Sound Installation Works - Week 1 (November
18 to November 28)
Click here for the installations program
for Weeks 2
NAT BATES (Entry)
Sound Installation Works - Week 1 (November 18 to November 28)
Click here for the installations program for Weeks 2
NAT BATES (Entry)
SONORHYTHMOSIS is a computer-based, virtual mixer environment. The user is immersed in a sonic environment that responds to controller movements with fluid shifts in volume levels. A rhythm constructed from a multiple of parts pulses continuously but the volumes of the individual elements (or tracks) are altered by user movement about the screen. The participant is able to create their own visual arrangement of the parts thus customising their own musical environment with which to interact. The work intends to be a fluid and immersive environment with the user becoming less conscious of themselves engineering a mix of sounds and more conscious of a constructed environment, experienced sonically, that they can manipulate. The piece is playfully presented as a video arcade game, complete with joystick controller, so as to encourage vigorous and robust interaction with a seductive fun-looking interface.
Nat Bates currently undertaking a Media Arts degree at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University. I produce and perform experimental music as an individual whilst collaborating with partner Linda Kenmar to produce interactive sound works for the web, CD-Rom and installation. I also work as a sound engineer and create sound design for animations. I have exhibited works in Melbourne at First Site, the Centre for Contemporary Photography and will have an interactive sound installation at the Linden Gallery for the Next Wave Festival 2000 in May.
Ian Stevenson (Gallery 1)
Soniferous objects
"a distant sound, a vague and joyful murmur." A. Rimbaud
Soniferous Objects - An exploration of imagined space.
Soniferous Objects is a collection of materialised images. Ordinary objects given life through sonification. The mysteries of containment and closure are made present in these objects. The viewer infuses the object space with his or her own subjective poetics.
Machines, luggage, cooking utensils: all are subject to processes of representation and identification. Soniferous Objects attempts to bring these processes to life with in the gallery environment.
Ian Stevenson recently returned from seven years living in Europe. He has worked as a sound designer and engineer in the fields of film, theatre and broadcasting. Ian’s installation work has been heard in galleries and public spaces in the United Kingdom and Australia. During 1997 and 1998 Ian completed a Masters degree in acousmatic music, digital signal processing and interface design, at the electronic music studios of City University London, studying under Dr Simon Emmerson. In October 1997 his sound installation, Motion was exhibited at the Coronarium in St Katharine Docks, London. He has also studied and worked in the fields of philosophical aesthetics, cultural studies, engineering and music. He currently lives in Sydney.
Chris Henschke (Gallery 1)
Corroded Grooves is an interactive installation that explores the spectrum that exists between the binary poles of noise vs. information and physical vs. digital. The installation combines digital and analog audio sources, rhythms and noises, patterns and textures, blurring such apparent oppositions and boundaries and forming unstable musical hybrids. The installation uses re-designed turntables to play a variety of materials and a user-unfriendly computer interface, playing upon the current DJ and technology hype. Through the extraction of sounds out of found objects and the randomized and interactive recomposing of the sounds, the traditional hierarchies of composer, performer, audience and computer are also broken down.
Chris Henschke is a new media artist who works in both the visual and audio arts. Since 1993 he has been using multimedia to combine images and sound, his main areas of research being in experimental virtual environments and interactive music. His works have been shown in various Australian and international exhibitions including MILIA 99 and Videoformes 2000 (France), the Create Australia conference at the National Gallery of Victoria, D.Art 99 (Sydney, Perth & Darwin), the Centre for Contemporary Photography and the Fifth Australian Contemporary Art Fair. He has won several awards including an ATOM award for best virtual reality product. He also teaches digital art and sound design at RMIT.
Donna Hewitt (Gallery 2)
PEEP SHOW Donna Hewitt (1999)
As a vocalist and woman working with technology, my interests are somewhat contradictory, the body/the machine, the feminine/the masculine. Peep Show is an exploration of the intersecting space between these worlds. The source materials can be divided into two areas. The first consists of interviews with a number of female vocalists who perform in bands. They were asked to discuss their experiences as female vocalists, in particular their relationships with other band members (male and female), audiences, managers, and sound crews.
For the second area, I was fortunate to be assisted by the National Voice Centre and ENT surgeon Dr Jonathan Livesey to carry out some endoscopy of my vocal chords. This involved the insertion of a probe containing a miniaturised camera through the nasal cavity and down into the back of the throat. The images of my vocal cords in action were recorded simultaneously with the sounds I was making and these images make up the other source material for the work.
