[EMS-NEWS]
SONIC ARTS The State of Affairs II:
Listening to Vision - Looking at Sound
One day symposium organised by the Sonic Arts programme, Middlesex
University
Saturday 4 December 10am - 4.30pm (registration from 9am), £12
(concessions £6) Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1, nearest Tube
Holborn
Rut Blees Luxemburg
Max Eastley
John Levack Drever
Conor Kelly
Andrew McGettigan
Dave Beech
Salomé Voegelin
As a result of the interest generated and the positive feedback received
after last year's symposium, State of Affairs: the relationship between
Sonic and Visual Art, the Sonic Arts programme at Middlesex University
stages another day of proceedings exploring the relationship between
visual and sonic arts. This sequel aims to again engage artists and
theorists working within the sonic and visual arts, and those moving
in-between, to discuss the relationship between sonic and visual
practices. In particular this year's symposium wants to engage in an
exploration of visual and sonic art from a perceptual angle.
Listening and Viewing
Seeing and Hearing
The perceptual processes make the aesthetic, ideological, conceptual,
etc., issues involved in the production of an artwork happen: listening
and viewing realises the material expression. At the same time, the
perceptual process is manipulated by the artwork: its materiality, its
concepts and contents, as well as its curatorial management and discursive
context influence our perception.
The assumption is that the perceptual processes pertaining to a particular
expression influence our modes of production, the perceptual engagement in
the work as well as the discourses surrounding these practices. This
symposium seeks to investigate the similarities and differences of a sonic
or a visual engagement and how these are theorised in concurrent
discourses of Visual, Sonic and Audio-Visual Arts.
The invited speakers introduce and debate their own practices and
research in reference to the relationship between seeing and hearing -
listening and viewing. The practice and theorisation of these two modes of
engagement are scrutinised to consider the sources and consequences of
their distinction.
Inspired by the range of ideas and practices discussed last year, this
year's programme aims to again include presentations of papers,
performances and documentation of artist's work, etc. There is no one
particular aim to these proceedings apart from the intention to debate and
expand concepts, practices and histories via a critical discussion and
presentation of material in relation to listening and viewing art.
The symposium is divided into a morning and an afternoon session. Both
these sessions are followed by a panel discussion, which aims to
encourage the audience to participate with their own questions and
opinions.
Abstracts and Biographies
Max Eastley
I should like to discuss the relationship of movement to sound and vision,
and its relevance to Sound Art.
Max Eastley is an internationally recognised artist whose work combines
kinetic sound sculptures and music into a unique art form. In 2000 he
exhibited six installations at Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery, London
and travelled to Japan to exhibit and perform with David Toop at ICC
Tokyo. The previous year a permanent sculpture was installed at the Devils
Glen, Co. Wicklow, Ireland.
In 2002 he exhibited at the Festival De Arte Sonoro, Mexico City, and was
commissioned by the Siobahn Davies Dance Company to write music for the
dance piece "Plants and Ghosts" which toured the UK. In 2003 he exhibited
a large scale sculpture for Art At The Centre, Reading in collaboration
with the Sound engineer Dave Hunt. He is also involved in the Cape
Farewell project which involves science and the arts in bringing awareness
of the affect of global warming on the Arctic environment, and has visited
Spitsbergen in 2003 and2004. His latest collaboration with David Toop:
Doll Creature, was released in 2004.
Andy Mcgettigan
Noisetheorynoise was initiated in 2003. It was conceived asan ongoing
series of events to address a set of problems in philosophy and
philosophical aesthetics. Chiefly, the failure to engage with the
transformed conditions of possibility for music produced by the
technological developments of the last 50 years and the concomitant
privileging of the visual arts (which proved more amenable to extant
theory).
I will survey the outcomes of the first two events, which both took place
in 2004.
My main themes will be:
1. the distinction between religious and aesthetic experience and its
importance for music;
2. philosophy's lamentable, idealist penchant for evading the question
of art's autonomy by reducing works to mere examples or tools for
self-creation;
3. the critical historicisation of aesthetic experience.
Producers discussed to be taken from: John Oswald, Merzbow, Porter Ricks,
Robert Hood, Schneider TM.
Andrew McGettigan is preparing a PhD on Jacques Derrida in the Centre for
Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University. With Ray Brassier he
organises the ongoing series of events: noisetheorynoise.
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/CRMEP/events/noise.htm
John Levack Drever
Audio-Vision: Cause and Effect?
As a sonic artists, who works primarily with environmental field recording
and voice, I often struggle with an essentialist reading of a recording,
(as if it is indelibly linked to the event that originally caused it),
coupled with a Cagian/ Schaefferian approach to sound as material. With
reference to work done by the GPO Film Unit in the 1930s, this
presentation will explore how this antagonism impacts on my practice.
John Levack Drever is a lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths College,
University of London. In 2001 he was awarded a PhD from Dartington College
of Arts, titled 'Phonographies: Practical and Theoretical Explorations
into Composing with Disembodied Sound'. 2001-3, he was a Research
Assistant for the Digital Crowd (University of Plymouth) co-ordinating
Sounding Dartmoor, a soundscape study of Dartmoor (www.sounding.org.uk).
He is a director of Sonic Arts Network and co-founder and director of the
UK and Ireland Soundscape Community (affiliated to the World Forum for
Acoustic Ecology), for whom he chaired Sound Practice: the 1st UKISC
Conference on sound, culture and environments. He has created audio work
for concert hall, radio, cathedral, catwalk, classroom, devised theatre,
fine art gallery, video, ice-cream van, Internet, dance, and for specific
sites such as the Tower of Winds, an eighteen century octagonal tower. Much
of his work is collaborative. He is a member of Blind Ditch, company in
residence at Dartington College of Arts.
