A few months ago I wrote a note to myself: “Try to create a mask that that doesn’t have anything to do with anything” and kept wondering what that could mean until I started to imagine Mask/Mirror. Mask/Mirror a sampler to process recordings of spoken language in real time… The sampler follows both sound and meaning criteria in sorting, organizing and processing samples and in formulating utterances. It is a software tool based on MaxMSP and speech recognition software interacting with my own voice during performances. It’s also a state of mind enabling expanded spoken and vocal improvisation, expanded communication and ecstasy.

It has been developed in collaboration with Harvestworks Digital Arts Center in New York and STEIM in Amsterdam. Mask/Mirror has to do with virtually everything but at the same time it does not have anything special to do with anything special. As well as being a blank mask I can put on my face - and my voice - it’s also a mirror that let me browse and talk to my memory while I am watching into it.

All mirrors are masks and vice versa. Both are tools enabling identity.

“It is difficult not to treat Mask/Mirror, with its randomized garble of words, as a willfully cryptic Oracle of Delphi reincarnated as an Apple laptop. While Bosetti had described the project as “about the aboutness of being about” what Noise got out all of this is that it’s devilishly hard not to seek meaning even where it’s clear none is forthcoming. Not until the program, in a moment of absurd hilarity, spit forth the word “hamburgers” did it all click: Mask/Mirror is a tool for shearing all meaning from language. It’s a liberation, of sorts, like the sound version of Rorschach tests: The mind is encouraged to wander freely and delight in words purely for their sound. In the information overload of contemporary times, Mask/Mirror’s playful rupturing of sense–its nonsense, in other words–is a welcome respite.” Raven Baker - Noise/Citypaper

ALESSANDRO BOSETTI, voice, electronics, Berlin / Milano / Baltimore: Alessandro Bosetti, composer and sound artist, was born in Milan, Italy in 1973. He works on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication and produced text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcastings and published recordings. In his work he moves on the line between sound anthropology and composition often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews often build the basis for his abstract compositions along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies,trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations. Since he’s curious about differences he travels. Just in 2006 he’s been living and working in West Africa, China, Taiwan, Holland, Scandinavia, United States , Germany and Italy. For the future he plans to be living and working between Berlin (D), Milano (I) and Baltimore (USA).

CHRISTIAN KESTEN, voice, Berlin, Germany: Christian Kesten was born in 1966 and works as composer, performance artist, vocalist and stage director. He lives in Berlin, Germany. His interest lies in the “space in-between”: between music and theatre, music and language, between music and the visual arts. His pieces work with the space which opens up between the sound of language and the parallel, non-illustrative action (-cycling 1990; des Kleinen Übergewicht 1995; 45 seconds 2006). They make use of everyday spaces and their sounds, including works made for train stations, in which minimal sounds of winds and brass are spread over the station and mixed with sounds of trains and passers-by (nordbahnhof 1996, bahnhof westend 1996, bahnhof zoo 1997). welcome home is written for the squeaking doors of the Nordbahnhof station in Berlin and two violins which mirror the door sounds: the passers-by experience the music while on the move. In (o.T.) für klarinette in einem raum mit langem nachhall 1(1999) and 2(2000) [(without title) for clarinet in a space with a long reverberation time] the clarinet plays to its own reverberation as a second voice, microtonally, and thus refers to the presence of space. parochial (1998) – for the group “Maulwerker” (4 female voices, trumpet/voice, clarinet/voice, alto saxophone + additional instruments) – was written especially for the space of the Parochialkirche in Berlin: sculptural shaped sounds are moved in space, while trumpet, clarinet and sax move mostly outside the space and so extending acoustic perception beyond the walls of the church.

Recently he developed the “video audio field recording”, by recording field sounds with a video camera, composing dense and light sound textures of field recordings and live instruments. The projected images are always fixed camera angles, filming spaces in-between, the incidental, the mundane: the Los Angeles catalogue; dodger stadium; cypress park; urban cafe restroom (all 2007). Kesten studied at the University of Arts (UdK) Berlin (Music: guitar, piano, voice; counterpoint/twelvetone-technique with H.Fladt; musicological thesis on “Silence in the works of John Cage and Morton Feldman”; Experimental music and music-theatre with Dieter Schnebel | Performance Art | Projects with the stage design class of Achim Freyer) and TU Berlin (German literature and linguistics). 1989-91 he studied privately with Michael Vetter (overtone singing, vocal improvisation, calligraphy/notation etc.). Movement studies with various teachers (Amos Hetz a.o.).

