-fictionachtige verkenningen in “outer space” tot onderwerp hadden; niet in het minst door de inzet van een uitgebreide bibliotheek aan foto’s die NASA ter beschikking had gesteld.

De kosmos stond ook centraal voor Henry Jacobs en Jordan Belson die met hun Vortextconcerten tussen spiragraphachtige visuals en opvallend genoeg etnische volksmuziek gekoppeld aan experimenteel-klassiek toeschouwer “gevangen hielden” in een wervelwind aan audiovisuele input. De onder- en achterliggende idee hiervan en van latere experimenten in immersie en participatoire rituelen in een concertsetting en daarbuiten was gelegen in de beredeneerde notie van de noodzaak de mens fysiek en mentaal voor te bereiden op de eisen die “space travel” aan het gestel stelt. De cyborg-implicaties daarvan kregen onder andere vorm door bijkans martelingachtige ingrepen in het uitschakelen van waarneming op zintuiglijk vlak en wederom ook juist het overvoeren van de zintuigen. Verrassend genoeg klinkt en oogt het theater van de toekomst dat Jacobs en Belson voor oog en oor hadden tegenwoordig pijnlijk gedateerd, tegelijk wijzend op een utopisch futurisme dat heden ten dage veel minder opgeld doet.

Niemand minder dan Robert Whitman zelve bewijst vervolgens dat je als maker zelf geen sjoege hoeft te hebben van de technische aspecten van de realisatie van je werk. De beste man is geen tovenaar met de laptop of Powerpointpresentatie en dat was hij ook niet in de uitvoering van zijn audiovisuele excursies en installaties. Als een waar conceptueel kunstenaar immers legt Whitman een idee (bijvoorbeeld de wens te komen tot een installatie die wat veraf is dichtbij laat schijnen en omgekeerd) neer bij technici die vervolgens maanden ermee worstelen om al dan niet tot uitvoering te komen. Het moet echter niet per se technologische avantgarde zijn voor Whitman, zo bewijzen zijn wandelingen/rondleidingen door het New Yorkse havengebied waar hij met de “ready made” aan gevonden locatie als Fundgrube en enige materiaal werkte. De verfrissende eenvoud van zijn anekdotische vertellingen, zonder enige borstklopperij of gezwollen hineininterpretierende taal, maar bol van nog steeds twinkelend plezier wanneer hij weer een verhaal opdiept uit de rijke catalogus aan persoonlijke historie, brengt Whitman en zijn werken binnen een kader van de menselijke maat, waar Fluxus-happenings en de hi-tech concept art installatie in het Pepsi Paviljoen in Osaka meer dan eens worden beschreven in bijna afgodterminologie.

Het is die verafgoding waarmee Whitman afdoet. Ook jegens bijvoorbeeld iemand als John Cage. In de quote van de dag zegt Whitman namelijk dat het maken zo belangrijk was en is dat de ware kunstenaar het ook zou doen op een “desert island”, ook zonder een berg geld of cutting edge technologie. Of: “Toen zei ik tegen John [Cage dus]: “Kunnen we de bomen niet zo snoeien zodat de geworpen schaduwen op de grond het werk vormen dat door het draaien van de stand van de zon gedurende de dag beweegt?”". Kortom: al heb je niks, John, Bob [Robert Rauschenberg] en anderen met Whitman: ze maakten, ze deden, ze hadden de idee en dat was het allerbelangrijkste. Veraf of dichtbij, spiegelingen die jezelf niet opvangt, bewustwording van industriele “waste lands”, binnen/buiten; de vonk van de idee en alleen die is relevant. De rest is slechts uitvoering. Niets om gewichtig over te doen, grinnikt een duidelijk geamuseerde Whitman.

HYBRIDE RUIMTE
Meerdere ruimten op verschillende parallelle vlakken van perceptie op één moment staat centraal in het panel over hybride ruimte. Tussen architectonisch futurisme en urbaan ingrijpen volgens vergaande online interactie en Duncan Speakman’s “subtle mobs” en het zicht- of hoorbaar maken van bijvoorbeeld elektro-magnetische straling die ons continu omringt, ligt een ogenschijnlijk pril en nog weinig ontgonnen terrein aan mogelijkheden voor de stapeling van sensaties in één ruimte of wederom juist het afbouwen daarvan. Hybrid space echter komt pas dan naar voren in de waarneming wanneer er direct en bewust gewezen wordt op het bestaan van de parallelliteit van tegelijk plaats hebbende werelden.

Ongemerkt is hybrid space een gegeven van alle tijden, eigenlijk. Gewichtige academische uiteenzettingen, uitmondend in utopisch futurisme; wensdromen en vista’s zonder nog veel basis in het leven van alledag leggen het dan ook af tegen Speakmans Sonic Acts XIII-subtle mob interventie die wederom in schijnbare eenvoud met weinig middelen en in vivo met een vrij kleine en simpele ingreep de grenzen van het private en publieke in hybride ruimten bevraagt op een manier die hybrid space direct en onwillekeurig zichtbaar maakt. De notie van hybrid spaces en het gebruik ervan ook in artistieke zin heeft echter wel noodzakelijkerwijs te maken met een bepaalde kritieke massa om van de grond te komen. Juist het voorspellen van waar, hoe en in welke mate die groep ontstaat en waar het “tipping point” ligt, is, aldus Speakman, vrijwel onbegonnen werk. Toch lijkt vooralsnog juist dáár de crux van het werken met verschillende aspecten van hybrid spaces te liggen.

EXPANDED CINEMA
Het liveprogramma in Paradiso deze avond staat voornamelijk in het teken van cinematografische werken. Zwaar conceptueel (Paul Sharits, Liz Rhodes) en museel (Beauvais, Moholy-Nagy) staan vrijwel contextloos in nevenschikking. De context zou gegeven moet zijn in het verruimen van de blik, van het filmische medium, van versneden tijd… Ruimtelijkheid en ingrijpen daarin ligt tactiel voor het oprapen bij Optical Machines dat met rasters en ‘kerstboom-verlichting’ een ingenieus lijnenspel projecteert. Helaas is de soundtrack weinig verheffend. Bovendien bekruipt je het gevoel dat er meer te peuren valt uit het an sich interessante gegeven van het live in 3D verschuiven van lichtval voor projectie in 2D op groot scherm. Vooral een narratief of een spanningsboog ontbreekt nog, waardoor de performance niet veel verder komt dan optical artachtige vlakkenspellen. Moholy-Nagy, Eggeling of Man Ray maakten hun films met min of meer dezelfde basistechnieken decennia geleden. Zoveel verder lijken we dus sindsdien niet gekomen, als je Optical Machines moet geloven. Quod non en alleen al daarom smeekt de spatiale projectie van dit jonge Nederlandse duo om een verdere verdieping, zowel visueel als muzikaal.

Van broekafzakkend allooi is de poehataal die Bruce McClure nodigt heeft in het Sonic Acts XIII-boekje om zijn PIE PELLICANE JESU DOMINAE te duiden. Een exercitie in uithoudingsvermogen zou ook volstaan hebben. Voor welgeteld zo’n vijf minuten is de flikkerende splice tussen verschillende filmfragmenten onderhoudend, over de volle lengte van maar liefst drie kwartier is het statement gemaakt en begrepen om tot vervelens toe door de strot geduwd te worden. Een weinig opbeurende soundtrack van in delay en distortion gedrenkte drones helpt daarbij ook niet. Waar de performance vooral faalt, is in het totaal uitblijven van enig waarneembaar, maar wel geclaimd zichtbaar effect van temporele asynchroniciteit als agent in het kader van dimensionale perceptie. Ook Light Trap van Greg Pope valt plat op het gezicht. Een sculptuur in licht wil maar niet ontstaan in de rook in de misschien wel te grote zaal. En om Gert-Jan Prins en zijn noise nu te omschrijven als één van de meest “challenging” geluidkunstenaars van Nederland te noemen, voert op basis van het vanavond gepresenteerde statische (power)noise-voor-dummies-werkstuk ook wel wat erg ver. Het is echter de muur aan bijna witte ruis die hij optrekt waar je tegenaan kunt leunen waardoor het werk nog enigszins een spatiale ingreep is. Voor het overige resteert vooral een “jammer” als conclusie.

De film van Beauvais zie je misschien liever op klein formaat in een museale omgeving, de concept art statements van Sharits lenen zich wellicht ook beter voor vertoning buiten het format van een grote concerthal, maar gelukkig redt één film vanavond met verve het gezicht van het Expanded Spaces-programma. Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis van Daichi Saïto laat in precies tien minuten en geruggensteund door door merg en been snijdend prachtige counterpoint viool patronen, dwarsverbanden, variaties en zinsbegoochelende verschuivingen van perspectief samenkomen vanuit een organisch gegeven van bomen, takken; een bos, naar flitsende en kleurrijke spatiale abstractie. Samen met Gill Heatherly’s Hand Grenade; een fraaie animatie voor drie vlakken op een Krautrocksoundtrack, gaat zo alsnog een wereld open in het thema van de expanded cinema.

Deep Spaces is all about the interplay between music and visuals. Fred Worden’s 11-minute film 1859 eschews sound. This experimental film is built out of a short clip of lens flare. At times the source material can be identified as such but Worden manipulates the dots into something truly cosmical: rotating molecules, unknown planetary systems and overwhelming suns that scorch the retina. The poetics of space as another term for psychedelia.

Next up are Thomas Köner and Jürgen Reble in another audiovisual collaboration. To be honest, for me this performance was the most conventional of the evening. I use the term conventional in a relative way, it felt as the most generic Sonic Acts performance. Köner’s artic music is as beautiful as ever but has over the years sadly grown into a well-worn format.  Materia Obscura at times possesses a strange beauty especially if you realize that what you expect to be purely digital constructions really is manipulated filmstock. There are plenty moments that deliberately make you wonder “am I seeing the birth of crystals? Are these African villages seen from above?” But overall there is something of a mineral Koyaanisqatsi feel about Materia Obscura.

Still In Cosmos, the collaboration between Makino Takashi and Jim O’Rourke was very well received by the audience and with good reason. Coming after Materia Obscura this piece seemed to answer the former’s detachment with forced immersion thanks to a continuous onslaught of skyscraping guitar (sounding as a compilation of bands ending their songs in feedback) and shifting visuals, so abstract that they cannot be put into words. Something sublime and ecstatic then: effective, powerful and unique.

Haswell & Hecker seem to slouch towards their equipment as if they just entered Paradiso from the street and bluffed their way in. That is just an impression because their performance of UPIC Diffusion Session #22 is very controlled and in spite of its piercing force quite beautiful. Of course their use of lasers is a masterstroke that enhances the at times overwhelming sounds. Something synergetic actually seems to take place. I am not sure if it is a space I want to live in but this performance seemed worthy of the visceral electronic lineage of Suicide and Pan Sonic.

