Day Three: Saturday 9 November
Lecture Theatre, Stockwell Street Academic Building
4-5pm: Screening 1
Chris Meigh-Andrews – Nothing Beside Remains
The title “Nothing Beside Remains” is a reference to Shelley’s famous sonnet “Ozymandias”. Even though I work with a time-based medium, I have attempted to make a work that is in some way timeless, to invoke a time or a place from which we are absent, gone and are no more. The video presents images of a landscape without any human presence; the sea, the sun, the sky, the clouds, and those huge worn limestone formations that are the central image of the work. To me they suggested the remains of some ancient sculpture – remnants of a forgotten human civilisation. A direct connection to the last lines of Shelley’s poem:
Nothing beside remains. Round
the decay
Of that colossal wreck,
boundless and bare
the lone and level sands stretch
far away.
The soundtrack music is Arvo Pärt’s magisterial “Spiegel im Spiegel”, (Mirror in the Mirror), an evocative image of infinity, in this recording elegantly performed by Leonard Roczek and Herbert Schuch.
Chris Meigh-Andrews is a video artist, writer and curator from Essex, England, whose work often includes elements of renewable energy technology in tandem with moving image and sound. He is currently Professor Emeritus in Electronic & Digital Art at the University of Central Lancashire.\
Riccardo Tesorini – Rather Than Fall
Rips, sharp lacerations, erosions and burns.
Fragments of film that go beyond space and time, in a non-linear, intermittent path.
A call to the other side of the screen, which first casts the eye into the depths of the abyss to then make it re-emerge, gracefully floating in a world of ether.
The image reveals itself instead of disappearing in what it makes us see, and the different linguistic systems explode into a thousand pieces uncovering unexpected connections between irreconcilable worlds, to the point of creating new immaterial auras.
Riccardo Tesorini lives and works in Bologna, Italy. He studied Sound Engineering at the National Academy of Cinema in Bologna and earned a Master’s Degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He graduated from Conservatory ‘F. Morlacchi’ in Perugia specializing in “Electronic Music and New Technologies”.
After his mobility period in Helsinki at Sibelius Academy, he is currently he is attending a Master degree in Sound Design at the Conservatory “G.B Martini” in Bologna.
His work encompasses different activities, ranging from soundtracks and sound design to a electro- acoustic project “Eezu” and “Haou Nebout” as well as the realization of sound installations and sound art. Always fascinated by the combination of music and images, he began his artistic career focusing on the different forms of sound space-time. Stylistically, his work is marked by an introspective vision coupled with a tireless inspiration towards nature, which is seen as an essential condition for harmony.
Laura Cooper – The Sun’s Tongue
The Sun’s Tongue documents the relationship between beekeeper, bees and the plant life of Birmingham city centre over the beekeeping season of 2022. It aims to map the plants that the bees forage on and the biodiversity of plant life in the city using 16mm film and experimental plant-based processes. Bee keeper Tim Vivian keeps bees on roof tops cross the city centre, the Custard factory, the Bullring and Millennium Point buildings which triangulate the area of Digbeth. The area offers a surprising variety of plants for the bees to eat, despite ongoing HS2 re-development. The film becomes in itself quite bee-like, taking single frame animations with a 16mm Bolex camera mapping the plant life of the streets, canals and carparks. Through the project we also tracked the bees diet, by collecting and sampling pollen they bring back to the hive on their legs. The pollen has been scanned using electron microscopy to create digital images that are also incorporated in the film. Each plants pollen grains are unique and they come in a variety of colours and unique forms. The bees diet is made up of a variety of these plants, which changes over the flowering season. The film attempts to track through the bee’s pollen harvesting activity, a pollen colour chart unique to this locality and these particular hive of bees.
Laura Cooper is a British artist and filmmaker. Solo exhibitions include Softening the Grid, Milton Keynes Arts Centre 2018, Nomadic Glow, Centro ADM Mexico City 2015, Soft Revolutions, Space In Between Gallery, London 2013. Selected residencies include Land Art Mongolia 360°Biennale, PRAKSIS Olso, Norway, Residency 108. NY, USA, and ARCUS Project, Japan. Film works include Colour Poem for Hyesous’ Herd (2015), Lure (2017), Eating Up the Sky (2018), and The Sun’s Tongue (2022). Along the way Cooper has collaborated with falconers, Oxford University scientists, urban beekeepers, equine therapists and nomadic herdsmen in Mongolia.
Andrew Knight-Hill – VOID
Freida Abtan – My Heart is a River, Act 3 (documentation)
My Heart is a River
Act 3:
v) Spilling upwards
vi) Floating down
My Heart is a River is a 45-minute immersive performance for cello and surround audiovisual media, written by Freida Abtan for Seth Parker Woods. Narratively, it investigates those moments where subjective identity must be reformed. The third act concerns itself with familial acceptance and the death of a parent. Each movement uses unique, related, aural and visual processes in its aesthetic and is a self-contained vignette depicted as a dream originating from the cellist’s instrument.
The music for My Heart is a River uses spectral processing to transform the sounds of the cello into physical materials such as water and skipping rocks. In performance, Woods plays in tight synchronization with the prerecorded audio and visual accompaniment, featuring cellist Simon Cummings and physical performance by both Woods and actor Ausar Stewart.
The piece was a commission from the Seattle Symphony and premiered in 2023. The sound and video surrounded the audience using an eighty-channel acoustic diffusion system as well as ten projection screens placed in an extended horseshoe configuration.
Freida Abtan is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist and musician. She works between fixed-media and computational technologies for concert, installation, and large-scale multimedia production. Her research revolves around intersensory composition and phenomenology. She holds degrees in Mathematics, Fine Art, and Electroacoustic Composition, completing her PhD in Computer Music and Multimedia from Brown University (2013) with dissertation: Fear of Flight: Presence and Gesture in Multimedia Performance. She lectures and performs internationally. Now Associate Professor of Electronic Music Composition at Carnegie Mellon University, she previously led the Electronic Music, Computing, and Technology Bmus/Bsc programme at Goldsmiths, University of London.