Bonus materials: To Start from Scratch
(2024)
author(s): Karl Salzmann
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition contains bonus material (audio-visual) on the doctoral project "To Start from Scratch" by Karl Salzmann (ARC - Artistic Research Center, University of Music and performing Arts in Vienna, Austria, 2024).
It presents a selection of documented artistic works, prototypes, performances and materials developed during the research process.
A Garden of Sounds and Flavours: Establishing a synergistic relationship between music and food in live performance settings
(2024)
author(s): Eduardo Gaspar Polo Baader
published in: KC Research Portal
During the past decade, there has been a surge in the literature about crossmodal correspondences, consistent associations our minds establish between stimuli that are perceived through different senses. Correspondences between sound/music and flavour/taste have received particular scholarly attention, which has lead to a variety of practical applications in the form of food and music pairings, mostly examples of so-called ‘sonic seasoning’, a way to use sound to enhance or modify the tasting experience.
This thesis aims to explore the pairing of food and music from an artistic perspective. Its goal is to find tools that would allow to present both music and food as components of coherent live performances in which neither of them is a mere ‘seasoning’ to the other. Through the description and exploration of different ‘mediating elements’ between them (such as crossmodal correspondences, but also structure, ritual, narrative, and others), a wide range of possibilities is presented to whoever wants to match food and music in a truly synergistic manner.
Readers interested in multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary artistic practices of any kind might find the outcomes of this research useful for their own work.
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.
Listening Into the Lattice
(2024)
author(s): Jorge Boehringer
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
This exposition details the opening phase of new research between an experimental sound artist and an archaeologist, with a detailed examination of critical epistemological questions that have arisen from the beginning of this project. Both collaborating researchers are situated within hybrid specialisations. As the project unfolds, archaeo-chemical data is explored and animated through methods developed from intersections of data science and musical practice, resulting in performance and installation environments in which knowledge of material culture of the ancient past may be made present through listening. However, beyond a case study, this exposition points to how interdisciplinary artistic work produces results that have value outside of normative paradigms for any of the fields from which it is derived, while offering critical insight about those fields. This exposition is formed of these insights. Readers are introduced to the structure of the data, its relationship to the materiality of the artefacts described, the technological apparatus and compositional methodology through which the data is sonified, and the new materiality of the resulting artistic experiences.
Sonification exists at a nexus of sound production and listening, interwoven with information. Meaning and interpretations arise from artistic decisions concerning sound composition and the context for listening to take place. Meanwhile, listening teaches us about data and about the physical and cultural spaces into which we project it. In this way, sonification is always already interdisciplinary.
Sounds of walking: Can sound re-present the embodied experience of movement time and distance in the landscape?
(2024)
author(s): Martin P Eccles
published in: Research Catalogue
In this thesis, having introduced my research questions, in Chapter 2 I present a layered analysis of the important contexts of my practice—walking, sound, walking poetry, and place. In Chapter 3 I present and discuss three works that together explore how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. In Chapter 4 I develop what I came to call replicated walks—walks made more than once in the same place. Begun in order to re-configure time, they also led me to extend my consideration of place beyond that defined by geography, to place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence. In Chapter 5 I describe my emerging ideas of human-scale of place and my underlying ideas of island-ness. Initially I worked on real islands, walking circumferential routes and those defined by chance procedures. From this I developed an imaginary island in the foothills of Northumberland’s Cheviot Hills; made from the human-scale of my embodied walking this led to my creation of an imaginary pandemic island of containment, created in a city, in my locale, made, and made real, by the traces of my embodied walking. Together my works constitute a body of work that represents a contribution to knowledge with specific contributions of: the use of Replicated Walks as a method of experimenting with time and place; Walking Words – the presentation of poetic text in forms (concertina-fold books, scripta continua, scrolls) that requires walking to engage with it, and that also function as metonyms for my original walking act; Walking Islands –the use of human-scale walking to imagine an island into existence, and then invoke the island as a lens through which to continue to pursue the idea. My work also contributes knowledge to the methods of how to record the sounds of the world whilst walking through it, over extended distances and time.
Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency - Clew: A Rich and Rewarding DIsorientation
(2024)
author(s): Lauren O'Neal
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
This exposition examines the curatorial project "Clew: A Rich and Rewarding Disorientation," held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2017. The project is part of my doctoral research on “Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency.” “Clew” proposes a framework for curatorial dramaturgy and asks: What is the potential of a dramaturgical approach within an open-ended exhibition structure? Who, or what, is the curatorial dramaturg? How do materials and time contribute to unfolding exhibition narratives?
[This exposition corresponds to Section Six: Extending Lines in All Directions: Curatorial Dramaturgy in the printed dissertation.]
FACT stage one
(2024)
author(s): Jenny Sunesson
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The research project FACT stage one aims to test the sonic capacity of fragmenturgy (developed by Sunesson 2014–19) as a method to unsettle polarised positions of areas and sites existing outside of the visual power structures and political strongholds.
The long-term purpose is to develop a Fragmenturgy ACtion Tool (FACT); a transitory toolbox for cultivating fragmenturgy methods and actions.
FACT stage one consists of a comprehensive case study carried out in collaboration with a group of students aged 18–23 based at Uppsala Community College in Sweden, which was explored as a site during 2021.
Image copyright: Christina Hillheim
Epiphanies of an Invisible weave
(2024)
author(s): Jenny Sunesson
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
Epiphanies of an Invisible weave
essay
by Jenny Sunesson, 2022
edited in 2023
Translated by Steven Cuzner
Preface (2023)
Epiphanies of an Invisible weave is an essay written during the processes of two different, yet overlapping, projects; the research project FACT stage one, and the solar driven, sound art project UNDER.
The essay explores the specific capacities and possibilities of sound and listening through the specific mode of field recording, which is the sonic modality that I have exploring for more than 20 years.
The essay aims to shed some light on the site-related, political, and hidden potentials of sound as it examines the possibilities of (re)-learning through listening in relation to both human and more-than-human explorations and possible “epiphanies”, imagining openings beyond stereotypical knowing.
/Jenny Sunesson
Image copyright: Ida Lindgren
P E R I C A R D I U M
(2023)
author(s): Sara Key, Max Landergård, Susana Santa-Marta
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
A COLLAB work about the current position of mankind where we are at in the NOW - a comment on that and an exploration of the automatization and the relationship between the human essence and the artificial.
