Screening 1 

 

Dave Payling – Neon Vibration (5:09)

NeonStillAn animated étude with rhythmically transforming geometric vector style imagery. It attempts to create rich visual textures and lighting effects from a minimal input coupled with the use of video feedback. The graphics were created by a visual instrument, which reacts to audio in real-time. Additional compositional structure and complexity was determined by the composer. The algorithmically generated music was inspired by the ‘dance chimes’ device (http://www.richter-spielgeraete.de/catalog-detail/items/9.06000- tanzglockenspiel-dance-chimes.html). This is an instrument that triggers bell like timbres when one of nine pitched chimes are stepped on by a user. Two Reaktor block modular ensembles produce sonic textures which are harmonised on the pentatonic scale used by the chimes.

Biography

Dave is from Sheffield, UK, and teaches and studies Music Technologies at Staffordshire University, teaching MAX/MSP, mastering, sound synthesis and Quartz Composer. He is a visual music composer and holds a PhD in Visual Music composition. His earlier research centred on sonification and auditory display and his composition ‘Listen (Awakening)’ was performed at the Sydney Opera House as part of the ICAD conference in 2004. His more recent work focuses on composition for Visual Music with animation and electronic music. Dave also produces more mainstream Electronic music and is From the Floor section editor for Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture.

Dave’s compositions have been performed at the Soundings Festival Edinburgh, MANTIS Festival University of Manchester, flEXiff Experimental Film Festival Sydney Australia, Seeing Sound Bath Spa, ICMC Shanghai, Noisefloor Festival Staffordshire and the Understanding Visual Music Conference in Brasilia, Brazil

 

Diana Reichenbach – Feux Follets (1:18)

CemeteryProductionStillP1050938Feux Follets was inspired by the approach of All Saints’ Day and a desire to activate a space intended to honor and celebrate life. The light-animation was created by students attending the Savannah College of Art and Design’s study abroad program in Lacoste, Provence. The animation was filmed at the cemetery in Lacoste. 

Credits:

Director/Editor: Diana Reichenbach

Light Paint Animation: Caleb Blue, Mai Bunch, Nick Chmil, Shelly Gertan, Sarah Mydland, Katie Woodworth, Sam Wu

Music: Thad Anderson

Website

www.dianareichenbach.com

www.thadanderson.com

Biography

Diana Reichenbach is a Professor of Animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she joined as faculty in 2016. An award-winning multimedia artist specializing in immersive and architectural media, her work breaks the traditional frame of filmmaking and explores 360 degree space through fulldome filmmaking, architectural installation, projection mapping, and interactive experiments.

Reichenbach’s work has notably been exhibited at the Virgin Airways clubhouse at LAX, Light City Baltimore Festival of Lights, HUBweek: A Festival for the Future, the Director’s Guild in Los Angeles, Burning Man Festival, Bonnaroo: Pageant of the Cosmos presented by Adult Swim, RiverRun Film Festival, Punta Y Raya Festival, and Anima Mundi. 

Select presentations include the 2015 Designing for Domes Symposium in Singapore, the 2014 Fulldome Festival in Jena, Germany, and the 2013 Society for Animation Studies conference in Los Angeles. Notable published works include a chapter entitled “Losing Time and Space: Experiencing Immersion”- part of the cross- disciplinary Springer-published text ‘Space, Time and the Limits of Human Understanding’, including authors such as Noam Chomsky. 

 

Maura McDonnell and Cobi van Tonder – Digital Alchemy (5:10)

DigitalAlchemy copyVisuals:

Digital Alchemy is a visual music work that consists of visuals crafted by Maura in response to a fixed media version of a music composition titled “Gala” by composer Cobi van Tonder. The visual music work explores the idea of the transformation of digital visual material through blending colour, merging different motions and speeds and applying symmetrical operations on raw and transformed material, however, the music composition provides the expressiveness, structure and energy from which the visuals are composed.

Visuals – Creative Process:

Maura McDonnell was interested in exploring the materiality and immateriality of colour and emerging forms that can be crafted with digital video tools.   Working with some sketches of what she would like to achieve, she set about setting up the initial visual in the software Adobe Premiere. The visual was a photograph of a light box with stained glass. This became the source material for generating colour, form and texture.   At a very early stage, the source image was no longer recognisable, and the images that were developed were used and re-used as new source material. Each re-use generated new colour results and motion effects. The images were animated, and layered and crafted akin to how a sculptor might craft stone to build their sculpture. The music was used as a type of structure and ground from which the motions and synchronisation of colour and motion events were aligned. The result is a deep listening experience of the music, which then becomes an important phenomenological addition to the choices made for the crafting and sculpting of the visual material. Many layers were output, discarded, re-used until something emerged for the artist after working with this process and the materials generated. At times, the material generated started to look like spun gold, and so the idea formed that this process and visual result of emerging colours and forms, that were forming and disappearing was a form of alchemy in digital form. Eventually, the visual emerged that the author felt met the initial intentions and felt right for the music composition.  

Music Composition: Gala (2015/16)

Composer: Cobi van Tonder

Titled after a Bridget Riley painting of the same name, Gala exists in a meta tuning system: a G harmonic series, 5-tet, 21-tet and 34-tet are all stacked on top of each other. From this only a small number of pitches are selected by ear to create a new meta scale of 34 pitches.

This allows for vibrations and beatings with varying intensities. The approach to form is strongly inspired by James Tenney: through simple macro gestures, the microtonal world can open up, breath and reveal itself in vertical directions. Similar to a sunset, colors shift and change, intensity changes, but everything else is still.

Maura and Cobi were co-colleagues on a PhD programme at Trinity College, Dublin and had talked of working together on visuals and music. Cobi completed her PhD and a suite of microtonal music compositions. She invited Maura to work with one of these compositions in her visual music practice.

Biographies

Maura McDonnell is a visual music artist based in Maynooth, Ireland, who creates visuals for new music and electronic music concerts, fixed media and installation productions. The medium of choice is visual effects and generative effects video and the style of her work is abstract. The meaningfulness that she seeks in her work is to explore the emotional, musical and evocativeness potential of music in a shared similarly crafted visual world. In 2005, she set up a visual music blog to document and research what she saw as an emerging field of creative art activity [http://www.visualmusic.blogspot.com] She has presented her visual music work and research at numerous international festivals, symposium, conference and film screenings. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering, Trinity College, Dublin teaching and supervising various music and media projects on the M.Phil in Music and Media Technology course and where she also teaches an arts practice research module on visual music.

http://www.mauramcdonnell.com
http://www.tcd.ie/eleceng/mmt/people/mmcdonn/

Cobi van Tonder is a South African born composer, media artist and lecturer based in Berlin, Germany. She completed a PhD in Music Composition at the Digital Arts & Humanities Program of Trinity College, Dublin, an MFA Art Practice degree at Stanford, USA; and a BHons in Music in History and Society (Musicology) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.​ The most recent works revolve around structural patterning – iterative and fractal (self-similar) approaches to composition, alternative tuning systems and micro-tonal music, three dimensionality in sound (or spatial audio) and the technological landscape that enables it. Van Tonder has also produced commercially for cinema, television, radio, and mobile media before commencing academic studies. Her work has been performed and showed in New York, London, San Jose, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seoul, Stuttgart, Berlin, Ogaki, Toronto, Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, Dublin and Antarctica.
http://www.otoplasma.com/info-bio

 

Julian Scordato – Engi (7:13)

scordato_engi copyEngi is an audiovisual work based on a sonification of stellar data related to the north polar constellations. Sound parameters are represented graphically and defined by certain observation data as well as physical characteristics of stars: sound duration is proportional to the distance from the Earth, amplitude is calculated considering the apparent magnitude, while main frequency changes according to the spectral class. Six temporal dimensions are added in order to activate the stars with a combinatorial system that virtually produces a perpetual change. Starting from these simple elements for sound generation, this work assumes a certain complexity through the interaction between electronic sounds in a feedback network capable of processing them both diachronically and synchronically, thanks to a series of interconnected processing units. Thus, sound elements no longer exist just as intrinsic and independent entities; they become instead strongly characterized by global processes that transform them as part of the network.

