Stone Circle Transmission – Maya Chowdhry
‘Stone Circle Transmission’ immerses listeners in a complex soundscape that explores human-stone communication through the medium of a crystal radio. It uses field recordings and their manipulation as a way to create and articulate experiential spaces. This is to engage listeners through both affect and immersion. The artwork draws on Oliveros’ work in creating links with deep listening as a way to connect with ancient technology, and then recontextualises and renders this to transduce sounds from the earth. The methodology shaping this piece draws upon Kahn’s ideas of natural radio.
The spatialisation mirrors the position of each stone in the circle inviting the audience into ritual space. Positioned at the entrance of the stone circle is a field recording from the Nine Ladies Stone Circle – rather than using a crystal the stone generates the frequencies. The soundscape construction is inspired by what Thompson describes as the transgressive poetics of noise, through which we can celebrate the static produced from unwanted radio frequency and speculate on the voice of stone.
Dolby Atmos Mix by Neil Bruce
Maya Chowdhry is an interdisciplinary artist currently utilising interactive audio, sonic art and sensory modalities to invite audiences to respond to, and create their own journey, through her artworks. She recently pivoted her practice through via an MA in Sound Design in 2023, and is a 2024 Factory International Fellow – exploring personalisation in large-scale immersive works.
Her most recent artworks are ‘Waves’, an interactive sound experience, exhibited at Salford Museum and Art gallery, 2023, which makes audible the transformation of Salfords’ waterways in relation to climate change. Galvanising Change, a participatory live art piece examining ‘climate anxiety’, Hulme Community Garden Centre, 2021, was created as part of Net//work Residency with The British Council and Digital Art Studios. You Sound Thirsty, a sonic commingling created in a time of planetary limits, was presented at Emergency Live Art Festival, Contact, 2022.
Maya is currently exploring biodata sonification; turning brainwaves into melodies, and plant waves into soundwaves – seeking to find a shared language between the human and the more-than-human.
The Veil – Cameron Clarke
The Veil is an audio visual installation inspired by classic horror film imagery that uses four household lamps, projection and sound to explore the ancient Irish tale of the thinning of the Veil between our world and the spirit underworld.
From late October to early November it is said the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest allowing malevolent spirits to enter our world. The rhythmic pattern of the lamps in the physical space of the installation become more erratic in response to the emergence of the malevolent spirit in the virtual space of the film projection.
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 reuse urban space and household objects against their intended design intentions. His work takes the form of A/V installations, public sound installations, interventionist performance and sound walks. He has exhibited at the likes of Golden Thread Gallery, Hatton Gallery and Belfast Imagine Festival.
Safe Box – Anqi Deng
Safe Box is an interactive sound installation artwork consisting of a wooden box, a stand, a sensor, and three speakers. Audiences can enter the box, where the left and right speakers continuously play field recordings and ambient sounds. The top speaker on the box is activated by a sensor that detects the heartbeat of the audience, generating a melody through calculations. Thus, the audience not only hears the ambient sounds but also experiences a unique melody generated by their own heartbeat, perceiving subtle changes in their emotions.
The initial inspiration for this work was rooted in research on autism and social anxiety. However, during the creation process, new concepts were developed. This piece can be understood as an exploration of how individuals are connected to the environment and society, where different sounds and environments evoke distinct psychological states in people. Through the interaction of sound, the artwork provides audiences with a unique experience, allowing them to sense the subtle and profound relationship between themselves and the surrounding world.
Anqi Deng is a musician from Canton, China, intricately weaves sound with imagery, emphasizing fluid relationships between elements in her work. Exploring new soundscapes, she continues to innovate, recently delving into the potential connections between psychology and music technology. Since arriving in London, she has been actively experimenting with unconventional instruments and innovative playing techniques, integrating her experiences as a musician with the field of experimental electronic and audiovisual interaction. Her work often explores the connection between marginalized voices and the world, as well as the dynamics between women and society, informing her designs of interactive and immersive experiences.
