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The first episode of #A.I.L - artists in laboratories, the radio show about art & science/technology i'm recording for Resonance FM is broadcast today Monday 21 May at 16.30 (GMT.) There will be a repeat on Thursday at 22.30. You can catch it online if you don't live in London. And of course there will be podcasts. This week i'm talking with the lovely and lively Anna Dumitriu, visual artist and respected founder and director of The Institute of Unnecessary Research. She explains how she finds herself locked inside university laboratories to collaborate with scientists on major projects. We're talking about bacteria and how the problem is not that they exist but that they keep talking to each other, we're talking panda blood transfusion ahead of the Paris edition of Trust Me, I'm an Artist and there's even a mention of the robot that steals your face.
Anna has a show opening this Wednesday at The Barn Gallery in Oxford. Normal Flora: Bioart Responses to Modernising Medical Microbiology blurs the boundaries between art, textile crafts, and science. It uses a range of digital, biological and traditional media including live bacteria, projections and textiles. I'll be going on Wednesday, expect blurry images on my flickr stream. |
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On Friday at 4pm, set your radio to 104.4fm if you live in London and your browser to http://resonancefm.com/ if you don't. That's when the pilot for programme i've recently recorded for Resonance104.4fm, London's edgy, radical, art radio is going to be aired. The focus of the programme is art & science/technology.
Critical designers Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen were kind and kamikaze enough to join me in the studio for the first episode. We've discussed topics as diverse as the beauty of life support machines, pigeons that poop soap, using design to infiltrate synthetic biology, collaborating with scientists and communicating the complexities of a projects that explore the impact of science on society. The last part of the broadcast takes the form of a quick agenda of exhibitions to see in and around London if you're interested in art&tech/science. I'll update this post with a podcast of the show if you can't catch it on Friday afternoon. Futures episodes won't be aired before next month. A new one will be broadcast every week, last 30 minutes and focus on an artist or collective whose work i admire such as London Fieldworks, Anna Dumitriu, Zoe Papadopoulou, Ruairi Glynn, Thomas Thwaites, Tom Keene, c-lab, Semiconductor, etc. I've also been sent on a mission to get Bruno Latour. The ten last minutes of each programme will be dedicated to the agenda, and once in a while i'll add audio snippets from the festivals i attend as a speaker or blogger.
So if you are curating, organizing or participating to an art&tech/science event in the UK in the coming months, do get in touch and i might plug it in the agenda. The same goes for anyone who'd have a great idea for a title, i'm far from happy with the current one, Artists in Laboratories. Finally, i'd like to thank Tom Besley and Richard Thomas of ResonanceFM for trusting me with a microphone. I know i wouldn't want to listen to my silly voice and silly accent on the radio. |
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Believe it or not, i enjoy sound art pieces more than many visual art ones. The reason why i hardly ever write about sound art is because i find it particularly challenging to write half intelligently about sound works. And in most cases, i cannot even rely on spectacular images to hide the shortcomings of my prose. The second confession i need to make is that i don't care for music. At all. I don't notice its existence, nor its absence. Yet, i love sound art. The LABoral art center invited me last week to the opening of a sound art exhibition and luckily for me, this one came with a strong emphasis on the visual presence of sound. Visualizing Sound - Representations of Sound in Contemporary Creation stems directly from the LEV (Laboratorio de electrónica visual - Visual Electronics Lab) Festival. Launched at LABoral in 2007, the festival focuses on the convergence of electronic sound creation and visual arts. Visualizar el sonido [Visualizing Sound] brings the same line of enquiry into the white walls of the art center. The result is an exhibition where sound and image perfectly balance each other. Some works give a graphic, architectural and physical presence to sound, others reveal the sound produced by physical objects we'd otherwise regard as perfectly mute.
Here's some of the works you will see/hear: Versus is a dialogue between two origami-shaped sculptures placed face to face. At regular intervals, one of the sculptures produces sounds. Meanwhile, the other machine listens, records and analyzes the sounds. It also moves according to the frequencies of the sounds. Immediately after that, the second sculpture plays back the recorded sound, but it adds to it any disruption caused by the reverberating space and the voices and sounds made by visitors entering the space.