Skin is the membrane that divides inside from outside, what is important and not, what is alive and not. Skin represents the human and at the same time the contrahent to the artificial.
We live in a time where everyone is trying to tell us which world will be the best for us to live in. We want you to tell you.
Love of God - Group Exhibition: A Retrospective Virtual Gallery
(2022)
author(s): Jeffrey Cobbold
published in: Research Catalogue
Love of God - Group Exhibition
Curated by Jeffrey Cobbold
September 14 - October 19, 2019
Artworks Trenton, Trenton, New Jersey (U.S.A)
2019 Curatorial Statement:
“…I will find you. I will always find you……A loving heart is the truest wisdom……To believe and be satisfied with just the way things are……No one has ever seen God……Jesus……Love is a circle……And what comes around goes around…”
The words above come from Love of God (L.O.G) Audio Quotation Database, a DIY online database and digital humanities project I started in 2015 when I was working as an intern within the Love of God Retreat Program in Lawrenceville, NJ. In order to create the database I asked the program’s high school student participants to find quotes about love and God that would help them reflect on the meaning of these words within their retreat program. These quotes are now the heart and inspiration for Love of God – Group Exhibition, which presents works from a selection of artists exploring issues of love and God revealed through artistic practice.
The artists featured in this volume are:
Jessica Browne-White (sculpture)
Jeffrey Cobbold (sound, video, text)
Devonte Roach (film)
Marina de Bernado Sanchis (drawing)
Together they create multiple entry points for one to consider the character of love, God and the intersections of both in our ever changing world.
Love of God – Group Exhibition takes on the spirit of the Love of God Retreat Program in Lawrenceville, NJ with its necessity for inclusive understandings about love and God. While Jesus was a central topic of discussion within the retreat program, there was no mandated opinion one was expected to have about him. Rather, the unifying aspect of this program was an affinity for music and the arts within the expression of community. Their community was intersectional, dealing with the differences of varied socio-economic statuses, sexual identities and divergent relationships with the organized Christian church amongst so many other forms of diversity.
The retreat program no longer exists as it did in 2015 due the disbursement of its high school participants and changes in adult leadership. The online database is now a relic of the digital humanities project that occurred at that time. Yet, this exhibition is an initial step toward sharing a glimpse of the spirit of this retreat program with others. I sincerely hope that the spirit of this exhibition will connect with you as you search for love and God in your personal life and within the communities you serve everyday.
Love of God Community Conversation (Luke 1:5-45)
October 12, 2019
Artworks Trenton, Trenton, New Jersey (U.S.A)
Featured presentation:
"Love, God, and Community" by Simone Oliver
2019 Community Conversation Statement:
This community conversation seeks to provide a space for theological and artistic reflection within the Love of God – Group Exhibition. A team of presenters will offer their individual reflections on love, God and community through engagement with Luke 1:5-45. Presenters will also consider the works of contemporary art and case study materials within the Love of God – Group Exhibition to aide their presentations. A time for discussion will be had between presenters and the audience for better articulation and understanding of divergent pathways toward love, God and community that can be useful for work in Christian ministry and contemporary art & culture.
Artist-author in Action and Reflection
(2022)
author(s): Mike Croft
published in: Research Catalogue
Published as part of: Michael Croft, 'Artist-author in Action and Reflection' in 'Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research', (eds.) Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Erika Goble, Juha Himanka, Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 17 (2022), No. 1, ISSN 1913-4711
https//journals.library.ualberta.ca/pandpr/index.php/pandpr/index
Voicelanding - Exploring the scenographic potential of acoustic sound in site-sensitive performance
(2021)
author(s): Mareike Nele Dobewall
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This practical artistic research project explores how the performance of acoustic sound in dialogue with site can create a sonic scenography, experienced by an audience from within the sonic structures.
Six art projects were carried out in the context of this research. Their form varies due to the site-sensitive approach that is employed: the space and the participating musicians are both the source and the frame for the resulting spatial sound performances.
During workshops the collaborating musicians are introduced to site-sensitive methods. They learn full-body listening, spatial sounding, and space-care. The musicians learn to co-create with the space. In a collaborative process, spatial sound compositions are created using the site-specific sonic material that is elicited from the dialogue between the performers and the space. The relation to the audience plays an important role in the sharing of the performance space and the experience of the sonic scenographies. Therefore, active audience encounter is considered during the creative process towards the performance and it is further explored during each performance.
As sound is invisible and ephemeral it is a vulnerable material to engage with when creating scenographies. In this research its instability has revealed itself as an indispensable quality of a scenography that aims to connect the elements of a shared space and make their relations perceivable.
There is a tendency to make ‘reliable’ material scenographies and to sustain spatial sound through audio systems while attempting to overcome the challenges a site brings to performance. This approach to performance, scenography, and spatial sound composition, however, limits the relation between acoustic sound and site. In my sonic scenographies the performers are dependent on the dialogue with the space in order to create sonic structures that can be experienced by an audience. The attention needed for this collaboration is space-care. It includes care for all entities in the space, and especially the audience. The ephemeral quality of acoustic sound creates an active sonic scenography that performs together with the musicians, and engages multimodal listening.
The resulting spatial sound performance includes the placement and movement of sonic expressions that are specific for each instrument-site relation. In the created performance, as the audience can ‘roam through’ it, they can experience a sonic scenography that unfolds around them. In the interaction of performers and audience in these shared spaces (architectural space and sonic space) a social space can develop that allows for an ephemeral community to emerge.
Sounds of Another Home: Telepresence, COVID-19 and a Bioscience Laboratory in Transition
(2021)
author(s): Rebecca Carlson
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Based on an ethnography of a bioscience laboratory in Tokyo before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper focuses on telepresence, and the growing demand for workers to maintain extended simultaneous presence in multiple electronic, or electronically augmented, spaces. In contrast to views promoting the liberating affordances of telework in the maintenance of healthy work-life balance (reduced commute time; increased “presence” in family life), an analysis of sound reveals the way the home becomes reorganized, and ultimately de-prioritized, under work demands. In particular, online meetings, which privilege discrete information exchange, position the home as a barrier to productive communications. Receding the soundscape of the home in this way reflects a normalization of the neoliberal imperative to find self-realization in workplace forms of sociality.