N. 33 Holistic notation study I {Granular visions} – Christian Dimpker
The video art score N. 33 Holistic notation study I {Granular visions} takes a look into the greatest expanse and the finest microscopy. It fuses images and sounds that elude the lazy eye and ear, constantly escaping them. Visitors view the work through jeweller’s loupes, which – attached to a microscreen – add an extra layer of blurry deception and fuse the screen with the piece. The images and sounds cannot be pinned down because they only take shape in the granular range, usually between 5 and 80 ms, rarely longer. By doing so, the template evolves to a substantially new work, opens up abstract worlds while the flood rattles faster than the brain.
Christian Dimpker is a composer and art theorist with academic studies in Philosophy, History and Sound Studies as well as a doctoral dissertation in Musicology / Composition. Dimpker’s compositions explore unconventional fields of notation. This is enabled by an extensive notation system for extended playing techniques and electroacoustic music. This treatise with the title Extended notation: The depiction of the unconventional has been released by the LIT Verlag publishers. Currently, Dimpker further extends this research to the fields of visual arts, theatre and dance. The monograph Kinetic notations for the visual and performing arts forms the basis of this work. It will be released in 2024 by Transcript Publishing / Columbia University Press. Scores are published by Universal Edition Vienna. Residencies inter alia at Cité des Arts Paris, EMS Stockholm, Asia Culture Center, Tokyo Arts and Space, Kuenstlerdorf Schoeppingen. Grants by the Berlin senate, German government, E.ON foundation, Lotto foundation, German Artist Fund, Musikfonds, GEMA. Performances in Germany, Japan, France, South Korea, Portugal, Australia, Serbia, the USA, England, Sweden and Romania (International Contemporary Ensemble / Contemporary Insights / Elision Ensemble / Ensemble 2e2m / Ensemble Resonanz). Scores are distributed by the Universal Edition. Engraving works include Helmut Lachenmann’s Schreiben for Breitkopf & Härtel and teaching assignments have been held in the UK, Germany, Hong Kong and Sweden.
Petit Violence #1: Breath – Gin (Jing Chang)
“Petit Violence #1 : Breath” draws its creative inspiration from an incidental discovery — the sound of a manual balloon pump resembles the sound of rapid human breathing. Both sounds are akin to the swift passage of air through a narrow tube, creating a similar compression noise. Observing from the perspective of action imagery, a balloon, when inflated, endures increasing internal pressure until it becomes taut, with the possibility of bursting at any moment. Similarly, rapid human breathing usually occurs when there’s an imbalanced state of pressure, which can lead to physical or psychological harm if excessive, or may gradually return to a stable state as the pressure decreases.
Inspired by this concept, this artwork employs a latex balloon inflation device and a six-channel speaker system, attempting to evoke a shared human experience of anxiety and fear through the interplay of balloon inflation sounds, human gasps, and the physical act of inflating balloons.
“Petit Violence” is planned to develop into a series of works including video, sound, and installation elements, aiming to reveal the often-hidden emotional traces that are habitually ignored during daily life but are genuinely present throughout our growth.
Gin, also named Esme Chang, is a 24-year-old MFA student pursuing New Media Art at Taipei National University of the Arts. Currently, her work focuses on the relationship between the inner senses and the Other. The artist’s works span across image, installation, body art, and sound.
Before entering the art field, she graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Design, had over two years of visual design experience and received awards in national technology innovation competitions. Her expertise includes graphic design, project planning, interactive design, creative coding, music post-production, etc.
WAD for 5 Digitally Prepared Pianos – Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully
WAD is an algorithmic audio/visual composition based upon a single stream of note values processed by discrete, inter-related criteria (probability, velocity, timbre, delay, space) for each of the 5 prepared instruments.
Building upon my wider research on participatory tools for digital art, ‘WAD for 5 Digitally Prepared Pianos’ explores how mainstream music production DAW’s can be utilised to extend the capabilities of digitally-reproduced acoustic instruments. Here, 5 digital pianos are ‘prepared’, and subject to generative and algorithmic processes that affect both their timbre and their frequency (in terms of both how often they sound and the pitch at which they sound). What is more, these same processes are used to affect aspects of volume (both amplitude and how a sound occupies space in terms of its resonance or reverberation), and repetition (in terms of both re-emergence of prior sound events and the delay and feedback of sounds). On some levels, the pianos are fed a relatively small amount of information, but this information is subject to processes that affect nearly every perceivable quality of each of the 5 instruments.