The last performance has to wait until the midnight hour. With rights one should say as it gives some time to shift the audience. The influx of the regular clubbing crowd seems like an unusual move but in the end gives Monolake with Tarik Barri a broader audience that should be receptive to the slightly experimental yet pleasurable techno. Listening to Monolake live got me thinking of something I would like to dub the Avatar effect. Or the possibility of the Avatar effect, I am not sure Monolake is there yet. The Avatar effect is about making a technical jump within a discipline that threatens or succeeds in forming a new experience. The sound design of Monolake is probably the best I have ever heard in 20 years of techno. Every detail is heard, the smallest blip, the lowest roar. But the strange thing is that the volume made it into an oppressive experience. Monolake live nowadays are state of the art and chances are this setup will gain popularity. Understandable as one rightfully seeks to enhance the technology of sound, and yet I wonder if techno does not lose something with this newfound clarity. The old cavernous sound, woozy and wooly, seems to belong to another domain, of dreams, labyrinths and ecstasies.

Omar Muñoz Cremers

When over here at The Mobile City we talk about Hybrid Space, we usually refer to the work of Adriana de Souza e Silva who in several articles has convincingly argued against the dichotomy between physical or real space on the one hand and virtual or mediated  spaces on the other. The very fact that these two can longer be separated is one of the central themes of The Mobile City: media spaces and virtual networks extend, broaden, filter or restrict the experience of  physical spaces, and the other way around.

Interestingly, over at Sonic Acts they have adopted a broader concept of hybridization. Moderator Eric Kluitenberg explained that hybrid space is not a technical concept. Rather hybridization is about heterogenic logics that are simultaneously at work in the same space. For instance there is the top down logic of the build environment developed by the architect. But the same space may also be subjected to the logic of an informal street economy that may or may not be compatible with the ideas operationalized by the architect. The mediated experiences of the mediascape make up only one of the logics that operate in a space. Sometimes these different logics clash, sometimes they overlap, sometimes they just negate each other. However, we should understand all these different logics as real. They are all operative at the same time and together make up how a place is lived and experienced.

Having said that, the addition of the new media technologies such as mobile phones has increased the density of different logics operational in (urban) space, and new cultural practices and adaptations of space are emerging as a result. This makes the urban experience more complex and messier than ever. It’s even doubtful whether we can truly get a grasp on these processes. What we can do is try to increase our sensitivity of the complexity of different logics at work. It was this issue that most of the presentations in this session addressed.

Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob

The work of sound artist Duncan Speakman, who discussed his subtlemob-project, addressed several aspects of the hybridization of space through the advent of digital media technologies.

A Subtlemob is a collective urban audio-experience set in urban space. Participants download an mp-3 file, head to a location in the city, and at a particular time they all press play at the same time, thereby collectively experiencing the same soundtrack. The soundtrack does not only consist of music but also of spoken instructions that the participants have to carry out (And sometimes there is different instructions for different groups of participants). It is like a flash-mob, yet more subtle. That is: flash mobs are often staged experiences that gain most of their audience and impact not at the moment itself, but because the event is taped on video and broadcasted on Youtube. A subtlemob is only to be experienced live, there are no recordings, it is all about the experience you have when you are there. You just have to be there to get it.

Continue Reading at The Mobile City Website

De dertiende editie van de Sonic Acts conferentie en het bijbehorende festival staat in het teken van de ruimtelijkheid in de kunst(en); in het bijzonder de filmische en geluidskunst. Hoe definieert ruimte en ruimtelijkheid een kunstwerk? Wat ervaart een toeschouwer of luisteraar vis-a-vis ruimte en ruimtelijkheid? Welke rol spelen technologische ontwikkelingen hierin? Een paar van de vragen die in lezingen en installaties, naast een uitgebreid avondprogramma centraal in meer of mindere mate de revue passeren tijdens Sonic Acts XIII -The Poetics of Space.

OPENING
Krap bemeten en bloedhete ruimte drukt de bezoeker al bij de opening met de neus op het feit van de beperkingen van een te kleine zaal voor de lezing door Brandon LaBelle. Hij schreef onder andere het zeer geslaagde Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. Hij mag dan ook gelden als een logische keuze als inleider en gever van de aftrap in het Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst (NIMk). Helaas is de belangstelling voor zijn voordracht zo groot dat al zo’n uur voor aanvang het zaaltje volstroomt. Als LaBelle begint, gaan de deuren dicht en staan vele bezoekers ietwat beteuterd in de gang. Een mooie kans om een blik te werpen op het volle programma, dat wel. Tegelijk natuurlijk een ironische miskleun wanneer een conferentie en festival die beide ruimte tot thema verheffen al bij de opening te kampen hebben met gebrek daaraan.

EXPOSITIE NIMk
In hetzelfde NIMk presenteert Sonic Acts gelukkig ook een expositie van werken die in beeld en geluid ruimte tastbaar maken of bevragen. Carlo Bernardi’s The Light That Generates Space begint al buiten het pand, loopt ogenschijnlijk dwars door muren heen en brengt zodoende en met de subtiliteit van tegen wanden of net erachter ricocherende lichtlijnen buiten en binnen samen en in een lange gang wordt zonder optisch illusie de langgerektheid benadrukt en tegelijk uitgebreid tot een grotere ruimte voorbij de architectuur. Met datzelfde gegeven speelt ook de aftastende en ogenschijnlijk zichzelf in een flits ‘resettende’ projectie Blink van Hans Christian Gilje.

In een verduisterde ruimte schijnt slechts één spot. Een ideale locatie voor solo contemplatie en meditatie op het gepresenteerde geluid van Jacob Kirkegaards Labyrinthitis, maar de aanwezigheid van in-en-uitlopers bemoeilijkt het geheel ondergaan van de klanken helaas nogal. De presentatie van dit werk in een spiraal van speakers in een koepel spreekt bovendien meer tot de verbeelding. Ontegenzeglijk echter bespeelt Kirkegaard het binnenoor dat zelf een deel van de tonen gaat produceren waarmee het geluid in die minuscule
binnenwereld aan ruimte fraai geïnternaliseerd wordt.

Een beklemmende vorm van externalisering presenteert Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag met zijn GAMMAvert #2 an X-Seascape. Straling die van een foto komt wordt opgepikt en omgezet in een clicks. Staane golven interfereren door de ruimte en klinken op plekken hard, op andere zacht of vrijwel helemaal niet. Gepaard aan één-frequent groen licht verwordt de op zich grote ruimte zo tot een unheimliche plek waarin golven hoorbaar tastbaar gemaakt worden.

De expositie is ook na Sonic Acts XIII nog een tijd te bezoeken. Hopelijk is dan de lucht van net aangebrachte muurverf opgetrokken die nu onbedoeld een extra en niet bepaald prettig stemmende sensatie aan de beleving van deze ruimten toevoegt.

DEEP SPACES
Ademhaling en microgeluiden in akoestische blaasinstrumenten, improv-noise en abstracte interferentie in hypnotiserende visuals op een aantal televisieschermen figureren in de performance van Keith Rowe, Kjell Bjorgeengen en Streifenjunko waarmee de Paradiso-avond van start gaat. Knarsend minimalisme in een complexe feedback tussen akoetische en elektronische instrumenten levert een klankbeeld op dat laveert tussen wijds en open enerzijds en verdicht en massief aan de andere kant. Stiekem lag de lat van de verwachtingen voor wat betreft improvmeester Rowe wellicht net een tandje hoger.

Fred Wordens film 1859 daarentegen gaat voorbij enige verwachtingen door het gegeven van lensschitteringen te extrapoleren tot een elf minuten durend “ballet” voor zalvende lichtbeelden. De montage van stills suggereert een doorlopende beweging, ook van en naar het objectief van de opnamen. Stilstand verwordt zo tot een presentatie van ruimte in niets dan schittering en licht waarin de camera/toeschouwer rondwaart.

De weg kwijt raken kan ook gemakkelijk in Makino Takashi’s Still in Cosmos. De heftige sequentie aan beelden in een ogenschijnlijk overvloedige lading chaotische abstractie roept referenties op richting Jackson Pollock, maar is per se en ten diepste non-performatief. Takashi’s avant-garde film laat de maker verdwijnen achter een overdosis aan visuele input die menselijkheid en bio-organische maat lijkt te ontberen. Dit gegeven wordt met meesterlijke hand gekoppeld aan Jim O’Rourke’s ziedende noise-soundtrack die wel degelijk overduidelijk man-made is, zich laat meeslepen in opwinding en in gierende feedback en staalplaatpercussie juist wel performativiteit tot focus heeft. De bezwering van deze ogenschijnlijke spagaat ligt in de nieuwe visuele kosmos die Takashi oproept en de bijkans aardse oerkrachtnoise van O’Rourke. Gezamenlijk wordt zo een bloedstollend spannende nieuwe ruimtelijke visuele en auditieve orde als een Golem uit een niets in het midden tot leven gewekt.

Alchemistich zou je ook Materia Obscura van Reble & Köhner kunnen noemen. Stills van chemogrammen op groot scherm brengen meditatieve sferen boven, geruggensteund door klanken die van zachte ambient naar staande golven auditieve perceptie op de korrel nemen. Het langzame spel van Köhners muziek tegen de opeenvolging van 25.000 stills levert een duet in abstractie op. Tegelijk is het beeld steeds organisch van aard, hoe uitvergroot en daardoor ogenschijnlijk losgezongen van een gegeven dat je makkelijk kunt plaatsen ook. Intense kleuren en een verbijsterende hoeveelheid detail houden de kijker in de greep. Gedachten dwalen opvallend genoeg niet af, daarvoor is de kleurenpracht te overweldigend en indringend. Een vlucht vogels, een reptielenoog, een stuk smeulend papier; de weinige direct tastbare visuele gegevens ten midden van een virtuele nieuwe wereld, voorheen en na afloop onbekend en onkenbaar. De scheppingshandeling voltrekt zich voor je oog en oor in licht met als belangrijkste acteur technieken die bekend zijn van bijvoorbeeld Sigmar Polke, nu ingezet om een vista te openen op een ruimtelijkheid die de projectie zelf ver overstijgt.