Biography

Julian Scordato is a composer, sound artist and music technologist. He studied Composition (BA) and Electronic Music (MA) at the Conservatory of Venice. He completed a Master’s Degree in Sound Art at the University of Barcelona with a thesis on IanniX software documentation. Co-founding member of the Arazzi Laptop Ensemble, research assistant for the Sound and Music Processing Lab at the Conservatory of Padua, he works as a professor of Electronic Music at the Conservatory of Brescia. As an author and speaker, Scordato has presented results related to interactive performance systems and graphic notation in the context of conferences and workshops. His award- winning electroacoustic and audiovisual works have been performed and exhibited in over 100 festivals and institutions. Among these are Venice Biennale, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, Instituto Cervantes (Rio de Janeiro), Gaudeamus Music Week (Utrecht), Festival Punto de Encuentro (Valencia), Sonorities Festival (Belfast), Seoul International Computer Music Festival, Art & Science Days (Bourges), Kochi- Muziris Biennale, Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (Stanford), Muestra de Música Electroacústica MUSLAB (Mexico City), Contemporary Music Research Center (Athens), Spektrum Art Science Community (Berlin), and New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. His music has been broadcast by RAI Radio3, NAISA Webcast, RadioCemat, Radio Papesse, Radio UNAM, RadioCona, Radiophrenia, Ràdio Gràcia, and Radio Círculo. His scores have been published by Ars Publica and Taukay Edizioni Musicali.

 

Claudia Robles-Angel – HINEIN (inwards) (10:00)

HINEIN_mail2HINEIN (inwards) is an invitation to travel inside the world of natural microstructures, combining subtle sounds and extreme close-up images of diverse natural surfaces whose micro-dimensions are not perceived in our daily life.  Both visual and auditory layers of the composition suggest the idea of a tactile/haptic feeling, inviting the audience to use their eyes/ears also to feel and not only to see/listen to, based on the following words by French philosopher Deleuze: ‘Where there is close vision, space is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic, non optical function: no line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance; there is neither horizon nor background nor perspective nor limit nor outline or form nor center; there is no intermediary distance, or all distance is intermediary.’

Biography

Claudia Robles-Angel is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bogotá-Colombia, currently living in Cologne-Germany and active worldwide. Her work and research cover different aspects of visual and sound art, which extend from audiovisual fixed-media compositions to performances and installations interacting with bio-data via the usage of interfaces such as, for example, the EEG (electroencephalogram, measuring brain waves activity).

Her work is constantly featured in not only media and sound-based festivals/conferences but also in group and solo exhibitions around the globe, for example, the ZKM Centre in Karlsruhe; KIBLA Multimedia Centre in Maribor, Bauhaus Museum für Gestaltung Berlin, the International Computer Music Conferences ICMC in Copenhagen, Montréal and Utrecht (2007/2009/2016); Festival Internacional de la Imagen in Manizales (2009/2010/2013), ESPACIO Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires (2010), the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival NYCEMF (2010/2013-2017); the SIGGRAPH Asia in Yokohama (2009); the Re-New Festival in Copenhagen (2011); the New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference NIME in Oslo (2011); ISEA 2011 Istanbul, at Prohelvetia – Salon Suisse/ 55th Venice Biennale (2013), Audio Art Festival Cracow (2013), Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research CMMR in Plymouth and Marseille (2013/2015), Miami New Media Festival (2014/2017), at the Museum of Contemporary Art Bogotá (2008/2015), at MADATAC 07 Madrid (2016), Sound/Image colloquium in London (2016), IK Stichting Vlissingen (2016) at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center New York City (2014/2017), Digitale Duesseldorf (2016) and more recently at ISEA2017 (International Symposium On Electronic Art) in Manizales (Colombia).  http://www.claudearobles.de

 

Paul Prudence – The Mylar Topology (5:00)

MylarTopology_HD_01_11_800The Mylar Topology is an wide-screen audio-visual work intended for panoramic projection and spatial sound. The piece synchronises binaural drones and generative video simulations of liquid forms condensed in space.

The works’ liquid prismoid and polychromatic psychedelia are minimal subjective interpretations of the liquefied reflective properties of Mylar sheets. For a long time I cannot seem to erase from memory Ira Cohen’s lysergic film ‘Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda’ which I learned he filmed by pointing his camera at reflections of distorted Mylar sheets to create visual effects. The Mylar topology is both a reflection and distortion of a (non visible) luminosity point that exists beyond/outside the screen.

Biography

Paul Prudence is an audio-visual performer working with generative video environments and abstract soundscapes. His work, which has been shown and performed internationally, focuses on the ways in which sound, space and form can be cross-wired to create live-cinematic visual-music experiences.

Paul maintains the weblog Dataisnature exploring the historical and contemporary interrelationships between natural processes, computational systems and procedural-based art practices. He also writes for Neural and HOLO magazines.

 

Beth Warshafsky and Gerry Hemingway – Calling You (8:32)

CallingYou_05_momCalling You is a lyrical tone-poem which evolved from several live, interactive performances into this single channel piece.Working with the musician Gerry Hemingway, it reflects a process of shaping associations between sound and image in an intuitive way. Pictorial elements interweave with more abstract sequences of color and texture. These appear and reappear, creating a  structure with the sound. 

The sound is a recording from a Performance in 2013 at Roulette in Brooklyn, New York. Gerry plays a drum kit layered with a vignette of the tin pan alley song, “Indian Love Call” as performed by Slim Whitman from a deteriorated cassette recording. He manipulates the envelope of this material through a volume pedal.  

The visual sources include 8mm movies shot by my father in Wisconsin, a flock of Brooklyn pigeons, various processed textures including writing, ‘found’ footage including Muybridge’s running buffalo, buffalos in the western plains and some 16 mm movies from a family in Ohio. There are also textural snippets of Gerry’s performance at Roulette. 

Biographies

The long collaboration between visual artist Beth Warshafsky and percussionist/sound artist Gerry Hemingway has evolved from single channel videos to include live performances at  Roulette, The Cell, The Stone and Spectrum in New York and the Kleintheater in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Beth Warshafsky is an artist, and educator based in New York City. Her artwork has been included in the International Short Film Festival in Hamburg; Follow the Sound Jazz Festival, Antwerp, Belgium; 

Screen Compositions at Experimental Intermedia; The Bruccenial in New York; The Tricky Woman Animation Festival; Vienna, Australia; The BITT Festival, Seoul Korea; The 9th Korea Experimental Arts Festival; The MadCat Woman’s International Film Festival; SIGGRAPH; The 5th International  Digital  Art Exhibit and Colloquium in Havana Cuba; and in numerous group shows. 

Gerry Hemingway is one of the leading pioneers of solo drum performance. He has led a number of quartet & quintets since the mid 80’s and been a member of a wide array of collaborative groups including BassDrumBone, Brew w/Reggie Workman & Miya Masaoka, a trio with Georg Graewe & Ernst Reijseger, the Swiss based WHO trio with Michel Wintsch and Baenz Oester,  as well as numerous duo projects with Thomas Lehn, John Butcher, Ellery Eskelin, Marilyn Crispell.