The piece was created using Media 100, ProTools, SoundHack, SoundEffects and the Kurzweil K2000, and was mixed in 4 channel surround at the University of Western Sydney Nepean. Most of the sound materials are voice, at times untreated and at other times subjected to various digital processing and re-synthesis methods such as convolution, mutation and granular synthesis.
Donna Hewitt is a vocalist and composer of electro- acoustic music. As a recipient of an Australian Postgraduate award, she is currently working on her PhD at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean where she also lectures part time. She completed a B.Sc. at Sydney University before moving into the arts where she still manages to incorporate aspects of science into her music,. Her most recent multi-media work 'Peep Show' uses images of her own vocal cords taken with a microscopic camera. This work which was facilitated by the National Voice Centre was shown at the Llewers Gallery, Penrith as part of the 'Fuse' exhibition in 1999.
Donna has engineered a number of CDs including Biodiversity Vol 1 and 2 (Australian Piano Music Since 1970). She composed the music for the Australian premiere of the theatrical adaptation of the George Eliot novel "The Mill on the Floss" (Sydney Theatre Company/Babylon Productions) in 1999 and her compositions and performances appear on a number of CDs including 'Space, Time and the Roaring Silence' (PostWest) and SSsshhh (UWS Nepean) which she was also the mastering engineer for. Donna performs regularly in various Sydney based duos and bands and was the lead singer in the Big Big Band in 1997-98.
Ros Bandt (Gallery 3)
Speak before it is too late focuses on lost or endangered languages. In Australia we are in danger of losing contact with our linguistic roots of both indigenous and imported cultures. This installation brings some of these sounds into audibility before they slip away from us forever. The sound of ancient Greek and Latin languages, the most important sources of the English language are heard in snippets from Homer, Parmenides, the liturgical mass, while members of the Yorta Yorta and Barkindji language indigenous groups tell their horrendous stories of colonialism. Languages of migration become frozen, lost or mutated by their dislocation from their source as is evidenced in the 1930s Warsaw Polish.
6 ceramic urns, reminiscent of funerary urns but also preserving jars hold these living sounds. 6 channels of voices, whispering and emphatic tones come and go from these jars. Contextual sounds of real sound environments where these languages were recorded, the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas and the Murray/Willandra region, Australia are mixed through the 6 channels to give a sense of place and location for the sound sources. The passer-by must stop to focus on each or easily slip past, missing these sonic residues of an environment and culture that is
changing very quickly. The sonic hues, shaping the Australian identity are symbolised in the smell of red box eucalyptus, an unprotected woodland eucalypt often used for firewood.
Ros Bandt is an internationally recognised Australian composer and sound artist. She has pioneered spatial music, sound sculpture and audience- interactive sound installation through her original works and writings. Her radiophonic works have been commissioned by the Studio of Akustische Kunst, WDR, Koln, the ORF, Vienna, and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Her many awards include the inaugural Benjamin Cohen Peace Prize for Innovation, Ball State University, USA, the Sound Art Australia Prize and the prestigious Australian Don Banks Composers Fellowship. She has recently been working on endangered sounds and electronic sound archeologies for new media and installation and was awarded an ARC grant to develop multichannel sound sites in virtual space. Her works are recorded on New Albion, Wergo, EMI and Move Records. She has a PhD in the performance practice and composition of New Music, from Monas University. She performs, records and tours with many artists and ensembles including the early music ensemble La Romanesca. Her new book on Australian Sound Sculpture will be published in April 2001 by Craftsman House, Fine Arts Press. She is honorary senior research fellow at the Australia Centre and has just been awarded a large ARC grant to write a book on sound design of public space.
Peter Chamberlain (Gallery 4)
SAN RIN SHA began with the simultaneous pondering of the way we meter time (relative to the millenium's end) and subsequent discovery and aquisition of some old tube-based electronic metronomes that clicked and flashed. They were made in Hartford Connecticut in the early sixties and perhaps the late fifties. I took them apart and reassembled them so they would fit inside units of these sculptural assemblages.
These clean electro-mechanical designs incorporated only one tube run by a small transformer and just a couple capacitors and resistors that caused a neon bulb to blink simultaneously with the activation of a small electro-magnetic solenoid that "tapped" a small metal plate attached to a larger thin sheet of wood/veneer. No actual speaker-type transducer is involved.
The assemblages that were built to house these analogue meters of time evolved from a process of"search and re-stroy" that has become my primary mode of composing. I had skateboards in the stash, because they were solicited from my students to mount some 50-pound tube amps onto but I never got to that project. The ceramic armadillo was a gift about 8 years ago and has been sitting in my office with a set of blinking Christmas lights shoved inside. It is a piggie-bank ("armie-bank"?) so it has the slot-shaped hole in it perfect for the light...as was the hole in the stomach of the Budha-guy (originally for incense?)
