1.30-2pm: Screening 3
Lecture Theatre, Stockwell Street Academic Building
Simon Puriņš – Forest Bathing
The video element of this piece was shot on a GoPro in Mežaparks (Forest Park) on the northern edge of Rīga, Latvia, on 20th August 2023.
The primary audio element is a heavily processed (hardware & software) field recording of 4 shouts/screams made in Nacka Forest, Stockholm, Sweden on 25th September 2023. This has been combined with additional elements created from processed camera noise, an electric guitar drone and a short synthesizer melody, to add texture.
The forest is important in Baltic history and culture. Important in relation to pagan beliefs and practices and as a place of safety, hiding and refuge from invasion and persecution.
I found shouting/ screaming in the forest far more of an emotional and cathartic experience than I had anticipated; a ‘dark’ and ‘alternative’ form of ‘Forest Bathing’. I initially thought I was creating a work focussed upon the pain of ‘imagined’ historial events and experiences but realised that it was also very much of ‘the now’ and of my reaction to the collapse of my 34 years domestic relationship.
Simon Puriņš (b.1964, UK) is a British-Latvian Visual/Sonic artist, Filmmaker and Artist Educator/Enabler. He studied Fine Art Painting in the UK and Poland. He holds an MA in Hypermedia from University of Westminster and completed a year of Sound Art courses at Morley College 2022-23. He has worked extensively with aural history, testimony, reminiscence and memory, on many national and international arts projects. This has greatly influenced the focus of his own artwork.
Simon has spent many years exploring personal family histories of deportation, exile and the ‘legacies of displacement’, relative to his Latvian heritage. These themes have, more recently, found their outlet in combining his visual art background, with an interest in psycho-geopraphic practice and sonic explorations using field recording, processed and synthetic sound.
He is currently involved with an international project ‘Long Shadows of War’ – exploring the concepts and effects of Intergenerational Trauma.
Bret Battey – Estuaries 4
“Estuaries 4” is the fourth and final part of the author’s “Estuaries” audio-visual series, which can be viewed as a series of standalone works or ultimately as one large, multi-movement work. “Estuaries 4” explores contrasts between intense and frenetic textures and a gentler poetics, with the latter expressed in part through visualisation of the mathematical Rosenbrock function. The “Estuaries” series involves 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 or maxima/minima of a function. The music was created with the author’s Nodewebba software, which interlinks pattern generators to create complex emergent behaviours.
“Estuaries 4” was awarded Best Video in the MuVi6 Visual Music Award 2022 (Granada, Spain), Best Regional Music (Europe) Award 2022 from the International Computer Music Association, and an Award of Distinction: Video Music from Prix CIME 2023.
Bret Battey (b. 1967) is Professor of Audiovisual Composition at the Music, Technology, and Innovation Institute for Sonic Creativity at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He creates electronic, acoustic, and audiovisual 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, MADATAC and MuVi4, Abstracta Cinema of Rome, Amsterdam Film eXperience the Texas Fresh Minds Festival, the International Computer Music 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.
Rodrigo Romero-Flores – Short Wave Project
Between one radio station and another, we ignore the random textures that creep into the dial, the small, rebellious, cunning signals that struggle to break through the electromagnetic limit of the official frequencies with their disorderly beauty.
It is under these circumstances that SW Project emerges, a work that consists in the collection, processing and experimental composition from the static generated in the SW frequency and captured through multi-band radio receivers.
For this purpose, I have integrated to my sonic composition, samples extracted from the SW frequency statics, which have interesting and beautiful harmonics.
This work was the result of a research and creative process during my artistic residency at Belgrade Art Studio.
Rodrigo Romero-Flores. (Chile. Currently based in Northern Ireland).
Experimental sound composer, visual artist and poet. He has finished a BA in Hispanic Language and Literature at Universidad de Chile, 2004. In 2021, he finished Field Recording: Soundscape Composition at Goldsmiths, University of London.He has participated in exhibitions, festivals, performances and collaborative works in South America, Europe and the United States. In 2022, he was awarded a grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for an artistic residency in Iceland. Since 2022 he has been a commissioned artist for Sonic Arts Research Centre SARC at Queen’s Belfast University. In 2023 was released “Tides”, a live improvisation performance curated by Extreme Chill Festival. This 2024 he was awarded a grant to Mentoring Support Scheme for Northern Ireland Writers, by the Irish Writers Centre and his work “Travel” was exhibited in Sonorities Festival Belfast.