Mr. Hemingway is a Guggenheim fellow and has received numerous commissions for chamber and orchestral works.  He has collaborated with some of the world’s most outstanding improvisers and composers including Evan Parker, Cecil Taylor, Mark Dresser, Anthony Davis, Derek Bailey, Leo Smith and many others.  He currently lives in Switzerland having joined the faculty of the Hochschule Luzern in 2009.

https://vimeo.com/bsky

http://bskynyc.com/

www.gerryhemingway.com

 

Screening 2 

 

Jean Piché – Threshing in the Palace of Light (28:30)

THING 3 (0-06-20-00)An audiovisual rendering of Samuel Beckett’s one act play, Krapp’s Last Tape. An old man listens to a recording of himself made 30 years before. He revisits his ambitions, successes and failures with lovers, poetry and life. The voice, recorded in 1984, is that of actor Rick Cluchey who was imprisoned for years at San Quentin, created a theatre company there and, upon his release, became a close friend of Beckett.  

As inspired by a passage in the text about separating the grain from the husk, Threshing is about memory and the imposture it forces onto self-awareness. After days, months and years, what was once thought to be a conscious and sentient appraisal of one’s world turns out to be an illusion, informed by the heartless burden of experience. As Krapp listens to the tapes, he is is suddenly aware of the anguish it reveals in his younger self. The ensuing bitterness is revealed in the half-destroyed films playing back in his head.

The Palace of Light, that corner of the mind where anchors to the past are cast off and the terror of aging is appeased, is a refuge from fear and loneliness.

“We lay there without moving, but under us, all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.”

Biography

Jean Piché (1951) is a composer, video artist, professor and software designer based in Montreal.  His practice focuses on videomusic, a hybrid form he has helped define in the early 90s. More recently he turns to photography as a fixed representation of movement, musical or not. He was one of first composers in Canada to explore the emerging digital tools for music and sound. He has approached all contemporary forms of musical expression including opera, fixed media, mixed instrumental and live electronics by espousing the view that poetics supersede formalism. His music was presented worldwide and has been described as confounding, colorful and virtuosistic. 

As a professor at the Université de Montréal, he has guided a few generations of young artists who are active today in music and the media arts. He also develops software, notably Cecilia and the music platform for the famed “One Laptop per Child”  program at MIT Media Lab. 

Since 2015, he is Associate Director for artistic research at CIRMMT (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology) at McGill University in Montreal.

 

Bret Battey – Estuaries 3 (9:00)

Estuaries 3 FULL WITH TITLES.00_07_32_25.Still010This is the third of my ‘Estuaries’ audio-visual series, which can be viewed as a series of standalone works or ultimately as one large, multi-movement work. The works entail visualizing Nelder-Mead optimization, a process used by mathematicians to find solutions to complex, multi-variable problems that cannot be addressed by solving equations. We see the results of many such routines searching for the brightest points in a source image. The music was created with my Nodewebba software, which interlinks pattern generators to create complex emergent behaviours. In “Estuaries 3”, my focus was on spaciousness — longer, more slowly developing audio and visual gestures — and occasionally on establishing a multi-part counterpoint of both events and gestures.

Biography

Bret Battey (b. 1967) creates electronic, acoustic, and audio-visual concert works and installations, with a focus on generative techniques. He has been a Fulbright Fellow to India and a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and he has received recognitions and prizes from Austria’s Prix Ars Electronica, France’s Bourges Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique, Spain’s Punto y Raya Festival and MuVi4, Abstracta Cinema of Rome, Amsterdam Film eXperience the Texas Fresh Minds Festival, and the Red Stick International Animation Festival for his sound and image compositions. He pursues research in areas related to algorithmic music, haptics, and image and sound relationships. He completed his masters and doctoral studies in Music Composition at the University of Washington and his Bachelors of Music in Electronic and Computer Music at Oberlin Conservatory. His primary composition and technology teachers have been Conrad Cummings, Richard Karpen, and Gary Nelson. He also served as a Research Associate for the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media. He is a Professor of Audiovisual Composition at the Music, Technology, and Innovation Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

 

Antonino Chiaramonte – soundtrack to Harry Smith’s Early Abstractions, No.7: Color Study (1950-52) (5:40)

Color_Study_Image 312My electroacoustic soundtrack for the Harry Smith’s abstraction No.7: Color Study (1950-52) is a composition part of my PhD portfolio.

The Harry Smith’s abstract animation No.7 is a study which displays a similar behaviour all over its five movements. The rhetoric of the visual discourse is always the same: many and diverse shapes and colours rapidly interacting one another, with the visual energy, rhythm, and editing speed increasing during each section. Then, after a climax, the film usually has a drop in intensity. I focused my compositional efforts on an independent musical structure, where only some film’s features, shapes and visual behaviours act as binding elements with the music. Therefore, the level of synchronism is always subordinate to the musical discourse in a given moment and a function of it. Also harmonic and melodic features were taken into account. There is not a proper harmonic structure, but there are few recurring pitches all over the soundtrack that perform the function of anchors for the listener. The sound palette is derived from a unique instrumental source, every single sound in the music is from an alto flute, even the most seemingly far. The composition ends with the music that follows in tight sync the final eight visual gestures, underlying and reinforcing in this way the unequivocal musical structure of the film.

Biography

Antonino Chiaramonte is an eclectic Italian musician, internationally acclaimed electroacoustic composer, live electronics performer, sound designer and flautist. His musical research is focused on electroacoustic music and music & the moving image interaction. His music production is oriented towards research and experimentation on new expressive abilities, which arise from the interference between different music languages and technologies applied to the arts. His attention is focused on intermediality, live electronics, and performers’ interaction, in a continuous dynamic exchange between gesture/improvisation and control/composition. He currently is Professor in Performance and Interpretation of Electroacoustic Music at the Frosinone Conservatoire (Italy) and PhD candidate in Electroacoustic Audio-visual Composition at the Bournemouth University (UK). He is also active as movie soundtracks composer. His works have been successfully performed in Italy, Switzerland, U.S.A., Canada, Belgium, The Netherlands, China, France, Finland, Japan and UK.

 

Jean Detheux and Marco Ambrosini – Impromptu (6:24)

Impromptu 2 1080p-0 copyMarco Ambrosini, master of the nyckelharpa, and Younes Paknezhad, master of the kemanche, met in the Linz ORF studio in May 2017. They had never played together, and without any preparation, they started improvising. When I heard the recording, I immediately knew I had to listen to that music with my eyes, my images becoming a third instrument (much of this film has been generated in real-time, captured, then edited). Marco Ambrosini’s reaction to seeing the movie for the first time: “I cannot find the words to describe my emotion when seeing our latest little one. I can recognize almost all the notes from my instrument in your images!”. We hope to be able to do live images – music concerts soon.

Biography – Jean Detheux

Born in Belgium in 1946, Jean Detheux is a graduate of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Liège.
Lives and worked in Canada and the US since 1971.
Has taught “Art” in Canada and the US (NY Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, NYU, Concordia University in Montréal, Alberta College of Art in Calgary, Algonquin College in Ottawa etc.).
Artwork (natural media and digital) in private/public collections (in Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle-East).
Left natural media (1997, due to sudden deadly allergies to painting materials) for digital technology (started exploring “time-based art”).
Films with the National Film Board  of Canada (“Liaisons” and “Rupture”), numerous films in festivals since 2005.
Focuses on the importance of the hand gesture in image making (“le geste révélateur”), and especially, on the exploration of “inherent animation” (that which is done/found “by accident”), avoids “smarts” like the plague, believes that the conceptual approach is a dead-end.
Numerous lectures (in the US, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Lebanon, Belgium), conducts master-classes (including in music schools), has written many articles (AWN, SAGE, VFXWorld, NFB, The Wig, International Journal of Arts and Technology, Animation Studies 2.0, etc.), makes films and participates in concerts, creating images in real-time in collaboration with musicians (improvising and/or not).
His collaboration with musicians musicians (performers and composers), explores the possible dialogue between music and images (“listening with his eyes”) and this, in studio work as well as in live “images – music” concerts.
A large collection of his time-based work can be seen on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/jeandetheux

 

Daniela Diurisi and Emanuela Bartolotti – Il Sentiero (The Path) (3:46)

il sentiero 01A young woman walks a sensory path giving it the appearance of an imaginary – imagined wood.