Since 1987, he has been performing new vocal music and experimental music-theatre throughout Europe and in New York, Rio de Janeiro, Israel, Moscow and Tokyo. He currently works with the ensemble “Maulwerker” and as soloist. In a long collaboration with Dieter Schnebel he premiered most of his music theatre works since 1987. He has recently worked with Alessandro Bosetti, Jacques Demierre, Chico Mello, Makiko Nishikaze, Iris ter Schiphorst, who wrote solo works or operas for him. Kesten conceives and curates the series “maulwerker performing music” (since 2005) in Berlin with programs like ?poems for feet“, ?pro cedere. Music as Process“, “Situationen.. Interpenetrations of art and life” or “Halt’s Maul. Screaming pieces from four decades”, with World Premieres by Antonia Baehr, Alessandro Bosetti, Bill Dietz, Jürg Frey, Robin Hayward, David Helbich, Michael Hirsch, Sven-Åke Johansson, Travis Just, Christian Kesten, Andrea Neumann, Pauline Oliveros, Dieter Schnebel, Emmett Williams, István Zelenka, a.o. Since 2006, he is co-curator of the experimental music concert series Labor Sonor at KULE Berlin.

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia was founded by composer Michael J. Schumacher in 2001 and its program builds on the efforts of Schumacher’s previous sound space, Studio Five Beekman, founded in 1996. Diapason is the sole venue in New York City and one of few internationally dedicated to the presentation of multichannel sound installation where composers and sound artists can realize their work for an interested public. By providing an optimum listening environment, two high quality multi-channel sound systems, a regular audience, and a place for experimentation, Diapason seeks to engage composers and the public in dialogue about the place of contemporary music and sound practice in a broader cultural context. Diapason is supported by NYSCA, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Phaedrus Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, Kirk Radke, and by generous individuals. Diapason is a 501(c)3 organization.

Voices from the Paradise Network is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with the funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

John Hudak has been interested in sound and music from the age of four, when he began to play a variety of instruments. At the University of Delaware and the Naropa Institute for the Arts, he studied English, video, photography, creative writing and dance. John then began to create taped soundtracks for his solo performance-art/dance pieces, that later developed into audio, audio-video, and mixed-media pieces. Language has also been a predominant focus, and John has studied and published haiku poetry, the literary equivalent of the reductive, minimal, and nature-based sound forms that interest him.

John’s current work focuses on the rhythms and melodies that exist in our daily aural environments. These sounds usually remain hidden, as we tend to overlook their musical qualities; or, their musical qualities are obscured through mixture with other sounds. This work takes the form of audio CDs, web-based projects, mixed-media installations and performances. In simplified terms, what John is doing could be considered reframing and transforming sound in our environment so it can be noted, admired, and valued.

In their collaborative practice Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal deal with audio-acoustics and storage media used for acoustic material. Their core interests are audio-recordings, particularly of language, spoken word and speech, original footage taken from radio-broadcastings or other archives. Their work found its multiple form in the project voiceoverhead which is rooted in a record collection of approximately 350 records, including footage documenting political speeches and language orientated radio-programs. The records aurally cover historical events and were originally designed to function as “documentations of the real”. This notion of the ‘documentary’ has been questioned throughout the history of the medium itself and developed as one of the inherent debates around the emerging modes of reproduction in the late 19th century - the phonograph, film and photography. Starting with the early Lumière-movie ‘Workers Leaving the Factory,’ this discussion emerges. Harun Farocki has shown, in his 1995 video-essay on the Lumière-sequence, the complexity of a playful representational conspiracy between the audience / viewer, the document / documentarian and the documented beginning at the birth of the genre itself. This act of conspiracy takes place when any document from the archive is brought back to the public sphere as a kind of reenactment of a communicative and rhetorical figure.