Peripheral frequencies
(2021)
author(s): Mika Kiviniemi
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition explores the backround noise as aesthetic periphery. My attempt is to define my subjective experience about what I consider as peripheral frequencies and how do they affect the formation of aesthetic experiences.
Space, Sound, and the Home(less)
(2021)
author(s): Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Following Rosalyn Deutsche, this essay examines how the binary opposition enforced by the boundaries of domesticity enforce containment and enclosure, particularly of excluded bodies, i.e. the homeless. This enclosure, which is read through Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the decorporealization of space, is enforced primarily through a logic of visuality and compartmentalization. This essay proposes sound as a means to counter these states of enclosure. Using concepts of dwelling (Heidegger), weaving (Ingold), and nomadism (Braidotti), a sonic recorporealization is developed through personal, domestic sound art experimentation and instrument building. The results and repercussions are then examined in the context of the singular home, its local community, and society more broadly, wherein sound is proposed as a means to instigate practices of spatial recorporealization.
FERRY EXPERIMENT: READING LINE AND SOUND | PHYSICAL MOVEMENT LAB
(2021)
author(s): Greta Pundzaite
published in: Research Catalogue
Ferry Experiment: Reading Line and Sound aims to grasp movement in different artistic elements and trace their interconnection. A sound of a ferry trip Lisbon-Berreiro is recorded as if from two differing ears of a passenger. One traces the movement of detailed noise inside while the other lowers itself to the machinery and gives an impulse of the repetitive swing of moving water. A drawing is created as a result, dismounted to its detail and used together with the sounds as a continuation searching itself in the movement of a body.
Walking with Soldiers: How I learned to stop worrying and love cadets
(2020)
author(s): Susanna Hast
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
“Walking with Soldiers” examines an auto-ethnographic moment of marching across the city of Helsinki with first-year cadets of the Finnish National Defence University. In a reparative reading, the walk dismantles boundaries of bodies, critiques, and affects. Through a walking methodology and autoethnography, the present exposition demonstrates how the author began orienteering within military structures through an affective investment. The exposition is a researcher’s journey across subjectivities and difference in a female civilian body. Epistemologically, it brings theory closer to the skin; and empirically, it offers insight into the affective world of belonging. “Walking with Soldiers” is multimodal and polyphonic: it consists of a text for reading, three audio tracks for listening and co-walking, as well as illustrations created by Julia Järvelä based on photographs taken by the author. The provided materials can be selectively attended to. The artistic technique used in the exposition is seduction: the reader/listener is invited into an experience. The exposition is a conversation between critical military studies and artistic research: it gives artistic attention to a military march and places importance on the acoustic and vibrating qualities of academic research. The writing itself subverts the practice of authoritative scholarly writing by presenting descriptive work as theoretical work, and by using citations as companions from the outside.
The Pteropoetics of Birdstrike
(2020)
author(s): Jacob Smith
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
“The Pteropoetics of Birdstrike” is a work of multimedia scholarship consisting of a curatorial essay and a twenty-five minute audio piece. Working at the intersection of Sound Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Mobility Studies, the project examines the phenomenon of birdstrike: when birds collide with aircraft. The physical and radiophonic spaces of the airport create a contact zone of human and avian aeromobilities, with birdstrikes as vivid dramas of that shared space. I consider the implications of birdstrike through a critical essay that curates an audio composition that works through the selection and juxtaposition of found sound material. That material consists of recordings of air traffic control conversions during birdstrike incidents, recorded interviews with a pioneer in the field of forensic ornithology, and several poetry recitations. The recitations include the iconic “aerial image” of a skylark’s flight-song, paired with recordings of the actual bird. The result of the whole is to redirect a tradition of aerial imagination towards a new “pteropoetics” that understands the sky as a habitat shared with others.
The Missing Page: Place as Palimpsest and ‘Foil’
(2020)
author(s): Jeremy Bubb
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
In this exposition, I analyse the making of The Missing Page, a short film I shot in 2016 (and completed much later, in 2018) in response to the disappearance of my mother, Dorothy, from her home for over twelve hours; she was later diagnosed with dementia. This exposition reflects on the key stages of the project: establishes the aims of the film and its inspirations; the nature of the exploratory research, which took place on location at my parent’s home; and the conclusions I drew. I also review my working methods and discuss influences such as slow cinema and defamiliarization, identifying the importance of narrative, ethnographic methods, sound design, the notion of ‘space’, ‘place’, and palimpsest in shaping my thoughts, and the progress of the making of the film.
The Limits of Traverso; Exploring the sound possibilities of traverso through contemporary music
(2020)
author(s): Dorota Matejova
published in: KC Research Portal
In ‘early music’ performance today ΄sound΄ does not get as much attention as other expressive devices, even though the sound was an inseparable part of expression in music performance in 18th century.
This research attempts to explore the traverso and its expressive sound possibilities when placed in the field of contemporary music. The tonal capabilities of the traverso will be viewed from the perspectives of both 18th century sources and modern-day ΄early΄ and ΄classical music practice΄. The research considers what have sometimes been seen as the instrument´s “limitations” and "imperfections", asking how they could be positively exploited in contemporary music. At the same time, so-called ‘extended techniques ’for the modern flute are explored on the baroque flute, by a study and performance of two contemporary compositions for traverso solo. At the end, I will be looking at how this untraditional perception of traverso sound could open up our expressive imagination in performance of the traditional 18th century traverso repertoire.
The research hopes to bring some new inspirations for traverso players as well as other ΄early music΄ performers, and to clarify the distinctive role of sound as an expressive device in early instruments. It also hopes to inspire composers to write more contemporary acoustic music using the specific sonority of this instrument. The presentation will be given in the form of performance-lecture.