Lange rijen op de trap naar de bovenzaal voor Alexander McCalls enigmatische A Line Describing a Cone, lange rijen ook buiten Paradiso voor aanvang van Monolake wanneer het vaste donderdagavonduitgaanspubliek (inclusief wat men tegenwoordig geloof ik kakelende Breezersletjes noemt en puberende hormonenstormen). Eerst is het nog de beurt aan Haswell & Hecker. De overweldigende lasershow ontlokt het publiek vreugdekreetjes en scant vaardig de ruimte en snijvlakken in een met rook gevuld “niets” dat je altijd omringt. Het geluid waaiert langs de extremiteiten van het geluidspectrum, opent en sluit zich om je heen in surround, maar het lichtspel en de muziek lopen teveel langs elkaar heen om een onvergetelijke indruk achter te laten. De novelty-SF factor die lasers blijkbaar nog steeds hebben, wint het dan ook met een straatlengte voorsprong van de conceptuele uitdaging die er ligt in muziek gegenereerd door grafische input en vice versa. De lasers brengen de discosfeer echter al nadrukkelijk dichtbij, waarmee de opmaat voor een lange en ongetwijfeld hete dansnacht gegeven is.

WORM.shop is part of WORM, a Rotterdam-based organization for music, film and media old and new: www.wormshop.nl

Sonic Hub offers an opportunity for people from media arts and culture in the Netherlands and beyond to meet, present, exchange and discuss their projects, be it labels, festivals, magazines or spaces, in an informal setting at De Balie. If you want to participate, please register at social@sonicacts.com

Launch Tubelight Special

Sonic Hub kicks off with the presentation of a Tubelight special devoted to digital arts. This special issue is the result of the Masterclass Kunstkritiek, a masterclass for critical writing on digital arts, organized by Virtueel Platform, Tubelight and Domein voor Kunstkritiek in 2009/10.

This presentation will be in Dutch.

Creative Dimensions of Space

The STEIM Jamboree sessions are something in between a conference, expert meeting and a salon that deal with specific themes. For this edition we take the opportunity to work with Sonic Acts Festival to host two sessions on aspects of space that we are particularly interested in. The whole event is limited to 30 participants to encourage in-depth discussions.

Session 1: STEIM Sonic Acts Residency
Hans W. Koch: Two Rooms Flipped – sound installation for two remote spaces, flipped
Yutaka Makino: Conflux – live performance for sound, light and fog

Through the collaboration with Sonic Acts XIII we have invited two artists to work at STEIM for 3 weeks to create new art work. Hans W. Koch and Yutaka Makino both cross seamlessly between performance, composition, installation and technology. They will talk about the process of their residency as well as touching upon their general practice as interdisciplinary artists. Both of their work will be shown every day during the festival period of Feb 26 – 28.

Sonic Acts presents a number of games that play with the conventional experience of space in Paradiso. Usually the games industry strives for a visually realistic rendering of space, believing that this enhances the realistic game experience for the players. A better experience of space is equated with having more polygons. Sonic Acts presents games that break radically with this idea.

Jonatan ‘Cactus’ Söderström
Cactus Arcade

A collection of short and small games, each of which in their own way undermine all the conventions and clichés of computer games.

Jonatan ‘Cactus’ Söderström (SW) specializes in developing games of an experimental nature. His use of bizarre plots, new game mechanics or strange graphics guarantees that players will always encounter the unusual and unpredictable.

JoDi
Wolfenstein 3D

A classic art game hack, in which all the visual elements of the 3D computer game Wolfenstein 3D are replaced by simple graphic black and white lines and surfaces.

JoDi is a collective of Joan Heemskerk (NL) and Dirk Paesmans (BE). They started creating original artworks for the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, and soon turned to software art and artistic computer game modification. They disassemble games to their basic parts, and reassemble them in ways that do not make intuitive sense.

NIMk houses the main Sonic Acts exhibition comprising spatial audiovisual and interactive installations, classic video art, light sculptures and sound works that explore different ways of experiencing space.

On Thursday 25 February the festival kicks off with the opening of the exhibition at NIMk, where works of HC Gilje, Carlo Bernardini, Ralf Baecker, Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag, Yoko Semaya,Jacob Kirkegaard and others can be seen, heard and experienced. At this occasion Brandon LaBelle will perform his lecture Q&A, or the further adventures of a sonic body.

Hans Christian Gilje
Blink

HC Gilje’s Blink investigates how audiovisual techniques and light can transform, enlarge, enhance and interpret physical spaces.

HC Gilje (NO) creates installations, live performances and videos. He was also a member of the video-improv trio 242.pilots.

Jacob Kirkegaard
Labyrinthitis

Labyrinthitis (2007) relies on a principle that when two frequencies of a certain ratio are played into the ear, additional vibrations generated in the inner ear, so-called ‘distortion product otoacoustic emission’ or ‘Tartini tone’, will produce a third frequency…
Commissioned by Medical Museion in Copenhagen, Summer 2007

Jacob Kirkegaard’s (DK) work focuses on the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and hearing. His installations, compositions and performances deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible. Kirkegaard uses unorthodox recording devices to capture and contextualize hitherto unheard sounds from within a variety of environments: a geyser, a sand dune, a nuclear power plant, an empty room, and even sounds from the human inner ear itself.

Ralf Baecker
Rechnender Raum

Rechnender Raum (2009) is a light-emitting geometrical sculpture made of sticks, wires and small pieces of lead that is simultaneously a fully functioning neural network. The functioning of the machine is completely transparent, but it carries out its computations only for itself, concealing the results.

Ralf Baecker (DE) builds kinetic installations and sculptures that deconstruct the fundamentals of symbolic processes.

Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag
GAMMAvert #2 an X-seascape (1998–2006)

A photograph of a seascape, developed using uranium nitrate, a substance that emits gamma waves. The room is flooded with standing waves and a monochrome green glow, formed by a single light frequency, an allusion to the famous ‘green ray’ described by Jules Verne: a flash of green light that, on rare occasions, appears on the ocean horizon at sunset.

Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag (DE) has an academic background in instrumental music, fine art, art history (new media), music theory, composition, philosophy and cognitive science. He has mostly focused on site-specific installations based on sound and biomass but also specifically on monochrome gas discharge light.

Carlo Bernardini
The Light that Generates Space

A sculptural light installation (2010) made of optic fibres that takes over the space and passes through walls, combining the external and internal environments in a single mental drawing, creating a place where light generates space.

Carlo Bernardini is an Italian artist who makes abstract light installations using, among others, optical fibres and electro-luminescent materials.

Yoko Seyama
This Light Work #6

This Light Work #6 (2009) is an installation inspired by the life of cicadas. Cicadas are known for their transparent wings and high pitched buzzing, they live underground as nymphs for most of their lives, feeding on root juice and using their strong front legs for digging. One summer day, the nymphs emerge from the soil and climb up a branch to metamorphosize….

Yoko Seyama (JP) is a scenographer and media artist. She concentrates on scenography for time-based art and combines digital materials (video/photo) with real materials (fabrics/paper/elastics), processing these into spatial installations.

Nan Hoover
Impressions

A long, narrow streak of light falls across the screen, a hand plays through it. Now the volume of the hand breaks the light, then again the light remains intact. The spot of light becomes an object that can be lengthened by means of the index finger. It is almost as if the finger is drawing a ray of light. (1978, 10’24”)

Nan Hoover (1931–2008) Hoover started experimenting with video as an extension of her painting practice and as a documentary medium in 1973. Her videos often explore a visual ambiguity between the body and the landscape, or between abstract and ‘natural’ forms.

Steina Vasulka
Somersault

Somersault is an exercise in the phenomenology of vision and the redefinition of space. Steina Vasulka uses mechanized devices to generate an artificial vision that alters the viewers’ perceptions and spatial perspectives. (1982, 5’30”)

Steina Vasulka’s (IS/US) video works are considered landmarks in video art. The pieces often treat the video signal as a plastic medium, and rework the space of the video image in ways that alter the viewer’s optical perception of the image, confounding the ability to distinguish between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space.

EXHIBITION OPENING TIMES

Opening Thursday 25 February 17:00 – 19:00
Special opening times during the festival:
26 February 11:00-20:00, 27 February 13:00-20:00, 28 Feb 13:00-18:00
Regular opening times:
Tuesday – Friday 11:00-18:00, Saturday & first Sunday of each month from 13:00-18:00

The exhibition will run on until 2 May 2010.

SOLD OUT!

An extraordinary programme in a remarkable location: the Beyond Space event in the Planetarium at the Amsterdam Zoo (Artis) includes the international premiere of a composition by the recently deceased innovative composer Maryanne Amacher in acknowledgement of her lifelong dedication to her craft; a new audiovisual work by the Italian multi-talent TeZ; Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand explore the potential of laser and light projections on the Planetarium dome and on soap bubbles, accompanied by live audio by Francisco López; and the British designer Paul Prudence guides the visitors through a visual spectacle specially designed for the Planetarium dome.

Tribute to Maryanne Amacher

PlayThing

Introduction by Naut Humon

A fifty minute experiential audio archive designed and played live for the ages by Maryanne Amacher for Recombinant Media Labs. Over a period of several residencies Maryanne Amacher has been working on a 12 channel composition for the Recombinant Media Labs audiovisual surround environment. The work is keenly representative of the live performances that she has been giving in the recent years and was close to completion when she passed away. For Sonic Acts, Edwin van der Heide and Naut Humon will present an 8 channel, audio only, adaptation of her live to disk composition. Both Humon and Van der Heide have been working closely with Maryanne Amacher. They have finished the work according to Maryanne’s approach to sound and space. The original engineer on the project when it was started in 1999 was Vance Galloway who has recently re consulted us on the work’s initial spatial correlations. Greg Lenczycki has assisted Naut Humon in LA to refurbish her live sessions to a digitally restored playback source. Ambrose Field is a spatial re-interpreter for the Maryanne ‘module’ channel count which enables a version of her live mix to be decoded to variable speaker output setups in different auditoriums.

Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009) was an American composer and installation artist with a unique approach to sound and space. She worked extensively with the physiological phenomenon called otoacoustic emission, in which the ears themselves act as sound generating devices. Amongst her many projects, she had been working for three years on a 40-channel piece at the time of her passing. More information about Maryanne Amacher can be found here.

Naut Humon (US) is the founder of Recombinant Media Labs and was head of A&R for Asphodel Records, both based in San Francisco. During the 1970s he presented a series of events that transported the audience through various indoor/outdoor sites, and interrupted the process of moving with ‘destabilized’ media occurrences designed to repurpose the visitor’s frame of reference from the prevailing performance proximities of the day. Later activities emphasized a strong musical foundation with tactile instrumentation and audio/video technologies that focus the perceptions of the viewer on the physicalization of form. He also helped coordinate the Digital Music category at the ARS Electronica Festival for ten years. Throughout the years, along with his own electroacoustic excursions and products Naut Humon has collaborated with many artists and musicians of numerous influences, disciplines and styles.