Lengerer & Gal developed the idea voiceoverhead in order to locate the record collection and their artistic practice within a broader context and to include the work of other artists, filmmakers and musicians working with archived language materials in multiple ways and diverging modes. So too do divisions exist in the cultural field: such as electronic music that is entrenched in elements of language and radio-sounds and there is a sub-genre of visual artists, filmmakers and documentarians who also focus their work in this area. Both fields are conceptually and practically applying different approaches to the given speech material: differences in working and presentation methods, as well as differences in distribution and public reception. voiceoverhead presents, confronts and merges the approaches applied in these diverse cultural productions in the exhibition and in an evening of sound performances, taking place on Friday 29 February.

voiceoverhead is a co-production with the Jan van Eyck Academy.

http://www.smartprojectspace.net/

More of the Same is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) overwhelms the senses with new media in their performances, videos, objects, and installations. LoVid has toured the US and Europe extensively performing, exhibiting, and lecturing at PS1, The Neuberger Museum, The Butler Institute of American Art , The Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv, Exit Art, Evolution Festival (UK), The Kitchen, RISD, Massachusetts College of Art, FACT, Kansas City Art Institute, Chicago Art Institute, University of Wisconsin, Futuresonic Festival (UK), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Ocularis, and Institute of Contemporary Art London, among many others. LoVid has been artist in residence at Eyebeam, Harvestworks, iEAR, Alfred University, and Stevens Institute of Technology; and has received grants and awards from Turbulence.org, Experimental TV Center, NYSCA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The Greenwall Foundation. LoVid is also a free103Point9 transmission artist.

Issue Fighters is an annual project that Insa Art Space (IAS) designs as an agenda-specific program. Tongue, Liberated!, the project for the year 2007 focuses on ’speech act’ as it intends to be in tandem with “sound,” which is this year’s IAS curatorial theme. This project illuminates speech as a performance and examines the ways in which speeches are constructed and conveyed as public utterance in the interface with the public. As the contemporary art practices step beyond the realm of art to meet with the public, relationship building based on dialogue and communication is surfacing as the major process of artists’ work. Dialogue, in this sense, can be understood as speech act–sophisticated and purposeful political act carried out in a format of everyday conversation. Those who featured in this project include a wide spectrum of professionals such as artists, activists, poets, performance artists, and curators engaged in the experiment of various speech act formats including conversation, speech, lecture, public reading, recital, theatrical reading and performance.

With Joseph Beuys, Nicoline van Harskamp, Keiko Sei, Kiwan Seong, Su-hwan Choi, Bo-jun Shim & 20 Other Poets,
voiceoverhead (Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal): featuring Romuald Karmakar, Akin Fernandez, Holly Ward, C. M. von Hausswolff / Friedrich Jürgenson.

The Art of Listening :: November 5 - December 15, 2007 - IAS further expands its activities on sound, performances and text works by carrying out case studies on creative collaborations of visual art with other art genres. The workshop explores sound that is available in our everyday lives but has not been truly recognized. It induces participants to hear subtle sound that comes from human body, buildings and the earth, and suggests them to find the cultural, political and social significances of such sound.

The Art of Listening

How ’sound art’ differ from ’music’, and where is the thin borderline between them? The definition of sound art has been constantly questioned ever since sound art has entered the realm of contemporary art; but, there is no agreed definition on this matter. Actually, sound art has explored its own definition, implicitly denying classifications and is expanding its domain to the genre of contemporary art, music and literature.

Wikipedia defines Sound art as: “Sound art is a loosely associated group of art practices that concern sound and listening as their focus.” The former is a sound-making work for the purpose of playing, and the latter is a plain sound-listening. According to this definition, the sound workshop of Insa Art Space is focused to ‘listening’ as the title the art of listening implies. In other words, this workshop aims to perceive the surrounding world and communicate with it through auditory senses.

Insa Art Space will further expand its activities to sound, performances and text works by carrying out case studies on creative collaborations of visual art with other art genres. This workshop will explore current visual-oriented culture by investigating sound.