With every single step, the fleeting shadow amongst the leaves or a newly perceived sound are the references to the world of emotions. A study of gradual progression.

A woman, a girl, a child. Touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight.

Nature welcomes the sensorial path of growth and memory.

The sound construction of “Il Sentiero” (The Path) is an acousmatic work focused on the cyclic transformation of the history continuum. The sound returns a multi-dimensional dramaturgy carrying the various sections of  animation to unexplored opportunities and therefore posing itself as a sound dramaturgy.

Thanks to micro-assembly techniques and using only freely manipulated concrete sound objects, the idea is to work between electro-acoustic composition and sound design.

On this research, composition takes things from realistic sound sources specifically constructed in relation to the “gestures” of the drawing and at the same time introduces extra elements: water sounds, little bells, a modified female voice chosen for its particular color, sounds of nature, contrasting sounds to bring the “gesture” into an imaginary dimension and many other sound objects of real nature, but transformed with various techniques in a dreamlike direction.

The choice is to erase the referential character of some sounds and to work on an unstable territory always between the known and the unknown, so you can use the breath, a word, a door that opens, steps or a error the same way; this choice is designed in adherence with the visual work and the particularities that this expresses in being a story that has the characteristics of the dream, of the visionary nature.

The proximity of the poetics of concrete music to the 2D animation technique is also felt and the languages blend together in an ancient flavor with contemporary characters.

The result is a slippery work, a sound made of material sounds that mix together and move continuously between the known and the unknown, recalling the nocturne.

Biographies

Daniela Diurisi attended the DAMS music at the University of Bologna and and she graduated with honors in electronic music at the Conservatory “T. Schipa” in Lecce, where she deepened her studies on composition and interpretation acousmatic (acousmonium). 
She plays the tenor and baritone sax. She uses to work conducting research on possible matching between sound and theater (audiobook TeatroSonoro “Invisible Journey – Odyssey Visionary” on the issues of migration in Sardinia) Prize in 2013 on Rai Radio 3 “Il Cantiere”. .
She worked in audio post production and has led projects “in the dark” by involving associations of blind people for new paths of non-visual communication.
She has studied Acousmatic Execution on the Acousmonium MARE and has been invited to perform her works in Amiens (Fr) on the Acousmonium MOTUS for Journées Nationales de l’Electroacoustique.

Emanuela Bartolotti: After attending the artistic high school in her hometown (Lecce), she moved to Bologna to study and work. Here she gets a degree at the Art Academy, where she studied scenography.
Then, she attends the School of Animation and Illustration in Urbino (PERF). She uses and tests different techniques such as photography, papier-mâché and drawing.
In 2009 she gets the first recognition in the photographic field.
Between 2005 and 2009 some of her images have been used as book covers by some publishing houses.
After attending PERF, she develops a passion for animation and illustration.
Nowadays, she leads as freelance two working projects: “Ortica” (Illustration/animation) and “Regine erranti”, handmade furnishing elements.

 

Jaroslaw Kapuscinski and Kacper Kowalski – Side Effects (16:00)

Side_Effects“Side Effects” is a project that Kacper Kowalski started as a book of photography featuring complex relationships between people and nature as seen from 150 meters above ground. This estranged perspective inspired Jaroslaw Kapuscinski to propose a collaboration. What if a specially composed music performed live in concert interpreted the images, guided the viewers through a rich world of unexpected emotions, meanings and abstract visual forms?

Biosgraphies

Kacper Kowalski (b.1977) is a graduate of the Technical University of Gdańsk, where he studied architecture. After having worked in architecture for four years, he devoted himself entirely to flying and photography, specializing in aerial pictures of natural and urban environments of his native Poland. He has received numerous awards, including the World Press Photo award (2009, 2014, 2015), the Picture of the Year International POYi award (2012, 2014, 2015, 2016). He is represented by the Panos Pictures agency. He lives and works in Gdynia, Poland.

Jarosław Kapuściński (b.1964) is an intermedia composer and pianist whose work has been presented at New York MOMA; ZKM in Karlsruhe; Centre Pompidou in Paris; and Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, among others. He has received awards at the UNESCO Film sur l’Art festival in Paris, VideoArt Festival Locarno, and FNCNM in Montréal. Currently, he is Associate Professor of composition and intermedia and Chair of the Music Department at Stanford University.

 

Irving Kinnersley and Finn Kinnersley – Air Under Water (9:30)

Bubble1‘Air Under Water’ is a fantasy that immerses the viewer in an underwater world of refracted light, sound and air. It suggests a world that might exist in the hidden depths of a glass of carbonated water, taking the viewer on a journey which metamorphises from the literal to the imaginary and back again. The imaginary, though, is also real: it is composed of sound and vision recorded underwater, to capture the unique and organic formations which are gently transformed into a strange and playful world.

Biographies

Irving Kinnersley is a Somerset-based composer working mainly in the realm of electroacoustic and acousmatic music. He recently completed a MMus at Bath Spa University, and is particularly interested in developing compositions based on environmental sound which respond to the complexities of place. He is currently developing work which responds to the Avalon Marshes on the Somerset Levels, and to the Isles of Orkney. In addition, he is working on two trilogies, one inspired by the poetry of Ezra Pound, and the other ‘Three Fantasies of Air Light and Water’ of which ‘Air Under Water’ is the first piece.

Finn Kinnersley is a self-taught visual-media artist with a background in anthropology and artifiicial intelligence. She is currently exploring different ways of abstracting patterns and motifs from the natural or concrete, especially with relation to the unique landscape and wildlife of the Somerset levels.

 

Giorgio Magnanensi – some tiny noise (7:00)

still image 01Seeking to link the seemingly disparate phenomena of sight, movement, noise and sound, I have been researching and experimenting to implement, integrate and conjugate sound within visual imagery and choreographic structures and to explore methods and devices, which can translate sound and movement into an audio-visual presentation.

My work aspires to be speechless, without the urgency of communicating anything. If it expresses anything at all, that is pure character, essence more than intentionality. It manifests potential energy more than activity, relying on its own bare existence: an imaginary scenography without any specific or intentional kind of narrative or message.

Sonorous spaces – like traversable spaces – map our perception of time; and to light sound should be compared when sound is not just what we hear but also the medium of our perception. If we understand the close relation here between listening and seeing, sound and light; then visualizing sound is like understanding that is not about what we “see” as what we ”see in”: theatricality.

Biography

Born and raised in Italy, Giorgio Magnanensi (1960) currently lives in Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, Canada. His diverse artistic practice includes composition, conducting, improvisation, circuit–bending and video art. From the early 80’s to date he has been working as a composer, conductor, teacher, and performer in Europe, Japan and Canada. He is artistic director of Vancouver New Music, Laboratorio Arts Society and lecturer at the School of Music of The Vancouver Community College.

giorgiomagnanensi.com

 

Wilfried Jentzsch – The Shining Stone (8:40)

Jentzsch_The shining stone imageWorld Premiere

A photo of a stone-sculpture has been used as material image. This image has been geometrically transformed based on fractal algorithms, compressed and stretched to create new perspectives. My most interest in the visual conception was to structure two opposite characters: light and shadow moving in a virtual 3D space.

