Huge thanks to Iris Garrelfs for this brilliant review of Acts of Air exhibition in Sound Studies. 

'Overall, Acts of Air invites an engagement with different urban conditions across several countries, through the lens of sound. Some of the scenarios encapsulated in the scores can be experienced directly, others are surveyed from afar, accessed through our imagination. Collectively, they allow us to consider similarities and differences across urban locations affected by varying material and cultural circumstances. The exhibition is successful in allowing for different kinds and degrees of participation by adopting a range of responsive strategies such as “re-voicing, re-hearing and re-sounding”, intended to reconfigure the urban sonic.'

I really enjoyed Iris' reflection that the impact of these artworks was one of 'imaginably inhabiting [urban life] a little more boldly' and that this is a 'step towards reshaping our urban environment', one that we are in charge of.

The full article is available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20551940.2021.1879500?needAccess=true

And link to the exhibition: http://acts-of-air.crisap.org/ 

Big thanks to the Cities & Health team for putting together this detailed write up of Acts of Air exhibition and for interviewing Cathy Lane and I.

It's available here. 

And here are some snippets below ....

Very pleased to be invited to be part of this Sustainable Sound series by CESSA (Concordia University) with Jordan Lacey and Pamela Z. I'm looking forward to connecting CESSA students in Montreal to the Acts of Air exhibition on the 26th.

It's been super interesting over the last couple of months doing workshops like this one - being able to be able to connect with people while they enact the artworks, watching their videos and talking about how their location and performative choices come into play. Looking forward to this one on the 26th! Sign up if you'd like to join in (there's a little space for non CESSA students I believe)

Sonic Rupture w/ Jordan Lacey (Apr 12) https://www.facebook.com/events/291318962607217

Acts of Air w/ me (Apr 26): https://www.facebook.com/events/1837378519754732/

Pamela Z (May 3) https://www.facebook.com/events/869490890294453/

And here's a link to the online exhibition Acts of Air, that we'll be visiting! http://acts-of-air.crisap.org/ 

Score & performance
Exhibited in online exhibition Composite by the Numbers
https://compositebythenumbers.com/lisa-hall/

Many thanks to curator Dayang Yraola for this invitation!

At this devastating point in the pandemic, this work 100'000hz sounds out the the number of people who have died each week in the UK due to covid19, as an attempt to understand these awful statistics. Starting from March 2020 when the first person died, to the latest weekly total of 7507 deaths captured in mid January, these numbers are compiled in an 11 piece score that I perform in a short video.

In the performance, each number is sounded as a frequency - to hear these death in hertz. Working from a field recording taken during the early days of the first lockdown, each frequency is drawn out and emphasised. Through this the statistics become audible, found in our environment. The peaks and declines of the pandemic are heard and the cumulative effects build to fundamentally change the sound of that spring sunny morning.

See the whole score and watch the performance on Composite by the numbers:
https://compositebythenumbers.com/lisa-hall/




About Composite by The Numbers
Tracks the statistics of covid around the world and over the year.
Curated by Dayang Yraola. With works by: Auspicious Fam, C-drik, Chris Brown, escuri, Jai Saldajeno, Laure Boer, Lisa Hall, Mary Katherine Trangco, Makoto Nomura, No one pulse, Pauline Despi, Teresa Barrozo, Tintin Patrone and Tugtugang Musika Asyatika.

New normal is a world that has shifted into irreversible discomfort, fear and all sorts of hideous ness that were dystopic possibilities we thought once could only happen in fiction. And constantly, it requires us to rethink our footing on this present trembling ground. We have now been reduced to statistics. We are numbers of those who have been infec ted. We are numbers of those who have been killed. We are numbers of those who have been saved. We are numbers of those who are collateral damage. We are numbers of those who are beyond reprieve.

Every day we are bombarded with numbers. At one point, these numbers were just too many that people already fail to recognise that each number represents a LIFE. Although in these statistics 1 is just 1 out of 100,000, for a real person that 1 could be a mother, a sister, a daughter, or self.

I'm really pleased to share this article, written by myself and Salomé Voegelin reflecting on our sound and text installation 'And it tastes like hair' that we made for the Translating Ambiance exhibition last year.
Have a read of Unlikely Journal, issue 6 guest edited by Jordan Lacey, we're one of a huge number of articles sharing thoughts and artworks on ideas of wildness and translation;

• Read 'Hearing a Possible World in the Crackling of Dry Leaves' here
• Read the whole issue 6 online here

I'm delighted to be sharing this exhibition that I've curated; 

Acts of Air: Reshaping the urban sonic
An online exhibition exploring and interrogating our cities of sound.
Launching on 16 July 2020, with two online events at 9:00 BST and 20:00 BST.
Commissioned by CRiSAP, part of the Un-Earthed Festival directed by Prof Cathy Lane. 

Although hosted online, this exhibition requires offline participation, each work is relational and needs your activation. The exhibition is just the prompt or score, your local urban environment is the gallery or performance space and you are the audience as performer who realizes the work through your participation. 