Sculptural sounds: a co-compositional approach
(2020)
author(s): Eleni-Ira Panourgia
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This article discusses a specific approach to sound from a sculptural perspective, based on an innovative process named "co-composition", in which physical and sonic material can be concurrently produced, rearranged and transformed in a solo environment. This approach investigates ways of working with the direct response of materials to performed actions by mapping actions of making in ways that can inform new actions through sound. I question the way sculptural sounds are caused and how sounds and their real-time transformation could influence the way I understand the process as a practitioner and researcher, and how this is experienced by the audience. How does the process change once sound is transformed to something different, new? How does this affect practising with sound as more than sound? To achieve this, I develop new ways of articulating aesthetic decisions from one medium to the other on the basis of their "stories" as they are manifested through traces of material manipulation.
Post-immersion: Towards a discursive situation in sound art
(2020)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Immersion is a much-used word in the domain of sound-based media arts. It is through immersion that the audiences are often made to engage with the artworks, using technical devices and medial dispositive that are at the intersection of culture and materiality in a post-digital era. In this mode of artistic representation, immersion operates as a context for realizing the production of presence as an illusion of non-mediation (Reiter, Grimshaw et al). The main concern of this proposed article is whether the audience tends to become a passive and non-acting guest within the immersive space often constructed by an authoritarian and technocratic consumer-corporate culture. I will argue in the article that in this mode of non-activity the audience may lose the motivation to question the content and context of the work by falling into a sensual and indulgent mode of experience, therefore allowing the consumerist-corporate powers to take over the free will of the audience (Lukas et al). From the position of a socially and environmentally committed sound artist myself, I will argue for producing a discursive context rather than an immersive one in sound artworks that aim to represent contemporary crisis such as climate change critically engaging with the Anthropocenic conditions. I will examine the possibility to create artworks where the individuality of the audience is carefully considered and taken into account as a crucial parameter. I will discuss a number of my recent works to develop and substantiate the argument.
Hive Five Sound PicNic
(2020)
author(s): Christina Stadlbauer
published in: Research Catalogue
Microphones installed inside the hive in the frames
Demmin – letting a city sound
(2020)
author(s): Mareike Nele Dobewall
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The project ’Demmin – eine Stadt zum Klingen bringen’ (’Demmin – letting a city sound’) explores the history and stories of the German city of Demmin in a dialogue between the local choir, Peenechor, and the site of Haus Demmin. During a two-week workshop the choir and Mareike Dobewall explored how to vocalise other stories, of the inhabitants of Demmin and the two decaying buildings known collectively as Haus Demmin (the ruins of an 11th century fortress and a former mansion). In a sonic dialogue between ageing voices and decaying architecture a vocal performance in the open air was created. Stories, history and fairy tales took new shape through vocal music, and un-listened sound was given presence. The site-determined performance allowed for the memory and the imagination of the visitors and the participants to rise up and become a part of a holistic experience.
Sounding Out Vacancy: Performing (anything but) Empty Space
(2019)
author(s): Julieanna Preston
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition translates the intentions and experience of the 2014 performance Sounding Out Vacancy as a piece of spatial writing structured by four voices operating in unison to contest ‘emptiness’ as a condition of interior space. The seven-day performance occurred in a street-level urban central business district retail shop that, like many other ‘for lease’ properties in the city, had stood empty for several months. Its glass façade obscured from view, the performance broadcast sounds continuously from the interior space to the general public as an alternative advertisement of the shop’s availability. During the nine-to-five work day, sounds were harvested from the interior where construction hand tools and material surfaces interacted as a process of virtual renovation. While the city slept, the ambient sounds of the space persisted and put the shop’s vacancy into question.
Listening in/to Exile: Migration and Media Arts
(2019)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition responds to the current flux of migration and the resulting condition of estrangement. The projects – an augmented book project and a corresponding media artwork – respond to mass migration, hyper-mobility, placeless-ness and nomadism, which are blurring the boundaries between the local and the global, the corporeal and the digital, the private and the public. Through an exploration of the poetic and critical capacities embedded in everyday listening the two projects attempt to shed light on the aesthetics of addressing the notion of exile, alienation and estrangement. The exposition let the viewer/reader engage with the artistic matter; namely, the field recordings and on-site writings - artistic acts of poetic contemplation grounded in a personal experience of the urban alienation, with the aim of movement towards self-understanding and emancipation.
50 Billion Micrograms. In the Search of the Aftermath of an Event
(2019)
author(s): Christine Hansen
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition provides an example of how art can offer an alternative way of understanding the past through my work “50 Billion Micrograms”. The project explored a forgotten media event from 1979, in which a gigantic meteorite supposedly landed in a remote lake on the west coast of Norway. The exposition attempts to demonstrate how ambiguity was a fuel the project. In the process what I call "fluctuating thinking" was an important method. This meant that I let seemingly irrelevant and speculative elements be part of the process. In this process, the different conceptual and aesthetic elements had to be studied carefully to consider whether random ideas and speculative elements were relevant for the work. However, such an open-ended approach is often fundamental to artistic research, I argue. I had no hope of finding the answer about the meteorite or explaining this natural phenomenon. My interest was to dwell on the uncertainty and keep the wondering alive. What became increasingly important was to explore the search itself through images and sound. The exposition also ask what is an event, what keeps an event alive? Were does fact and fiction interlace?
What colour is Signature?
(2019)
author(s): etherlinna
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
What Colour is Signature? acts as a platform with a score to play and experiment with different compositional structures. The platform aims to create a non-intensive means to enjoy the possible mental representations you may experience when listening to sounds that negotiate the amount of noise and information.
Fluxus and Avant Garde art in 1960s often explored the relation between noise and silence and how it is communicated within a space (during the so called ‘happenings’). Noise (or the source of randomness) shifts the listener’s perception to the non-sense that art often produces, and brings into play the attempt of the mind to focus on the mental representations it is creating. Therefore, the non-sense (noise and silence) in itself acts as a measurement of information.