The result is a fairly mammoth hour-long work, with a constantly evolving structure. The piece feels randomly generated, but isn’t, and points to the affordance of the acoustic piano but presents this through a digital rendering beyond what any pianist could reasonably perform. Stylistically, the piece is very much a work of avant-garde classical music, falling somewhere between the slow emergence of Feldman and the erratic playfulness of Kagel.
Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully (Distant Animals) is a composer, writer, performance artist and researcher based in Lewes. Unable to commit to any one endeavour fully, he simultaneously teaches electronic music theory at a leading London conservatoire, works as a researcher for inter-disciplinary digital participatory art projects, writes for the Quietus, creates music videos for local bands, and runs a largely unsuccessful micro-label. Sometimes he dresses as a rabbit.
Granby nature rayonnante – Étienne Lavallée
Granby nature rayonnante lives through the images, sounds, and history of the city of Granby. With this work, I invite you to dive into the past and present that have shaped the landscapes of this region. I will take you to three crucial bodies of water: Lake Boivin, the Yamaska River, and the Choinière Reservoir. With a simple touch, you will be able to explore my city and create landscapes. Granby reveals its radiant nature as it has appeared to me.
Étienne Lavallée: A lover of the color of sound and timbre, new music, sound installations, and film scoring, Étienne Lavallée works in all spheres of sound creation. As a master manipulator of auditory material, he refines his artistic practice by focusing his research and creations on the power of audiovisual experiences to raise awareness of climate change among all audiences. After completing an undergraduate degree in musical composition for film in 2023, he composed the soundtracks for three documentaries, two experimental films, and one work of fiction, in addition to contributing to the sound design of three independent video games. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree, exploring his creations in relation to space, the environment, and the collective impact we have on them. His sound creations harmoniously blend music and visuals to transport the audience on an unforgettable sensory journey. He invites his audience to rethink their own connection with the world around them, thus creating a profound and inspiring dialogue between humans and their environment.
The Death of Arcadia – Aidan Lochrin
‘The Death of Arcadia’ was written as a response to “the end of the world” – i.e., the feeling of watching the climate crisis and economic disparity get worse, while being powerless to stop it. It comes from a place of catharsis – to show that despite a feeling of doom, everything is not hopeless. The title reflects this, referring to the Ancient Greek Arcadia; Pan’s Domain; of which the more well-known equivalent would be the Christian Eden. As such, the work often takes on a pseudo-religious form to better frame the severity of the subject matter, with each section reflecting on a different aspect of the ongoing “end of the world”.
Aidan Lochrin’s work is heavily steeped in improvisation and the drone – they have produced sound & visuals across many genres; from contemporary classical performance, experimental noise, field recording works, to video game & film scoring. In recent years, their practice has increasingly contained themes of the environment, liminality, and the self, with works often taking a more long-form approach; using both time and space to allow sound & sight to develop into its own, unique, audiovisual environment.
Aidan has shared the stage with Cucina Povera, Montreal’s Jason Sharp (Constellation), and mythic synth duo Ultramarine (Realsoon). To date, Aidan has recorded and released upwards of fifteen albums and EPs across various projects, including numerous one-off tracks and pieces, while also producing several experimental short films & audiovisual works.
zone of middle dimensions (swerving matter) – Mhairi Vari
Mixed media, 2024
Formed from material gathered between New Delhi rooftops and London airports.
Thanks to Jasone Miranda Bilbao for sun salutations.
Mhairi Vari is a multi-modal Scottish artist based in London. She started out in theatre, trained in Fine Art sculpture and is currently undertaking a practice based Phd within the Sound/Image Research Centre at the University of Greenwich.
Through process led practice, rather than construction by design, installations are evolved that talk with and through the given physical context. She often makes work in non-standard spaces: from damp basements and agricultural barns to world heritage sites. She has made work for St Augustine’s Tower, the oldest building in Hackney, East London and is the only artist ever to have installed work on the exterior of the iconic Lloyds building.
Her current research activity involves learning to be a steam engineer with the volunteers at Crossness, a historic Victorian sewage pumping station on the banks of the river Thames, where she is working towards generation of an expansive installation.
