Research Catalogue

The 'sonozones' project investigates sound art practices in public places through personal and public acts of listening and sounding. The topic is explored using artistic processes developed on site in Mülheim in the Ruhr region of central Germany. Four sound art practitioners collaboratively explore ideas and concepts that question the significance and impact of listening and sounding in public places and suburban and urban spaces. The project collects traces and artefacts of the artistic processes as a basis for investigations into key elements of the individual and social dimensions of sound art. The exploration of forms sets the stage for experiments, interventions, and performative presences carried out on site by the artists. A continuous dialogue and the collection of verbal reflections frames these activities. In addition to texts, this exposition lays out a collection of audio recordings, photographs, and videos in order to document and convey sensory experiences as well as thoughts.

Exploring terminologies describing the relationships between music and gesture in composition, text (score), perfromance and re/perception

The media portfolio for 'Sound Presence'

Wir sind auf (Innerschweizer) Spurensuche und beleuchten die Performanceszene der letzten 40 Jahre: Eine Karte – eine «Performance Archäologie» ist am Entstehen. Wer hat wann, wo, mit wem performt? Wir interviewen Veranstalter_innen und Performer_innen und recherchieren im Stadtarchiv Luzern. ...Wir sind eine (ergänzende) online Plattform: Snapshots berichtet über laufende Veranstaltungen; im Archiv wird vergangenes dokumentiert. ...Wir machen Innerschweizer Akteur_innen sichtbar.

Jan Schacher | Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, Artesis Plantijn University College, Antwerp, BE \ Zurich University of the Arts, CH Day 1, 9 November, De Bijloke Kraakhuis, 12:00-13:00 New Islands is an entwined, manifold, physical, sonic, gestural, electronic, mediated, yet immediate musical performance. The performance’s main issues are presence, agency, and mediation. This manifests in an interwoven, complexly folded situation of physically performing with electronic sound processes and technological instruments. At stake are the relationships between the artist’s body, actions and affects connected to the resulting soundworld, abstract narrative, and the imagination triggered in the audience. This happens in the social situation of the concert space, the period shared in co-presence with the audience, by sharing the moment of shaping the sounds and the overall musical form. The performance is tied to the key elements of the physical actions, the perceived intentionality and agency of the performer, yet also the invisible presence of the “machinic” agency, and the interaction and dialogue with the musical processes and structures. Algorithmic, rule-based processes are counterbalanced by a state of pre-reflective, intuitive “surfing” of the piece. The stage situation represents an “island” in the flow of everyday life, which comes naturally for the audience but is equally true for the performing artist. The moment onstage represents the tip the iceberg, a singularity, a focal point, the compression moment of a practice that spans a considerably larger scope. This compression results in a “manifold,” a “fold,” and a “millefeuille” of elements that are infinitely entwined. Yet, given a beginning and an end in a performance, this multiplicity of elements becomes finite, at least in time, and can be perceived and experienced as a unified object, created and shared in the presence of the audience/viewers. The metaphor of the “manifold,” a concept from abstract mathematics, serves to point toward a state of affairs where many dimensions intermingle, explode, and get wrapped and enfolded in such a way as to render nearly impossible the task of identifying, isolating, and evaluating the individual constituent parts; or at least it only permits approximations to singular exemplars of the experience in question. This abstract model represents the multiplicities of implications, operational domains, and significances present in any musical performance situation, particularly when applied to non-predetermined or non-textual practices. New Islands investigates a core question through “showing/doing”: whether and how the signifiers, act(ors/ants), and shifting scopes that get (re)present(ed) in the stage situation are organised hierarchically and how they represent a gridded cultural space; whether and how they embody a decentred, shifting, and enfolded web of relationships and strata that we are forced to continuously traverse in multi-perspectival, shifting perceptions.

Music, when performed live, carries the musician's physicality with it, either embedded within the sound or perceivable through the musician's physical presence. A dancer's movement follows dynamics and expresses shapes that are based on musical phrasing principles and 'kinetic melodies'. The two pieces 'Double Vortex' for trombone, movement, and live-electronics and 'Moving Music' for interactive dance and electronic sounds represent experimental devices for exploring the relationships between musical actions and movement, sound and space, and between instrumental and embodied performance modes. With physical tasks and movement components added to open-form, improvised, and compositional work, the otherwise tacit and taken for granted contributions of the performer's corporeal presence is brought to the foreground. By putting the dancer into the role of an instrumentalist and by setting the trombone player into movement, the intrinsic musicality of movement and the dependence between dance and music is shown. By linking sound and movement in both the corporeal and the technological domains, a shifted relationship is established that generates forms of interaction particular to this specific practice. The work on the two pieces is carried out with a focus on artistic creation, and in parallel becomes the object for observation, trace interpretation, and analysis from the perspective of art as research. The exposition further thematises the methods of trace collection and analysis, as well as the making of maps, diagrams, and assemblages, and addresses the scope of this secondary discursive format. In a movement that goes from media trace to text to sketch, from descriptive to contextual to associative juxtaposition, the exposition speculates about – rather than claims to generate – insights and understanding on corporeality in technologically mediated music and dance performances.