Visitors are intruders in this conversation, their every noise and presence degrades the communication. Over time, the original sound gets more complex and unpredictable. The memory of past events is on hold for a moment, until it is reproduced, degraded, and then forgotten, replaced by the present. The video 20 Hz shows a geomagnetic storm occurring in the Earth's upper atmosphere. This kind of temporary disturbances of the Earth's magnetosphere are caused by a solar wind shock wave and/or cloud of magnetic field which interacts with the Earth's magnetic field. That might sound like a far-away phenomenon but these storms do affect our bodies, communication systems and energy structures. Semiconductor worked with the data collected from CARISMA (the Canadian Array for Realtime Investigations of Magnetic Activity) and translated the space weather phenomenon into image and sound. We hear tweeting and rumble caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz. Generated directly by the sound, tangible and sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualizations. As different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the limits of our perception. The Creators Project has a stunning video interview with Joe Gerhardt and Ruth Jarman of Semiconductor. Waves is perhaps the work that best sums up the concept of the exhibition Visualizing Sound. A long stretch of rope is hold tightly between two poles. Left to its own devices, the rope remains immobile and soundless. But as soon as visitors approaches, the rope starts spinning, hissing and adopting sinusoid and times, almost menacing volumes. The installation physically represents a series of waves in space while generating sound by the very physics of motion. By cutting through the air, the rope at once creates volume and produces sound, configuring a single element.
Table d'harmonie would be compelling enough as a silent installation. It's graphic, puzzling and it evokes drawings as much as natural or post-industrial landscapes. The small crates are made of black corundum dust and a loudspeaker is laid out in the center of each. The sound piece is composed with the help of a software programme of granular synthesis, a method by which sounds are broken into tiny grains which are then redistributed and reorganised to form other sounds.
A couple more for the road: Ryoichi Kurokawa's rheo: 5 horizons has the whole church at Laboral Ciudad de la Cultura to himself. The audiovisual compositions are so jaw-dropping that showing any work in its vicinity would have been cruel.
Cylinder literally sculpts music and other sound samples.
Visualizing Sound - Representations of Sound in Contemporary Creation is curated by Cristina de Silva Marbán & Nacho de la Vega from Fiumfoto. The exhibition remains open at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón until 25 June 2012. The 6th edition of L.E.V. Festival at La Ciudad de la Cultura, in Gijón, Spain. Also on view in LABoral: Experimental Station. |
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I discovered the work of Anri Sala only a few months ago but once i looked into it, i started seeing his work everywhere. Back in September 2011, i was invited to the Absolut Art Award in Stockholm to see some of his videos, attend a screening with popcorn of 1395 Days without Red and interview the artist. A few weeks later, Anri Sala had a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The show is now closed. I've waited far too long to write about Anri Sala's work.
Sala is a video artist but somehow, he outgrows the title. He makes films of course but each of them enters in a dialogue with local weather conditions, architecture, history, live performances, sound, language, public participation, etc. Even more interestingly, he seems to play his own works against each other. Many of Sala's works are stuck inside my head, even months after having seen them. Let's start with the first video i saw:
On what looks like the outskirts of a city, a lonely man is slowly playing Should I Stay or Should I Go? on his music box. Somewhere nearby, a man and woman are pushing a music box on a cart that plays the same punk-rock tune. But there's a third instrument playing the famous riff of the song: an abandoned concert hall where The Clash played in the early 1980s. Microphones were placed inside the building and the music reverberates with a melancholy that the original tune didn't have. Le Clash is an homage to punk-rock song Should I Stay or Should I Go?. It is also almost a reenactment of the concert the group gave in that building in Bordeaux. But the once influential rock and punk venue is derelict, its future uncertain, just like the relationship the song is talking about.
The show at Serpentine added a further layer to the movie: a glass pane was fitted with a music box that visitors could play. The music was the same as the film's soundtrack. Sadly, it was broken when i visited the show.
In the site-specific installation, Score, the perforated score used in the barrel organ is part of the architecture of Serpentine gallery. The perforated pattern is carved through walls covering the windows in one of the exhibition spaces, translating sound into a different materiality and creating openings to the park, letting the natural light sneak into the gallery and intertwining the sounds of the park and the sounds of the gallery.
The lion of Why the Lion Roars is the Metro Goldwyn Mayer one. The lion usually roars to signal the start of a movie, the start of the viewer's disconnection from the outside world. In Sala's piece, the animal roars each time the temperature outside of the cinema room goes up or down. The installation is based on a temperature chart made up of several movies. Every degree Celsius represents one movie. A film like Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville is associated with cool temperatures, a romantic drama will evoke the Summer. Whenever the temperature outside the exhibition building changes, the movie on display inside changes, too. If you're lucky, the temperature outside won't bulge and you'll be able to watch Ninotchka till the end. Most of the time, however, only fragments of various length of the films are screened. Why the Lion Roars is the temperature-cut version of a fiction based on a true story: the weather.
Answer Me was filmed in Berlin's listening station Teufelsberg, which means "Devil's Mountain" in German. It's actually just a hill but a hill made from the rubble of postwar Berlin and a military-technical college designed by Albert Speer (Adolf Hitler's chief architect), is buried under it. Later on, the NSA built a listening station on top of the hill to monitor Soviet and East German communications. In the film, a woman attempts to end a relationship, but the man stubbornly plays the drum to silence her. Her appeal is lost in the spectacular space of the Buckminster Fuller-created geodesic dome and even after the man has stopped playing the drum, the whole drama is deafened by the long echos reverberated in the building structure. But the role of the building doesn't stop there, the frequencies of the man drumming are amplified by the dome, causing the skin of a drum abandoned next to the frustrated woman to vibrate and its drumsticks to bounce.
1395 Days Without Red, 1395 without being able to wear red or any other bright colour that might be easily spotted by one of the snipers positioned in the hills surrounding Sarajevo during the siege that lasted from May 1992 till February 1996. The film relives the trauma experienced day after day by people caught up in the siege. The camera follow a woman crossing the city. Each crossing, each alley, each street commands a change of pace. She often has to pause when she feels that the next few meters will expose her to shootings. Then she holds her breath for a moment (i found myself doing the same) and runs till she has reached a safer street. The city's topography alternates exposure and protection, fear and relief. As the woman moves through the deserted city, an orchestra rehearses Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 6, Pathétique elsewhere in the city. She seems to rehearse the music in her head too, using it as the soundtrack of her perilous journey through the city under siege.
The ABSOLUT ART AWARD was instituted in 2009 to celebrate the vodka company's 30 years of creative collaborations (which started by chance during a dinner attended by Andy Warhol i was told.) After giving the award to Keren Cytter in 2009 and Rirkrit Tiravanija in 2010, the third annual ABSOLUT ART AWARD went thus to Anri Sala. He clearly deserved the recognition. The jury's citation reads: "Anri Sala's work offers a unique way of looking at the world that combines reflection on history, memories, and consciousness of the instant, with an absolute awareness of presence and disappearance. He possesses a special talent for precise and subtle displays, and a unique ability to conceive installations and architectural proposals including sound, image, sculpture, film and live performances." |
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A quote from John Cage, 'art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living', gave its title to the exhibition that opened a few days ago at Laboral Art and Industrial Creation Centre in Gijón, Spain. Estación experimental [Experimental Station] (see the first part of my report over here) presents the work of artists who see in scientific research a path for artistic methodology and inspiration. Whether the relationship they have developed with science is akin to formal research, pataphysics, science-fiction or investigates paranormal events, these artists play with our expectations and question our current knowledge without necessarily looking for a definite answer. The works selected are often low-tech, they are made using plastic flowers, old school turntables, magnets, music boxes or butane gas cylinder. The way they function is sometimes even laid before the visitor's eyes. No mystery, no magic trick but poetry, irony and inquisitiveness. The exhibition is divided into 4 sections that sometimes intertwine and overlap. I've already explored the chapter about artists in the laboratory. Here's my notes on the artists who leave the lab to explore nature and on those who are looking for alternative uses of existing technology.
