Sound Reasons III @ Clarke House, Bombay | 03 – 07 June | Sound and Mix Media Installations
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Sound and Mix media Installations at Clarke House, Bombay
Ish S (diFfuSed beats) Sitting still is an installation about the listening and being the heard. It is a sort of sonic heterotopia wherein an experience is created which is a part of both the imagination and reality. This sound sculpture develops spatially and its discovery unfolds itself in the present, bringing with it the experience of sound and listening as a sonic sculpture. Such listening does not pursue the question of meaning, as a collective, but that of interpretation which is individual and heterogeneous to the listener. Sound will narrate, outline and fill but at the same time will be ephemeral. Sound here is actually created in the listening of it and in its inventions is in the imagination of the listener. The knowing here is the experience of sound as a temporal relationship; not between things but ‘is the thing itself.’ Salome Voegelin 5 meter conduit is a work in a series of compositional pieces that focus on the small and slight, the unseen and almost overheard. It records material at the margins of the everyday soundscape and the threshold of hearing, to produce sonic fictions and trigger auditory imaginations from moments that almost remain inaudible but that nevertheless determine what we see. Farah Mulla When mirrors face each other, the objects reflected in them become smaller and less distinct until the mirrors seem merely to reflect themselves. An echo is differentiated by being made of (one or more) distinct and discrete repetitions of the original sounds. Aural mirror is an installation, which tries to immerse the listener in the echo’s of their own sounds. It is not only a mirror in the metaphorical sense of reflecting (sounds) as a mirror but a psychoanalytical sense of the sonorous womb. As the listener enters the installation the ambient sounds of their movement and voice are picked up by the microphones and played back into the space. These repetitions of sounds are reflected within the space until they abstracted into a drone. This drone devoid of any signifying content keeps looping back on itself. This opens up a space in which the listener hears first an acoustic impact, followed by echo effect, followed by clear out-of-phase sounds. Psychoanalytically, this series of moments renders how the fantasy of sonorous enclosure can only be heard in retrospect. That is, only after hearing voices split away from one another can we imagine their having once sounded together. After the above-mentioned splits and before the end, the fantasy of sonorous envelope consists both in the listener’s hearing intertwined and indistinguishable “sounds” and the fact that we know that one is stationary (as if deaf), the other mobile and listening. Listening subjectivity is produced as the listener joins the configuration; he/she is stationary, like the recorded sound, but while the recorder is deaf (it can only speak), the listener is mute (we can only listen). The unison between visitor and the installation at the beginning of each of this piece presents the listener with a fantasy of sonorous oneness; as the visitor and recorder diverge, we hear a clear acoustic mirror as one sound literally echoes another. This initial unison- followedby- divergence is heard as if from the listener’s position from within the imaginary order with its binary categories of listener, on the one hand, and immediate perception of sound, on the other. Aural Mirror also explores the sonic possibilities of the timeless continuum; it is intended to steal your sense of time from you, that it slows time, that it achieves a balance or merely a state where sound floats and stands still at the same time, its effect being to drown your own self into a real-time oblivion. The layering tones over each other in increasingly dense structures and require a very high volume level, following in the footsteps of La Monte Young in wishing to envelop the listener in sound so that liminal harmonic relations are experienced from within the sound what Douglas Kahn terms as “listening inside sounds.” What is important about this is that by thus enclosing the listener within sound, the listener is unable (aurally) to leave the auditory space of the piece and thus able fully to experience its most essential dimension, namely time. The installation creates an illusion of the sonorous envelope through very repetitive and metrically regular fragments, on the one hand, and irregular entrances of sustained pitches, on the other. Marcus Maeder The link between trees and various climatic processes is usually not immediately apparent. Plants, in general, do not live merely on moisture from rain, sunlight (which drives gas exchange) and nutrients from the soil: they also absorb carbon dioxide from the air and produce the oxygen that we breathe, maintaining our climate and biosphere. In our research project „trees: Rendering Ecophysiological Processes Audible,“ we are working on the acoustic recording, analysis and representation of ecophysiological processes in plants and studying the acoustic and aesthetic requirements for making them perceptible. Measurements of acoustic emissions in plants are only interpretable in relation to climatic and physiological dynamics such as microclimatic conditions, sap flow and changes in trunk radius and water potential within the plants – all measurement data that is not auditory per se. Therefore, our work involves analysing