Sonoqualia 2.0
(2019)
author(s): Concha García
published in: Research Catalogue
Sonoqualia is a project aimed at people with visual impairment, whose main objective is the creation of sound artistic experiences linked to pictorial works housed in museums of the city of Madrid. The name (Sono-qualia) refers to the subjective qualities of the sounds we feel and perceive each one of us, so its intention is far from objective criteria translators of visual material in sound material. Pictorial works are the frames of reference from which the spaces and sound experiences are created. The audio-descriptions offered by museums, understood as descriptive narratives of the elements put in relation in the pictures, are the starting point of the project, conceived as a 5-week workshop in which the participants work in groups, assisted by technicians who facilitate them the access to sound-composition software. Sonoqualia focuses on the construction, enrichment and communication of the mental images of the participants, generated from these descriptive narratives, understood as internal representations shaped from our multimodal experiences, in which all the senses intervene. Various elements are used for this purpose, such as symbolic values and emotional meanings of the sounds daily used in our interpersonal and environmental relationships; the sound imagination, which has the capacity of development, sophistication and complexity; previous sound experiences or "sonorous culture", variable in each participant, but enriched when shared and put together; sound material chosen simply by "as it sounds", i.e. by aesthetic criteria... The result is the creation of sound pieces with a duration around 2 minutes. This project has been the beneficiary of an aid for the artistic creation of the city Council of Madrid 2017 and so far, two editions of it have been made.
Addressing the Mapping Problem in Sonic Information Design through Embodied Image Schemata, Conceptual Metaphors, and Conceptual Blending
(2019)
author(s): Stephen Roddy
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article explores the mapping problem in parameter mapping sonification: the problem of how to map data to sound in a way that conveys meaning to the listener. We contend that this problem can be addressed by considering the implied conceptual framing of data–to–sound mapping strategies with a particular focus on how such frameworks may be informed by embodied cognition research and theories of conceptual metaphor. To this end, we discuss two examples of data-driven musical pieces which are informed by models from embodied cognition, followed by a more detailed case study of a sonic information design mapping strategy for a large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) network.
The Lost and Found project: Imagineering Fragmedialities
(2019)
author(s): Jenny Sunesson
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The Lost and Found project began as an attempt to challenge my own sound making in opposition to a linear, capitalist, narrative tradition, dominated by visual culture.
I wanted to explore the possibilities of sound as a counterpart material risking our perception of what sound is and what it can do.
To reach beyond my own aesthetic and sociocultural baggage, I started to experiment with chance operated live performance as a method.
By multilayering uncategorised sound scraps the work emerged to “produce itself” and I began to catch glimpses of alternative sound worlds and sites.
I called the method fragmenturgy (fragmented dramaturgy) and the alternative realities that were created; fragmedialities (fragmented mediality, fragmented reality).
“Step by Step” Reading and Re-writing Urban Space Through the Footstep
(2018)
author(s): Elena Biserna
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper explores the materiality of sound by focusing on the interaction between the walker and urban space established by the most “basic” form of soundmaking on the move – the sound of our footsteps. It considers the presence of footprints and empreintes in the contemporary arts and surveys a series of projects by artists and composers – Peter Ablinger, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, katrinem, Dennis Oppenheim, and Jessica Thompson – highlighting the interplay between body and site established through the footsteps. By drawing on an interdisciplinary body of literature on city walking and on sound studies, I consider the step as the fundamental bodily contact with the environment while walking as well as a sound signal that generates a sense of presence, activates the surroundings, and locates us in space. Therefore, I interpret the footstep as a primary auditory event, allowing us to “read and rewrite” (Augoyard 2007) urban soundscapes, to explore and perceive – but also to reshape and participate in – acoustic spaces, establishing a material, embodied, situated, and mutual relationship with our context.
The Secret Theatre Revisited: Eavesdropping on Locative Media Performances
(2017)
author(s): Pieter Verstraete
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
With the proliferation of the iPod and related audio mobile technologies in our daily experiences, Shuhei Hosokawa’s “The Walkman Effect” (1984) gains new significance. While exploring the locative aspects of these technologies for media art, I elaborate on Hosokawa’s idea of a “secret theatre” by paralleling it to some compelling concepts in audio (culture) studies, such as Michael Bull’s “auditized looking,” Elisabeth Weis’ “écouterism,” Denis Hollier/Jean Paul Sartre’s “auditory gaze,” and Steven Connor’s “modern auditory I.” As case studies, I focus on three performative audio walks that all took place in train stations around 2012-2013: Janet Cardiff’s Alter Bahnhof, Dries Verhoeven’s Niemandsland, and Judith Hoffland’s Like Me. Each in their own right reconfigures the urban experience by means of locative features and interactive relations with their environments. These art works help to see Hosokawa’s “secret theatre” in a new light of highly individualized yet relational aesthetic experiences that open our ears and eyes to an outside social context and reality rather than shut them off.
The Relationality of the Adhaan: A Reading of the Islamic Call to Prayer Through Adriana Cavarero’s Philosophy of Vocal Expression
(2017)
author(s): Lutfi Othman
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The Call to Prayer, the Adhaan, is one of the most instantly recognizable Islamic sounds that we might hear in our soundscape today. For Muslims, the Adhaan is a specific call to notify the Islamic community that the time for prayer has arrived. For those who are not trained to respond to it religiously, the experience of listening to the Adhaan can trigger the formation of different interpretations, sometimes in hostile ways, from its original intent. This paper looks at the Adhaan from the perspective of sound and suggests that the voice of the Mu’adhin, who calls for prayer, carries with it the possibility to be perceived in manifold ways. Through the sound of the human voice and its pervasive nature, the Adhaan carries its original message, fusing it with new meanings, and announces it in a way unique to the voice. Guided by philosopher Ariana Cavarero’s conception of the voice and referencing situations in The United States of America where the Adhaan was at the center of controversy, this paper approaches the Adhaan with a focus on the sound of the voice and the relations that it fosters both intentionally and unintentionally.
The sounds of food: Defamiliarization and the blinding of taste
(2017)
author(s): Tara Brabazon
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This essay – situated within the small but emerging field of sonic food studies and gastronomic auditory cultures – is positioned in the gap between the sounds of food and the meanings derived from the behaviors and practices encircling food. In food studies literature, assumptions abound about multi-sensory engagement. Yet, the sonic components of food remain undertheorized. This sonic research article – consisting of an sonic artifact and exegesis – emphasizes and prioritizes sensory incongruity. Intentionally, the non-eating sounds of the digital and analogue interactions surrounding food are summoned. There is a reason for the focus on these interfaces. Working with Viktor Shklovsky’s theorization of defamiliarization or ostranenie (остранение), presented in his 1917 essay “Art as Device,” I am interested in reducing “automatization” and value “disruptions.” I have produced a sonic artifact that textualizes three slices of food sound: shopping for groceries, the delivery of food to a domicile, and cooking. These sounds were not slotted into a convenient narrative of a sonic documentary. They were not staged; they were not sound effects. There is a gap – of experience, expertise, perception, and meaning – between signifier and signified, the sound and its reception. The deferral of meaning creates hesitation, confusion, instability, and unsettles meaning systems.