Five Tube-Bells are the material sounds. Using the Spectral Extractor programmed by the composer they have been decomposed in two components of sound, noise and harmonics, and finally their spectra were granulated. The light/ shadow components of the visual were related to noise/ harmonics in sound to create a close relationship between moving images and music.

Biography

Born in 1941. He studied composition at Musikhochschule Dresden and Akademie der Künste Berlin, and electronic music at Musikhochschule Cologne.

From 1976 to 1981 he studied at Sorbonne University in Paris under Xenakis where he was conferred a degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of musical aesthetics whereas he conducted research projects of digital sound synthesis both at IRCAM and the CEMAMu.

He was professor of composition and director of the Studio for Electroacoustic Music at Musikhochschule Dresden from 1993 to 2006. His acousmatic and visual music works have been presented at international festivals such as Warsaw Autumn, ZKM, VMM Boston and New York, Melbourne, MusicAcoustica Beijing, EMUfest Rome, Montréal, and Musica Viva Lisbon. He has been giving lectures and masterclasses on electroacoustic music and visual music in Germany and abroad. Since 2007 he also has been working as a curator of visual music. Recently he was invited for Composer in Residence by Musiques & Recherches Brussels, and Guest composer at the ZKM with focus on the spatialisation of electroacoustic music.

He has received international composition prizes such as Boswil (CH), Paris, Bourges and ZKM Karlsruhe.Two CD with acousmatic compositions were published by Schott: Visions (WERGO Arts 8105 2) and sai-ji-ku (WERGO Arts 8121 2). Currently he is living in the Cologne suburbs.

 

Screening 3

 

Rob Godman – Faraday Waves (6:30)

still_faraday002Faraday Waves is a short audio-visual work written as a companion piece for a concert-hall performance of Poème électronique by Varese. Faraday discovered that a liquid undergoing vertical vibration, whose frequency exceeds a certain value, becomes unstable to surface waves. Also known as Faraday Instability, they form non-linear standing waves that appear on liquids enclosed by a vibrating vessel. In ordinary Newtonian fluids (those that do not exhibit shear thickening or shear thinning) the wave patterns include ones with 1-fold symmetry (stripes), 2-fold symmetry (squares), 3-fold symmetry (hexagons) as well as higher orders of symmetry.

The effect was first reported by Michael Faraday in 1831, and forms one of many experiments in visualizing vibration and sound – a means of converting analogue data from one form to another.

Thanks to an award from Santander, Rob was able to visit his colleague Professor Stephen Morris at the Physics Department, University of Toronto in May 2015. Part of Stephen’s research regards ‘shaking things’ and sound is often used as a form of stimuli. The visualization, created by Sam Jury, uses video documentation of the classic physics experiment invented by Faraday with the analogy of sound to image data transfer used as the starting point for the creation of the music.

Faraday Waves uses speech rhythms found in the e.e. cummings poem I Carry Your Heart With Me. Placed within the resonance of a bell; it symbolizes the creation and birth of a new life.

Biography

Rob has a passionate interest in how sound behaves acoustically and has developed many techniques for controlling and building virtual spaces for use within live performance and installation.

Re-performance of old and potentially obsolete audio-visual works involving technology has become an increasingly important part of his work. Many of his projects take their inspiration from early scientific experiments relating to visualisation of sound and periodicity.

He has a long track record of collaborative interdisciplinary projects with Simeon Nelson, Professor of Sculpture at the University of Hertfordshire, including Plenum, Anarchy in the Organism and most recently, Hydrosiren and Cosmoscope. Their research focuses on art/science crossovers, engaging with leading scientists from around the world. Cosmoscope, led by Nelson, was researched and produced in collaboration with an expert team of artists and scientists, culminating in a monumental multimedia sculpture incorporating sound and light initially shown at the Durham and London Lumiere’s 2017/18.

Whilst relatively new to working in linear film, he has recently completed the sound for Sam Jury’s film Popehelm and Kamila Kuc’s Batum. The films have been shown throughout the world with future screenings at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and Buenos Aires International Festival 2018.

With awards ranging from the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Composition to numerous ACE commissions, Rob has aimed to bring electroacoustic sound to new audiences through innovative programming and performance strategies within interdisciplinary work.

Rob is a Reader in Music at the University of Hertfordshire.

http://www.robgodman.com

 

Tony Tizard (Tired Eyes) – Pets (1:50)

pets preview pictureAn Audio/Visual Composition built upon the reclamation of analogue effect processes in a digital age. Drawing influence from the pre-eminent works of Mike Leonard and the Liquid Light Shows this work is a celebration of the imperfections and unpredictability within nature.

The fluidity of time is reflected within the work during the push and pull fluctuation of the track, mirrored by Sonic content of the Piece. This was created using real instruments fed through effects pedals and captured to tape, amplified and re-recorded before constructing the final piece in a digital audio work station.

Biography

Tony Tizard is a Southampton born Musician and Visual Artist Creating works under the synonym Tired Eyes. Recently moving to the city to surrounding himself with the exciting culture that the city has to offer. He is also currently finishing a Bachelors Degree with Honours in Creative Music Technology at Bath Spa University.

 

Susie Green – Memories of Filey (9:17)

This 9’17 min Audio/Visual piece portrays the experience of sound-inside-sound, and the interaction of two simultaneous embodied experiences. Field recordings from a visit to Filey, UK were played through an underwater speaker in a pool in Miami, FL, USA and recorded by a hydrophone as was my singing. My movements underwater were filmed and gestures were run through The Tesseract, a bespoke system chain created during my research at The University of Huddersfield which interprets movements to shape sound using Laban Movement Theory. Rhythm and phrases were analyzed and extracted from the underwater recordings and structured as a palindrome.  It begins with the raw sounds of Filey waves and progresses into a standard structured pop formula. The third section of the piece slowly morphs back into the original Filey field recordings. This piece represents the embodiment of the entire experience containing the two soundscapes and the memory of one processing into the other and back again. The cycling of these two is also a virtual tesseract in motion creating a separate dimension of experience altogether. It was in this water-within-water where two very different environments were unified and the movement of one inside the other created textures and shapes that would not have existed otherwise.

Biography

Susie Green (Miami, FL) is an audio-visual, Cuban/American artist working at the intersection of music, art and science. Following a sound engineering internship at Gloria Estefan’s Crescent Moon Studio where she worked alongside, and co-wrote songs with several Grammy Award winning producers and artist she subsequently went on two world tours as a backing singer for Latin artists Chayanne & Christian Castro. Although she has continued to work in commercial music, producing sound design for a number of short films, theater productions and releasing the album One Drop Theory in 2014, she decided to undertake post-graduate research in audio-visual interactive composition systems at the University of Huddersfield, England in 2017. Her research explored means by which she could harness the body’s movements to shape sight and sound, based initially on Rudolph Laban’s Movement Dance Theory and expanding theoretically to explore concepts from quantum mechanics, astronomy and various forms of movement therapy. She currently works as a freelance artist in Miami, FL, USA.

 

Laura Hopes – Lacuna: Colour of Distance (4:55)

LauraHopes_WeatherStation23A blank on a map: a lacuna. The Cornish china clay pits had lured me from afar, their sky-tip peaks brusquely puncturing distant horizons, remaining in my imagination for a long time. I was drawn by their elusive nature: fenced, signpost-barring, dangers of death, falling, blasts, the inability to fix them on maps. But sneaked peeks glimmered with opalescent blues, scarred whites, stoic pioneer plants. So beautifully stark, closer inspections triggered my weakness for sublime landscapes, and I yearned to enter and explore these realms.

