Ulla Rauter, Klaus Filip, Noid, Christine Schörkhuber, Ute Wassermann, Julien Ottavi, Boris Baltschun, Serge Baghdassarians, Piotr Tkacz, Gerard Lebik, Alfredo Costa Monteiro – exhibition – opening 18-20.2017
Soundart displaces sound from its musical context, it shifts the relationship between concrete hearing and contextual or reflexive perception. The soundart exhibition of this year’s Sanatory of Sounds festival presents a variety of approaches to this particular form of new media art.
An expanded concept of sculpture is represented by the works “Tacet”, “Tuning”, “We arrived on the dark side of Europe – the tents of Idomeni” and “Imaginary Habitat”. Sonic geography can be experienced in the works “Photophon” and “Ghost Hunter”, whereas “Imaginary Habitat” and “It Live on a Farm” focus on sound itself in a certain environment.
A very different approach that derives from reportage can be found in “Kino Pami Ci”, and “Fragments of An Unfinished Tale”. Soundart is not only thinking about sound it is thinking in sound, shifting the primary human awareness from seeing to listening. Sound as art speaks from the perspective of the medium itself. Sometimes you cannot dance to it.
curated by Klaus Filip and Noid
Ulla Rauter
TACET
This intervention refers to acoustic pauses – – in urban background noise, turning it into an unwritten score. TACET works as a detector for silence: the flashing of the letters accentuates visually a moment of silence. Once the level of noise goes down, the characters light up.
As an instruction to be quiet, TACET poses new questions: who should actually be quiet? TACET is aimed at someone non-present playing music: it is aimed at the collective producing noise, elements as well as living creatures in the immediate surrounding and broaches the issue of their struggling for acoustic supremacy of the spot.
façade scan
Moving through a city, the visible urban structures – the rows of houses with their fronts, their facades – can turn into a kind of experience for the passer-by.
façade-scan translates these visual elements into auditive signals. The surface of the city gets “scanned“ by a sine-generating sound tool. Using the photographs of façades as musical scores, every part of the exterior architecture generates a particular sound and the façade’s elements become tones, and rhythm. The vertical line defines the pitch; the horizontal movement along the rows of houses corresponds to the timeline of the soundtrack.
In that way, each building produces its own specific and sonic identity. The changes within the particular structures (e.g. decay) become audible
Klaus Filip/Noid
Photophon
A room illuminated by sound. The optical multi-speaker setup transmits a multi-channel composition that becomes perceivable with light-sensitive headphones. Take a walk in the sonic landscape – listening into the light. Tiny movements cause drastic changes in perspective.
Christine Schörkhuber
We arrived on the dark side of Europe – the tents of Idomeni
After the closure of the “Balkan route” a few months ago, thousands of people stranded at the / border. To overcome their speechlessness their only possibility was to write their demands on their tents, hoping this lines would be transported and read. And they have been carried on to Nickelsdorf. , displaced and out of context they reappear as a relict of history on trembling tarpaulin.
in collaboration with / Mitarbeit von: Amir Zada, Bachir Abdulahad, Nadir Hussain.
Julien Ottavi
GHOST HUNTER – feedback, microphones, amplification, and space.
For an undetermined duration, a quasi-living entity is seeking the subtle moments where the stripped bare.
Through setting up of a fragile between the tension and its slackness, this time where sound disappears and is replaced by the deepest doubts, those coming from a slight anxiety pushed forward by micro-cracks in the non-human interpretation of a distant visual as the art of nothing.
The refusal of a reject or an error, if not dramatic, at least allegorical, the error of a machine for breaking off electronic rejects, a system of returning to the source in discussion with the invisible forms of a black box, non-space, new, revived and neutral of all previous life.
Is that true? How can it work when we look for something that does not exist a priori? How does this subtle form, this piece of non-living, become impregnated in us and create a mystery that we are trying resolve: that of its disappearance?