Edwin van der Heide (NL) studied Sonology at the Royal Conservatory, where he graduated in 1992. He is working as artist and researcher in the field of sound, space and interaction. His current work is hard to define in the traditional terms of music, sound art or media art because he often works with specific characteristics a chosen medium. The medium is not meant to ‘just’ mediate but its properties become an intrinsic part of the work. Van der Heide extends the term musical language into spatial, interactive and interdisciplinary directions and goes beyond the traditional concert presentation form. The result can either be an installation, a performance or an environment. Often the audience is placed in the middle of the work and challenged to actively explore, interact and relate themselves to the work. In 1995 he started lecturing at the interfaculty Image and Sound / ArtScience of the Royal Conservatory and the Royal Arts Academy in The Hague, The Netherlands. Since 2002 he lectures at the Media Technology MSc program of Leiden University, The Netherlands. In 2007 he became an assistant professor at the same institution.

Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand with Francisco López
Ten Thousand Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid

In Ten Thousand Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid, Domnitch and Gelfand use a white laser to scan the surfaces of nucleating and dissipating soap bubble clusters. Unlike ordinary light, the laser’s focused beam is capable of crawling through the microscopic structures within a bubble’s skin. When aimed at specific angles, this penetrating light generates a large-scale hemispherical projection of molecular interactions as well as mind-boggling phenomena of non-linear optics. Bubble behaviours viewed in such proximity evoke the dynamics of living cells (the lipid membranes of which, are direct chemical descendants of soap films). In collaboration with sound artist Francisco López, they employ direct membrane sonification as well as incidental and improvisational techniques. Emanating from a prolific palette of field recordings, the organic materiality of López’s sound environment incites a saturated cross-sensory coalescence with Domnitch and Gelfand’s proto-biotic imagery.

Dmitry Gelfand (RU) and Evelina Domnitch (BY) create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. They have collaborated with numerous scientific research facilities to create installations that exist as ever-transforming phenomena that take place directly in front of the observer without intermediation, thereby often serving to vastly extend the observer’s sensory envelope.

Francisco López (ES) has developed an astonishing sonic universe based on a profound listening of the world. His extensive catalogue of sound pieces have been released by more than 200 record labels worldwide.

TeZ
Anharmonium

Modal phenomena – in nature – occur as interactions between different oscillating systems, producing mutual perturbations and deviations from gravitational and electromagnetic linear behaviours. The interferences patterns produced by such meeting of forces and energies form the beautiful diversity of shaped matter at any possible state of motion. Only a small range of this beauty falls under the spectrum of ordinary sensorial perception. Aiming to explore the allure of these hidden fluctuations, Anharmonium combines techniques of cymatics and laser to create a magnified vibrational spectroscopy. A mirror vessel, with fluid set into resonant motion by a sound transducer, acts as a cupular light reflector and projector from laser beamsʼ sources. The live composition unfolds in a spatialized sound and light performance where the spectator is immersed in a deeply synesthetic experience.

Artist and producer TeZ (Maurizio Martinucci, IT/NL) uses technology as a means to explore synesthesia and the relationship between sound and images. He creates immersive installations and performances.

Paul Prudence
RyNTH

RyNTH uses parameters from real-time sound analysis to generate transformations and deformations of the ‘superformula’ (a generic geometric transformation equation that encompasses a wide range forms found in nature). Its dynamic surface texture is generated by incoming audio frequencies resulting in a kind of synesthetic surface tension and modulation. The result morphing geometric construction pays homage to gyroscopic devices and anti-gravity mechanics. The periodicity of the individual elements in RyNTH, and their harmonic relationships with respect to sound alludes to the ancient concept of ‘The Music of the Spheres’.

Paul Prudence (UK) is a writer, reseacher and a visual performer who works with generative/computational systems, audio responsive visual feedback and processed video.

Visitors enter a dark space and are confronted with recordings of thunderstorms and the sound of airplanes taking off, fragmented urban sound structures, singing deserts, and underwater or underground recordings. This more than four-hour-long programme is devoted to various approaches to soundscape composition and features works produced by several generations of composers and musicians – from acoustic ecology to extreme field recordings. The spatial aspects of sound are showcased in the compositions, and space is made audible by means of spatial speaker arrangements and multi-channel sound.

Annea Lockwood
Thirst

Annea Lockwood’s 6 channel electroacoustic composition, Thirst, counterpoints tension and serenity, swinging between Grand Central Station in New York at the ‘high tide’ of rush hour, and the Lebanese sculptor, Simone Fattal’s memories of her family home’s courtyard in Damascus – a place of sensory richness and peace. Such memories provide a refuge for the mind from the pervasive noise of crisis which surrounds us now. A Serbian song, sung by Kristin Norderval, threads through the piece.

Annea Lockwood (NZ) is known for her explorations of the rich world of natural acoustic sounds and environments, in works ranging from sound art and installations, through text-sound and performance art to concert music. She has written for a number of ensembles and solo performers, and created pieces for surround-sound installations like A Sound Map of the Danube.

Barry Truax
Chalice Well

Chalice Well is a holy well situated at the foot of Glastonbury Tor in southwest England, thought to be originally the island of Avalon from Arthurian legend, and the site where Joseph of Arimathea placed the chalice known as the Holy Grail. According to legend, the Tor, a masculine symbol, is hollow underneath and the entrance to the underworld, guarded by the Grail. The well, on the other hand, is a symbol of the feminine aspect of deity, and its waters are believed to possess healing qualities. This soundscape composition takes the listener on an imaginary journey down into the well, passing through several cavernous chambers on its descent, filled with rushing and trickling water, including the chamber of the feminine spirit. The journey continues to the glass chamber, then to the gates of the underworld, only to be confronted by the image of the Grail, and finally coming to rest in the space where wind and water, the masculine and the feminine, are combined. Chalice Well was premiered in the Sonic Lab of the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) in Belfast, in March, 2009 on their 32-speaker rig positioned on four different vertical levels, above and below the audience.

Barry Truax (CA) a Professor in both the School of Communication and the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University where he teaches courses in acoustic communication and electroacoustic music. He has worked with the World Soundscape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, and has published a book Acoustic Communication dealing with all aspects of sound and technology. As a composer, Truax is best known for his work with the PODX computer music system which he has used for tape solo works and those which combine tape with live performers or computer graphics. A selection of these pieces may be heard on the Compact Discs Digital Soundscapes, Pacific Rim, Song of Songs, Inside, Twin Souls, Islands, and Spirit Journies, all on the Cambridge Street Records label, plus the double CD of the opera Powers of Two. In 1991 his work, Riverrun, was awarded the Magisterium at the International Competition of Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, France, a category open only to electroacoustic composers of 20 or more years experience.

Jacob Kirkegaard
Sabulation

‘He tried thinking of something else. When he closed his eyes, a number of long lines, flowing like sighs, came floating toward him. They were ripples of sand moving over the dunes. The dunes were probably burned onto his retina because he had been gazing steadily at them for some twelve hours. The same sand currents had swallowed up and destroyed flourishing cities and great empires. They called it the ‘sabulation’ of the Roman Empire…’—Kobe Abe, Woman in the Dunes, 1962.
This piece consists of sound and video footage of the so-called Singing Sands or Booming Dunes in the deserts of Oman.

Jacob Kirkegaard (DK) is a Danish artist who focuses on the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and hearing. His installations, compositions and performances deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible. Using unorthodox recording tools, including accelerometers, hydrophones and home-built electromagnetic receivers, Kirkegaard captures and contextualizes hitherto unheard sounds from within a variety of environments: a geyser, a sand dune, a nuclear power plant, an empty room, a TV tower, and even sounds from the human inner ear itself. Now based in Berlin, he is a graduate of the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne, Germany and has given lectures and workshops in institutions such as the Royal Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen and the Art Institute of Chicago. Over the last fourteen years, Kirkegaard has presented his works at exhibitions and at festivals and conferences throughout the world. He has released five albums (mostly on the British label Touch). Among his numerous collaborators are JG Thirlwell, Ann Lislegaard, CM von Hausswolff and Lydia Lunch.

Hildegard Westerkamp
Into the Labyrinth

Into the Labyrinth is a sonic journey into aspects of India’s culture. It occurs on the edge between dream and reality, in the same way in which many visitors, myself included, experience this country. Nothing ever happens according to pre-determined plans or expectations. Although travellers usually do reach their destination somehow, the journey itself – full of continuous surprises and unexpected turns – becomes the real place of experience. In composing this piece, I was challenging my own compositional process as it has developed over the last 25 years: just as India has challenged many of my Western Eurocentric values and turned them upside-down, so has this piece challenged my preconceived notions of the creative process. From the start I had the image of entering a labyrinth of a multitude of sounds and sonic experiences. I had made no plans for the piece other than letting the recorded sounds move me through a compositional journey into an unknown sonic labyrinth. Obviously my experiences of travelling in India and of recording the sounds played a significant role in the formation of this piece. But I could never be sure of where I was going and where I would end up. I worked on it continuously as if on a 15-day journey, where the journey itself became the centre of experience. The composition simply is a result of that experience.

Into the Labyrinth was commissioned by New Adventures in Sound with the assistance of the Canada Council and was realized in the Electronic Music Studio of the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Many thanks to Darren Copeland for giving me this opportunity to explore composition for 8-channel diffusion. I would also like to thank Savinder Anand, Mona Madan, Arun Patak, Veena Sharma and her mother Mrs. Goyal, Situ Singh-Bühler and Virinder Singh for taking me to the places where the sounds and soundscapes for this composition were recorded. Without their help and local knowledge I would have had a difficult time gathering them on tape. Many thanks go to Max Mueller Bhavan (Goethe Institut Delhi) for inviting me to India in the first place and giving me the opportunity to meet and work with those who have become my Indian friends. Listening to India together has deepened our understanding of each other and our cultures’ differences.
Into the Labyrinth is dedicated to my daughter Sonja, who courageously travelled through India by herself and emerged enriched from a labyrinth of new and complex experiences.

Hildegard Westerkamp (DE/CA) was born in Osnabrück, Germany in 1946 and emigrated to Canada in 1968. After completing her music studies in the early seventies Westerkamp joined the World Soundscape Project under the direction of Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver. Her involvement with this project not only activated deep concerns about noise and the general state of the acoustic environment, but it also changed her ways of thinking about music, listening and soundmaking. Her ears were drawn to the acoustic environment as another cultural context or place for intense listening. While completing her Master’s Thesis she also taught courses in Acoustic Communication together with colleague Barry Truax in the School of Communication at SFU until 1990. Since then she has written additional articles and texts addressing issues of the soundscape and listening. She is a founding member and is currently active on the board of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE). as well as the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology (CASE). Between 1991 and 1995 she was the editor of The Soundscape Newsletter and is now on the editorial committee of Soundscape – The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, a new publication of the WFAE.