“City Noise”: Sound (Art) and Disaster
(2017)
author(s): Frans Ari Prasetyo
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
My sonic work “City Noise” proposes both an artistic and a theoretical approach to the city-sound relationship. The default assumption about this relationship is that sounds reflect a one-to-one relationship between soundscape and landscape, both drawing upon and revealing the physical and social landscapes from which they originate. However, the question can be posed regarding whether there actually is a direct relationship between sound and place in our increasingly globalized world. Due to this globalization, the relation between the local and the global has become more fluid, and the relation between sounds and scapes has begun to blur.
“You can hear them before you see them” Listening through Belfast segregated neighborhoods
(2017)
author(s): Nicola Di Croce
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The present research explores urban segregation in Belfast through listening. Specifically, the aim is to investigate how auditory culture subtly and deeply affects everyday lives and how marginal areas can be identified and analyzed from an auditory perspective. Moreover, the paper highlights the strong relationship between everyday sonic environments, certain urban and social issues, and the system of public policies related to the preceding. Therefore, urban planning and public policy design are investigated through a sonic studies approach in order to reveal the political framework of the city.
The sonic environment of Belfast’s most segregated areas is characterized by ice cream van melodies and their propagation within different neighborhoods. Such a street trade, which is also spread over Great Britain and Ireland, represents the perfect opportunity to enter areas that are often difficult to approach.
The case study shows how a study of the production and reception of the moving melodies emanating from ice cream vans is crucial in detecting where and how Belfast's contemporary culture is developing and in what ways sonic studies may influence a new wave of inclusion policies. The sounds of ice cream vans and their dissemination can be investigated to both confirm and challenge Belfast’s segregation trend; understanding them offers practitioners and dwellers an unexplored “sonic tool” to discuss segregation.
Silencing Urban Exhalations: a case study of student-led soundscape design
(2017)
author(s): Jordan Lacey
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper describes a practice-led soundscape studies project in which students created sound interventions to transform the “voice of the city.” A loud exhaust fan outlet dominated the site, and students were asked to create a soundscape intervention in response to an imaginative-artistic question: the exhaust outlet is the voice of the city, speaking; can this voice be deciphered, transformed, augmented? Students responded with live sound-art, musical and electroacoustic performances played through loudspeakers placed adjacent to the exhaust outlet, and physical changes to the environment with interactive sound-making artifacts. The intervention was informed by the acoustic ecology movement’s maxim that acoustic design and the “retrieval of a significant aural culture” is a “task for everyone” (Schafer 1977: 206); thus, students were encouraged to listen and creatively respond to the dominant sound. Students were introduced to a mixture of acoustic ecology listening exercises and structural approaches derived from the Research Centre on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment (CRESSON). The project aimed to demonstrate that with the assistance of educational resources, city dwellers, given the opportunity to creatively interact with city sounds, might revitalize their own city-relationship through participatory soundscape design.
Animal Sounds against the Noise of Modernity and War: Julian Huxley (1887–1975) and the Preservation of the Sonic World Heritage
(2017)
author(s): Marianne Sommer
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper engages with Julian Huxley’s and Ludwig Koch’s sound recording of animals and the production of “soundbooks.” This collection and preservation of animal vocalization is discussed in the larger context of Huxley’s engagement with nature conservation that included the fight against the noise of modernity. He also promoted the protection of nature through the medium of film and its capacity to store and distribute sounds. I focus on Huxley’s directorship of the London Zoo (1935-42) but follow these endeavors up to his involvement in the foundation of the WWF. Once again, the parallels between zoo – where the sound recordings were made – and film, which also presented animated animals, through human and/or animal sound, become apparent. For Huxley, animals could not possess language; that was the preserve of the crown of evolution, i.e. humankind. But they should have a voice. Finding the right voice to politically represent animals on record, film, or cartoon proved to be a long journey.
Smorzando. Chopin on the MP3 player
(2017)
author(s): Michel Roth
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
My article focuses on the phenomenon of the ephemeral in music in general. I would like to stay with piano music for a while, where the rapid fading away of tone is normal, and a central component for the regulation of this process, the damper, is called il smorzatore in Italian. The Préludes Op. 28 by Frédéric Chopin will serve as one example; I will later move on to a piano LP by the Swiss artist Dieter Roth and will end with an orchestral work by the young German composer Hannes Seidl.
Experimental Cylinders – Experiments in Music Psychology around 1900
(2017)
author(s): Julia Kursell
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article asks how the availability of recording in the sound archive changed the way in which researchers and music listeners related to musical performance. I focus on a study of intonation that Otto Abraham carried out between 1906 and 1923 at the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin and that he published in a Festschrift for Carl Stumpf. Abraham conjectured that individuals experience their singing as correct, even when measurement demonstrates that they have actually deviated strongly from the values required by musical notation. As he was able to demonstrate through a series of recordings of singing individuals, this also holds for professional singers and those with absolute pitch. I suggest that the singing of one amusical subject was critical in bringing melodic contour, as a Gestalt quality of song, to the fore as an answer to Abraham's problem, because the recording allowed this individual to articulate his listening in addition to his singing.
Archive, Collection, Museum: On the History of the Archiving of Voices at the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University
(2017)
author(s): Britta Lange
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Available today under the name of the Berlin Sound Archive (Berliner Lautarchiv) or the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University (Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is a collection of now largely digitalized sound storage media begun in 1915 (https://www.lautarchiv.hu-berlin.de/, all internet references retrieved 24th June 2016). The collection includes shellac records with recordings of prisoners of war (1915-1918), sound recordings of the voices of so-called famous personalities (1917-1939), speech samples of German dialects (1921-1943), and recitations of poetry and literature in German (1930s and 1940s) as well as magnetic tapes from the 1960s that have not yet been transferred to a digital format. While, since its inception, the collection has repeatedly been referred to as a sound archive, prior to the digitalization of the shellac holdings in the 1990s this term never found its way into any of its official names. Against this background, this article traces both the Sound Archive’s early institutional history (1915-1947) as well as the use of the term “sound archive.” By considering the archiving of voices in the framework of an emerging history of knowledge, it explores the disciplinary contexts (the academic sciences) and configurations of conservation, research, and presentation (collection, archive, laboratory, library, and museum) in which the preserved human voice operates as an epistemic object. On the basis of a renewed examination of a number of sound recordings of prisoners of war, it should be shown how this historical material can be made productive for current research horizons.
