Exploring sonic and audio-visual practice
Thank you to everyone who came to be a part of #soundimage19! It was a weekend full of concerts, talks, screenings, performances unpacking the audiovisual and sharing ideas!
We had a really fantastic programme, with guests visiting us from all over the world. Below are some of the images from the weekend.
This work follows a series with the same title (Accumulator 1,2, 3) etc as well as realizations of works by Pauline Oliveiros, Michael Pisaro, Hanne Darboven, John Cage and others. All of these combined live music for double bass with film/video. Works have been exhibited, performed and presented at conferences in Norway, Austria and Ireland.
Jeremy Welsh (1954, UK) is a visual artist and professor of Fine Art. Has exhibited internationally since the late seventies. Formerly exhibitions coordinator at London Video Arts (later known as The Lux) and former director of Film & Video Umbrella, London. Resident in Norway since 1990.
jewelsh.blogspot.com
Michael Francis Duch is a professional musician and associate professor of musical performance. He has worked with many renowned musicians within contemporary and improvised music and is a member of leading Norwegian ensemble Lemur. Duch has released several solo and collaborative albums of own and others’ music and is a member of Scottish/Norwegian avant-rock band Amor.
It is a short abstract narrative that was made using a mixture of filmed footage and hand-drawn elements that were then animated. All the sounds (except for the song in the middle) originate from a guitar.
Paul Klooren born in 1994 in Tallinn, Estonia. Currently studying audiovisual composition in the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre and works mainly with filmed footage and animation.
Beginning in late 2017, the demolition of the Netherland’s Central Bureau of Statistics office created an extreme type of slow cinema for railway passengers travelling between The Hague and Amsterdam. Over the following year, as the building was methodically deconstructed from the top down, I visited the site each month to document the gradual erosion. Using a drone and a digital mapping process, photogrammetry, I created an archive of virtual 3D models. As the building’s architecture and its inevitable collapse were reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s 1975 High Rise, I further sought to accompany this scene with the voice of a machine learning system trained on the complete corpus of Ballard’s writing. This recurrent neural network generates texts that describe the materials, invisible bodies, and possible narratives residing within the broken grounds of the building. The resulting film combines digital animation and the voice of the machine learning system. It debuted at the 2018 Modern Body Festival in The Hague’s Theater de Nieuwe Regentes, a former swimming pool built in the 1920’s. Made possible by The Modern Body Festival, Yukun Zhu, Google Artists and Machine Intelligence, Maxwell Forbes, and the University of Washington Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media. Narration by Kevin Walton.
Tivon Rice is an artist and educator working at the intersections of visual culture and technology. Based in Den Haag (NL) his work critically explores representation and communication in the context of digital culture and asks: how do we see, inhabit, feel, and talk about these new forms of exchange? How do we approach creativity within the digital? What are the poetics, narratives, and visual languages inherent in new information technologies? And what are the social and environmental impacts of these systems? These questions are explored through projects incorporating a variety of materials, both real and virtual. With recent films, installations, and A.I. generated narratives, Rice examines the ways contemporary digital culture creates images, and in turn build histories around communities and the physical environment. While much of Rice’s research focuses on emerging technologies, he continuously reevaluates relationships with sculpture, photography, and cinema. His work then incorporates new media to explore how we see and understand a future thoroughly enmeshed in new data/visual/production systems. Rice holds a PhD in Digital Art and Experimental Media from the University of Washington. He was a Fulbright scholar (Korea 2012) and is currently an Artistic Researcher at the Delft University of Technology. His projects have travelled widely with exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Seoul, Taipei, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, and São Paulo.
Trotters
We trot towards a riddle.
Boogie Stomp Pink
This boogie dance performed by William & Maeva was downloaded from the internet. Vertical sections taken from each frame are arranged into 24 panels to show pattern and movement across every second of it. First shown at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in Sept 2017.
Stuart Pound lives in London and has worked in film, digital video, sound and the visual arts since the early 1970’s. Since 1995 he has collaborated with the poet Rosemary Norman. Video work has been screened regularly in London and at international festivals.
The visual components of this multimedia project consist of movies/photos which are taken with various high magnification macro and microscopic devices from one single broken microscopic slide containing some parts of an insect’s body. It was not the intention to produce realistic imagery, but to photographically explore this single object in order to render visible the hidden beauty of varying abstract landscapes. ‘Magnification’ was also the motivating idea for the composition of the piece. Based on generative principles, the music grows out of a simple constellation of numbers which creates complex structures by unfolding in time.
Gerhard Nierhaus studied composition with Peter Michael Hamel, Gerd Kühr and Beat Furrer. Working within both traditional and contemporary digital and intermedial formats, his artistic output includes numerous works of acoustic and electronic music and visual media. He works at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria, and teaches Computer Music and Multimedia.
For other projects see: gerhardnierhaus.com
Uriel is a collaboration between visual artist Harvey Goldman and composer Jing Wang.
Jing Wang, a composer and virtuoso erhu artist, was born in China. Ms. Wang has participated in numerous musical communities, as a composer and a performer of diverse styles of music. Her compositions have been selected and presented in China, Spain, France, Italy, Serbia, Turkey, Romania, Russia, Australia, Japan, Argentina, and throughout the United States. They have also been recognized by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers and Electro-acoustic Miniatures International Contest Spain. She was the winner of 2006 Pauline Oliveros Prize given by the International Alliance for Women in Music and has been awarded the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Vilcek Foundation Fellowship, and the Omi International Musicians Residency Fellowship. As an active erhu performer, she has introduced the Chinese indigenous erhu into Western contemporary music scene with her wide array of compositions for chamber ensemble, avant-garde jazz improvisations and multicultural ensembles. She has also successfully performed erhu concertos with several symphony orchestras in the United States. Ms. Wang is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where she teaches electroacoustic music, composition, and music theory.
Harvey Goldman has created critically acclaimed work in the fields of ceramics, digital imaging, animation and music. He is founder of the Digital Media program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. Goldman’s work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Iota Center for Experimental Animation, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Everson Museum of Art, Decordova Museum, Currier Museum of Art, and the Crocker Art Museum. His animations have been screened throughout the world including, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhon Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the White Box Museum, Beijing, China. His interests include gardening, storytelling, world music, sound exploration, language development, writing systems and basketball. He resides in Dartmouth, Massachusetts with his wife and fellow artist, Deborah Coolidge.
The abstract experimental film investigates right-wing extremist crime scenes in Germany. The photographic material of street textures and surfaces, which has been shot at three exemplarily selected crime scenes in Rostock, Bottrop and Magdeburg is re-animated digitally and transformed into an immersive visual experience. Schuchmann combines methods of Formalism and Abstract Animation with an intensive sound design to explore the places and to give viewers a new perspective. The project was funded by the Faculty of Design, Media & Information of the HAW Hamburg.
Moritz Schuchmann was born on 22.06.1993 near Darmstadt in Hesse. After studying digital media, he moved to the Hanseatic City of Hamburg, where he studied in the Master’s program Time-Based Media – Sound / Vision. A workshop on the topic “Abstract Narratives – Narrative Abstractions” with video artist Max Hattler paved his way for the future in the field of experimental film. A strong Formalism in the tradition of Absolute Film is the basis of his work. Schuchmann wrote his master’s thesis on the subject of Meaning in Abstract Animation. Exhibitions & Film Screenings: Platzhirsch Festival | Duisburg, Germany | 30.08. – 01.09.2019 Solo Exhibition at Klub der Künste | Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany | 02.05. – 18.05.19 Anifilm Festival 2019 | Trebon, Czech Republic | 10.05. – 12.05.19 – Abgedreht Festival | Hamburg, Germany | 13.12. – 14.12.2018.
Tones and textures intersect sonically and visually to alternately expand and contract our impressions of space, drawing us into an experience of this non-place.
The concept of the non-place is dynamic, in symbiotic opposition to that of place. In the same way, noises & tones, light & shadow and textures & forms, sit in audiovisual opposition. Such materials (all captured in one physical space) have been edited, extended and expanded in order to extrude impressions of an enveloping space; thus seeking to construct the dynamic contrast between place and non-place.
But, the piece is not conceptual. It should be experienced. A journey in spaces through lost, neglected and forgotten forms and material…
Andrew Knight-Hill (1986) is a composer of electroacoustic music, specialising in studio composed works both acousmatic (purely sound based) and audio-visual. His works have been performed extensively across the UK, in Europe and the US. Including performances at Fyklingen, Stockholm; GRM, Paris; ZKM, Karlsruhe; New York Public Library, New York; London Contemporary Music Festival, London; San Francisco Tape Music Festival, San Francisco; Cinesonika, Vancouver; Festival Punto de Encuentro, Valencia; and many more.
His works are composed with materials captured from the human and natural world, seeking to explore the beauty in everyday objects. He is particularly interested in how these materials are interpreted by audiences, and how these interpretations relate to our experience of the real and the virtual. He is Senior Lecturer in Sound Design and Music Technology at the University of Greenwich and programme leader of Sound Design BA.
Otisimine means ”Searching” in Estonian. This work is a journey of searching for the unknown. A leap into the void using photographs by Etienne Boile to give shape and color to an ambiguous and mysterious destiny where doubts and uncertainty are represented as holes and slits that arouse the curiosity of the viewer. This work is an abstract representation of how human beings can reach disturbing and unsuspected stadiums and conclusions through investigation and the need to solve our innermost vital intrigues.
Edgar Pacheca Ruiz (Alicante, 1990). Audiovisual artist, composer and music teacher. He studied Audiovisual Composition at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theater and Composition at the Superior Conservatory of Alicante. Winner of the SOIS CULTURA contest in the category of New Creators. His works have been screened at festivals such as the “Estonian Music Days”, the “eviMUS 2018” of Germany or the PROJECT XIII (CEU) in Valencia, where he was finalist of the Audiovisual Creation contest. Currently studying a master program of Audiovisual Composition in Estonian Academy of Music and Theater.