The Fieldwork section, dedicated to artists who get out of the labs to collect data or formulate theories that combine art, science and nature, contained two of my favourite works.
The first is Herbarium of Artificial Plants for which Alberto Baraya took the role of a botanical explorer and collected, catalogued and displayed artificial plants from some of the earth's most fertile places, starting with Colombia, his own native country and one of the world's most biodiverse countries. Made out of plastic or fabric, the samples are dissected and exhibited inside botanical slides that rigorously detail the false plant parts and their characteristics. Baraya's concern is representation, not ecological critique. "A lot of people need a relationship with nature, the good feeling of nature, but they sometimes get it through artificial plants. We need the representation of nature more than the reality" (via.)
4,000 years ago, a shower of meteorites crashed into Campo del Cielo, Argentina, a rare event that turned the area into natural research laboratory. Since 2006, Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolás Goldberg have been investigated the cultural impact of the Campo del Cielo meteorites. One of the meteorites, named El Taco, weighed 1998 kg. It is older than Earth itself, and comes from the Asteroid Belt located between Mars and Jupiter. Discovered in 1962 by a farmer, the meteorite was shipped to the Max Planck Institute in Germany and divided in two halves through a cutting procedure that took more than a year. Since then, one part has been located at Washington's Smithsonian Institution, the other one in Buenos Aires's Planetarium. In 2010, a Faivovich & Goldberg exhibition held at Portikus, Frankfurt, reunited the two main masses of El Taco, after almost forty-five years of being apart. The artists have now embarked on a research for a second specimen that seems to have mysteriously vanished into thin air. The Mesón de Fierro was a meteorite venerated by the area's original inhabitants since it crashed there thousands of years ago. It was last recorded in 1783 by lieutenant commander Miguel Rubín de Celis, who led one of the first scientific expeditions in South America. Despite its weight of 15 to 20 tonnes, the Meson del Fierro is now lost, no one has the slightest idea on its whereabouts.
The artists in the Artefacts and Mechanisms section are mostly interested in subverting existing technology. Interestingly, most of them were sound artefacts and their cohabitation in the same space leads to a surprisingly pleasing 'soundscape.' O Grivo's turntables proved to be the perfect companions for the tired and delicate sound of Alberto Tadiello's Eprom. I'll never get tired of seeing this installation (or any other of Tadiello's work), strangely enough, i have the feeling i might have blogged this one a thousand times but can't find the post anywhere.
O Grivo build musical instruments using waste or cheap materials. From old turntables to bits of cables or wood. Activated by mechanical and electrical systems, the instruments might look like accidental contraptions but pay closer attention and you will realize that their sound is as delightful as their visual appearance.
Julio Adán's Ecografía (no tocar, por favor) had a whole room to itself. Adán uses musical instruments for drawing using magnetic dust. The result is unpredictable and often fairly loud. The motors and sensors are activated by the presence of visitors.