About the exhibition:

Acts of Air invites you to reshape your urban sonic present by enacting 14 sound works directly in urban spaces. Each work proposes a sounding out, a performance, a site specific listening or engagement in the streets, under bridges, by water fountains and extractor fans. They offer a means to explore and interrogate our cities of sound.
While the urban is a seemingly fixed and impermeable place, the urban sonic is in the air, performed and enacted each day as we ride the buses, press the buttons and talk to one another. With these vibrations we can choose to re-voice, re-sound, re-hear and rebuild the urban sonic in new ways.
This online exhibition brings together artists from around the world. While the works are shaped by the sites and locations they were made in, including Porto Alegre, Santiago, Hong Kong, Manchester, Melbourne and Cairo, they can be enacted and activated anywhere around the globe. Through local participation the audience as performer can sound out the artists’ provocations and create new engagements with their own local urban. From global participation we can reveal our shared and different conditions of urbanity – the opportunity to hear new possibilities and togetherness through documentation, participation and trace of these art works.
Artists: Agnes Paz, Anna Lann, Anna Raimondo, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Catherine Clover, Cedric Maridet, Colin Priest, Jacek Smolicki, Julieanna Preston, Kate Brown, Raheel Khan, Vagné, Vitório O. Azevedo and Yara Mekawei.


About the launch events:

Two launch events will be held online on 16 July 2020 BST. Launch one: 9.00 - 10.00 BST. Launch two: 20:00 - 21.30 BST. Please join us at either event that suits your timezone best (check BST here https://time.is/BST)

Both events will both include talks by the curator, Lisa Hall, presentations from the artists, plus a live participatory online performance, RMP hums, choral, viral, directed by Julieanna Preston. You are invited to participate in this live online performance - to listen and tune to electrical motors; to make their life force palpable.

RMP hums, choral, viral
During this relational encounter we will absorb, sound, mimic and emulate the motor’s vibrations; to quiver, tremble, shudder, shiver and spasm as a complementary and counter-humming material body. The noise pollution produced by electric motors, an everyday irritant to urban life, is heightened by a deep hush emerging during various levels of pandemic isolation across the globe. Imagine the chorus of our collective effort wafting through latitudinal and longitudinal currents.
To participate, you will need: A mobile device with camera, Zoom meeting software downloaded, internet access, and to be located at the site of an electric motor, device, appliance or system anywhere in your city at the time of the performance.
Duration: 15 minutes
Time & Date: 16 Jul 2020, 9.00 BST and 20.00 BST

Performance instructions and the zoom meeting links will be sent to all registered participants - anyone is welcome to participate.

Register for the launch event & performance here

A nice article about the exhibition Translating Ambiance that Salomé Voegelin and I made the sound & text installation, 'And it tastes like hair', for. Curator Jordan Lacey interviewed by Foreground.

I'm putting together this exhibition as part of CRiSAP, Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice, research centre's,  forthcoming festival;

Un-Earthed: A festival of listening and environment. A critical reflection on our relationships with the environments that we share with other people and with other species.

This open call invites relational sound works that interrogate our sonic urbanism and sound out our sonic agency within it – works that trigger a hearing below the surface of our urban sonic landscapes in order to find something else within those same vibrations, to hear the unspoken or the cancelled out, the restraints or opportunities that might be found there, demonstrating our possibilities within these often seemingly impermeable spaces.

• £150 fee for selected work
• Deadline 17 May 2020, (midnight BST)
  

Full details are here: https://www.crisap.org/2020/04/24/call-for-works-online-sound-art-exhibition/

Kaffe Matthews and I are starting work on a new commission with The Bicrophonic Research Institute, creating a new sonic bike project for Middlesbrough with Auxiliary Gallery. 

We're heading up to Middlesbrough this week for a one week residency, to start developing the project. We're thinking about air quality, noise pollution and generally what else might be in the air of Middlesbrough. The plan is to kit up the sonic bikes with air pollution sensors, to not only collect data, but to make their air quality audible. 

We're hoping to meet new people who'd like to get involved. If your based in the area, come and join us - we're holding an open day on Sat 22 Feb 2020. There will be vegan chili and drinks to enjoy too.
Details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1985213998290171/

The work will launch at MIMA for Sonic Arts Week July 18-25 2020, Orange Pip Festival August 2020 and Middlesbrough Art Weekender September 24-27 2020

• More on the BRI here: https://sonicbikes.net/news/#middlesbrough
• About the BRI: https://sonicbikes.net/
• What's a sonic bike? https://sonicbikes.net/sonic-bike/
• Auxiliary Gallery: theauxiliary.co.uk

Hannah Kemp-Welch and I just passed our Amateur Radio exam and are now licensed for the Amateur radio waves!! 

A giant home made aerial will soon be being strung out of one of our windows, as we get our radio shack set up... 

Thanks to the wonderful people at Eltham's Cray Valley Radio Society for the epic two day course to get us clued up and ready for the airwaves and part of the Radio Society of Great Britain.