highlike

Kris Verdonck

IN
In IN (2003) an actress remains motionless for an hour in a display window filled with water. The distortion to her senses caused by the environment she is in makes her go into a trance. The sounds of her breathing and movement are amplified by microphones.

Doug Aitken

Sonic Fountain II

An excavation filled with milky water, Sonic Fountain is surmounted by nine taps distributed in a grid which taste according to a precisely written score. In the water, microphones record the sound of drops of water – sound broadcast live in space, like a concert. In the artist’s words, Sonic Fountain “is a deliberately abstract work that bares architecture and reveals its rhythm, tempo and language”.

LAUREN LEE MCCARTHY

Lauren
J’essaie de devenir une version humaine d’Amazon Alexa, une intelligence domestique intelligente pour les personnes dans leur propre maison. Le spectacle dure jusqu’à une semaine. Cela commence par l’installation d’une série d’appareils intelligents en réseau conçus sur mesure (y compris des caméras, des microphones, des commutateurs, des serrures de porte, des robinets et d’autres appareils électroniques). Je surveille ensuite la personne à distance 24h/24 et 7j/7 et contrôle tous les aspects de son domicile. Je vise à être meilleur qu’une IA car je peux les comprendre en tant que personne et anticiper leurs besoins. La relation qui s’en dégage s’inscrit dans l’espace ambigu entre homme-machine et homme-humain.

Robert Rauschenberg

Mud Muse

 

One of the show’s highlights is Mud Muse (1968-71), which is 1,000 gallons of bubbling Bentonite clay in a 12ft by 9ft (365cm x 274cm) tank.The work is also something of a technical feat in that it is listening to itself. The mud’s bubbles and spurts are measured by microphones, which in turn trigger a complex series of pumps to release more air and create more bubbling.

 

Kutin | Kindlinger

ROTOЯ
The Rotor is equipped with a four channel speakersystem and a 360° camera. The artists control the speed of it’s rotation which directly influences the projected video-images as well as the sound-characteristics and the perception of the object itself. Acceleration & deceleration become main parameters, which enables the artists to compose an otherworldly piece that seems to follow it’s own logic. A strange communication between audio, video, object and light establishes itself and seduces the audience. There is the hypnotic movement of the sculpture while inevitable auditory and visual feedback is used as a central aesthetic element: The rotating speakers are amplified by static microphones, provoking complex feedback loops and patterns, that trigger psychoacoustic sensations.

Maki Namekawa

Pianographique
Pianographique is a series of collaborations of real time visual artist Cori O’Lan and Maki Namekawa. The visualisations are not videos that are more or less synchronous to the music and it is also not the musician’s playing to prefabricated material, they are jointly created together in the moment of the performance. As with most of Cori O’Lan’s visualizations, all graphic elements are derived directly from the acoustic material, i.e. the sound of the music. For this purpose, the piano is picked up with microphones and these signals are then transformed by the computer into a multitude of information about frequency, pitch, volume, dynamics, etc… This information, in turn, is used to control the graphics computer, create graphical elements or modify them in many ways. Since these processes take place in real time, there is a direct and expressive connection between the music and visual interpretation. The visualization is actually not “created” by the computer but much more by the music itself – the computer is rather the instrument, the brush operated, played by the music.

Shilpa Gupta

For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit
‘For, in your tongue, I cannot fit,’ gives voice to 100 poets who have been jailed through time for their writing or their beliefs. The haunting work highlights the fragility and vulnerability of our right to freedom of expression today—and the bravery of those who struggle to resist. Visitors will encounter 100 microphones suspended over 100 metal rods, each piercing a verse of poetry. Over the course of an hour, each microphone in turn recites a fragment of the poets’ words, spoken first by a single voice then echoed by a chorus which shifts across the space.

Jonas Pequeno

Foley
Huxley-Parlour gallery presents a solo exhibition of new audiovisual and installation works by the London-based artist Jonas Pequeno. Comprising of three works, a kinetic sound installation Foley, a CGI video Ocean Scene Composite and a photographing print, and the act of appearing, the exhibition considers incongruity in digital fictional constructs. The title of the exhibition, /ˈfəʊli/, is a phonetic transcription of the word foley, a film-making technique used to manually mimic everyday sound effects in post-production when props do not acoustically match their real life counterparts. Influenced by the concept of foley, Pequeno’s work features an audiovisual installation that incorporates microphones and balloons swayed by a fan, replicating the sound of crashing ocean waves.