Rut Blees Luxemburg
RBL will introduce the collaborative opera "Liebeslied/My Suicides".
Taking at its starting point the still image, the project was elaborated
by Text and sound. The construction of the opera reflects this creative
process, as it foregrounds the relationship between an artist and a
writer, which is interrupted, frayed and de-stabilized by the entry of the
third "collaborator": the lover. RBL will explore the process of making
the opera and show extracts from the recent world-premiere at the ICA.
Rut Blees Luxemburg was born in Germany. She studied Political Science and
Photography. Her work is regularly exhibited both in London and
internationally and has been included in a number of key exhibitions of
contemporary photography. Recently she showed her series Phantom at the
Tate Liverpool and To Delphi at Union Gallery, London. Monographs by Rut
Blees Luxemburg include: London - A Modern Project, and ffolly.
Conor Kelly
Conor Kelly is an artist and composer based in London. He recently had
solo shows at Fordham Gallery and Peer in London. Although primarily
known for his use of sound, Kelly has increasingly involved film and video
in his work. He has also shown work at CCA Glasgow; Cornerhouse,
Manchester; Ffoto Gallery Cardiff; On Gallery, Poznan; La Friche Belle De
Mai, Marseilles and Frunde Gutter Music, Berlin. He has collaborated with
many artists and filmmakers as a composer and sound artist, with work
presented at the Venice Biennale, Toronto Festival Of Moving Image, Tate
Britain, London Film Festival as well as on BBC Radio 3. With music
collaborator Sam Park, (under the name Bell Helicopter) he has composed
extensively for theatre and contemporary dance; including work for the
Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon; The Royal Court Theatre,
London; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh; Lyric Theatre, Belfast and Abbey
Theatre, Dublin and Purcell Rooms.
Dave Beech
Following the Dada concept of anti-art, which continues to inform
contemporary art practice, I am interested in the negation of established
formats (and their implied social relations) for culture. Around the same
time during WW1, Tristan Tzara developed the idea of an unpoetic poetry,
Duchamp's Readymades established the practice of an unsculptural
sculpture, Francis Picabia explored a range of possible unpainterly
painting techniques. Shortly afterwards noise was presented as music but
the art of noise did not negate musical composition in the same way as the
Dada artists negated art. What interests me, as an artist, is how sound
can be used unmusically. I do not mean by this that sound can be used as
an anti-aesthetic in which noise extends the range of musical tastes.
Sound in contemporary art can be used for completely unmusical ends, such
as facilitating certain forms of hospitality, as an alibi for
socialisation or as the signifier of care. In this sense, I am not
interested in sound, I am interested in what sound can do.
Dave Beech was a prominent member of the young London art scene in the
mid-90's, working closely with BANK in exhibitions such as Zombie Golf,
Cocaine Orgasm, BANKTV and Dog-u-mental.
His most recent exhibitions include a solo show at Sparwasser HQ, Berlin
in which he invited Berliners to convert their daily routine walks into
marches for their favourite historical political slogan. He was also in
the Futurology exhibition at the New Art Gallery Walsall and recently
recorded 20 songs of from friends' lyrics for "Radio Radio" at
International 3, Manchester.
He is a regular writer for Art Monthly and other art magazines such as
Untitled and Mute, and has contributed to several books, including the
Verso anthology dedicated to his writing with John Roberts and selected
responses "The Philistine Contoversy". He has written a chapter on Leonard
Cohen's song "I'm Your Man" for the forthcoming anthology "Pop Fictions",
a book about songs in the movies and guest edited a special issue of Third
Text entitled on political art.
He is currently the Subject Leader of Fine Art as Social Practice at the
University of Wolverhampton after having taught on the MA Fine Art course
at Chelsea College of Art.
He is a Director of FLOATING IP gallery, Manchester and was nominated this
year for the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists.
http://www.dave.beech.clara.net/
Salomé Voegelin
'I spy with my little eye something beginning with s' -
sound as a strategy to challenge perceptual norms
This presentation proposes to investigate the scope and motivation to
challenge perceptual (visual) norms via sound. The idea is not to set up
or confirm a dialectical conflict between sound and image, nor do I wish
to reverse a perceived preference for the visual. Rather, I seek to
challenge the conventions and framework that determine and restrict
perception to a normative expectation in sound and image alike. The
suggestion is that the sonic extends the visual: stretching its periphery
and bloating its centre, ultimately bursting the limits of visuality we
might attain the vision of Ray Milland's character Dr. Xavier in 'X' - the
man with the x-ray eyes.
Salomé Voegelin is a Swiss artist and writer based in London. Her work
encompasses single screen and installation video and audio work as well
as radio productions and sonic pieces for CD. Most recently her work has
been presented as part of MIMA's (Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art)
QSL project. She is currently preparing the first solo show of her work
for UNIT2 Gallery in London. Her theoretical enquiries focus on the
Aesthetics of Sound Art: strategies of production and perception and its
consequences for visual theories and subjectivities. She writes regular
articles and reviews for the sonic arts network, other texts and articles
are published in a variety on contexts. In addition to her practice,
Salomé is an associate lecturer on the Sonic Arts Programme at Middlesex
University.
How to get to Conway Hall:
Conway Hall is situated in Central London, three minutes walk from Holborn
Underground Station (Piccadilly and Central Lines).
Buses:
From Oxford Street: 8, 25, 55, 98 (terminates Red Lion Square)
From Euston Station: 59, 68, 91 188
From Waterloo Station: 1, 59, 68, 188, 521, 243
From Victoria: 38 (Theobalds Rd., rear side of Hall)
Parking:
There is metered parking available in Red Lion Square and adjacent
streets, unrestricted on Saturdays after 13:30.
For more details:
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/sonic/research/stateOfAffairs2.html
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