Day Three: Saturday 8 November
2-4pm: Talk 4
Lecture Theatre, Stockwell Street Academic Building
Richard Whitby – Evicshen’s Liveness
This presentation examines the currency and impact of live, embodied performance at a time when cultural production is increasingly automated and ‘inhuman’. It is built on a case study of sound artist and instrument maker Evicshen (Victoria Shen).
As well as enveloping distorted sound and scratched vinyl, Shen’s performance is noted for her use of her own body (for example, using an instrument that amplifies the act of brushing her own hair; another that consists of record player needles attached to artificial finger nails). Whilst her work is also disseminated on social media and as recordings in both digital and physical media, I will argue that Shen’s live performance centralises experiences and potential meanings that can only be articulated and accessed when in the same room as the artist.
As well as considered Shen’s own statements on her work, I will use comparisons with other viral video stars such as ‘Salt Bae’ as well as work on noise music, burlesque and contemporary labour.
Traditional live performance necessitates bodily presence, however Shen forces an audience into a nuanced and complicated relationship with the powerful but also vulnerable position of the performer. This will be argued as an explicit aesthetic and political strategy for this artist and perhaps others too.
My current research is into the meanings of liveness and labour in performance: what kinds of value do physically present performers’ labour have in large budget or commercial productions? How is that same element used in other practices, away from the mainstream? Are there important qualities to be found in this, in an increasingly online cultural context?
A connection to my own creative work seems to be the factor of ‘visible labour’ – creative acts, gestures and decisions that remain perceptible to an audience, whether the work is live, gallery based or distributed digitally.
Most of my artwork is video; sometimes performance – and I make music. I often use humour; I often use handmade or rough modes of making. I tend to treat works and texts as containers, designed to house heterogenous materials that might seem like they are pulling the work apart. My work has been described as dark, weird and surreal – I like to use physical materials blended with digital techniques.
Often the subjects of my critical, research work are in some way opposite to the artwork I make myself, for example, the national displays that constitute Olympic opening ceremonies seek to celebrate the state, whereas my own artwork is more likely to critique it; mainstream blockbuster cinema usually employs a ‘sutured’ form or realism, whereas my videos use a disjunctive and rough editing style.
I studied at Wimbledon College of Art and then the Slade, and then did a PhD in Cultural Studies at the London Consortium.
Joseph Hyde – Tracing Music Technology to its Interdisciplinary Roots
The history of music technology is enriched and diversified if one separates it from its ‘traditional’ context within Western Modernist and Post-Modernist contemporary music. One way to do this is to look at the development of new ideas around sound and music in other artforms and even non-artistic disciplines.
This paper will focus in particular on such developments within an audiovisual context, around the history of what is often termed ‘visual music’. It will focus on specific instances where developments in visual music have, perhaps counter-intuitively, prefigured those in more widely-recognised music history, often by decades.
These include Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, who developed the first electro-mechanical ‘colour organ’, the Sarabet, in the early 1900s. Although this instrument did not produce sound, it pioneered key technologies, many of which she patented, that were later used in electro-mechanical and electronic musical instruments. We will also consider Margaret Hughes Watts, whose late 19th Century invention the Eidophone offered both a sophisticated early form of audio visualisation and a prescient understanding of the spectral qualities of sound.
We will also explore the origins of synthesis through experimentation with optical cinema soundtrack, addressing a particularly remarkable history of such work in 20th Century Russia, including examples such as Evgeny Scholpo’s Variophone, a fully-featured polyphonic synthesiser developed in 1930, and the ANS synthesizer, first conceived by Boris Yankovsky and Evgeny Murzin in the late 30s – which offered a pioneering version of additive synthesis decades before any comparable implementation.
These developments in optical synthesis reached their apex in the Oramics machine developed by British electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram from 1957. As well as being an early polyphonic synthesiser, Oram’s instrument offered a far radical interface based around graphic inscription years ahead of its time.
Joseph Hyde is Emeritus Professor in Creative Music Technology at Bath Spa University, UK. He has Directed the Seeing Sound Symposium from 2009 to 2020. His sound and audiovisual works have been performed worldwide, and he has published many papers and book chapters on visual music, including a focus on the work of Oscar Fischinger. He often works with collaborators – scientists, engineers, artists and dancers/choreographers. In 2023 he left the university to pursue a freelance career in music and audiovisual work and has worked on a number of projects such as Celestial Live, InnovateUK funded Creative Research and Development to deliver fully interactive drone light shows.