Gilles Aubry
Grrounding

Grrounding is a new live set by Gilles Aubry based on sound recordings collected at several European airports. The title refers to a dramatic moment of Swiss history, as in 2001 the national Swissair Airlines Company went bankrupt due to its corrupt management. The performance is an immersion into the broadband sounds of reactors and the menacing atmosphere of tarmacs. Aubry writes: ‘Grrounding is new chapter in my sonic explorations of specific spaces. While the inside of airports have become entirely controlled spaces with specific light and acoustic design, the few dozen meters that one need sometimes to walk from the gate to the inside of the aircraft provide a radically different experience. One can hear and feel the sound of airplanes, their size and movements, the air, the light, the temperature and the vastness of a place which has obviously not been conceived for pedestrians. As a frequent flyer I’ve recorded some of these moments and started to imagine how a longer stay there might feel like.’

Gilles Aubry (CH) is a Swiss sound artist and musician living in Berlin since 2002. He uses environmental recordings, computer programming, surround sound technology and improvisation to create live performances, sound installations, CDs and radio pieces. His work is informed by personal investigations on formal, perceptual and anthropological aspects of sound production and reception, including auditory perception, cultural acoustics, space representation and history of sound technologies. Recent realizations include Berlin Backyards (2007, audio piece awarded at the Phonurgia Nova Competition’07), Modulor (2008, sound installation at Singuhr Galery, Berlin), Outside of the Plane (2008, sound installation for the Cairoscape Exhibition, Kunstraum Bethanien, Berlin), Planes (2009, sound installation for the Laptopia Sound Exhibition, BatYam Museum, Tel Aviv) and Les Ecoutis le Caire (2009, audio piece premiered on Deutschland Radio).

Éric La Casa
Les Pierres du Seuil

Composed between 1998 and 2001, Les Pierres du Seuil (the stones of the threshold) is a series exclusively based on field recordings. Parts 4 and 5 are one continuous movement of water sounds. From the rumour of a storm to lightning – a space symphony of rain (part 4). From a subterranean spring to the powerful North Sea – dynamics of fluids into landscapes (part5).

Éric La Casa (FR) is a sound artist who lives and works in Paris. For fifteen years or so, his musical practice has been a series of experimentations / improvisations with the sonic locale. As it passes through his microphones, the site of the survey – everyday life – is transformed into a site of play. The dimensions of the real world generate sonic representations whose proportions found another perspective on the world. The propagation of sound in a locale is a complex vibratory / undulatory phenomenon which involves acoustic measurement just as much as it involves aesthetic appreciation. How to account for the size of things by their sonic properties? Beyond technical protocol, listening becomes tied up in the surfaces of the world. Recordings, sonic readings, open out into a musical form which reactivates a perception of that which surrounds us, whether visible or not; a reinjection.

BJ Nilsen
Solid Curtain

The sounds produced by thunder have been categorized into recognizable terms. Claps are sudden loud sounds lasting 0.2 to 2 seconds. Peals are sounds changing frequency or amplitude. Rolls are irregular sound variances. Rumbles are of long duration but relatively low in frequency. Close-in lightning has been described first as a clicking or cloth-tearing sound, then a cannon shot sound or loud crack/snap, followed by continuous rumbling. BJ Nilsen presents a performance based on these sounds.

BJ Nilsen (SE) is a sound and recording artist, who has released works in various constellations since 1990. His works focus on the sound of nature and its effect on humans, field recordings and the perception of time and space as experienced through sound, often electronically treated. He has worked for documentary film and television and as a sound engineer.

Yolande Harris
Fishing for Sound

A sea of spatial connections between phenomena underwater, in themind, and from outer-space. The performance weaves sounds fromscientific analysis of marine environments, sounds used inpsychological treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, and sonified data from satellites orbiting the Earth. All share in a mass of background noise, sounding in the contexts of environment, memory and information. Listening in these spaces is like fishing for sounds.

Yolande Harris (UK) uses her performances, installations and instruments to investigate how we use sound to relate to our surroundings, both architectural and ecological. Her current research/practice considers the musical potential of sound worlds outside the human hearing range, through underwater bioacoustics and the sonification of data.

Ji Youn Kang, Alo Allik, Olivier Messiaen
WFS programme

Wave Field Synthesis is a specific technique for spatializing sound, which only recently became available to composers. The array of 192 speakers plus 8 subwoofers, built for the Game of Life Foundation, provides a platform for composers to experiment with spatial sound. This system is installed in the Small Hall in the Paradiso, where compositions by Ji youn Kang, Alo Allik, and Olivier Messiaen can be heard.

The Expanded Space programme revisits the heyday of Expanded Cinema. The 1970s saw a short-lived flourishing of artists and filmmakers who literally thought outside the box when it came to filmmaking, and who discarded the established rules about film (re)presentation and investigated all possible approaches to screening films. These ranged from projections on multiple screens to projections void of imagery that only used the light source from the projector as the subject. With performances and films by Paul Sharits, Lis Rhodes, Takashi Ito, Yann Beauvais, Daïchi Saïto, Bruce McClure, Greg Pope, Optical Machines, Gill Eatherley and László Moholy-Nagy.

László Moholy-Nagy
Lichtspiel Schwarz-Weiß-Grau

Light flashes, moving, blinding. Whirling spirals, which always return. All solid shapes dissolve into light.

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was a Jewish-Hungarian painter, sculptor, designer, photographer, filmmaker, teacher and theoretician, as well as a professor of the Bauhaus school. Influenced by constructivism, he was an advocate of the integration of technology into the arts.

Yann Beauvais
RR

The viewer sees two images functioning as each other’s reflected image, constituting a panoramic and abstract film.

Yann Beauvais (FR) is a filmmaker, teacher, film critic and co-founder of the experimental film distributor Light Cone. His work is deeply influenced by Russian formalism and minimal structuralism.

Gill Eatherley
Hand Grenade

A short, energetic extravagant three-screen colour film, based on B&W source material that is orchestrated to accompany the music.

Gill Eatherley (UK) studied at various art academies in Britain. Her Expanded Cinema performances and film installations have been widely exhibited.

Optical Machines
(SHIFT)

(SHIFT) is true live performance, an abstract play of light images that are generated, manipulated, mixed and projected on the spot using homemade equipment.

Optical Machines (NL) consists of Rikkert Brok (visuals) and Maarten Halmans (audio) who work with an open set-up that invites the audienceto their laboratory-like playground. Their tools include modified record players, pattern models, lamps, lenses, cameras, customized projectors and self-made analogue synthesizers.

Takashi Ito
Spacy

A Möbius strip, an Escher film at Japanese tempo, from slow to fast, from pianissimo to fortissimo.

Takashi Ito (JP) is one of the leading experimental filmmakers of Japan. His intention is to draw the audience into a vortex of supernatural illusion by exercising the magic of film.

Paul Sharits
Color Sound Frames

Color Sound Frame is a film about a film and the kind of illusions that can result as the film’s concrete properties create abstractions.

Paul Sharits (1943–93) was an avant-garde filmmaker noted for manipulating film stock itself to create a variety of fascinating, abstract interplays of light and colour when projected on the screen.

Bruce McClure
PIE PELLICANE JESU DOMINAE: And After Several Rapid Strokes of Their Wings

As each projector sets bi-packed film loops into motion, achronicity is chronicled away. Footage from Birds of Northern Places, a 1950s nature documentary is centrifuged, drawing out sequences in space that evidence time displacement as a primary agent in dimensional perception.

Bruce McClure (US) works with sound and film technologies such as experimentation with spinning discs. He is best known for his groundbreaking multi-projector performances that interrogate the very substance of film and its mechanical supports.

Daïchi Saïto
Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis

Entirely hand-processed, Saïto’s Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis, with contrapuntal violin by Malcolm Goldstein, seeks perceptual insights and revelations through a syntactical structure based on patterns, variations and repetition.

Daïchi Saïto (JP) turned to filmmaking in Montréal after studying philosophy, Hindi and Sanskrit. He is a co-founder of the Double Negative Collective, a Montréal-based group dedicated to experimental cinema.

Greg Pope & Gert-Jan Prins
Light Trap

Light Trap is a live performance using four prepared 16 mm projectors to create a voluminous and spatial sound/light sculpture that is in constant flux and explores the raw elements of cinema. Gert-Jan Prins will join this Light Trap performance.

Greg Pope (UK) founded the Brighton based Super 8 film collective Situation Cinema in 1986 that evolved into Loophole Cinema (London 1989–99), which used 16 mm multi-projection techniques.Working collaboratively and individually, Pope has made video installations, live art pieces and single screen film works since 1996. Gert-Jan Prins (NL) is one of the most challenging sound artists in the Netherlands. He focuses on the sonic and musical qualities of electronic noise.

Lis Rhodes
Light Music

A thorough investigation into the relationship between the shapes and rhythms of lines, and their tonality when printed as sound. The optical soundtrack ‘makes’ the music.

Lis Rhodes (UK) is an avantgarde filmmaker and artist. While firmly rooted in the history of experimental film, her films cross into performance, photography, writing and political analysis.

DISCO 3000 Sonic Acts Out in Space Special

Paradiso’s Disco 3000 and Sonic Acts present a heavyweight Out in Space Special Night. Far-out house, techno, electro and italo in the Big Hall, with Anthony ‘Shake’ Shakir, the legendary underrated techno-producer from Detroit; Dutch electro and italo frontman I-F from the Hague Bunker Records scene. Theo Parrish will play a 5-hour set in the Small Hall.

Melkweg Mediaroom

Yutaka Makino

Sound artist Yutaka Makino examines with painstaking precision how sound can uniquely manifest within its given boundaries. He will be preparing for a series of intimate performances that will be held everyday in a space that he has defined for his composition.
In collaboration with STEIM.

Imagine walking through a film, but it’s happening on streets you know well. For this subtlemob you’ll be invited to download an MP3 and arrive at a secret location and press play at a specific time. When you put on the headphones you’ll find yourself immersed in the cinema of everyday life. Sometimes you’ll just be drifting and watching, but sometimes you’ll be following instructions or creating the scenes yourself. This is no requiem; this a celebratory slow dance, a chance to savour the world you live in, and to see it with fresh eyes. Download and register via: www.subtlemob.com.

Duncan Speakman (UK) examines how we use sound to locate ourselves in personal and political environments, creating experiences that engage audiences in public spaces. He is develops site-responsive soundwalks, street games and pervasive theater works.

Musician and composer Hans W. Koch thoughtfully and delightfully remodels our ordinary tools and spaces to expose unnoticed characteristics. He will be working on an installation that connects two distant spaces within STEIM through an analytical feedback system where each room influence the other and sounds are generated by found objects within building.

