Day Four: Sunday 10 November
10am-12pm:Talk 5
Lecture Theatre, Stockwell Street Academic Building
Simon Knighton – Sculpting Sound: Exploring the Creative Affordances of Material Agency in the Generation of Novel Tuning Systems.
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, many composers have explored methods of finding freedom from both the fixed rigidity of the notated score and the fixity of the chromatic tuning system. Some recent extensions of this trend in current contemporary music practice are ‘materialism’ (Shlomowitz, 2018), ‘non-human affordances’ (Sergeant, 2018) and ‘material agency’ (McLoughlin, 2022) in which instruments and physical materials themselves become quasi-agents of the music making process. In my ‘Sound Sculpture No.8 for Installation, String Trio and Electronics’, I investigate how unique, esoteric tuning systems can be derived from the non-human creative affordances of a specific set of physical materials. In this talk I hope to provide insights into a unique approach to composition that blurs the boundaries between installation/performance, and between various forms of spatialised acoustic/electronic/automated sound.
Simon Knighton is a composer and sound artist from Sheffield. He regularly works with the Nonclassical label and is currently studying for a PhD at the Royal Northern College of Music where he is developing a series of sound sculptures that explore acoustic, electronic and autonomously produced sound interactions in spatialised settings. In 2023, he won the Royal Music Association Tippet Medal for Sound Sculpture No.5 and was nominated for an Ivors Award in the best orchestral piece category for his Sound Sculpture No.7. His Sound Sculpture No.8 premiered at the Southbank Centre this year in anticipation of his debut album which will be released through Nonclassical in the summer of 2024.
Simon Puriņš – The Long Shadows of War and the Legacies of Displacement: Exploring Real, Imagined and Hybrid Spaces through Sound and Image
When exploring a place or space of personal and historical importance, how do you set about interpreting that space in a meaningful way that moves beyond simply just looking, listening and reflecting? How do you share the feelings and emotions engendered through a place, to a wider audience? How can you transform the specific and personal experience of a space into one which is suggestive of greater ‘universal’ relevance?
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and retracing and locating relatives in early 1994, I have been sporadically piecing together my Latvian family history. Sometimes there is a wealth of information – documents, photographs etc. – and other times, nothing; just a gap or a fragment or a rumour or a guess. The long shadows of war and the legacies of displacement.
But gaps and fragments and rumours and guesses provide great opportunities for creating immersive artworks. Immersive emotionally as much as experientially. Artworks that attempt, metaphorically, to reach out, grab the audience by the throat and shake it.
Places and spaces have become increasingly important to my practice as an artist. As has the marrying of Sound with Image. Sometimes these places and spaces are real and sometimes just imagined. But often they are hybrids of both – a ‘new’ space created as both a ‘container’ for and a ‘conveyor’ of emotion.
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.
Cameron Clarke – Do weird stuff in town: Creating a curious landscape
The proposed presentation will explore my practice-based research into sonic-making within urban transient spaces. It will explore the site-specific sonic interventions and sound installations I have developed in underground tunnels in Belfast, Northern Ireland, as part of my doctoral research at the Sonic Arts Research Centre.
A core project discussed will be ‘Surround Sound,’ a home made sound system designed to excite the resonant harmonics in a large underground pedestrian walkway in Belfast.
Cameron Clarke is an Audio/ Visual artist and researcher currently in year one of a practice based PhD at the Sonic Arts Research Centre Belfast. His work deals with how to re-use urban space and household objects against their intended design intentions. His work takes the form of A/V installations, public sound installations, interventionist performances and sound walks. He has exhibited at the likes of Golden Thread Gallery, Hatton Gallery and Belfast Imagine Festival.
Paula Guzzanti & John D’Arcy – ‘Pathways’ to Someplace Else: Mediating the sensory experience of urban landscapes
This talk shares a series of practice-as-research projects that investigate the use of audiovisual media to document and mediate sensorial experiences of urban infrastructure. The work sits at an intersection of performing arts, cultural heritage and sustainability and aims to centre the sensuous body in conversations around urban design and regeneration.
The work draws on somatic movement practice and incorporates 3D scanning, 360 video and other media to document performance walks along roadways. The core project used as a case study is ‘Pathways: the Futurity of the Pedestrian in Malta’, which places the performer at a recently developed highway system, the Marsa Junction in Malta. This project evokes ‘the sensorial pedestrian’ as a tool for awakening practices for sustainable urban living.
The talk situates the work within contexts of interdisciplinary arts practices that use digital media to ‘immerse’ audiences in real-world built environments and how the space may be occupied by onscreen performers and the audience. We discuss the methodologies and aesthetic considerations involved in the context of collaboration between a dancer and a digital artist. In particular, we explore the technological affordances of consumer technologies for low-cost audiovisual production that might make such collaborations more widely accessible.
We share this methodology as a provocation for other practitioners to consider interdisciplinary collaboration between somatic movement practitioners and digital producers to explore ways in which to engage somatic investigation within the design of immersive mediations of bodies and landscapes, and ultimately ignite conversations about contemporary infrastructure and its effect on interconnected forms of living.
Dr John D’Arcy is an artist-researcher based at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. His research involves technology-mediated live performance, voice-based intermedia artwork, and participatory song-making. John directs and composes music for experimental vocal ensemble HIVE Choir, creating site-specific and participatory performances with found texts and melodic improvisation. He co-founded sound art collective Umbrella and curates sound art events and exhibitions at Sonorities Festival Belfast. John is a board member of the Irish Sound Science and Technology Association, was a member of the Steering Group for Belfast’s successful bid for UNESCO City of Music status and currently sits on the Belfast Region Music Board.
Paula Guzzanti (Ph.D) lectures in choreographic practices at the University of Malta. In her research practice, she develops socially engaged projects working at the intersections of dance improvisation and collaborative performance-making which she informs from the perspective of affect theory. Paula completed her practice-as-research Ph.D. project at Queen’s University Belfast (UK). Her performance work develops mostly in collaboration with sound artists and musicians. Her performances have been showcased at the International Metabody Festival (London, 2015); JamJar Women’s Improviser’s Platform (Belfast, 2016), Sonorities Festival (Belfast, 2017), Digital Echoes Conference (Coventry, 2018), Senselab Speakers Series (Montreal, 2017); International Women’s Day Celebrations (PS2 Gallery, Belfast, 2018); International Dance Day University of Chile (Chile, 2019), and at the University of Costa Rica (San Jose, 2019). In 2019, Paula won the Higginson Leadership Award of the year to facilitate a dance and well-being project for Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica.