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'The National 2019: New Australia Art’, is a celebration of contemporary Australian art, a 'survey exhibition. 70 artists have been commissioned to make new works responding to the theme of the 'times in which they live'. This large group exhibition spans three major galleries; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. This theme nicely invites a plurality of the now, and it's great that these works are commissioned, it not only means pay for artists, but it allows them to actually respond to now, now. There are a number of sound focused works in the show and I've written up in a review of them on Hannah Kemp Welch's Sound Art Text Images: Fort Thunder by Lucas Abela, Heala by Hannah Brontë, OH YEAH TONIGHT by Melanie Jame Wolf. I'm very pleased to be participating in this in Melbourne next month at RMIT and meeting Jordan, Phill and Polly. Many thanks to Jordan, Rose and the CAST research group! To register for a ticket visit the eventbrite page here.  Image: Polly Stanton, Dam Wall Sound artists interface with sonic environments to provoke changes in the minutiae of everyday life – social, political, aesthetic – as a means to disassemble/reassemble those relations and flows that inform our habitual connections with the world. Three international sound artists – Lisa Hall, Philip Samartzis and Polly Stanton – are invited to RMIT’s Black Box to discuss their sonic practices across urban and wilderness environments, and in relation to human perception. Embodiment, technology, listening and intervention form key approaches of each artist’s interactions with environments and everyday human activity. These practices will be discussed in relationship to immersive audio-visual artworks created by each of the three artists, presented in the Black Box’s state of the art audio-visual system. With discussion guided by Jordan Lacey, audience-participants will have the opportunity to be involved in an open conversation about what a sound art practice is, when realised in the political, social and cultural context of the city.
Lisa Hall is a sound artist exploring urban environments using audio interventions and performative actions, and is affiliated with Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) at University of the Arts London. Currently on sabbatical, Lisa is travelling, listening to urban spaces across the globe and developing new practice based research works. Phil Samartzis a sound artist, scholar and curator with a specific interest in the social and environmental conditions informing remote wilderness regions and their communities. Philip is the co-founder and artistic director of the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture and teaches courses in sound art and spatial practice in the School of Art. Polly Stanton is a moving image artist and sound practitioner who’s mode of working is expansive and site based, with her practice intersecting across a number of disciplines from film production, sound design, field research, performance, writing and publication. Polly is a lecturer in the Master of Media program at RMIT University. Jordan Lacey is an urban sound installation artist and author operating at the interface of the sonic arts and urban design. He is author of Sonic Rupture, which offers an affect-based approach to the design of urban soundscapes, and is recent recipient of a DECRA fellowship entitled, Translating Ambiance. CAST, Contemporary Art and Social Transformation https://cast.org.au is the research group within RMIT’s School of Art. This CAST OUT LOUD event is part of our Public Art research stream.  My sound walk work 'Walking with Crickets' is playing in this exhibition 'Live* from CICADA' which is a totally unique version of an online sound exhibition -
CICADA Gallery are exhibiting the work of twenty artists working in sound. Each audio work has been processed with an impulse response recording made within the the physical space of CICADA (an artist-run venue located in Ogden, Utah, America). By treating each piece with the natural reverberant qualities found within the approximately 1,325 cubic foot gallery space, a hypothetical performance takes place where the sonic works made in disparate locations now aurally appear to have been originally performed within the same subterranean structure. The exhibition is actually the recorded document of this conceptual event! I had the pleasure of catching the first Bangkok Art Biennale last week, and so have written a mini guide to the sound art, or sound focused works exhibited. Have a read on sound-art-text, the excellent website by my collaborator Hannah Kemp Welch: https://sound-art-text.com/post/182480760623/sound-art-guide-to-bangkok-art-biennale-bab-2018  image of Joscha Steffens' installation Dream hack
 Reel Lives concert series will be playing Virtual Voices, an 8 channel work by Hannah Kemp-Welch & I. This three part concert series is curated by Cathy Lane as part of the Reel Lives exhibition. Book on eventbrite.
Artists include Ain Bailey, Caroline Bergvall, Kate Carr, Viv Corringham, Poulomi Desai, Caroline Devine, Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch, Cathy Lane, Lina Lapelyte, Brona Martin, Else M’bala and Karen Power Virtual Voices reviews the current use of automated voices in our cities - considering how human presence is represented through recorded and digitally manipulated sound, and how this is used to direct our behaviour. The work questions how automation has been implemented, re-visioning the positive changes that voice technology could bring to working lives if social good were considered over profit motive. "It seems as if an invisible, disembodied workforce has moved into the cities. A workforce who have replaced certain roles such as train operators, ticket inspectors, check-out sellers and lift operators. They are becoming more and more present, sounding out from new devices, serving new roles, talking more, and more, and more. Yet who are they?" Virtual Voices articulates this workforce: hearing it's many mouths and many heads that speak simultaneously across great distances, hearing it's limited representation of the population, it's gender bias, and it's embodiment in the machinery it speaks from - the lumps of technology now clothed in a sonic human identity. Looking to the future, the work proposes how we could shape a positive automated future - one that doesn't result in mass unemployment or misrepresentation, but supports the anti-work movement's call for "The Right To Be Lazy". In support of this the artists commit their own voices into a hybrid synthetic persona, creating their own virtual workforce to speak on their behalf. Virtual Voices is part of the project Listening for Instruction - a sonic survey reviewing the current position of automated sounds in our cities.  15 November 2018 | 3-4pm workshop (RSVP) | 4-4.30pm Talk
Listening for Instruction Workshop: Add an entry into the Delhi “Dictionary of Beeps” - a zine that catalogues and defines the automated sounds heard in the city. Listen for the beeps, bips, hisses, tones and sirens, that sound out from busses, trains, passing vehicles and beyond; /(pu) (pe) (pu) (pe) (pu) (pe) / / (e) (aaaaaaa) / Through sound walks in the city, we’ll record, visualise and interpret the meaning of these sounds - for inclusion in a Delhi edition of a “Dictionary of Beeps”. The “Dictionary of Beeps” was created during a listening survey in London (UK) by Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch, to better understand the automated sonic landscape that is becoming more and more present in our urban spaces. These sounds of automation are often described simply as ‘beeps’ and ‘sirens’ yet they differ wildly and can convey complex information. They are designed to grab our attention, yet their ubiquity means they often fade into the background. In effect they form a language of the machinery that we interact with in our urban spaces, becoming the voice of the moving electronic limbs, objects and buildings around us. “Dictionary of Beeps” is made in conjunction with two sound work “Virtual Voices”, currently exhibited at Sound Reasons Festival and 'Journey' as part of the 'Listening for Instruction' project. ******RSVP for the workshop to; ish(at)soundreasons.in or lisa_hall_(at)hotmail.co.uk****** Listening for Instruction Talk: A short gallery talk with Lisa Hall at 4pm will give an overview of the project Listening for Instruction which includes the exhibited work Virtual Voices and the Dictionary of Beeps workshop. All welcome. Location: Korean Cultural Center, New Delhi Sound Reasons Festival http://soundreasons.in/festival/ Virtual Voices, a collaborative work made with Hannah Kemp-Welch, is on show at Sound Reasons Festival till 21 Nov.  Virtual Voices: Exhibited at Sound Reasons Festival, Virtual Voices is part of an ongoing project “Listening for Instruction” by Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch - a sonic survey that investigates the automated sounds of our urban environments. Attempting to hear between the lines - to decipher the beeps and bips of automated machinery, to hear beyond the words of the synthetic voices and to imagine a new future of automation. Sound Reasons Artists: Venzha Christ, Marcus Maeder, Shun Owada, Arnont Nongyao, Salomé Voegelin, Ish S, Cathy Lane, da Saz, Suvani Suri, Paul Purgas, diFfuSed beats, Lisa Hall & Hannah Kemp-Welch, Wicked Mannequins, Bidisha Das, Kaushal Sapre and Dipali Gupta Curators Note, by Ish S: For the second and the third ReINSTALL sessions of the Sound Reasons Festival VI, we have engaged with the possibilities of Sound and its capabilities to make unseen connections, to hold un-assumed narratives and produce curative and creative tensions. While expanding upon the spectrum of the potentiality in Sound, we want to initiate a listening experience using artistic explorations and inter-media intersections. In these works there is an interplay of text, video, synthesis, sampling, narratives with other creative practices and musique concrete processes. We conduct a curative dialogue with other mediums in which a listener is invited to explore its generative phenomenological possibilities rather than preserve/observe the actuality of the sonic event(s). It is therefore listening into a world, in order to hear what all it could be – to reconsider the frame of current actuality and explore the complexity of its sonic perceptions. This curative iteration is a thin slice of the sonic spectrum that reveals not just itself, but also opens up to newer resonating worlds for a listener, where the aim is to illuminate and generate the dynamically plural possibilities and not to just categorise and preserve it as a soundscape. http://soundreasons.in/festival/ Artist in residence at the Indian Sonic Research Organisation (ISRO), Bangalore, Dec 201811/10/2018
Very pleased to be working in residence at ISRO in December - I’ll be testing out some new ideas for works based around the sounding body in urban habitats.
About the ISRO: The Indian Sonic Research Organisation is a collective of instrument builders and artists dedicated to the proliferation of experimental music and sound art. We experiment with old and new technologies including DIY and home-made instruments made with discarded electronics and found objects. We run a community music lab where we make, perform, teach and collaborate through workshops, performances and artist residencies. Our independent record label disseminates works by Asian composers, sound artists and musicians from India and abroad. https://www.theisro.org/about.html
I had the pleasure of launching this lovely thing at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry the other weekend, working with Kaffe and the BRI and Nick of Imagineer Technologies. Having spent a week earlier in the year with Kaf and Nick in the cov lab developing this into it's earlier stages of prototype, and following many discussions in the BRI London lab in earlier years about making sonic cycling more accessible to people of all ages and abilities - it was amazing to meet the final product and then help lots of enthusiastic people have a go on it.
The Buzz Bike is quite an experience to ride and to be ridden in - the whole cargo box vibrates the music to you through transducers set along it's sides, in accompaniment to the speakers flank the edges of the box playing audible sound. Even the rider's seat vibrates thanks to the butt shaker below it. Plus the unique steering and smooth riding make it a joy to cycle. Kaf had composed a piece for the launch that used organ samples and field recordings, based from her recent work On golden hares, a sonic bike opera that's on now in Germany, and it made for the most dreamy rides. Ultimately this sonic Buzz Bike is being made for a big sonic bike opera opening in Coventry in 2021, set along an exciting new canal side cycle path opening then. Part two of the weird and wonderful bicycle creations commissioned by Imagineer Productions for this will be a sonic 'Pal' / 'companion' bike, brilliantly described by Kaf as possibly the most dangerous BRI idea yet.... but if it works, this side-by-side tandem, with GPD located sound compositions is going to be something else. Full details on the sonic Buzz Bike are on the BRI website. Our new work, Listening for Instruction, by myself and Hannah Kemp Welch is now up at Fringe Arts Bath's exhibition 'It Sounds Devicive. Show'. On till June 10 - info here: www.fringeartsbath.co.uk/devicive
If you're not in Bath this week, have a listen online to some extracts and have a digital flip through the zine: Listening for Instruction |
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