It on a farm – ground, flowers, plant, copper, zinc, 555 electronics circuits and piezo.
the ground, a few sound structures are invading the gallery space to change our perception of the inner structure of each of the components that it makes up.
is related to a time destination, though the journey is not always articulated as it away, the electronics survive on tiny batteries that die after one day, like an insect, the little changes in their song is related to how the acidity of the ground evolves during the day. The function of the plants in this process is essential, research on micro-evolutions is central, is represented as a process that exchanges with nature. Nurtured by water, the ground welcomes ions and becomes a resistance for the circuit, feeding the circuit with its little events.
Serge Baghdassarians & Boris Baltschun
Tuning 2011
A left alone car mutates into a reference tone generator and produces a frequency in a repeating interval. A large balloon modified with an animal voice generates a continuous glissando over a long period of time.
This couple – video and object – bonds and drifts apart at the same time.
„Tuning“ is part of a series of works addressing standards and rules of music making and their connection and relation to extramusical spheres.
Piotr Tkacz
Kino Pamięci (Memory Cinema)
“Kino Pamięci” is a 3-channel sound collage merging voices, field recordings, electronic and acoustic sounds. Something between a diary, a chronicle of personal stories more important than official history and a soundscape portrait of Sokołowsko. It’ll also touch upon a subject of the significance of sound in through of various audio excerpts from movies as a commentary or counterpoint.
Each of the 3 segments will be quite independent and of different duration so, while running on , with every repetition the combined entity will result in slightly version.
Gerard Lebik
Stones
Listen any time.
Site Specific.
Have lucky to listen when small beautiful stones dropping down in Rybnica Leśna Melaphyre Mine.
location :
N 50° 41′ 31.092”
E 16° 16′ 8.169”
KOPALNIA MELAFIRU Rybnica Leśna
https://gerardlebik.blogspot.com/2017/07/stones.html
Alfredo Costa Monteiro
Fragments of an Unfinished Tale (A Cinematic Story)
It starts with a jump. A man jumps from a moving train. This man is Zbigniew Cybulski, one of the fetish actors of the Polish New Wave. The film is Jump (Salto) by Tadeusz Konwicki.
The piece begins as a journey, but also as a tribute not only to Cybulski (who, ironically, was going to die a few years later by jumping from a train), but also to the Polish, Czech or Slovak New Waves, to a whole section of eastern european cinema pushed into the background or practically forgotten. A culturally different cinema, not only in its contents but also in its intentions.
Forgotten perhaps for political reasons, or simply because it risked to do much harm to the authors of our Western World, who seemed to carry the highest spiritual and visual values of cinema. A question of geography? Culturocentrism? Problems of circulation due to the Iron Curtain ?
But how strange it is to think that even today, most of these films and authors are almost completely unknown, or maybe known just by a bunch of connoisseurs…An unfair situation, especially when we know how much many of our western filmmakers owe to the early soviet autheurs, just to take an obvious example.
By discovering some of these wonders, we realize how much our cinematic knowledge was limited to a geographical zone, to some ways of doing things that, nevertheless, seemed to have reached the highest degree of what could be expressed on a screen.
Recovering these films, some of which are incontestable masterpieces, plunges us into other models, other ways of doing things where what seemed to be an exception here became the norm there, where formal innovations and concepts of an extraordinary richness and beauty get along with political stakes and brilliant visual experiments.
All in all, another dimension that pushes further the desire for cinema, the desire in cinema. And it is this desire that carries this work.
It is a different cinematic story that I propose; that, less obvious, built thanks to authors who won’t have had the visibility and recognition they deserved.
The sound fragments were used such as they are, without modifications or electronic manipulations, almost always by maintaining the actual durations of each scene from which they were extracted. They have often been chosen for their use and role in a key scene, or because they work in resonance with what was being composed, or simply because what is heard makes sense.
My interventions were stimulated from a given impulse, and most of the time took place in the background, almost never on a foreground. It was not for me to become a protagonist as a composer and a musician, but simply to help these fragments coexist, as if the soundtrack of a new film was being created.
The last fragment is taken from Pociag (Night Train) by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, where the same Cybulski, six years younger, gets on a train. Time seems to have gone backwards, and the loop is thus closed… but not completely closed, because the sound of a train also refers to the departure for a new journey.
Barcelona, February 2017