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MARTIN HESSELMEIER & ANDREAS MUXEL

CAPACITIVE BODY
file festival

The installation “capacitive body” is a modular light system that reacts to the sound of its environment. Each custom-built module consists of an electro-luminescent light wire linked to a piezoelectric sensor and a microcontroller. Through its modular setup it can easily be adapted to various urban spaces. The sensors are used to measure vibrations of architectural solids in a range of low frequencies. These oscillations are triggered by surrounding ambient noise, for example traffic noise. The data sensor controls the light wires, which are tensed to a spatial net structure. According to the values of the measurement, light flashes are generated. With increasing vibrations the time between flashes becomes shorter and shorter. The stability of this nervous system gets to an end where it collapses and restarts again. A dynamic light space is thereby created, which creates a visual feedback of the aural activity around the installation.

MARSHMALLOW LASER FEAST

En los ojos del animal
En los ojos del animal, un viaje a través de la cadena alimentaria, es una interpretación artística de las perspectivas sensoriales de tres especies británicas. Creada con escáneres Lidar, vehículos aéreos no tripulados (UAV) o drones y cámaras de 360 ​​° a medida, la pieza está configurada en un paisaje sonoro binaural utilizando grabaciones de audio provenientes de Grizedale Forest en el norte de Inglaterra.

Marshmallow Laser Feast

In the Eyes of the Animal
In the Eyes of the Animal, a journey through the food chain, is an artistic interpretation of the sensory perspectives of three British species. Created using Lidar scans, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones & bespoke 360° cameras, the piece is set to a binaural soundscape using audio recordings sourced from Grizedale Forest in the north of England.

Jonna Kina

Arr. for a Scene

“The sonic force of cinema’s most famous murder scene is investigated.Two foley artists recreate Hitchcock’s shower sequence, deconstructing the associations of aural signifiers, and the synesthetic power of sound. Jonna Kina contextualize this uncanny phenomenon — the “trans-sensory” quality of sound – within both Kina’s oeuvre, as well as other historical and contemporary works inside and outside the realm of art. In Arr. for a Scene (2017), Kina explores the structures and forms of cinematic sound – transforming an iconic image — the horrific shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) – into the sonic frequencies of quirky, seemingly innocent, domestic objects.” Melissa Ragona

 

sarah oppenheimer

N-01

The artist creates an unprecedented visuospatial system that transforms the historical museum and its viewers alike.Visitors are kindly invited to touch and move the black metal and glass elements of the artwork.The built environment is inhabited through an array of inputs and outputs. Our bodies set in motion invisible chains of cause and effect. Enter a room: lights turn on. Turn a handle:a door opens. This relay is modulated through system controllers, devices programmed to respond to moving bodies and aural commands. Buried within walls, floors and ceilings, building networks are a black box.

MARK HANSEN & BEN RUBIN

Марк Хансен и Бен Рубин
마르크 한센과 벤 루빈
Listening Post

Listening Post is an art installation by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.Listening Post cycles through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it’s own data processing logic.Dissociating the communication from its conventional on-screen presence, Listening Post is a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication.

KAZUHIRO YAMANAKA

sound cloud
London-based designer kazuhiro yamanaka has created the ‘sound cloud’ a light-emitting quantum glass speaker system installation for saazs ‘a glass house’ program. the structure is composed of five interactive monolithic glass panels, formed with the intention of modelling the integration of innovative glass within architecture and design. the sound and light radiating from ‘sound cloud’ shift in unison, their synchronization may be altered by the viewer as they adjust their aural and visual experience by means of a touch-screen controller.
yamanaka aspired for the visitors to ‘be able to hear the sound move from one to another, jumping back and forth and echoing from the panels.’
a sound module is attached to each panel. as it vibrates,the three layers of glass move at a frequency, which creates optimum sound quality. the sound for the installation was developed by the france-based sound designer, gling-glang. yamanaka and gling-glang devised a soundscape by which ‘sound cloud’ visitors were able to sense the sculptural construction of the music in walking through the installation’s glass-paneled pathway.
the glass is outfitted with a light-emitting system known as ‘LED in glass’, invented by quantum glass. through this technology, the panels become a source of light. the ‘sound cloud’ is illuminated as the LED bars are fitted around the edge of the panel in order to direct beams of light through the edge of the extra clear glass sheet. as a result, light refraction occurs from the front side by means of a white enamel screen print on the opposite side.
yamanaka chose to slightly obscure the brightness of the glass sound system by creating a thin layer from millions of light dots, culminating in a cloud-like shape.

KITE & LASLETT

P A N O P T I C
For platform79 – the berlin project Kite & Laslett produced two artistic interventions. The first, Panoptic, is a physical mobile-installation situated in Courtyard IV of the former Kantstraße Women’s Prison, exploring visual space. In contrast, Klangzelle, a sound installation, examines solely aural space and the acoustic energy of the prison interior. The two works stand in relative juxtaposition to one another, both architecturally and in conception.