Listening Forms – Land Bells – Rebecca Waterworth
Rebecca Waterworth’s practice is inter-disciplinary, working across drawing, painting, collage, film/animation, sound and installation. Her work examines the temporal nature of memory, spatial sensation and physical experience/gestures to reflect notions of care and the human affinity for narrative construction. This results in work that asks the viewer to be a conceptual and physical interlocuter, forming their own relation to the work through a combination of listening, touching and seeing.
The work frequently weaves and layers ‘parts’ to reflect a ‘whole’; a form of constructing art that uses the tension between logic (pattern, repeat, association) and imagination (chance, memory, motifs), as a productive space in which Waterworth can question how we make sense of the world. Collage, in its broadest sense—as a method to orchestrate and layer disparate materials (printed fabric, recorded sound, cannibalised past artworks etc) into a textual experience for the viewer—is therefore an important mode of both thinking and making for her.
These recent sculptural works explore the notion of ‘resonance’ in this context i.e. how personal history and one’s immediate environment might coalesce. By taking repeated walks in the natural environment, from which Waterworth has gathered audio and developed visual patterns, a set of fabric objects were made, called ‘listening forms’. The forms are made to amalgamate with the human body in various positions; embedded with speakers they invite listening and holding, with looped audio compositions that are specifically referential to the location they have come from, but also might echo spaces beyond them. Land Bells the musical composition for this set of ‘listening forms’ responds to the hearing of church bells while walking, the piano being the main part, ringing out repetitively. The percussion representing wafting grass and seed heads creating a different space at the front of the listening, quite close but gentle. The cello phrase quite distant like the wind. As the piece develops it goes into a section inspired by Alice Coltrane with the bass more prominent deep and resonant.
Rebecca Waterworth completed her BA (Hons) Degree in Fine Art Painting, Falmouth School of Art in 1995 studying under Professor Patrick Heron. She completed a Post Graduate Certificate in Education at the University of Brighton in 1998. After teaching for 5 years, she took a sabbatical to study under Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Professor Stephen Buckley completing her MA in Fine Art at the University of Reading in 2005. This is where she developed her practice examining the ‘frame’ and personal narratives through painting and installation.
In 2005 she took a position of senior lecturer and then programme director at the University for the Creative Arts where she combined her teaching practice with the development of her research profile via several funded projects examining performative space and complex, staged artworks.
Recent exhibitions include; Performing the Object (Crate Project Space, Margate, 2018 Project Space Brewery Tap, Folkestone 2019), Commonplace (Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury, 2020). Her work was recently selected for the Turner Contemporary, Kent Open and for a retrospective of practitioners from the University for the Creative Arts.
In addition to her visual art practice, she is a member of the experimental female quartet, Collectress, working with sound and music composition, alongside an exploration of contemporary performance. She has worked with Ballet Rambert and international choreographer/dancers Miguel Altunaga and Hannah Rudd performing at music venues across the UK. She is also the cellist in the newly formed Penguin Café and has performed both nationally and internationally.
皇潮King Tide – Garling Wu & Clovis McEvoy
In 1983 my father swam from China to Hong Kong.
From midnight till sunrise, he swam until he made it to the distant shore. He carried everything he owned wrapped inside two plastic bags. After reaching land, he knew he was far from being safe and he continued his journey on foot, walking over a mountain and down to the city where he met his younger brother. He knew that if he stayed there, he would never truly be free, and so the brothers came up with a plan. My father would climb aboard a container ship that was leaving Hong Kong for good.
I recount the legend now told through music and sound.
Garling Wu and Clovis McEvoy – Together we make immersive interactive installations. Our goal is to bring the audience into the art-making process by giving them direct, physical control over audio and visual materials, and simultaneously enveloping them within those same materials. In this way, we turn the gallery space into a gestalt; one that can communicate concepts, narratives, and emotions through embodied experiences. For us, this immersive interaction offers a much more direct and personal communication between ourselves, our art, and the people who engage with it. Recently, we exhibited our first work as an artist duo, King Tide, at the Pier-2 Art Centre in Kaohsiung, Taiwan from June 15th-21st, 2024. The work tells the story of Garling’s father and his journey to escape China. In 1983 he swam to Hong Kong from the mainland and stowed away on a ship, before eventually being discovered and put ashore in Germany, where he was granted political asylum.