Editorial - Encounters With Southeast Asia Through Sound
(2016)
author(s): Marcel Cobussen
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
What “we” as JSS editors had in mind was to make space for some “subaltern voices,” multi-media reports on Southeast Asian soundscapes preferably coming from (local) residents or people who have spent a considerable amount of time there, to find out whether they hear differently, whether they notice different things, different sounds; to find out whether they can bring in other concepts, enrich or change the common discourses in Sound Studies; to explore and bring to our attention what they find sonically relevant.
A brief proposition toward a sonic geo-politics: Rajarhat New Town
(2016)
author(s): Anja Kanngieser
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper explores some of the acoustic landscapes of Rajarhat New Town, a satellite city and special economic zone (SEZ) in West Bengal, Kolkata. Establishing these landscapes in their physical and economic geographies of primitive accumulation from farmland to IT parks, this paper indicates the potential for incorporating a sonic method into how urbanizing spaces are approached and understood. By crossing affective and semiotic registers, it argues for a perspective that brings the sensitivities of listening to the analytical practices of the social sciences. Through such interdisciplinarity, soundings become a means to engage with, and elaborate upon, contemporary social-economic and political landscapes. At the same time, the paper stages some possibilities for incorporating geo-economic and political critiques into sound discourses and practices.
Editorial: Recomposing the City: New Directions in Urban Sound Art
(2016)
author(s): Gascia Ouzounian, Sarah Lappin
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In the first year of Recomposing the City we hosted over a dozen public seminars, concerts, exhibitions, and an International Symposium in Belfast. The papers collected in this volume of the Journal of Sonic Studies (JSS) stem from the Recomposing the City International Symposium in 2014, a lively gathering that was followed with an equally stimulating Postgraduate Student Symposium in 2015. However, the papers published in this present volume represent only a small part of the dialogue that Recomposing the City has facilitated. Thus, in this editorial we will reflect on our group’s larger concerns as well as on the insights of those artists and scholars who have generously contributed to this ongoing dialogue.
Intersections of creative praxis and urban exploration
(2015)
author(s): David Prescott-Steed
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Since the 1960s, walking artists have documented the multifarious relationship between humans and their built environments. By turning walking into art, key figures such as Bruce Nauman, Richard Long, Marina Abramović, and Hamish Fulton paved the way for future practitioners, such as Janet Cardiff, Tim Brennan, Tim Knowles, and Rachel Clewlow, among others, who continue to use walking as an opportunity creatively to investigate notions of place, identity, time, consciousness, and heritage. Whether walking fosters new artistic inquiry or remains its product, what a vast majority of walking artists have in common is that they pursue a form of praxis on the surfaces of their habitats.
This practice-led research project contributes to creative walking praxis by pursuing notions of cultural identity through an engagement with sub-suburban infrastructure. By developing sound-based, visual, and textual interactions with subterranean space – specifically stormwater drains – this project seeks to investigate alternative ontologies of everyday life.
Mapping Soundfields: A User’s Manual
(2015)
author(s): Norie Neumark
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper was written as a keynote address for ESSA 2014, Mapping the Field, where the conference organizers asked me to reflect on my own and others’ journeys between sound theory and sound practice. As a live presentation, focused on voice, my aim was to speak in a way that would invoke the journey and invite the audience to join me. To do this, I both took literally the conference’s trope of mapping, and also, in terms of style, wrote/spoke in a performative mode that does not always translate easily into a written form. While I have adapted that address for written publication here, I have chosen to leave some traces of the aural mode, because in my view it speaks to the specific task of evoking a (theoretical and practical) journey. I have also retained the voice of situated knowledge, even if I have curbed some of its more poetic and emphatic spoken moments, because it resonates with the aim of reflecting on my own and others’ journeys, as I hope will unfold in the paper below.
Sound and Immersion in Timekiller Games
(2015)
author(s): Anahid Kassabian
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In this article, I consider the role of sound in the immersive experience of “timekiller games.” “Timekiller games” as I define them here are a subset of casual games that are mainly played on smartphones and browsers, and while there are many subgenres, they share an ability not only to use up significant chunks of player time, but for the most part to “kill time” while waiting, winding down, procrastinating, and so on. I argue that the hyperreality of these games’ sounds, which imply physical reality much more vividly than the games’ visual designs, is one important component that helps to keep players immersed in the game world. Immersion in video games is overdetermined, and the choice of hyperreal sounds is one among a number of strategies that intersect and overlap to create an immersive experience particular to timekiller games. As the games get more challenging, requiring more and more focus, they shift roles in the attention economy, demanding more attention (as suggested by the idea of “challenge-based immersion” [Ermi and Mäyrä 2005]). This immersive experience is a kind of affective labor in which players produce affective value for the company and the industry and which is converted back and forth into “pay to win” in-app/in-game purchases. The games thus have a mixed economic form, in which their revenue streams come from a combination of initial purchases (though often these games are free to download), banner advertising at the bottom of the screen, and in-app purchasing to get past a particularly challenging level or obstacle. Thus: 1) playing timekiller games demands increasing levels of attention; 2) the games participate in the attention economy, despite appearing to be simple little timekillers; 3) the games produce affective value; 4) players and games participate in a mixed economic model of game purchase, advertising, and in–app purchases, converting affective value into material value and back again; and 5) the player is re-inserted into the attention economy to produce further affective value, thus continuing the circuit.
In and out of memory: exploring the tension when remembering a traumatic event.