Light Music (1975, 16 mm, 2 screens, 25’00, B&W)

‘Lis Rhodes has conducted a thorough investigation into the relationship between shapes and rhythms of lines and their tonality when printed as sound. Her latest work, Light Music, is in a series of movable sections. The film does not have a rigid pattern of sequences and the final length is variable. The imagery is restricted to lines of horizontal bars across the screen: there is variety in the spacing (frequency), their thickness (amplitude), and their colour and density (tone)’.—William Raban, extract from programme notes for Perspectives on British Avant-Garde at Hayward Gallery, 1977.

‘The film is not complete as a totality; it could well be different and still achieve its purpose of exploring the possibilities of optical sound. It is as much about sound as it is about image; their relationship is necessarily dependent as the optical soundtrack ‘makes’ the music. It is the machinery itself which imposes this relationship. The image throughout is composed of straight lines. It need not have been.’—Lis Rhodes, A Perspective on English Avant-Garde, catalogue, 1978.

Lis Rhodes (UK) is an avant-garde filmmaker and artist. While firmly rooted in the history of experimental film, her films cross into performance, photography, writing and political analysis.

The opening event Deep Spaces presents a selection of audiovisual adventures in spaces defined by sound, light, smoke and lasers. Immerse yourself in Thomas Köner’s mesmerizing spatial sound tapestries, while his colleague, Jürgen Reble, takes you on a visual journey through the darker side of his alchemical chemograms. Haswell & Hecker will perform their radical UPIC Diffusion Session, an infinity of extreme sound and engulfing lasers. The godfather of electroacoustic improvisation, Keith Rowe, and the eccentric Norwegian group, Streifenjunko, will collaborate in an improvised performance, accompanied by Kjell Bjorgeengen’s hypnotic visuals. Finally, Monolake and Tarik Barri will transport you through their spatial audiovisual universe. This event also includes screenings of several extraordinary cinematic works by Fred Worden, Anthony McCall, and others.

Keith Rowe, Kjell Bjørgeengen and Streifenjunko

To investigate how to produce music and video in a way that cannot be foreseen, Keith Rowe and Kjell Bjørgeengen have developed an ingenious feedback routing system for music and image, in which each tiny alteration produces changes throughout the entire audiovisual loop. They are joined by the Nordic improv duo Streifenjunko, which creates an even more complex improvisation situation.

Most of Kjell Bjørgeengen’s (NO) works deal with a combination of representation and relinquishing subjective control through the structuring of images from automated processes of sound and music mediated through technology. The free improvisation tabletop guitarist and painter Keith Rowe (UK) was a founding member of both AMM in the mid-1960s, and M.I.M.E.O. Rowe continues to develop various prepared guitar techniques to produce sounds described as dark, brooding, compelling, expansive and alien. Streifenjunko (NO) makes dynamic music with a tenor saxophone and a trumpet. Members Espen Reinertsen and Eivind Lønning use unusual instrumental techniques to project a spacious sound.

Fred Worden
1859

‘Built out of a 30-frame clip of a lens flare. LSD is illegal, 1859 is not.’– Fred Worden.

Fred Worden (US) has been involved in experimental cinema since the 1970s. His work develops from his interest in how a stream of still pictures passing through a projector at a speed meant to overwhelm the eyes, might be harnessed to purposes other than representation or naturalism.

Jürgen Reble & Thomas Köner
Materia Obscura

A doorway to the world of dark and unperceivable materials, using Jürgen Reble’s 25,000 scans of 16 mm chemograms. A visual expedition into crystalized salts and dyes, showing the bizarre richness and beauty of film’s materiality. The quadraphonic staging of Materia Obscura expands the performance space, where the horizontal flow of time meets the sonic impulse. Thomas Köner’s music floats at the borders of perception, as if it is a means of communicating with the beyond.

Thomas Köner (DE) and Jürgen Reble (DE) have been working together since 1992 in the fields of film, installation and performance. Thomas Köner studied electronic music and extended his concept of time and sound colour to images, resulting in video installations, photography and net art. The works of film alchemist Jürgen Reble are often rooted in the manual processing of film footage using mechanical and chemical influences and reconstruction of the cinematographic apparatus.

Makino Takashi & Jim O’Rourke
Still in Cosmos

A product purposed of an installation project held at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Recomposed as completed film work in 2009. It originally was theme for “Complete Chaos” visualized by double exposure method, however it appeared entire opposite phenomenon as “Birth of Cosmos”, and that is unparalleled miraculous story behind the film. A transcend Free Jazz sound is presented by band Osorezan commanded by Jim O’Rourke.

Makino Takashi (JP) belongs to the new generation of Japanese experimental film makers. While studying at the Nippon University he made several Super-8 films. In 2001 he served his apprenticeship with the Quay Brothers. In Japan in 2007 he had his breakthrough with his film No is E, which received the Tereyama Shuji award at the Image Forum Festival. He is a filmmaker whose works are closely relates to art and music.

Haswell & Hecker
UPIC Diffusion Session # 22

Hecker and Haswell have been researching UPIC, Iannis Xenakis’ ‘graphic input’ computer music composing system since 2003, and now present this as a live multichannel electroacoustic concert, using surround sound and laser lighting to create an immersive multisensory environment.

Russell Haswell (UK) is a multidisciplinary artist who has exhibited conceptual and wall-based visual works, video art, public sculpture. Extreme Computer Music is one specialized area of activity. Compositions by the electronic music composer Florian Hecker (DE) tend towards noise music and are often released on the Mego label. He has collaborated with artists such as Russell Haswell, Peter Rehberg, and Yasunao Tone.

Monolake & Tarik Barri
Monolake Live Surround

Monolake Live Surround explores the possibilities of spatial sound design in a club environment, using Monolake’s minimal, dub-influenced techno music. Monolake’s Robert Henke is joined by Tarik Barri for the live performance.

Robert Henke (DE) is a composer, sound designer, software developer, installation artist and performer. His music has roots in academic sound research as well as in club culture, and the result is a sophisticated yet accessible body of work. Tarik Barri (NL) is an audiovisual composer who aims to discover new synergies and aesthetics in the combination of image and sound, through new audiovisual composition methods realized with self-made computer software.

Anthony McCall
Line Describing a Cone

In Line Describing a Cone, the conventional primacy of the screen is completely abandoned in favour of the primacy of the projection event. McCall: ‘The viewer watches the film by standing with his, or her, back towards what would normally be the screen, and looking along the beam towards the projector itself. The film begins as a coherent line of light, like a laser beam, and develops through its 30-minute duration into a complete, hollow cone of light.’

Anthony McCall (UK) was a key figure in the avant-garde London Filmmakers Co-operative in the 1970s and his earliest films are documents of outdoor performances that were notable for their minimal use of the elements, most notably fire. After moving to New York in 1973, McCall developed his ‘solid light’ film series, including Line Describing a Cone (1973).

Afterwards at Paradiso

Sonic Noodlanding! DJs Arnold and Dionysius spin the tunes, not right or left but straight to the point.

In order to survive the near future, humans need to rapidly adapt to the challenges ahead. Artists will play an important role in ‘gardening’ the future, not only by shifting from computer technology to biology and genetic engineering, but also by starting to understand the universe as a single, large natural algorithm that needs gardening in order to function in a sustainable way.

Roger Malina
Intimate Science; Or Artists in the Dark Universe

Humans were designed very badly to understand the universe they live in. Our senses filter out almost all the kinds of energy that reach our body. We develop ideas and intuitions based on our sensory experience of phenomena at our own physical and temporal scales. Scientists today obtain almost all their knowledge of the world via scientific instruments, not through their senses. Yet our intuitions, languages, metaphors and myths develop from our daily experience. Over 97% of the universe is in a form that emits no kind of light; it is dark. Because our body does not detect CO2 directly, it took over a hundred years before the increase in atmosphere CO2 reached our individual or collective consciousness. One of the tasks of art-science collaboration is to short circuit this process, making current scientific knowledge intimate. This is no decorative activity, it is part of the toolkit to allow us to survive the decades ahead.

Roger Malina (US) is an astronomer, with a speciality in space telescopes and observational cosmology. He has edited the Art-Science publication Leonardo at MIT Press for 25 years and is the executive editor of the Leonardo Book Series.

Paul Prudence
Generative Spaces: The Spatiotemporal Subroutines of Runtime Planet Earth

From the global to the microscopic, the Earth runs subroutines that generate a multiplicity of complex patterns & emergent spaces – their runtime(s) lasting from anywhere between a few milliseconds to millions of years. Paul Prudence discusses the metamorphic algorithms, hydrodynamic computations, aeolian protocols and sonic mechanisms, sometimes acting in collaboration with living organisms that define the dynamic generative forms and spaces around us.

Paul Prudence (UK) is a writer, researcher and a visual performer who works with generative/computational systems, audio responsive visual feedback and processed video.

Philip Beesley
Responsive Environments

Beesley presents a detailed tour through his recent interactive immersive environments. Discussion of implications of interactive architecture will be offered, commenting on behaviours and interactive qualities of these installations. Illustrated projects will include the Hylozoic Soil series, an immersive interactive reef construction  composed of overlapping flexible meshworks populated with kinetic ‘pores’, installed in a series of European spaces and the 2010 Venice Biennale. Also included will be the 2008-9 Epithelium series, which integrates air-muscle powered suspended meshworks, densely massed whiskers, and delicate ground-works of skeletal tripod-fields powered by organic power units organized as unit-clusters with faint signal-lure lights, microprocessor-controlled burrowing agents and space-filling filter packs. A cultural tradition is be explored in the talk, placing these new works within a context of work that questions the long history of humanism. The argument attempts a stance in an intertwined world moving beyond closed systems, pursuing mutually dependent relationships. An ambivalent argument will question expansion of human domain, considering the continuing ‘progress’ of the Enlightenment while also pursuing opposing qualities of sentiment and empathy commonly associated with nineteenth and twentieth-century anti-Modern aesthetics.

Philip Beesley (CA) focuses on field-oriented sculpture and landscape installations, with extensions in stage design and buildings. His projects have increasingly incorporated immersive digitally fabricated lightweight textile structures, and feature interactive systems that use dense arrays of microprocessor, sensors and actuators.

Gardeners of the Future closing session

The Panel Gardeners of the Future is followed by the closing session of the festival comprising a panel discussion moderated by Lucas van der Velden, with Roger Malina, Paul Prudence, Philip Beesley and others.

How do we perceive space? How do artists reflect on the experience of space and heighten the sense of space using sound and vision in sometimes radical or radically reduced ways?

Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag
raum-Arbeiten – The Space of Sound and Acoustic Architectures

Since the Renaissance the visual sense in our Western civilisation dominates our orientation, and since the geometrization of the world Euclidian space comes first. Even in the notation of sound and music we can see this priority. When in the middle of the 20th century space became again important as a parameter of music like for example in Stockhausens Kugelauditorium in Osaka 1970 which had more than 40 channels and speakers,  space as an acoustic parameter was, and still is, limited to directions where the sounds comes from. In the late 1980s, working on the philosophy of the perception of space, models of space and on acoustic phenomena in composition, I started to create non-Euclidean spaces out of interference-fields of dozens of high tuned sinus sounding units. In the beginning of the 1990s I started to work on the physicality of the sound itself: standing sinus-pressure waves created an amorphous sonic architecture inside the Euclidean architecture where the audience could walk or better dive through. In 1993 I realized, on an IRCAM Workstation, together with programmer Jörg Spix, the first endlessly rising and falling movements in noise to create a paradoxical situation of perception by a simulated volume movement in the space. The main problem of talking about the acoustic space is, that what we call hearing happens in our brain and not only with the ears, with the space of our body too, and also combined with all the other senses. Sonntag will talk about the theoretical background and the development of his raum-Arbeiten and sonic architectures.

Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag (DE) has an academic background in instrumental music, fine art, art history (new media), music theory, composition, philosophy and cognitive science. He has mostly focused on site-specific installations based on sound and biomass but also specifically on monochrome gas discharge light.

Hans Christian Gilje
Conversations with Spaces

HC Gilje researches how audiovisual technology can be used to transform, create, expand, amplify and interpret physical spaces. In his own work he works with real-time environments, installations, live performance, set design and single-channel video to make this research tangible.

HC Gilje (NO) creates installations, live performances and videos. He was also a member of the video-improv trio 242.pilots.

Jacob Kirkegaard
Acoustic Spaces and Unheard Sounds

Jacob Kirkegaard’ works focus on the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and hearing. His installations, compositions and performances deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible. Using unorthodox recording tools, including accelerometers, hydrophones and home-built electromagnetic receivers, Kirkegaard captures and contextualizes hitherto unheard sounds from within a variety of environments: a geyser, a sand dune, a nuclear power plant, an empty room, and even sounds from the human inner ear itself. Kirkegaard will talk about his works.

Jacob Kirkegaard’s (DK) installations, compositions and performances focus on the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and hearing.

Michael J. Morgan
Representation of Space in the Brain

As Descartes realized, there is no obvious reason why an image has to represented as another image in the brain. Yet, it is, at least in the early stages of representation. Reasons that have been advanced for this topographical representation include the need to establish ‘local sign’ during the development of the brain; the advantages of short-range connections over long nerve tracts; the simple mapping of sensory information onto motor maps; and the need to keep the maps from different senses in register. A philosophical tradition started by Berkeley and continued by Rudolf Hermann Lotze suggests that our spatial sense is in reality a representation of action, hence the close connection of the senses with motor maps. Recently, a counter-suggestion has been that the mechanisms of perception and action are separated into distinct dorsal and ventral streams of processing. The evidence for and against the dual process theory will be discussed.

Michael J Morgan (UK) lectures at City University, London. His area of research is the experimental psychology of vision, from neuroanatomy to perception and psychophysics.

The concept of Hybrid Space does away with misleading spatial dichotomies that have accompanied the rise of digital and networked media; real versus virtual; physical versus immaterial; flows versus places (Manuel Castells). Hybrid Space instead points at a layering of physical and information and media infrastructures, social, cultural and economic flows superimposed in one and the same space. Hybrid Space indicates the simultaneous presence of heterogeneous spatial logics at play in our everyday living spaces. This spatial heterogeneity is amplified by the growth of real-time communication and media technologies. Especially the rise of portable and wireless media, which we carry on our bodies and access in a variety of spatial contexts, heighten this daily experience of the heterogeneous.

In contrast to the sterile phantasies of seamless immersive virtual spaces, Hybrid Space emphasizes discontinuity, inconsistency, intimacy, heterogeneity, and paradox. The volatile presence of physical absence mediated by proliferating communication and media technologies permeating virtually every aspect of daily experience (gsm, wifi, umts/3G, gps, dvb, radiography) creates a powerful and rich locus for various forms of artistic and poetic intervention. Such aesthetic and artistic interventions in turn intensify the experience of an increasing spatial hybridity that has become so pervasive so quickly, that it has become almost impossible to recognize as a startling new experimental condition.

This panel will explore the new conditions of experience emphasized by the concept of Hybrid Space through the prism of a series of artistic and interventionist projects drawing on the increased hybridity of the contemporary spaces of everyday life. The panel was selected and will be moderated by Eric Kluitenberg, and features presentations by Duncan Speakman, Lancel/Maat, Peter Westenberg and Elizabeth Sikiaridi.

Eric Kluitenberg (NL) is a media theorist, writer on culture, media and technology. Kluitenberg heads the media program at De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam.

Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat create ‘meeting places’ in public spaces. These performances and installations are designed as seductive, visual environments. The artists invite their audience to experiment and play with social technologies – and to reflect on their own perception of body, identity, community and alienation.

Duncan Speakman (UK) examines how we use sound to locate ourselves in personal and political environments, creating experiences that engage audiences in public spaces. He is develops site-responsive soundwalks, street games and pervasive theater works.

Peter Westenberg (NL) is a visual artist and filmmaker who engages in open source practices.

Elizabeth Sikiaridi (GR) Elizabeth Sikiaridi studied architecture and urbanism at the École d’Architecture de Belleville in Paris and at the Technical University of Darmstadt.  She lectures on design in the urban landscape at University of Duisburg-Essen and together with Frans Vogelaar runs the Hybrid Space Lab, an interdisciplinary studio where architects, urbanists, landscape architects, designers and media artists collaborate with soft- and hardware engineers in the development of projects for combined analog and digital, urban, architectural, design and media spaces.

Virtual realities and the immaterial media flows of the contemporary world have deeply influenced the work of architects. What are the experiences of space that are implicit in their architectural conceptions?

Marcos Novak
21st Century Invisible Architectures: The Poetics of Transactivated Space

Spaces are the lightest of media, demanding the greatest subtlety in both sensibilities and poetics. Initially trained as a physicist, Gaston Bachelard used phenomenology to build a philosophical bridge between the science of space and the poetics of making significant places. Science informed his project but did not overwhelm his subject. Concisely, Bachelard gave precedence to the qualia rather than the quanta of space.

I propose that the nature of our relation to space has changed since Bachelard’s time, requiring us to follow but also to augment Bachelard’s procedure. A ‘ladder’ of conceptions of space is offered: passive, reactive, active, interactive, transactive, each corresponding to a level of activation, namely: inaction, reaction, action, interaction, transaction. Current technologies have enabled what I call transactivated space as the newest, most advanced, and yet most minimal architectonic material, and, consequently, have made possible what I have termed invisible architectures.

Transactivated spaces constitute the fulcrum between actual spaces and virtual spaces, forming a new continuum of liquid space (actual-invisible-virtual) in search of its own phenomenology and poetics. To study this new condition, and, even more so, to make new works for it, we must bring the power and refinement of Bachelard’s phenomenological poetics of static space to a new stage, and assemble our own phenomenology of spatial experiences in which space itself is not only interactive, but is transactive, that is to say, is a party to mutually modifying transactions between equals. But, as Bachelard has shown us, space does not pose a technical problem, it poses a poetic problem. What then is the phenomenology of invisible transactivated space, what psycho-spatial experiences does it draw upon, and how do we develop a new poetics for it?

I will propose a set of phenomenological entities for transactivated space, paralleling Bachelard’s cellars, garrets, nests, shells, corners, and so on, and discuss them through a series of installation projects revolving around the theme of invisible architectures and through the ongoing work of the transLAB and AlloSphere. In particular, I will discuss my traveling exhibition Turbulent Topologies, and indicate how it creates an infinite loop between urban life, numerous aspects of invisible transactivated space, and the eventual return to the fabrication of actual, tangible form, endlessly feeding back into the lived city.

Marcos Novak (US) is a ‘transarchitect’ who disregards physical laws and the constraints of Euclidean geometry by designing spaces, and the objects that fill and create those spaces, in computer-supported virtual reality to create new forms, which he calls ‘liquid architectures’.

Dirk Hebel & Jörg Stollmann
Misuse/Technology/Architecture

Strategies of misuse reveal the challenges and potential of space and can be turned into tools for design and appropriation. A guided tour though the works of INSTANT Architects: from the schizophrenic re-appropriation of a 1930s model home to a PET-bottle that wants to save the world. Dirk Hebel and Jörg Stollmann provide a guided tour.

Dirk Hebel (CH) is an architect whose research addresses the conceptual transfers between the human body and the contemporary city, and he has recently co-published a book initiating a plea for a new type of architectural practice.

Jörg Stollmann (CH) teaches Urban Design and Architecture in Berlin. He works in various collaborations and was principal of the INSTANT Architects project with Dirk Hebel.

How to intensify listening to the environment? What is the importance of raising our awareness of the sounds that surround us? How do we experience and remember spaces and landscape through their sounds? How to work with field recordings, soundscape composition and sound maps?

Hildegard Westerkamp
What’s in a Soundwalk?

This presentation will be a reflection on seven years of public soundwalks put on by the Vancouver Soundwalk Collective within the cultural context of Vancouver New Music’s concert and performance seasons. I will trace how this continuity of soundwalk activities over time and with increased involvement may have shifted and deepened experiences in listening and relationships to space and place. Have they altered cultural, political and ecological attitudes within the Collective, changed and inspired daily life activities, work, studies, creative processes? The presentation will be informed by my own involvement and by recent interviews with members of the Vancouver Soundwalk Collective and will include sound and video excerpts from selected soundwalks.

Hildegard Westerkamp (DE/CA) lectures on topics of listening, environmental sound and acoustic ecology and she conducts soundscape workshops. By focusing the ears’ attention to details in the acoustic environment, her many compositional works draw attention to the act of listening itself and to the inner, hidden spaces of the environment we inhabit.

Edward Shanken and Yolande Harris
Tuning In and Spacing Out: The Art and Science of the Presentness of Sound

A presentation that explores sound and space as modes of understanding environmental phenomena. Drawing on a variety of examples from sound art, visual art, and science, Harris and Shanken weave together extreme ideas from the mythic and scientific significance of marine mammals to the surprising interconnectedness of the sea and
outer-space. A consideration of how ways of experiencing space through sound modulate between fact and fantasy, actual and virtual.

Edward A. Shanken (US) writes and teaches about the entwinement of art, science and technology, with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media. His critically appraised survey, Art and Electronic Media, was published in 2009.