Led by Garling’s artistic interpretation of this family legend, the project integrates bodily motion, interactivity, music, and visual arts into a single, immersive audiovisual space. It is an excellent example of the kind of art we want to make going forward. In addition to our recent collaboration, we have both forged distinctive but related careers as solo composers and sound artists.
Garling’s previous works for contemporary dance use motion tracking and spatial audio to turn a 3D space into a single hyper-instrument that is played through physical gesture and movement. Her other projects include sound installation, acousmatic music, and live-performance. Using these forms she explores narrative and story-telling, weaving together referential and imagined sound worlds. At the heart of these ideas is her expressive use of computer technology. She has innovated novel uses for visual reality tracking systems; worked with large multichannel speaker systems; and built highly nuanced interactive installations. Amongst performances in Berlin and Switzerland, Garling’s work has been performed in the national Karlheinz Company concert in New Zealand, and been programmed in the International Computer Music Festival in South Korea. She completed a Masters in Music with First Class Honours at the University of Auckland in 2019.
Clovis’ work’s for virtual reality give people a first-hand experience of mental health issues through gradated forms of interactivity, and, specifically, by enabling people to use their voice as a tool to rebuild and shape virtual environments. His installations and live performance works have been presented in over thirteen countries, including America, France, Germany, Italy, England, and South Korea. From 2015 to 2019, Clovis lectured at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, teaching sonic arts, composition, and sound engineering. During this same period, he was a managing trustee of the SoundDome Charitable Trust – an organisation that helped foster multichannel acousmatic composition in New Zealand – and served as the lead audio engineer for the cutting- edge, 25-speaker geodesic sound dome.
Immersive Noise – Olive Gingrich Group Projects
Immersive Noise is an exhibition by the Analema Group and researchers and undergraduate students of the BA (Hons) Animation at University of Greenwich. The installation will feature the participatory artwork KIMA Noise by the Analema Group and experimental practice-based research into Gaussian splats and ambisonic sound by staff and students at the School of Design.
KIMA: Noise is as a participatory artwork originally exhibited as site specific installation at Tate Modern by the Analema Group. KIMA Noise invites audiences to explore the impact of urban noises interactively through 360 sound installation and drawing an ambisonic sound trajectory – a virtual sound walk. Using specific urban sound sources, the audience experiences urban noise as spatial soundscapes, responding to it, physically engaging and interacting with it. The audience is invited to interact with noise and sound streams from across the globe and to stream their own noise soundscape from wherever they are.
Originally intended to raise aware of the phenomenon of noise pollution, and exhibited at Tate Modern, the project was reimagined as part of the AHRC-funded p_ART_icipate research project on the effect of participatory online art on health and wellbeing in collaboration with University of Greenwich, CNWL NHS Foundation trust and Brunel University. In this sense, KIMA Noise not only explores the effect of participatory art on wellbeing, but also raises awareness for the effect of noise on health.
The exhibition also features work by researchers of students and staff ar the University of Greenwich: Gaussian splats are Neural Radiance fields or NeRFs are AI-based neural networks to represent and render realistic 3D scenes based on an input collection of 2D images. In recent years, NeRFs have revolutionised 3D scanning, 3D asset generation as well as streaming technology. The team has expertise in combining NeRFs with background image and generation, augmented reality (George Spencer, Ryan Flynn), immersive sound (Ian Thompson, Alain Renaud) and immersive technology (Julie Watkins, Olive Gingrich, George Spencer). The artwork has been created by undergraduate researchers Eulalia Civit, Christopher Gainz, and Maria Reyes Reyes.
www.Analemagroup.com
60 Second Shorts:
For Sound Image 2024, MA Digital Arts and MA Music & Sound Design students have teamed up to create a collection of short Audio-Visual works. The pieces explore their individual and collaborative interests while being challenged by a 60 second time constraint. This time limit is actually a gift, pressurising the creative process to find the unexpected potentials within each other.
Gush of Life, Sanzida Mahbub Khan Esha
The Infinite, Lacidre & Mafalda dos Santos
Grotto, Roman Poplutz & M. Deniz Kartal (with Stephane Goujon)
Found, Andy Iverson (with Jonathon Crabb)
Living Notes, Paulina Kompanovych, Sofia Pesco & Shivon Hanfler
i c u, Maria Karagkiaouri
Japanese Ramen, Mustafa Taha & Chia-Shan Tsai