This research is an exploration and development of the self-defined instrument concept "pneumatic postinstruments, which can act as independent beings on a stage and be put in connection with the body. These are specially designed air pressure-based mechanical instruments which, in a hybrid appearance, are both the instrument and what plays and moves it. The research is grounded in a vision of different vocalities and bodies, living and non-living, breathing together in a heterogeneous musical world.
The vision draws its inspiration from Queer theory, new materiality, interdisciplinary climate research, pyropolitics, Cli-Fi (climate-fiction), Russian cosmism, Chaos Magic and mysticism.
In the pneumatic post-instrument, the air's juxtaposed and various qualities such as volatile, chaotic, concentrated, powerful, diffuse and non-visible energy will be signified. The air is here, but also as a void. It can almost be described as a negation of itself and lives in the gap between "identity" and "non-identity".
Through the deconstruction of old instruments, textures, and bodies, Barratt-Due will use pneumatic mechanics to reflect on the energy form of air. Pneumatic mechanics are systems that uses air pressure. Fans and electromagnetic valves, scanners, sensors, as well as voices and bodies, will be part of the instrumental, technological, and performative ways to create new vocal and pneumatic music. The result will be performed by Barratt-Due alone and in collaboration with other artists.
The result will include instruments, performances, concerts, performative installations with associated performance practices and a reflects the practice, the art and the theory in which it is grounded.
Camilla Vatne Barratt-Due is a sound artist and musician exploring performance, installation and design of new instruments. She builds altered mechanical systems and develops her own performance practices, often with the use of live-coding and other DIY electronics.
Her work has been shown in places such as the Akademie der Künste. HAU, Stamsund Theater Festival, Black Box Theatre, Bergen Festivals, Piksel, and Insomnia.
She collaborates with different sound artist and currently working in duo-constallations with sound artists Lukas Grundmann, Julia Giertz and Hanne Skjelbred.
She is frequently composing for dance and theatre productions and collaborating with artists such as Ingri Fiksdal, Eirik Fauske, Espen Klouman Høiner, Meg Stuart and Rosalind Goldberg. In 2021 she was part of the program SHAPE, a platform for artists within electronic music in Europe - with her electronica project Canilla and released her debut album You always wanted more in life, but now you don't have the appetite published on Street Pulse Records.
Camilla is educated in classical accordion from the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen (BA), and in sound art (MA) from the Universität der Künste in Berlin.
De Motu Cordis
If the heart has a movement what movement does it have?
Instrument thinking with externalized organs and use of pneumatics
If the heart has a movement what movement does it have?
This is a sentence from one of the latest text by Thomas Aquinas text published around 1973.
A philosophical explanation of the relationship between the soul and the human heart as an organ. A gaze of materialisms and by making resources to aristotalian premises this piece reflects on the the heart and its function, evoking a bridge from mystic and medieval medicine to post human thinking of the queering of death.
How can this text embrace questions about what music not yet is.
if the human condition is an event of extinction, not as in that we all will die or disappear but more in the need appearing- of letting go of a certain idea of the human as the superior what can music do to help us
die this death?
Looking at the works by Claire Colebrook and Patricia Maccormack I look at music in its action and activism form searching the unknown, reveal the deviates, rendering movements to evolve, out of a dated role.
In my presentation I will show an instrument of a fiction-medieval heart-structure, drawing on simondonion ideas of reticulations.
I am asking what kind of other then humanness is embedded in musical affect. Letting the aesthetic of the technical object be at work juxtaposed with Aquinas text of the heart and its motion; de Motu Cordis. To
see music as what music not yet has become.
In my research on on pneumatics in instrument building I create instrumentsystems where mechanically operated air intersects with technology, code, craft, wax, wool, liquid, blood, pleasure spirit and magic. I investigate events of extinction, memories, places, medical histories and ontological accidents. I see the instrument or instrument-system as remains of that as which is left behind. Asking how can a story be absorbed into the instrument like an indirect or forgotten memory played back in a symbolic circuit. It carries the undegird to question critical methods in artistic research in the potential of failure analyzing symbolic meaning.