Guillem Bayo gives life to banal objects in his Misfits Series. The emergency fire hose got out of its box and snakes around the room but the fire extinguisher hasn't quite found a way to escape and repeatedly knocks on the door to be able to exit. The idea is simple and perhaps not particularly original but its realization was charming and the artist somehow managed to give a 'soul' and a real intent to the rebellious objects. Estación experimental [Experimental Station] remains open through April 9, 2012 at Laboral Centre of Art and Industrial Creation in Gijón, Spain. |
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This weekend, lucky me!, i'm going to Ghent to see ArtBots Gent, the Robot Talent Show. This international art exhibition for robotic art and art-making robots has been created in 2002 by Douglas Repetto of dorkbot fame. I'll tell you more about it as soon as i've seen the show but in the meantime i wanted to highlight one of the participating works. It might not be tremendously robotic but i found it so intriguing that i contacted Alex Braidwood and had him talk about it. The Noisolation Headphones attempt to correct an oversight of our body: our ears can't blink. We can't block out molesting noise as easily as we can shut off light or disturbing images. In 2004 already, Dr Michael Bull was observing that iPods and other m3 players were used to control their environment, and in particular to shield their users from the sound of the city. The Noisolation Headphones are a critical investigation that transforms the relationship between a person and the noise in their environment. While worn, exposure to the noise is structured through a sequence designated by a composer which controls the behavior of the sound-prevention valves. The composer also determines what values are adjustable by the listener through the single knob built into the device. The headphones mechanically create a personal listening experience by composing noise from the listener's environment, rendering it differently familiar. Hi Alex! I'm very curious by the appearance of the Headphones. Why did you make them so attention-grabbing? What would have been lost if the headphones had looked like any other headphones? I wanted to make an object that would start a conversation. The goal was to make a sort of visual inquiry that would lead a viewer to develop questions of their own about how we listen and our relationship to our sonic environment. As a media designer, I come from a visual background so it was important that the object itself be visually engaging to inspire a dialog. Formally, I wanted the piece to give an indication of what it was going to do but still leave people curious enough to want to listen for themselves. Through the prototyping process, it became a negotiation between the visual appearance and the acoustic qualities of the materials used. The listening experience needed to take on certain transformative characteristics and, as a result, the final selection of materials and form had to be determined by balancing the visual with the acoustic. My goal was to make people curious enough about the listening experience to want to wear the piece. I don't think this would have happened if they looked like just any pair of headphones. I like that when people approach me about them, they tell me they aren't sure what the experience is going to sound like but by looking at the headphones, they know that they want to find out. It also creates a bit of a spectacle when someone is wearing them which tends to expand the immediate audience and extend the conversation in really great directions. When I, or anyone else for that matter, wear them at an event or out on the street, people will stop and ask about what they are, what do they do, what does it sound like, why did I make them, etc. This aspect of the piece has been a lot fun and it would definitely be missing if it weren't for the visual nature of the piece.
The description of your work states that "The Noisolation Headphones are a critical investigation that transforms the relationship between a person and the noise in their environment." How is their experience transformed? First technically. Is it just a matter of turning the sound on and off or is the way the wearer manipulate sound more complex? It's actually a little more complex than just on and off. Because of the resonant qualities of the copper pipes, the listener is never as isolated as they would be if they were to wear an unmodified pair of hearing protection earmuffs. The characteristics of the noise that surrounds the wearer also impact the experience a great deal because various frequencies resonate through the pipes differently. Beyond the acoustic qualities of the pipes, there is also the interaction of the valves which open and close based on a combination of pre-composed sequences and user interaction with the selection knob. As the valves open and close, they do manipulate how much noise is allowed to travel to the listener's ears but they also affect the resonant qualities of the copper pipe. In fact, one unexpected outcome form one of my early prototypes was that even in a relatively noise-free space, there is a still an audible performance for the listener as a result of the sounds from the mechanisms functioning in combination with the "seashell" effect within the headphones. What occurs then for the wearer, no matter what type or level of noise is present, is a listening experience consisting of modified noise from their surroundings, given some form or structure through the compositions assigned to the valves. Issues of noise tend to come down to issues of control of the audio environment. From this perspective, I wanted to explore a way in which control could be something that is developed and then shared with a listener in the form of a composed sequence. What did the people who tried the headphones on had to say about the way the device had changed the way they experienced