The orb I travelled the landscape in removed me from it by insulating sound, heat, wind, while at the same time being utterly controlled by it. What I experienced was totally opposed to the gaze of the onlooker, the double subjectivity is implicit.

My work explores distance in a contemporary reading of the sublime. The anthropocene epoch and sublime both date from the beginnings of the industrial revolution when man’s distance from landscape – land sculpted for minerals or deemed barren in capitalist terms – led to a heightened awareness of the eco-aesthetics of environment. These individual projects make explicit the intertwined critical continuum of opposition and reflection, simultaneity and juxtaposition between the sublime and the anthropocene, where ‘humanity has been forced to a self-critical reflection on its place in the natural order. A neglected tool for understanding this is the sublime’ (Williston 2016).

Biography

I am an artist working in digital sound and film, installed spaces and sculpture, and have developed a body of work based around explorations of the sublime anthropocene. 

My artistic practice generates physical, intuitive and often collaborative layered and multi-faceted explorations of place. Through performative explorations of sites, chosen for their potential representation of the ‘sublime anthropocene’ and activations of their history, you and I, as activator, audience or observer can come to a more intimate and embodied knowledge of place.

I am interested in the use of stories to activate place and playful interventions to illuminate terrifying themes and radical and provocative re-interpretations of place. I contest liminal spaces between proximity and distance, observation and inhabitation. I explore, activate and focus not on a politely distanced spectatorship of the sublime, but on my blinded, immersed experience of the world as hyperobject.

 

Chris Casady – Anisometropia (or Segovia All Over Ya) (2:00)

Anisometropia1Anisometropia was made in stereoscopic 3D for a 3D film festival in Los Angeles. 

It’s is drawn with a stylus on a WACOM tablet directly into Flash software and output from there. It looks fine in 2D but is spectacular in stereo 3D. I was inspired by the abstract visual musical works of German animator Oskar Fischinger. 

Biography

Schooled in film at California Institute of the Arts in the 70’s, Chris worked as an effects animator on Hollywood FX movies adding lightning, sparks and other effects to live action movies. Since the onset of sophisticated CGI effects his interest has returned to the abstract lyrical films he was introduced to in film school; the early 20th century non objective abstractions of pioneering cinema and it’s spiritual implications. 

 

Ryo Ikeshiro – Call On Me Call On Me Call On Me Call On Me / CCCCaaaallll OOOOnnnn MMMMeeee (3:16)

CallOnMe01Pop music tracks are transformed so the pitch and speed continually rise higher and faster to happy hardcore heaven without every becoming slower and lower. The process is known as the Risset rhythm based on the Shepard tone, an aural illusion equivalent to Escher’s Stairs. The accompanying music videos are also accelerated, satirising the hyper-sexualisation of promotional videos.

The work is from the series Eternal Accerando, a light-hearted response to accelerationism which calls for an acceleration of technosocial processes to subvert its neoliberal origins or to further capitalist progress to hasten its self-demise.

Biography

Ryo Ikeshiro is a UK-based Japanese artist and researcher whose work deals with sound, media and computation. His output explores contemporary notions of Otherness as manifested through technology and sound, and he is interested in the artistic potential of computational technology and algorithmic processes as well as the cultural and political dimension of computation and media. His practice includes audiovisual performances, sound installations, interactive works, generative art, electronic music, data visualisation and sonification, video, 3D-prints and engravings.

He was part of the Asia Culture Center’s inaugural exhibition in Gwangju, South Korea, and his TeleText art pages have been broadcast on German, Austrian and Swiss national TV. He is a contributor to Sound Art: Sound as a medium of art, a forthcoming publication from ZKM Karlsruhe and he is featured in the Electronic Music volume of the Cambridge Introductions to Music series.

He has a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London. The topic explored was real-time data visualisation and sonification – or live “audiovisualisation” – of emergent generative systems based on dynamical systems and fractals within the framework of audiovisual and computational art. He is currently a fellow at the Contemporary Center for Art Kitakyushu, Japan. He also works as a visiting lecturer.

www.ryoikeshiro.com

 

Hiromi Ishii – Avian (5:22)

avian-6872nAvian is the second visual music piece relating to the biospheric theme (the first piece is titled Aquatic). The material sounds for music mainly are the recordings of voices and noises of cranes’ flocks which flied over my town. The idea to use this recording was the starting point for the composition. The visual part is abstract created by motion-graphics which may imply a “relation to the birds”. Structuring two time-axes (the moving images and the music part) is the focus of this composition, and both parts have been composed in parallel. 

Biography

Hiromi Ishii was born and studied composition in Tokyo. Having taught at  several academic institutes, from 1998 she studied electroacoustic music in Dresden and later at City University London where she was conferred her PhD. Her pieces have been presented worldwide such as Musica Viva Lisbon, MusicAcoustica Beijing, EMUfest Rome, Cynetart Dresden, Punto y Raya, NYCEMF, Synchresis, Festival Videomusique by Musiques&Recherches, and more. 

In 2006 and 2013 she was invited for Artist in Residence at ZKM Karlsruhe. Her recent works focus on multi-channel acousmatic, and visual music for which she composes both music and moving images in parallel. She has two CDs from Schott Music&Media (Wergo ARTS 8112 2 Wind Way, ARTS 8121 2 sai-ji-ku) . Ishii is currently living in the Cologne suburbs.

 

Vincent Fillion – Corollaire (4:50)

Corollaire_StillImageCorollaire is a videomusic work based on Super 8 found footage. An exploration of unexpected Quebec countryside family video memories where tape noise is as visual as sound, it comes from an impulse to show the past to understand the present, to report what was then beautiful and what was less. In constant oscillation between analog sources and digital processing.

Biography

Vincent Fillion is a sound and video artist based in Montreal. Currently finishing a bachelor’s degree in digital music, his ever-changing world oscillates between new technologies and strong interests in history and the past. Connecting the dots between acousmatic, mobile music and audio/video hijacking reveals his immersive sensory creations focused on reflection. Supported by an important stage performance experience in various ensembles including such as touring rock bands, choir and more recently in Nicolas Bernier’s ten-piece Oscillator Ensemble, he is currently concentrating on translating this knowledge into multidisciplinary projects, with a particular interest in video art, audiovisual performance & sound installations.

 

Harvey Goldman and Jing Wang – Ouroboros (9:00)

ouroboros _2_01Glints of light, passing of shadows, the choreography of perpetual existence sets the stage for this Delphian ballet. The impenetrable flow of life’s rhythms, their Sisyphean inceptions and cessations are punctuated with eternity’s ephemeral modulations. The transmigration has begun, the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning. 

The “visual music” collaborations of Jing Wang and Harvey Goldman attempt to produce a synesthesia like experience. The audience is encouraged to “see” the music and “hear” the visuals. The imagery and audio components are constructed without hierarchy, a true melding of sound and image. 

Biographies

Jing Wang, a composer and virtuoso erhu artist, was born in China. Ms. Wang has participated in numerous musical communities, as a composer and a performer of diverse styles of music. Her compositions have been selected and presented in China, Spain, France, Italy, Serbia, Turkey, Romania, Russia, Australia, Japan, Argentina, and throughout the United States. They have also been recognized by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers and Electro-acoustic Miniatures International Contest Spain. She was the winner of 2006 Pauline Oliveros Prize given by the International Alliance for Women in Music and has been awarded the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Vilcek Foundation Fellowship, and the Omi International Musicians Residency Fellowship. As an active erhu performer, she has introduced the Chinese indigenous erhu into Western contemporary music scene with her wide array of compositions for chamber ensemble, avant-garde jazz improvisations and multicultural ensembles. She has also successfully performed erhu concertos with several symphony orchestras in the United States. Ms. Wang is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where she teaches electroacoustic music, composition, and music theory.

