Morten Qvenild – The HyPer(sonal) Piano Project
(2024)
author(s): Morten Qvenild
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
Towards a (per)sonal topography of
grand piano and electronics
How can I develop a grand piano with live electronics through iterated development loops in the cognitive technological environment of instrument, music, performance and my poetics?
The instrument I am developing, a grand piano with electronic augmentations, is adapted to cater my poetics. This adaptation of the instrument will change the way I compose. The change of composition will change the music. The change of music will change my performances. The change in performative needs will change the instrument, because it needs to do different things. This change in the instrument will show me other poetics and change my ideas. The change of ideas demands another music and another instrument, because the instrument should cater to my poetics. And so it goes… These are the development loops I am talking about.
I have made an augmented grand piano using various music technologies. I call the instrument the HyPer(sonal) Piano, a name derived from the suspected interagency between the extended instrument (HyPer), the personal (my poetics) and the sonal result (music and sound). I use old analogue guitar pedals and my own computer programming side by side, processing the original piano sound. I also take out control signals from the piano keys to drive different sound processes. The sound output of the instrument is deciding colors, patterns and density on a 1x3 meter LED light carpet attached to the grand piano. I sing, yet the sound of my voice is heavily processed, a processing decided by what I am playing on the keys. All sound sources and control signal sources are interconnected, allowing for complex and sometimes incomprehensible situations in the instrument´s mechanisms.
Credits:
First supervisor: Henrik Hellstenius
Second Supervisors: Øyvind Brandtsegg and Eivind Buene
Cover photo by Jørn Stenersen, www.anamorphiclofi.com
All other photo, audio and video recording/editing by Morten Qvenild, unless stated.
Unfinished Business
(2023)
author(s): Hedvig Jalhed, Mattias Rylander
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
How can microsocial rituals connected to a specific site be used as interaction templates for artistic purposes? And how can we distort such rituals artistically in order to make them memorable events? As artists, we regard distortion as the process that gives character and distinction to things and situations, as well as something that confuses and enriches information and interpretation. Through examples emerging from the operatic production Chronos’ Bank of Memories (2019–2022), set in empty shop stores with interacting visitors, we have recalled and fleshed out issues of rituality with distorted proportions. Due to the covid-19 pandemic, its production was interrupted and later on revived, which affected the work. This exposition covers aspects of both our artistic practice in general and this particular opera’s tendency to encompass distorted rituals. Commentary texts, images, and audio/video clips are arranged into an introduction and then three thematic strands in order to offer a reasoned overview of our work process.
El paisaje sonoro de la memoria como forma de resiliencia. El caso de la violencia en Colombia.
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Estefanía Díaz Ramos
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Conflict and violence in Colombia have been a recurrent problem for more than sixty years in the territory. This has not only affected the spheres that have historically disputed political power, but also more than 8 million ordinary people who, as a result of the invisibilisation and systematic silencing of their experiences, have seen their memories relegated to the spectrum of what we call noise here, as something uncomfortable that nobody wants to listen to.
This exhibition is the result of a research process that has sought to highlight different ways in which sound has become an artistic tool of empowerment for victims in processes that, in addition to promoting exercises in resilience, have managed to connect with "deaf ears" when it comes to breaking with the old, homogenous and silencing discourses of memory, through what could be called a de-sensitisation by means of sound art.
Starting from the study and characterisation of how subaltern everyday experience and its dissemination - through sonority as raw material for re-memory in scenarios of violence - allow us to reveal strategies of connection between memories, through collective and vernacular sound production; we have sought to determine some of the characteristics, both physical and conceptual, that make up what would be a soundscape of memory.
Finally, this research project aims not only to identify different aspects of these new narratives of resilient memory through sound art, but also to invite a conscious listening to the different ways of sounding that make room for silenced memories, and highlight the construction of this new soundscape, the product of a confrontation with the hegemonic discourse through sonority in Colombia.
Hilsen Brettet / The Greeting Board
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Henning Kristoffer Borgen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"Hilsen Tavla" or "The greeting board" is a product designed to help those afflicted by dementia establish or maintain a relationship with those close to them. It does this by showing reminders of who their loved ones are and what they care about through a video with a short greeting from the person in question as well as a written description of them,