Yolande Harris (UK) uses her performances, installations and instruments to investigate how we use sound to relate to our surroundings, both architectural and ecological. Her current research/practice considers the musical potential of sound worlds outside the human hearing range, through underwater bioacoustics and the sonification of data.

Annea Lockwood
An interview with Annea Lockwood by Arie Altena

Annea Lockwood has been involved in the recording of environmental sounds for a long time, her A Sound Map of the Hudson River (1989) and A Sound Map of the Danube can be considered as classics of the genre. An informal interview with her will touch on her views on field recording, composition, and sound mapping. Hildegard Westerkamp, Edward Shanken & Yolande Harris will also join the conversation.

Annea Lockwood (NZ) is known for her explorations of the rich world of natural acoustic sounds and environments, in works ranging from sound art and installations, through text-sound and performance art to concert music. She has written for a number of ensembles and solo performers, and created pieces for surround-sound installations like A Sound Map of the Danube.

Fred Worden
After Hours in the Cerebral Kitchen

Relations among time, space and motion have befuddled thinkers since at least the time of Zeno and his paradoxes. With the invention of cinema came a promiscuous new tool for staging various thought experiments on how best to understand the complex and often slippery interrelations among these terms.
The lecture hypothesizes a cinematic space where time and motion can disengage from the theatrics of lens-based representations and dance to their own dematerialized tunes. Adopting the model of the cooking shows that proliferate on American cable television, filmmaker Fred Worden assembles a selection of hand picked ingredients then carefully stirs them together in an effort to produce his own irresistible dish of optical cuisine.
Among the ingredients going into the pot: apparent motion, including both the phi and beta varieties, a fresh consideration of the role of illusion in cinema which distinguishes between cine-illusions that simply dissemble and those that illuminate through the transparency of their dissembling, a consideration of acoustic motion as a precursor and prototype model for an ‘abstract’ visual motion (characterized here as both ‘directionless’ and ‘objectless’ visual motion), the secret recipe for converting black frames from inert null spaces to energized catalysts to perception, the cinematic possibilities for entraining the nervous system and the aspirational differences between a cinema of ideas and a cinema of direct experiences.
The proof will be in the pudding. You be the judge.

When Worlds Collude, 2008, 13 mins.

‘Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye? Is there any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words?’ Virginia Woolf, The Cinema, 1926.

An experimental film structured as a kind of specialized playground in which highly representational images are freed from their duties to refer to things outside of themselves. The images run free in their new lightness making unforeseeable, promiscuous connections with each other and developing an inexplicable, non-parsable plot line that runs along with all the urgency of any good thriller. When worlds collude, something outside of description is always just about to happen.

Fred Worden (US) has been involved in experimental cinema since the 1970s. His work develops from his interest in how a stream of still pictures passing through a projector at a speed meant to overwhelm the eyes, might be harnessed to purposes other than representation or naturalism.

Barry Truax
Composing Music with the Environment

Barry Truax was one of the members of the World Soundscape Project in 1973 at SFU when it pioneered the study of acoustic environments and published the Vancouver Soundscape recordings and booklet. Since then this work has achieved an international profile through the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. Truax’ artistic work has included the creation of soundscape compositions that create musical pieces using environmental sounds. Barry will trace this history and play examples.

Barry Truax (CA) is a Professor at Simon Fraser University. He has worked with the World Soundscape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. As a composer, Truax is best known for his work with the PODX computer music system. He also developed the first ever implementation of real-time granular synthesis, in 1986.

STEIM’s Artistic Director Takuro Mizuta Lippit moderates a panel discussion on issues relating to music and its different modes of representation. How does high definition in space change the performance of music and its perception? What are the compositional materials and instruments for a music that intends to go beyond the conventional trajectories of stereo and concert halls? As an audience where do we listen? With presentations by Yutaka Makino and Hans W. Koch, and a lecture by Steven Connor.

Steven Connor
Auscultations (Listening In)

A lecture which rethinks listening through tinnitus and other internal body sounds, touching on quietness, inaudibility, and other kinds of incipient or concealed sound, which have a bearing on the poetics of sound space.

Steven Connor (UK) is a writer, cultural critic and the Academic Director of the London Consortium. He is the author of books on Dickens, Beckett, Joyce, ventriloquism, skin, flies, and other topics, and is now writing a book about the historical poetics of the air.

Takuro Mizuta Lippit (dj sniff, JP) is a turntable musician working in the field of improvised and experimental music, a researcher of music technology, and STEIM’s Artistic Director since 2007.

Yutaka Makino’s (JP) works range from sculpture to sound works, and include computer music compositions and spatial sound installations that utilize spatial projection systems such as Wave Field Synthesis to achieve total physical immersion.

Hans W. Koch (DE) is a composer, performer and sound artist who examines unpredictability on all levels of a musical composition. When working with digital media, he explores its boundaries and implicit (de)faults.

The connection of the arts and technology in the 1950s and 1960s spawned many events that by now are legendary, beginning with the Vortex Concerts of Jacobs and Belson, and ‘culminating’ in the Pepsi Pavilion of 1970. The radical approach to space and the utopian spirit of these events and works continues to inspire artists to this very day.

Branden W. Joseph

HPSCHD: Ghost or Monster?

HPSCHD—the multifaceted, multimedia performance created by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller with the use of the ILLIAC II supercomputer and first staged at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on 16 May 1969—marks the culmination of the most experimental and challenging phase of Cage’s career.  Allied with, and in some sense a response to, the notion of the artistic happening, HPSCHD produced an intensely spatialized audio-visual environment, one in which the audience members, as Anthony McCall put it, became their own ‘mobile mixer’.  This talk considers the place of this work within Cage’s production, and particularly the implications of its technological and political engagements.

Branden W. Joseph (US) is Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Columbia University and a founding editor of the journal Grey Room, a multi-disciplinary quarterly journal about architecture, art, media and politics. Joseph has published three books, the latest being Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone Books, 2008).

Trace Reddell

Cyborg Ritual and Sentic Technology in the Vortex Concerts

Trace Reddell’s talk presents the Vortex Concerts of Henry Jacobs and Jordan Belson, which took place at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium between 1957 and 1959, as extensions of astronautic research and cybernetic space sciences. While considering the audiovisual content and new performance interfaces used by these artists, Reddell is most interested in how this space age ‘theater of the future’ plays out a cosmological agenda. The unique spatial structure of the planetarium dome represents the near atmosphere and distant outer space, but it also mimics the observatory and even the cramped interiors of spacecraft. Through this vehicular mechanism, the Vortex Concerts, according to Reddell, promoted a new understanding of the nexus of mind, mood, and body as these are integrated into highly technical cybernetic systems by means of bio-engineering and pharmaceutical regimes. These performances facilitate the emotional life and imaginative health of the cyborg-astronaut through ritual use of sense-altering technologies

Trace Reddell (US) is a digital media artist and theorist exploring the interactions of sound and the cosmological imagination. His live cinema performances and video works have screened at more than thirty international venues over the past two years.

Robert Whitman

On Experiments in Art and Technology

In his lecture Robert Whitman discusses the way that he has used space as part of the vocabulary of his installation and performance pieces. In 1966 Whitman was one of the New York artists who worked with Billy Klüver and more than 30 engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories to create works for the now legendary 9 Evenings. Whitman was also one of the co-founders of Experiments in Art and Technology along with Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer and Robert Rauschenberg. And he was one of the core artists for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70, in Osaka, a project administered by E.A.T. One of the main features of the interior of the Pavilion was the central performance space in a 90 feet diameter 120 degree spherical mirror made of aluminized reflective PET film, which produced real images of the visitors hanging upside down in space.

Robert Whitman (US) is best known for the more than forty seminal theatre pieces he produced during the early 1960s that combined audio, actors, film, slides and evocative props in environments of his own making. Since the late 1960s he has collaborated with engineers, scientists and artists on installations and works that incorporate new technology: laser sculptures, optical reflector systems, and more recently, cell phones.

How do composers work with spatial sound using arrays of loudspeakers? How is space constituted in music? How do we listen to the sound-space?

Daniel Teruggi
The Fifth Element

Positioning sound sources in space permitted new perspectives and conceptions of the effects space could exert on music. At the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) musique concrète evolved alongside the sound systems and carriers that were used to compose the music. This multiple approach has important implications for the composition of music, as well as for the tools and environments needed for it.

Daniel Teruggi (AR) studied physics, composition and piano, and he was appointed director of the GRM in 1997. Teruggi compositions for fixed media (tape), small instrumental groups and tape, or real-time processing of instruments focus on the relationships between creation and technology, and on problems related to sound perception.

Raviv Ganchrow
Sense of Ambiguity

There is no single ‘sonic-spatiality’. Each approach to sound can yield diverse, yet distinct materialities from acoustic events, the instances of which remain ‘spatialized’ within definitions inherent to the particular material extents. What links these various, at times contradictory, spaces is that they are all artifacts from ‘listening in’.  A diversity in approaches and techniques of listening will also breed a variety of ‘sound-spaces’, where each sound-space can be understood as an amalgamation of ideas of presence, notions of perception, and attitudes of measure. This talk will open with a discussion of the spatial multiplicity in sound, followed with selected documentation from Ganchrow’s recent sound works relating to the frameworks of everyday acoustic environments.

Raviv Ganchrow (US) studied architecture in New York and has taught at several institutes in the Netherlands since completing his Masters of Music in Sonology. His sound installations and sound works have been exhibited in the USA, France, Austria, the Netherlands and Norway. He developed and designed the spatial sound performance Wave Field Synthesis system, commissioned by the Game of Life Foundation.

Derrick de Kerckhove
Beyond Perspective, From the Point of View to the Point of Being

Between the Renaissance and Cézanne, the poetics of space were ruled by perspective and the spectacular. Even the magic illusions of the Baroque era were eventually directed at effecting a transition from a multisensory to a dominantly visual spatial representation. Take trompe-l’oeil, for an example of the eye giving information normally provided by the hand. Today, the trend has been reversed and a paradoxical tactile, proprioceptive sensory modality has been developed over the centuries of electricity. We may be traversing a Neo-Baroque era where the effects of a dominantly visual episteme are reversed in multimedia, 3D and VR. In the global environmental perception that is developing, the point of being, that is a proprioceptive sensation of the world, may be doubling if not replacing the point of view as the principal referent of my position in space.

Derrick de Kerckhove (CA) worked with Marshall McLuhan for over ten years as translator, assistant and co-author. He has published extensively on culture, technology and biology, including co-editing a book that scientifically assesses the impact of the Western alphabet on the physiology and the psychology of human cognition, and a collection of essays on the new electronic reality. Connected Intelligence (Somerville, 1997) introduced his research on new media and cognition.