The dancing Budha-not-really-a-Budha and the fencing mask are garage sale debris that have been floating around in various personal tableaux for more than a few years.
In short, visual elements of these pieces were determined largely by practical considerations.
Given the approaching transition between millenniae, and given the indexical richness of possible
"readings" of this work due to the unlikely juxtaposition of diverse cultural debris, seem to evoke all manner of personal decodings. These works - as best witnessed by the backs of the boards and the internal layout of electronics components and wiring. For better or worse, I am a sculptor, not an electrical engineer or machinist.
As for "the artist's intentions"...
it's about time and recycling and recomposing the stuff of life as an improvisational act. What you get is what you see.
While very well crafted, these pieces emit the rawness of step-by-step improvisational construction
Peter Chamberlain's solid backgrounds in the areas of sculpture, music, electronic media, and computers allow him to intermix elements of both hard and soft media with reasonable facility and finesse. He has logged extensive experience in applying these skills toward the production of intermedia works that metaphorically reflect and question unlikely juxtaposition of cultural, natural, and technological elements.
His first interactive installation was produced at Electronic Body Arts in Albany, NY in 1976. Since then he has exhibited interactive electro-kinetic and intermedia work throughout the mainland US, in Vancouver, BC, Canada, in Mexico City, in Essen and Munich W.Germany, and in Hawai'i. He has lectured on this work in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, mainland US, and Hawai'i.
Teaching activity: Chamberlain has been teaching some form of electronic arts full time since 1977. He taught sculpture and electronic arts at Elmira College in central NY for 15 years. In 1991 he moved to Oahu to restructure, update, and direct the Art Department's foundations program and design and implement Electronic Arts courses at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Ken Steen (REAR GARDEN)
(h)Earscaping is an ongoing sound/noise/music installation process begun in the fall of 1999, it's main premise is the placement of sound/noise/music into a particular environment. As one might place plants or trees in a landscape or a chair or other piece of furniture in an interior space, (h)Earscaping has been designed to transform over the course of an individual installation by its internal structuring as well as by transforming over longer stretches of time [including multiple installations] through the addition or deletion of sounds or discs in the set. The collection of audio events is meant to enhance, embellish or perhaps even accessorize, the chosen space. In addition, the sounds are also designed to trick, confront and/or challenge the hearer as one moves through the installation environment. This is especially true as one moves through the space at different times throughout the duration of the work and experiences nuances of long term juxtaposition and development. An increased awareness of ones relationship to his/her immediate surroundings through exercise in both short and long term audio memory is also a desired by-product of this work.
The sounds on the discs were created, collected and transformed as found audio artifacts. Pro Tools, Digital Performer, Peak, MetaSynth, as well as Sound FX Machine and other DSPs were all utilized in the creation and modification processes. Each of the 11 discs was constructed [through the use of a combination of the Fibonacci series and English change ringing patterns] as an event/time cycle, that when combined in groups, overlap to create a kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of sounds that transforms over rather long periods of time.
Ken Steen has received numerous awards for composition including the 1992 ISCM Boston Composition Award for Looming for string quartet, an American Symphony Orchestra League New Music Project with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin, grants from The Connecticut Commission on the Arts (1992 Individual Artist Grant to compose Silent Thalia, a concerto for Electronic Cello and Orchestra, for electronic cello soloist Jeffrey Krieger), The New England Foundation for the Arts, Meet the Composer, The Roberts Foundation, The Margaret Fairbanks Jory Copying Assistance Program of the American Music Center, and a fellowship to The Millay Colony for the Arts among others. Metastasis for orchestra was recorded by the Slovak Radio Symphony conducted by Szymon Kawalla and released on the Vienna Modern Masters CD label (VMM 3017), Shadows and Light for electronic cello was recently released on a CRI disc (Night Chains CD 680) featuring Jeffrey Krieger and While Conscience Slept for fl., cl., elec. vc and synth. can be found on Spectra (Capstone CPS-8650). With his music becoming more in demand, Steen has recently been commissioned to compose new works for The Kent Singers, [bassist] Robert Black, Trio Fibonacci (Quebec), Basso Bongo and clarinetist Guido Arbonelli (Italy). In addition to composing concert music in many forms, Steen has composed numerous works both acoustic and electronic for dance, theater, documentary and installation. His music has been featured on concert and radio programs throughout the U.S.A., Canada, Europe and Japan. Mr. Steen is currently Chair of the Composition Department and Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory, with a specialty in music technologies, at The Hartt School, University of Hartford.