(2015)
author(s): Anna Walker
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The modernist approach to trauma points to an occurrence that demands representation and yet refuses to be represented (Roth 2012: 93); the intensity of the experience makes it difficult to remember and impossible to forget, making any form of recollection inadequate. This exposition explores the repetitive and unresolved notion of trauma using 11 September 2001 as the entry point to navigate a pathway backward into the past and all that was remembered, and uncovers what was forgotten in an effort to lay a traumatic memory to rest. The research began with a journal written on the day of and days following the disaster, which up until a couple of years ago remained closed and unread. Personal remembering is layered upon a well-established collective memory of the event and a vast array of literature, art, and theory written in response to 9/11.
JENNY SUNESSON
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Jenny Sunesson
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Jenny Sunesson (b. 1973) is a Swedish artist predominantly
working with sound. Her practice ranges from field recording and live collages to conceptual sound art and video. Sunesson uses her own life as a stage for her dark, tragic and sometimes comical re-contextualised work where real and invented characters and
derogated stereotypes, collaborate in the alternate story of hierarchies and normative power structures in society.
This exposition contains bonus material (audio-visual) on the doctoral project "To Start from Scratch" by Karl Salzmann (ARC - Artistic Research Center, University of Music and performing Arts in Vienna, Austria, 2024). It presents a selection of documented artistic works, prototypes, performances and materials developed during the research process.open exposition comments (0)
This exposition examines the curatorial project "Clew: A Rich and Rewarding Disorientation," held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2017. The project is part of my doctoral research on “Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency.” “Clew” proposes a framework for curatorial dramaturgy and asks: What is the potential of a dramaturgical approach within an open-ended exhibition structure? Who, or what, is the curatorial dramaturg? How do materials and time contribute to unfolding exhibition narratives? [This exposition corresponds to Section Six: Extending Lines in All Directions: Curatorial Dramaturgy in the printed dissertation.]open exposition comments (0)
The research project FACT stage one aims to test the sonic capacity of fragmenturgy (developed by Sunesson 2014–19) as a method to unsettle polarised positions of areas and sites existing outside of the visual power structures and political strongholds. The long-term purpose is to develop a Fragmenturgy ACtion Tool (FACT); a transitory toolbox for cultivating fragmenturgy methods and actions. FACT stage one consists of a comprehensive case study carried out in collaboration with a group of students aged 18–23 based at Uppsala Community College in Sweden, which was explored as a site during 2021. Image copyright: Christina Hillheimopen exposition comments (0)
Epiphanies of an Invisible weave essay by Jenny Sunesson, 2022 edited in 2023 Translated by Steven Cuzner Preface (2023) Epiphanies of an Invisible weave is an essay written during the processes of two different, yet overlapping, projects; the research project FACT stage one, and the solar driven, sound art project UNDER. The essay explores the specific capacities and possibilities of sound and listening through the specific mode of field recording, which is the sonic modality that I have exploring for more than 20 years. The essay aims to shed some light on the site-related, political, and hidden potentials of sound as it examines the possibilities of (re)-learning through listening in relation to both human and more-than-human explorations and possible “epiphanies”, imagining openings beyond stereotypical knowing. /Jenny Sunesson Image copyright: Ida Lindgrenopen exposition comments (0)
A COLLAB work about the current position of mankind where we are at in the NOW - a comment on that and an exploration of the automatization and the relationship between the human essence and the artificial. Skin is the membrane that divides inside from outside, what is important and not, what is alive and not. Skin represents the human and at the same time the contrahent to the artificial. We live in a time where everyone is trying to tell us which world will be the best for us to live in. We want you to tell you.open exposition comments (0)
This exposition explores the backround noise as aesthetic periphery. My attempt is to define my subjective experience about what I consider as peripheral frequencies and how do they affect the formation of aesthetic experiences.open exposition comments (0)
Ferry Experiment: Reading Line and Sound aims to grasp movement in different artistic elements and trace their interconnection. A sound of a ferry trip Lisbon-Berreiro is recorded as if from two differing ears of a passenger. One traces the movement of detailed noise inside while the other lowers itself to the machinery and gives an impulse of the repetitive swing of moving water. A drawing is created as a result, dismounted to its detail and used together with the sounds as a continuation searching itself in the movement of a body.open exposition comments (0)
In this exposition, I analyse the making of The Missing Page, a short film I shot in 2016 (and completed much later, in 2018) in response to the disappearance of my mother, Dorothy, from her home for over twelve hours; she was later diagnosed with dementia. This exposition reflects on the key stages of the project: establishes the aims of the film and its inspirations; the nature of the exploratory research, which took place on location at my parent’s home; and the conclusions I drew. I also review my working methods and discuss influences such as slow cinema and defamiliarization, identifying the importance of narrative, ethnographic methods, sound design, the notion of ‘space’, ‘place’, and palimpsest in shaping my thoughts, and the progress of the making of the film.open exposition comments (0)
Microphones installed inside the hive in the framesopen exposition comments (0)
What Colour is Signature? acts as a platform with a score to play and experiment with different compositional structures. The platform aims to create a non-intensive means to enjoy the possible mental representations you may experience when listening to sounds that negotiate the amount of noise and information. Fluxus and Avant Garde art in 1960s often explored the relation between noise and silence and how it is communicated within a space (during the so called ‘happenings’). Noise (or the source of randomness) shifts the listener’s perception to the non-sense that art often produces, and brings into play the attempt of the mind to focus on the mental representations it is creating. Therefore, the non-sense (noise and silence) in itself acts as a measurement of information.open exposition comments (0)
The Lost and Found project began as an attempt to challenge my own sound making in opposition to a linear, capitalist, narrative tradition, dominated by visual culture. I wanted to explore the possibilities of sound as a counterpart material risking our perception of what sound is and what it can do. To reach beyond my own aesthetic and sociocultural baggage, I started to experiment with chance operated live performance as a method. By multilayering uncategorised sound scraps the work emerged to “produce itself” and I began to catch glimpses of alternative sound worlds and sites. I called the method fragmenturgy (fragmented dramaturgy) and the alternative realities that were created; fragmedialities (fragmented mediality, fragmented reality).open exposition comments (0)
Jenny Sunesson (b. 1973) is a Swedish artist predominantly working with sound. Her practice ranges from field recording and live collages to conceptual sound art and video. Sunesson uses her own life as a stage for her dark, tragic and sometimes comical re-contextualised work where real and invented characters and derogated stereotypes, collaborate in the alternate story of hierarchies and normative power structures in society.open exposition comments (0)