the acoustic emissions mathematically, on one hand, and sonifying ecophysiological data on the other. How can phenomena that are beyond our normal perception be made directly observable, creating new experiences and opening a new window on the processes of nature? „trees: Pinus sylvestris“ is a ecophyiological data sonification and research system: Rendering audible the way in which water transport or trunk diameter, for example, are influenced by sunlight, humidity and wind allows us to identify and better understand plants’ responses to climatic processes. “Phytoacoustics” Sonification of ecophysiological data In this installation, we have combined field recordings of meteorological phenomena, recordings of acoustic emissions in a tree and acoustic representations (sonifications) of ecophysiological data, collected on a Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) at Salgesch in the Swiss mountains in 2014. We measured relative air humidity, sap flow, stem radius changes and ultrasonic acoustic emissions (UAE) throughout an entire tree growth cycle and recorded the data at ten-minute intervals throughout the day and night. As the data relating to the ecophysiological processes was multidimensional, an analytical system is needed that focuses on the key factors and the interrelations between these and renders them intuitively perceptible. Pinus sylvestris: Data sonification „trees: Rendering ecophysiological process audible“ is a research project conducted by the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology ICST of the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL. „trees“ is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK. Artistic realization and programming: Marcus Maeder (ICST) Scientific data and analysis: Roman Zweifel (WSL) Programming support: Philippe Kocher (ICST) Technical engineering field measurements: Jonas Meyer (ICST, decentlab) www.icst.net/research/projects/trees/ http://blog.zhdk.ch/marcu Artist Profiles diFfuSed beats (Ish S) is a duo comprising of Ish S(Delhi) and Konrad Bayer (Munich) as they engage with sound with both philosophical and de-constructive aesthetics. Their works are synthesized out of sounds, noises and field recordings that were recorded in various locations around the world. They are also performing their material over 6-8 speakers(channels, when available) to give a spatial performance, here the audience is surrounded by speakers as they are usually are seated in the middle to give them an immersive experience of their sounds and music. diFfuSed beats use a lot of electronic synthesis along with the filed recordings where by re-arranging, re-contextualizing, re-constructing and re-interpreting the sonic material an acoustic topography of the places along with the hidden spaces that constitute the subjective observant self emerges. They try to engage with sound as a philosophical and social reverberant and not just as an aesthetic object. Both sound and electronic music are the main elements in their works and as they pursue it with an expressionist angle in order to reflect on the times we live in. Ish also manages a record Label called Sound Reasons(http://soundreasons.in) and curates the Sound Reasons Festival to promote Sound Art and electronic music which takes place across various cities in India. He has composed for contemporary dance recitals, films and theater and and two pieces are touring Europe this year in 2014 and will be performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall/ London, Theater Gessnerallee/ Zurich, Dampfzentrale/ Bern, Kulturzentrum Schützenmatt/ Olten, Theater Phoenix / Steckborn to name a few. More detailed information of his works plus these dates can be found at http://soundreasons.in/edgecut Ish had performed under the moniker of edGeCut and diFfused beats at Art Basel, BeatWave Festival @ M Bar, Helsinki/ Electrogonner Vienna, Estonia, Goethe Institut/ Max Mueller Bhawan, F+F Schule fur Kunst und Medien / Zurich, Blue Frog/ Mumbai, Olives in Delhi and Mumbai, The British Council, Ignite festival for Dance, Provouge and Vie / Mumbai to name a few. Marcus Maeder is a sound artist and composer of electronic music. His artistic work focuses mainly on computer music and the artistic and media extensions of the term. As an author, Maeder has written on a number of topics in the fields of sound art and digital media. Maeder studied Art at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences He runs the music label domizil, which he co-founded in 1996 with Bernd Schurer. Maeder has worked as an editor and producer for the Swiss radio station DRS and has been working as a curator and researcher at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology of the Zurich University of the Arts since 2005. Salomé Voegelin is Swiss artist and writer based in London. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, Continuum, NY, 2010. Other writings include ‘Ethics of Listening’ in the Journal of Sonic Studies, Vol. 2, 2012, and ‘Listening to the Stars’ in What Matters Now? (What Can’t You Hear?), Noch Publishing, 2013. She co-hosts, together with Daniela Cascella, a monthly radio show, ‘ora: voyages into listening and writing’ on Resonance FM, and is currently working on a second book Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, to be published by Continuum/ Bloomsbury in 2014. Voegelin is a Reader in Sound Art at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. www.salomevoegelin.net / soundwords.tumblr.com / ora2013.wordpress.com
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