Harvey Goldman has created critically acclaimed work in the fields of ceramics, digital imaging, animation and music. He is founder of the Digital Media program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. Goldman’s work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Iota Center for Experimental Animation, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Everson Museum of Art, Decordova Museum, Currier Museum of Art, and the Crocker Art Museum. His animations have been screened throughout the world including, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhon Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the White Box Museum, Beijing, China. His interests include gardening, storytelling, world music, sound exploration, language development, writing systems and basketball. He resides in Dartmouth, Massachusetts with his wife and fellow artist, Deborah Coolidge.

 

Elsa Justel – Metal Study (6:38)

Still image aluminioExploratory work on the flexibility and transformation capabilities of metallic materials in their different states (solidity, cracking, crushing, fluidification …).

The sound material complements these states with effects of resonance and granulation in different densities, until reaching the white noise.

Biography

(Argentine-France)

Doctor in Aesthetics, Science and Technology of the Arts at the University of Paris, Justel currently works as an independent composer and video artist.

Because of her double formation in the fields of image and music, Justel is always interested in the relations between both languages, particularly by its perceptive aspects.

Her works have received numerous awards in international competitions and were commissioned by the French government and different European studios. She has developed a pedagogical and research activity at the Universities of Marne La Vallée (France) and Pompeu Fabra (Spain) and several European schools of music.

Recordings by Empreintes Digitales (Canada) (http://www.electrocd.com/fr/bio/justel_el/discog/), and other publishers.

In 2007 she creates the Foundation Destellos to promote electroacoustic music and digital arts, organizing an International competition.

www.fundestellos.org/Bio.htm

 

João Pedro Oliveira – Neshamah (12:13)

Neshamah stillNeshamah is a Hebrew word that means “breath”.

This piece was inspired in the following biblical text:

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature (Genesis 2:7).

This piece was commissioned by the Ibermúsicas Project and was composed at the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras and at the Centro de Pesquisa em Música Eletroacústica of Federal University of Minas Gerais. It received an honorable mention at the Concours International de Composition Electroacoustique de Monaco 2016

Biography

João Pedro Oliveira completed a PhD in Music at the University of New York at Stony Brook. His music includes one chamber opera, several orchestral compositions, a Requiem, 3 string quartets, chamber music, solo instrumental music, electroacoustic music and experimental video. He has received over 50 international prizes and awards for his works, including three Prizes at Bourges Electroacoustic Music Competition, the prestigious Magisterium Prize in the same competition, the Giga-Hertz Special Award, 1st Prize in Metamorphoses competition, 1st Prize in Yamaha-Visiones Sonoras Competition, 1st Prize in Musica Nova competition, etc.. He is Professor at Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) and Aveiro University (Portugal). He published several articles in journals, and has written a book about analysis and 20th century music theory.

www.jpoliveira.com

 

Rolling Programme

 

Andrew McNiven – A636 (5:00)

A636 Still Andrew McNivenAndrew McNiven makes video work adopting the often disregarded element of ambient sound as the starting point – the hum of electrical transformers or mobile ‘phone masts; the babble of rivers; the rumble of traffic. Drawing on minimalist aesthetics, the use of diegetic sound in cinema, and the traditions of large-format photography, the works are made using an extended fixed single shot, which includes the site of the source of the sound.

A central interest in McNiven’s work is the idea of ‘attention’ and this work aims to reframe the audience’s relationship to the sonic environment by provoking their attention through the directing-to and fore-fronting of ambient sound together with the related image.

Biography

Andrew McNiven is a Scots/Irish artist, academic and curator. Born in Edinburgh in 1963, he studied fine art at Goldsmiths’ College in London, graduating in 1987, a contemporary of many of the artists who rose to international prominence during the 1990s. He received his MA from Goldsmiths’ in 1995. Since 1990 his work has been shown internationally by, amongst others, the Lisson Gallery, the Whitechapel Gallery and the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin.

He was a lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art until 2004 and completed an AHRC-funded, practice-led PhD at Northumbria University in 2010, in which he researched sound, photography and the cultures of display. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Zeppelin Universität in Friedrichshafen, Germany. He is based in the UK.

http://www.andrewmcniven.com

 

Pell Osborn – If Kazimir Met Maurice, or, Suprematism Out on a Spree (4:48)

Suprematist Composition HeroThe Suprematist paintings of the Russian Futurist Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) are poised to burst into motion. What if Malevich had had the tools to animate his work? Imagine a collaboration between Malevich and his contemporary, French Impressionist composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1916.) “If Kazimir Met Maurice, or Suprematism Out on a Spree,” a hand-animated response to this possibility, evokes Modernity’s chaotic apotheosis. Unleashed at full vitality, the sliding, leaping, soaring shapes of Malevich’s “Suprematist Composition” (painted in 1916) synchronize with the restive pulse of Maurice Ravel’s “Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello in A minor” (composed in 1914). The Dresdner Klaviertrio provides the throbbing music bed (from a Berlin Classics compact disc, ©1994 BERLIN Classics, a division of “edel” Gesellschaft für Produktmarketing mbH, used for inspirational and educational purposes only.) Pell Osborn supervised the deliberately rough, propulsive hand animation at MotionArt Studios, Boston.     

Biography

Pell Osborn, award-winning animator and creator of the LineStorm Animation Digital FlipBook education curriculum, holds degrees from Kenyon College and Lesley University and attended Harvard University for additional study in animation. Co-founder of MotionArt Studios in Boston, he has designed animation projects for ABC News, American Airlines, Ocean Spray, Raytheon, Save the Children and UNICEF. His lifelong passion for animation led him to create the LineStorm Digital FlipBook programme, combining traditional and computer animation as vehicles for teaching and learning.

Mr. Osborn is a Creative Teaching Fellow with the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Since 1998, he has taught animation seminars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City, and the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. He has also lectured on the Practice of Animation at Harvard University. Harvard University’s Project Zero calls LineStorm “the best example of project-based learning we’ve ever seen.” 

As an Independent Animator and Teaching Artist, Mr. Osborn works with students and teachers to create in-school animation projects. His LineStorm Digital FlipBook programmes use animation as a powerful vehicle by which to explore topics from new directions. LineStorm students design storyboards and create flipbooks, then add colour and texture for final assembly into their group videos. LineStormers face three crucial questions: What to animate? How to animate it? How to finish it on time? A celebration of flux, of objects and ideas in motion, LineStorm uses old technology in exciting ways, balancing old and new.

 

Giulia Vismara and Salvatore Insana – Crocevia (8:18)

CroceviaStill3

The space of the images is expanded by the sounds. These sounds, belonging to memories, move everywhere without taking a precise position, they are organized following the idea of perpetual indecision suggested by the video. The sounds become the object of thought of the figure dressed in blue and therefore do not find a perfect place, they move continuously, sometimes are close, sometimes are out of focus, sometimes they spread out in space to form a bigger soundscape. The sound material comes from the re-elaboration of recordings made with dpa microphones within beehives in Florida and other field recordings collected over the past few years. An audio-visual rebus complete with cancellations, details and missing elements. A space to conceive. An event to rebuild. Only virtual can be high-definition, not imperfect and ambiguous reality. A crossroads of memory, of its opaque (non)reproducibility. A turning point, the point for making a decision. Or lose the chance forever. Every crossroads gives rise to temporizing, inner debates between one part and another, between one direction and its opposite. Every choice misleads your path.