We are surrounded by all sorts of sound that constantly bursts into our auditory system. Many times a day, fruit and vegetable vendors wander around residential areas shouting their sale items. During election time, candidates’ promotion vehicles take turns with the fruit/vegetable vendors. When you want to take a nap on a lazy afternoon, the maintenance office kindly announces things of no importance. Our ears are constantly harassed by all sorts of sound as long as you live in a metropolitan city.

Actually, this sound portrays and conveys the culture and the landscape of the world that we are now living in. However, we block all these sound with electric devices such as portable MP3 players. The mobile phones and CDMA detach our auditory system from surrounding environment. The advanced technology and cutting edge communication devices accelerated development in the sound-media, but at the same time, blocked our ears from the soundscape.

In the workshop, the art of listening, we will introduce sound that is available in our everyday lives but has not been truly recognized. At the same time, we propose you hear very subtle sound that comes from your body, buildings and the earth. We want you to find the cultural, political and social significances from such sound with your keen ears.

Workshop, “A Little Bit”
Byungjun Kwon
Nov. 5 - 17, 2007
Performance : 5 PM, Nov. 17
Register.

Workshop, “Sound, Architecture, and Environment,”
Mark Bain
Nov. 12 - 17, 2007
Artist’s Talk : 4 PM, Nov.10
Register.

Workshop, “Hearing Perspective: Think with Your Ears”
O+A (Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger)
Dec.10 - 15, 2007
Artists’ Talk : 2 PM, Dec.15, 2007
Register.

“Dongducheon : A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision”
Dec. 1, 2007 - Feb. 24, 2008
Public Panel Discussion : 3 PM, Dec. 1, 2007
Register.

IAS also presents a project, “Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision” in New Museum of Contemporary Art as one of four partner institutions invited to a program, “Museum as HUB,” which is an inter-institutional collaborative project conceived by New Museum. In the inaugural two-year cycle, Hub partner organizations address the topic of “neighborhood” as it relates to specific aspects of the local region in which they are located, culminating in two presentations. IAS selects Dongducheon as a representative Korean neighborhood that implicates particular contextual memories and stories of modern and contemporary condition of Korea, as well as common concerns of some local cities in other parts of the world. New works by four artists, KOH Seung Wook, Sangdon KIM, RHO Jae Oon and siren eun young jung are introduced in the opening presentation, and further development of which will be presented in next May at the same venue.

The third and final movement in a trilogy of site-specific sound-focused installations, Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech) carries forward lines of investigation Allora & Calzadilla opened first in Clamor (at the Moore Space in Miami in 2006) and then in Wake Up (at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2007). The trilogy of exhibitions comprises a series of works that counterpose militarism and war with adroit manipulations of sound, music, and—in this new project for the first time—spoken word.

Strategically seeking out the sounds of combat as their sonic media, Allora & Calzadilla redeploy petrified—if still petrifying—riffs like reveille in ways that fundamentally challenge the ostensible glories the drumbeats of war traditionally encode. Part of their collaborative task has been to track such martial sound effects to their precognitive hideouts “under the skin,” where the body is agitated and stirred before the mind has had a chance to reflect—the hangouts, in short, of an unthinking patriotism. Allora & Calzadilla’s endeavor to reissue sounds whose meanings have grown far too familiar is an effort to restructure, at the source, those corporeal conformities—always marked in and on the body already—through which violent and potentially devastating action first becomes possible. In the new work for the Walter and McBean Galleries, this same system of undoing is set in motion against the equally inured fixations of the word—from the grain of the speaking voice to the artificial diction of operatic language and political oration.

Never limiting themselves to a single medium, Allora & Calzadilla complement their far-resonating, site-sensitive interrogations of sound and word with a suite of recent works in video: Returning a Sound (2004), Under Discussion (2005), Amphibious (2005), Sweat Glands, Sweat Lands (2006), Unrealizable Goals (2007), and There Is More Than One Way to Skin a Sheep (2007), the last of which recently premiered at the 10th International Istanbul Biennial. As a literal testimony to their thematic precedence in Allora & Calzadilla’s oeuvre, these videos will be on view starting Friday, 5 October in the Walter and McBean Galleries, that is, two weeks before the opening of the exhibition proper. The preemptive presence and visibility of Allora & Calzadilla’s video work on the SFAI campus—in particular, Returning a Sound and Under Discussion—will reinforce the deeper context of the ensuing installation, namely, Allora & Calzadilla’s active participation, from 2001 to 2004, in the acts of civil disobedience in Vieques (the island off Puerto Rico used by the US Navy as a weapons-testing range from 1941 to 2003) that eventually led to its partial evacuation by the US government.