John Russell and Joey Holder

TETRAGRAMMATON
A dialogue between these two artists on themes of myth, ritual and meaning, as much about their exhaustion and propensity to bewilderment as any potential they may inhere, for recuperation for and by language, culture and society.Joey’s work, ‘Religiously observant’, is inspired by alchemical and occult ideas, the world of spirits and hallucinations. The wall print features a gold CGI blazon of the Tetragrammaton It references the Sumerian mythology of the Annunaki a race of ancient chthonic fertility Gods, subsequently inscribed in a series of publications by Zecharia Sitchin (a kind of elder statesman of conspiracy theorists worldwide) as descendants of aliens, who enslaved the human race to extract gold from the earth.John’s work similarly ranges over territories of opposition: between ancient and contemporary; mythic and kitsch; between the viscid and primordial. It takes as its subject the vector of congealment, in the Marxist sense of the way labour power is congealed in commodities and so forth, extending this metaphor into an aesthetics of myth and ritual, emptied out, flattened, compacted like a sedimentary layer of anthropocene garbage, for the post-historical epoch.The sound component provides an aural complement to this structure of refuse, exhaustion and abjection. Mixing pre- or -post-linguistic utterances, grunts, groans, screaming: a kind of secular glossolalia chaotically interwoven with whalesong, deep techno and political oratory.

SERGEI TCHEREPNIN

Ear Tone Box
“I am interested in transforming various mundane objects into speakers. Listening to sound through a cardboard box is very different from listening through a chair, which is very different from listening through computer speakers. In these works, I am attempting to expand aural dimensions by orchestrating flexible listening situations, which draw attention to the materiality and variation of sound as filtered through these objects.”

JON MCCORMACK

flicker

Flicker is an immersive electronic environment of generative image and sound. A collaborative work with Oliver Bown. Based on biological models of firefly behaviour, Flicker generates an ever shifting rhythmic, meditative environment to the viewer. Flicker uses 4 channels of synchronised high definition video and 8 channels of sound to immerse the viewer in a phenomenologically rich environment of artificial life. The work is a large-scale agent-based simulation, with each agent providing a rhythmic pulse at regular intervals. Agents try to synchronise their pulse with other agents in their immediate neighbourhood. The collective pulsations of groups of local agents are spatially sonified with int exhibition space. Over time, large groups synchronise at different rates, leading to complex visual and aural structures, syncopating and constant shifting in to a long term complexity.

JOYCE HINTERDING

Field and Loops

Loops and Fields, is a collection of drawings that resonate sympathetically to the electromagnetic fields within the gallery. These graphite drawings function as graphic antennas and explore the qualities and inherent nature of a combination of hand-drawn and mathematically generated forms. Delving into algorithmic structures, fractals and the chaotic nature of the hand drawn line, these drawings are an exploration of conductive materials and the possibilities for drawing electronic components. When connected to a sound system they make audible their interior activity and reveal the energy that exists in the immediate environment.Relying on the basic principles of the directional loop antenna, the drawings in Loops and Fields, like any receiving antenna, convert an electromagnetic wave into a voltage; the loop antenna is particularly sensitive to magnetic fields and outputs a voltage proportional to that field. Monitoring this activity allows us to experience the local fields and generates a site-specific and dynamic aural landscape.The different shapes and line qualities that make up the algorithmically generated and stencilled drawings come from thinking about the possibilities of extending a line. Fractal mathematics and the research into fractal antennas has focused on reducing the overall size and space an antenna needs to occupy. My interest is in the frequency range at the lower regions of the spectrum, where the wavelength is large; so my interpretation of recent antenna design research has led me to explore the possibilities for drawing antennas that can receive large wavelengths, on something the size of a standard piece of fine art paper.

KONRAD SMOLEŃSKI

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

Konrad Smoleński represents Poland at the Venice Art Biennale 2013. His monumental installation in the Polish Pavilion in the Biennale’s Giardini is titled Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. The work is a continuation of the previous explorations of Konrad Smoleński, who focuses his interest on sound. Two church bells that have been cast especially for this exhibition are at the center of the installation. Two walls of loudspeakers and other elements complete the work. In regular intervals, the traditional bronze bells, full-range speakers and other sonorous objects play a symphony. The create both a visual and aural experience, where the delaying and modifying of the initial sound of the bell is important. The exhibition Konrad Smoleński: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More is curated by Daniel Muzyczuk and Agnieszka Pindera.
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Mo H. Zareei

Rasper
Rasping Music is an audiovisual installation in appreciation of the ignored aural/visual phenomena surrounding our daily lives. It involves new mechatronic instruments that employ some everyday objects of the urban life, shifting the medium in which they normally exist, and formalizing them through patterns of a rhythmic grid. In these instruments, DC motors and actuators are detached from the realm in which they are tools to help run our machines––where their noise is merely the aural artifact of the urban technology––, and turned into amedium for sound/music. In contrast to their everyday location, i.e., hidden inside black boxes of our machines, their bodily existence is fully exposed, flaunting the physicality of their noise. This physicality is further highlighted in arrays of white light, which––unlike the florescent lights of our offices––are not there to help us see things, but to be seen themselves.

MANUELA DONOSO AND LUISA PEREIRA

The Harmonic Series

File Festival

Created by Manuela Donoso and Luisa Pereira, The Harmonic Series is a collection of mechanical devices , software, sculptures and prints that explore the relationship between musical and visual harmony.Inspired by the nineteenth century mathematician Jules Lissajous who invented a device to visualize sound vibrations using two tuning forks and a beam of light reflected from one mirror to the next to a screen, Manuela and Luisa have re-created and extended this experiment using recent tools. An electronic version of the device replaces the tuning forks with microphones and speakers, allowing people to sing different musical intervals, and contrast the resulting figures with the more chaotic ones generated by percussive sounds. An application plays groups of three notes and plots 3d Lissajous figures for their frequency ratios. The frequency ratios for major, minor and diminished chords are 4:5:6, 10:12:15 and 20:24:29 respectively. These chords were plotted using the app, and then printed as posters and sculptures that reveal a tight relationship between aural and visual harmony.