the noise that surrounds them in the city? There are a few different ways that people respond once they have tried on the headphones. Some people find it calming and have described it as peaceful, tranquil, or almost meditative in nature. They find it interesting that the it is somewhat isolating but in a way that they have not completely lost connection with what is happening around them. Some have even reacted this way to the headphones in places that are incredibly noisy and chaotic. People also will talk about what they heard and discuss how, when not using the headphones, they hadn't noticed a particular noise. Because of the materials, certain frequencies resonant differently and this filtration causes their listening focus to shift. I've talked with people who really enjoy this and begin discussing what it was within the space they felt made the most interesting tones or textures when heard through the headphones. There have even been times when other people waiting to wear the piece have started making different kinds of noise for the wearer to hear. I've had a couple of events where a half dozen people standing in line waiting their turn are suddenly giving a collective, cacophonous performance of noise for a single listener. Others have gone a step further and gotten curious about what different things sound like with the headphones on and will begin to explore the space while wearing the device. Seeing the headphones inspire people to take an active roll in the way they hear the city, or any space for that matter, has been really interesting. There's a great deal of listening that we don't do when we are audibly-concealed within a headphone+mobile device space. There is space between being completely imposed upon by noise (i.e. the naked ear) and entirely cut-off from the sound around us (i.e. noise cancellation headphones). I think these types of reactions are an indicator that the headphones are operating in this in-between space to some extend but it also provides some indicators of new directions for my research and explorations. Your work explores the relationships that people have with noise. Can you tell us more about this relationship? For example, do people in cities still pay attention to the noise that surrounds them? My interest with this relationship between people and the noise surrounding them began when I was attempting to get a handle on what the word "noise" meant in different contexts and to different people. I developed a lot of investigations as well as various probes in order to begin to dig into this and what I found to be of the most interest was that a sound getting labeled as a "noise" in many cases comes down to an issue of control. This led me to look into how people attempt to maintain a level of control over their audio space and as a result, I became interested in the pervasive use of the mobile devices and headphones in public spaces. Which led me to start asking questions about this blocking out and covering up of surrounding noise. Biologists give a great deal of credit to hearing for our ability to stay alive and evolve over the last couple million years. But over the last couple centuries, we've started loosing portions of this that has served very well through time. For example, if you watch an animal like a deer, when it hears a noise that it isn't expecting, it looks in the direction of the noise and then stands perfectly still in order to assess the risk presented by the source of the noise. As humans living in populated, modern industrial environments, we aren't really doing this anymore. We have the luxury of assuming things to be relatively safe.
With the increase in "quality" and affordability of noise cancelation technology, one can see noise not only be ignored but go completely unheard no matter what the potential risk might be. We tend not to look in the direction of a noise and asses it for risk any longer. This is true when we are ears-deep in a great album while racing to the train but I also think that this is a good metaphor for what is happening in terms of sound design when introducing new noise into our environment. For example, researchers are starting to find negative effects on hearing and communication from people who, as babies and small children, were highly exposed to white noise machines in order to reduce crying and maintain a sense of calm. Have you noticed that the way people relate to urban noise in Los Angeles is different from the way they experience noise in other cities? From what I've observed, there are a lot of similarities in places of similar size and with similar resources. For my work, it is more about the fact that it is a shared, populated space more so than a differentiation of one city to another. Part of my personal interest in urban spaces as a type of location for study is that originally, many many years ago now, I am from a very small town in the Midwestern United States. It was, and still is, farm country. There was one traffic light. The crosswalk signs don't beep or talk. There is no public transportation and people aren't walking down the three blocks of main street wearing headphones. "Noise" in this environment is a very different thing when compared to a metropolitan area looking to keep its residents safe, moving and informed. While clicking around your website, i thought that it would be great if your work could be shown more widely in Europe. Do you have any plan to come back to Europe after ArtBots? Thank you for checking out the rest of my site and I appreciate the nice words. Currently, I do not have any definite plans for showing again in Europe. I am, however, in the process of pursuing a couple opportunities that would bring me back and am very open to any possibilities where my work and interests might be a good fit. Thanks Alex! This year's ArtBots is organised by timelab Gent, in cooperation with ArtBots US, Ugent and Foam. It's open only over the upcoming weekend in Ghent, Belgium. |