Consistent with the comprehensive rearticulation of SFAI’s Exhibitions and Public Programs, which look beyond the traditional histories and narratives of exhibition and curatorial practice, Allora & Calzadilla were invited to exploit, as fully as possible, the intricacies of the SFAI campus—to conceive of it, in other words, as what Hou Hanru, SFAI’s director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, has called “a dynamic site of production instead of a static venue for mere representation.”

Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech) occurs under the Global Figures component of Exhibitions and Public Programs, which is divided into five discrete but intersecting directions for investigating current constructions of contemporary global culture. Global Figures presents solo exhibitions of major artists from different cultures who have importantly influenced the current global art scene. The third and final movement in an ideologically critical, three-city trilogy, Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech) could literally not have assumed the concrete, site-specific form it will in fact assume anywhere else than at the Walter and McBean Galleries. The entire project will be captured and reflected upon in a joint publication slated to appear in 2008.

In addition to the installation in the Walter and McBean Galleries, Allora & Calzadilla gave a talk on 17 October as part of SFAI’s Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series.

Allora & Calzadilla first exhibited internationally in 1998 at the 24th Sao Paulo Biennial. In group exhibitions they have shown at the Tate Modern in 2003, the 2005 Venice Biennial, and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. In solo exhibitions they have shown or will show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2004); the ICA in Boston (2004); the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2006); the Serpentine Gallery in London (2007); the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2007); the Whitechapel Laboratory in London (2007); the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007); and the Lyon Biennial (2007).

Allora & Calzadilla’s work can be found in major public collections at the Tate Modern; the Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain (FMAC) in Paris; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Musaoe d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC in Paris; the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Ghent (Belgium); the Dallas Museum of Art (Texas, USA); and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Ohio, USA).

In Trailhead we will map the Wave Farm grounds with sound and images. As we wander through the woods, we will listen and respond with our equipment. We will record our activities and document our location. We will invite collaborators to help in our mission, to shape the project, and fill out the map. The final transmitted product will have no fixed form. Instead, the listeners of free103.9 will be invited to select locations on a map available online, and by doing so, see images and video, and trigger changes in the final on-air mix.

For more information: http://edinburgh.murmur.info/about.php

Spectacle Island was recently transformed into a publicly accessible landfill park after serving the city of Boston as a dump for nearly a century. Core Sample is a GPS-based interactive sound walk that evokes the material and cultural histories contained in and suggested by the landscape of this very unique island environment. Visitors take the 15 minute journey to Spectacle Island via the Harbor Islands Express Ferry from Long Wharf and borrow headsets free of charge at the Spectacle Island Visitor Center. Sounds play back automatically in response to each visitor’s unique itinerary. Thematic sound content shifts with the changing elevation contours of the path system suggesting the vertical layers of a metaphoric core sample. Abstract sounds and spoken word blur surface and core, natural and artificial, industrial and organic, past, present and future.

The installation has a corollary presence in the Founders Gallery at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art where a ninety-nine foot sound sculpture appears as an architectural element installed along the length of the gallery which offers panoramic views of Boston Harbor. The two sites are engaged dialogically as each references the other abstractly through the disjunction between what is seen and what is heard. [Read a review >>]

Art on the Harbor Islands is a multi-sensory discovery of the Boston Harbor Islands’ remarkable resources—water and sky, sand and city, historic sites and new trails, all just a ferry ride from the heart of Boston. This national park area, home to beaches, marinas, walking trails, picnic sites, and wildlife, provides inspiration for four new contemporary art projects. Leading artists and architects who examine our relationship to the spaces around us-whether abandoned buildings, progressive design, or the natural world-present work that goes below the surface and into the past, exploring the built environment, the natural landscape, and our connection to it all.