Lauren Lee McCarthy

SOMEONE
SOMEONE imagines a human version of Amazon Alexa, a smart home intelligence for people in their own homes. For a two month period in 2019, four participants’ homes around the United States were installed with custom-designed smart devices, including cameras, microphones, lights, and other appliances. 205 Hudson Gallery in NYC housed a command center where visitors could peek into the four homes via laptops, watch over them, and remotely control their networked devices. Visitors would hear smart home occupants call out for “Someone”—prompting the visitors to step in as their home automation assistant and respond to their needs. This video installation presents documentation from the initial performance on four screens throughout the space.

KANNO So / yang02

Avatars
For this installation, So Kanno + yang02 composed all kinds of differently sized objects, including a telephone, a traffic cone, a plaster figure, a car, and a plant. Cameras, microphones, monitors and microcomputers are embedded in everyday objects arranged in the exhibition space, and connected to the Internet. Visitors can experience the work by logging in to / riding each object via a web browser. Those objects exist as substitutes of – yet together with – real human beings (the visitors) in the same real environment that is subject to physical laws, rather than operating in a virtual space. Against the backdrop of the age of IoT, where all kinds of things are connected through networks, and artificial intelligence is about to mature, this work observes the new relationships that emerge when inorganic, non-autonomous objects transform into persons that act and perceive the world according to their own intentions.

Andrew Schneider

YOUARENOWHERE
Conjuring a futuristic sort of shamanism, Andrew Schneider’s YOUARENOWHERE experiments with the virtues of sensory overload via quantum mechanics, parallel universes, and the “Missed Connections” board on Craigslist. Battling glitchy transmissions, crackling microphones, and lighting instruments falling from the sky, one guy on a mission and a tricked-out interactive new-media landscape merge to transform physical space, warp linear time, and short-circuit preconceived notions of what it means to be here now.

Steve Reich

スティーヴ・ライヒ
סטיב רייך
스티브 라이히
СТИВ РАЙХ
Pendulum Music

Reich came up with the concept while working at the University of Colorado. He was swinging a live microphone in the style of the cowboy’s lasso, and noting the produced feedback, he composed for an “orchestra” of microphones.Three or more microphones are suspended above the speakers by means of a cable and stand. The microphones are pulled back, switched on, and released over the speaker, and gravity causes them to swing back and forth as pendulums. As the microphone nears the speaker, a feedback tone is created. Different lengths of cable will swing at different speeds, creating an overlapping series of feedback squeals. The music created is thus the result of the process of the swinging microphones.

Adam Basanta

the sound of empty space
The sound of empty space explores relationships between microphones, speakers, and surrounding acoustic environments through controlled, self-generating microphone feedback. Amplifying and aestheticizing the acoustic inactivity between technological “inputs” and “outputs” – stand-ins for their corporeal correlates, the ear and mouth – the notion of a causal sound producing object is challenged, and questions are posed as to the status of the ʻamplifiedʼ. By building flawed technological systems and nullifying their intended potential for communication, the ear is turned towards the empty space between components; to the unique configurations of each amplifying assemblage.

Kevin Beasley

Strange Fruit
Using both sculpture and musical performance in his practice, Kevin Beasley explores the physical materiality and cultural connotations of both objects and sound. His sculptures typically incorporate everyday items like clothing, housewares, or sporting goods, bound together using tar, foam, resin, or other materials. Often they also contain embedded audio equipment that warps and amplifies the ambient tones of their surroundings. For Storylines, Beasley has created two new works specifically for the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. Within this vast and open sonic environment, Strange Fruit (Pair 1) and Strange Fruit (Pair 2) (both 2015) offer an experience of intimacy, absorbing and reflecting the sound of the crowd at the scale of a personal conversation. Each work embodies this spirit of dialogue in its two-part structure—at its core are two athletic shoes, one merged with microphones, the other with speakers. Suspending these objects in space, Beasley compounds their technological interchange with additional layers of meaning, bringing to mind the urban phenomenon of shoes hanging from overhead wires or poles (itself an open-ended form of communication). At the same time the works’ titles refer to history of lynchings in the American South memorialized by Bronx schoolteacher Abel Meerepol in the 1937 protest song “Strange Fruit.” In these contexts, the hanging forms of Beasley’s sculptures resonate not only with his body, which molded them by hand, or with the bodies moving through the museum, but also with those inscribed in the problematic history of race and class in the United States.

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.