Biographies

sound design and music: Giulia Vismara’s experimental research is focused on electroacoustic composition, sound installations, music for performances, live electronics. She is particularly interested in the action of listening and spatialization. Her sound works were performed in Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, Canada. She holds a degree in musicology from Bologna University and a master in electroacoustic composition attended in Florence and Den Haag Conservatory. Currently, as a PhD researcher at IUAV, Venice, she is investigating the mutual relationship between architectural spaces and sound.

video: Salvatore Insana attended the University of Roma Tre concluding his studies in 2010 with a paper on the concept of Useless.With Elisa Turco Liveri, actress and performer he has created in 2011 the collective Dehors/Audela, producing video-theatrical works, audiovisual projects, site specific installations and photographic investigation, experimental workshops. He continued his research in motion pictures, photography and other media forms, interested in moving bodies in their elusiveness, in their metamorphic and tragic ability to elude us, interested to probe deeper on the limits of vision, on the “visual spectra”, and collaborating with several sound artists, composers and theater companies, and his works has been screened at several institutions and festivals around the world.

http://www.giuliavismara.com

http://dehorsaudela.blogspot.it/

http://salvinsa.blogspot.it

 

Simon Le Boggit – Surface Tension (7:22)

Surface Tension by Simon Le BoggitSurface Tension is a CGI animation depicting numerous human-constructed artifacts – past and present – orbiting and tumbling around the Earth. Sometimes they dance in apparent harmony, while at other times they incongruously crowd into the same physical space. The accompanying music soundtrack is an algorithmic composition, computer-generated via mindless chaos fed through an array of simple statistical equations. Technically the sound and vision are not connected, yet they complement one another – just a gentle reminder that direct cause-and-effect ganging together of various media is not the only creative approach available. Sometimes chance can be captivating.

Biography

Simon Le Boggit is a multimedia artist currently focusing on distillation of “meaning” from chaos. This has included the creation of evocatively mesmeric videos and the generation of chaotic algorithmic music – where any melody, harmony and syncopation are a product of chance and the human compulsion to identify patterns.

Simon is especially interested in finding statistical sweet-spots where chaos and repetition (and sometimes mutation) may evoke moments of “apparent intentionality”, which feel like they must have been specifically engineered by a sentient creator rather than be a product of non-sentient chance.

Rather than follow the virtual herd as it stampedes towards ever more complex Artificial Intelligence, Simon has sought to head in the opposite direction – just how simple can a mindless system get, while still creating sounds which (some) people will regard as music? And what happens when chaotic music sets the context for random motion, and vice versa?

Simon’s compositions have been performed live, and as acousmatic surround-sound recordings, at art festivals in various parts of the world including Bath, Lincoln, London, Edinburgh, Swansea, Stockholm, Athens, Barcelona, Seoul, Vancouver and New York.

quantumsouporchestra.weebly.com

https://www.facebook.com/SimonLeBoggit

 

Julian Hoff – Cameos of Lights (5:00)

Cameos of lights still 1Cameos of Lights is a tribute to Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren and his visual music. For this work, I wanted to make sound-image associations by exploring various elements of synchrony. I explore within micro-montages associations of grains, shapes, flows, rhythms, movements, spaces and intensities. Begone Dull Care, the original work of Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren was my source of inspiration for Cameos de Lumières and my source of sampling. It is surprisingly vivacious and virtuoso but also offers ecstatic passages of beauty. These tension-rest poles were my conductors for the structure of the work and guided its realization.

Biography

My creative fields are divided between works for media (acousmatic and videomusic) and multimedia comprovisations (mixed music, musical algorithm, generative audiovisual devices, physical interfaces). I draw my inspiration from themes such as lyrical abstraction, surrealism, the place of the human face of technology, technoculture, post-humanism.

My music has been awarded twice at the Canadian Electroacoustic Community’s Jeu de Temps / Times Play Competition, the Beijing Musicacoustica Competition and the Luigi Russolo Award. Since 2011, my works are regularly presented at international festivals.

My main collaborative projects are Torinói Ló, Live Electroacoustic Duo and KhöraSotto, Audiovisual immersive artworks. I also collaborate with other artists on digital game projects and art installations.

I am currently writing a master’s thesis on human-machine interactions in a context of multimedia comprovisation, carried out at the University of Montreal. Recipient of a research-creation grant from the Quebec Research Fund – Society and Culture and student-researcher member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology of Montreal.

 

Martin Keary – NEW (19:00)

NEW_Thumb_1080pThis piece is based on the concept of ‘newness’ in art: an idea loaded with more connotations and expectations than any other I can think of, and one that I have a complicated relationship with since I constantly feel it exerting pressure on my visual and musical work.

With this in mind, NEW is intended to ‘practice what it preaches’ by embodying what I think are the most interesting characteristics of the idea of newness in the 21st century: the uncomfortable link that it has with novelty, technology and self-promotion; how it can fill a work with promise and excitement or conversely, cheapen it. And ultimately – when you consider that a work which is ostensibly ‘new’ is really just the latest re-shuffling of a collection of innumerable historical influences – how unattainable it is.

Biography

Martin Keary is a composer and visual designer based in London. He currently works as a consultant at Microsoft.

He studied a Masters degree at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland from 2013-15 , where he was awarded a first-class degree along with the Craig Armstrong prize and the Patron’s Fund Prize (Royal College of Music) for composition.

Martin has also been awarded the Claxica International prize for his piece ‘Herostratic’ (for guitar and string trio) in 2015 and the West Cork Music Festival Prize for his string quartet in 2017. His visual music work is performed at various conferences and exhibitions around the UK, including ‘Seeing Sound’ (2016, Bath Spa University) and ‘SOUND/IMAGE’ (2015, 2017, University of Greenwich).

In May 2016, his large scale visual music piece, ‘NEW’ – for amplified chamber orchestra, electronics and synchronised animation – was performed by the Scottish ensemble ‘Red Note’ as part of the opening night of the PLUG festival in Glasgow. In November 2016, his piece ‘Beat Fatigue’ was performed by the renowned jazz musician Peter Brötzmann in Dublin.

Martin is currently working on the soundtrack to a short film called ‘The Field’ by the award winning director Sandhya Suri – to be released in 2018 and a video game called ‘Thrust’ by Hayemaker Games. He lectures on the topic of visual music and can be contacted about this at martin.keary@gmail.com. He also has an active YouTube channel under the name ‘Tantacrul’, where he regularly posts videos on a variety of musical topics.

 

Sarah Ouazzani Touhami – Zuhaitz (13:30)

Photo-zuhaitz1_300dpi«Zuhaitz» is the Basque word for «tree». This video uses the pretext of a heathen rite – celebrated each year in the period around the 15th of August in a small Basque village – to enter into a daydream, guided by fire, and to explore subjectively and sensitively this rite’s impact on its surrounding environment. Like the tree which unites opposites, I try to reconcile the intimacy of an evening around a fire with a nocturnal village celebration lit by torches. I act by sliding and overprinting both the sound and visual materials, while preserving their autonomy_ in order to foster transformations.

Biography

Visual and sound artist. Living in Marseille, France. Video practice led my interests going to non-visible, unspoken words, sound as a possibility of dialogue with the unconscious. Time, slowness, displacement, myths, rituals, elements are central in my approach. I practice vocal improvisation, and electroacoustic music, sometimes linking it with cinema, in performative experiences, installations or videos. I also conduct workshop with different participants : schools, social institutions… That is a way to share and to experiment ideas collectively.

https://www.o-sarah.com