Listen to the new edition of radio emission framework:afield by felicity ford and valeria merlini in collaboration with students from RITS school of arts.
During the workshops in March, Felicity Ford and Valeria Merlini worked with students from R.I.T.S to explore the sonorities of Brussels in advance of the main Tuned City Festival. This workshop involved exploring the sites where Tuned City will take place, and practising a variety of listening techniques adapted from R Murray Schafer, Pauline Oliveros and CRESSON. The workshop emphasis lay on establishing an imaginative and appreciative listening-focussed investigation of the city, and the outcome was a series of experimental shorts, reflecting the students’ engagement with experimental documentation techniques. This work celebrated some of the sounds of Brussels in advance of the festival in June. This first workshop in March also lead to the production of a radio show for framework:afield, which celebrates students’ sonic discoveries of Brussels and conveys an ephemeral impression of the city in sound and which will air as part of the framework:afield broadcast schedule on Friday, 21st June, 01:00, Brussels, on Radio Campus 92.1fm.

http://www.frameworkradio.net/2013/06/425-2013-06-16/

Brussels has a particular sonic identity. Felicity Ford and Valeria Merlini explored the sonorities of the city. They focused on both interior and exterior spaces, individual versus collective experiences and a range of possibilities to hear a city. Listening Back and Forth in Brussels is envisaged as a diffusion concert performance. It will offer the audience some sense of the aural character of the largest urban area in Belgium. The
audience is invited to spread out and relax for an optimal listening experience full of sometimes stunning, at times familiar or completely unexpected sonic impressions.

Stalker proposes experimental strategies for intervention. The methodology is rooted in exploratory spatial practices, using playful, convivial and interactive tactics that relate to an environment, its inhabitants and their local culture. Practices and methods are conceived to catalyze and develop evolutionary and self-organizing processes. The traces of interventions constitute a sensible mapping on the complexity and dynamics of the territory. In addition, the applied strategies employ unedited forms of cooperative documentation to contribute and promote a better self-awareness of the community among locals. In the Brussels context, the walk of Stalker will be guided by “unusual” guides. Specific target groups will accompany the audience to see the city through their gazes.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Situational listening – 29. June 2013

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Les Porteurs / 29. June 2013

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Les Porteurs / 29. June 2013

Born 1970. Artist. 1991 – 1995 MA fine arts at Städelschule für Bildende Künste DE. In 1992 founded Agency, an agency for quasi creations. He conducts a long term research on the practices of reapropriation and the public domain. Lives in Brussels.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Noise & Gentrification / 28. June 2013

What happens hidden in the aether? The sound designer, historian, curator and member of Polish Society for Electroacoustic Music Lukasz Szalankiewicz aka Zenial takes us on a trip in the ‘fifth element’. Between scientific experiment and alchemist approach, Connection Reset by Peer’ dives in interferences of environment sounds based to a large extent on electricity, radio feedback and electromagnetic fields. With a battery of every day electronic gadgets he is generating and sensing traces of the real and imitated spectral voices.

Music that owes equal portions to musique concrete, noise and microsound, not necessarily in that order. Things buzz, crackle, hiss and form long wave sine tones, radio interceptions, stuck together in an interesting collage of sound.

His aural experiments ooze an otherwordly atmospherics, as if ghosts yearned to escape from his lingering audio abyss. Clicks, beeps, field recordings, disembodied “voices” all compose Zenial’s sonic world. An exploration of a sonic parallel reality – a somewhat different atmosphere…

With the support of the Polish Institute, Cultural Service of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Operative Atmospheres – 30. June 2013 ]]> http://www.tunedcity.net/?feed=rss2&page_id=3910 0 http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3907 http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3907#comments Mon, 27 May 2013 14:39:15 +0000 rik http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3907 Akio Suzuki (JP) & Aki Onda (US)

Extended duration performance in the round with legendary Japanese sound artist/instrument builder Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda – an electronic musician/composer/visual artist best known for his Cassette Memories project.
The sound equipment for this site-specific performance is set up in the middle of the space. This allows visitors to surround during the concert that will consist of very dense as well as sparse and quiet moments. The performers deal with the acoustics of the location as an essential part of the concert. Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda will play with the architecture by moving around in the space and changing the position of the sound sources they use. The performance is variable in length. Visitors can come and go depending on the time they would like to spend on this unique event.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Operative Atmospheres – 30. June 2013 ]]> http://www.tunedcity.net/?feed=rss2&page_id=3907 0 http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3905 http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3905#comments Mon, 27 May 2013 14:36:47 +0000 rik http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3905 The Vilvoorde viaduct was built as the last piece to close the Brussels beltway in 1977. The gigantic construction has a length of 1700 m and a height of 35 m and covers in it’s largest span 162 m over the river Zenne.
Today’s daily traffic is about 140 000 vehicles, while the saturation point is about 180.000. Imagine to walk inside directly underneath the street of that all metall structure, brought to resonance by the the traffic.

appearance at Tuned City Operative Atmospheres – 30. June 2013

This sound work is exploring oral history recordings from the BNA-BBOT archives, an online open-access database that has been facilitating inhabitants of Brussels to record and upload their conversations. Voice is a threshold phenomenon, oscillating between the bodily interior and exterior. It is spanning the emotional and the linguistic and extending from the individual to the social. In the work Lies and Other Truths, Zoë Irvine uses biometric voice analysis technology to examine the emotional content of the material voice in forensic detail. It is an experimental work placing the voice in a new light.
Eloquent Voice has been kindly supported by DJCAD, University of Dundee.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Operative Atmospheres – 30. June 2013 ]]> http://www.tunedcity.net/?feed=rss2&page_id=3902 0 http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3894 http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3894#comments Mon, 27 May 2013 14:28:20 +0000 rik http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3894 Margaux Nessi (BE) graduated in scenography at the National School of Visual Arts of La Cambre. She currently works for theater, film and museums and created for example the set design for La Maison dans la Forêt of the theatre company Welcome to Earth. She also designed masks for the film Never Die Young of Pol Cruchten and conceptualized the scenography of the exhibition of “Haren Visité”.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Haren visité / 30. June 2013

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Haren visité / 30. June 2013

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Haren visité / 30. June 2013

In his essay “Discovering the vernacular landscape” John Jackson Brinckerhoff defines the vernacular, political and emerging landscape. These landscapes overlap, juxtapose and form what Sébastien Marot calls hyperpaysage. In the context of Haren – previously a mecca for chicory production – landscape traces of industrialization contrast with a rural center. Interviews with former residents have been recorded. With the help of locals and institutions of the City of Brussels, images and impressions reappeared, synchronously providing a reality of the past. Since 2010, two photographic sets have been made to account for the Haren vernacular landscape.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Operative Atmospheres – 30. June 2013

Over recent years, and thanks to a broad community of artists, phonographers and individuals working with sound and field recording, the radio aporee ecosystem has collected and developed both an extensive body of sound as well as tools for artistic practices and research in the field.

In addition to aspects of collecting, archiving and sound-mapping, the radio aporee platform also invokes experiments at the boundaries of different media, and public space. Within this notion, radio is both a technology in transition and a narrative. It constitutes a field whose qualities are connectivity, contiguity and exchange. Within this, concepts of transmitter/receiver and performer/listener may become transparent and reversible.

During Tuned City Brussels, Udo Noll will accompany the course of the festival with his experimental radio device bx (bROADCAST BOx), a hybrid assembly of tools and techniques for entering and exploring different media spaces more or less simultaneously. The bx is an advancement of the previous concept of fmwalks, a setup combining performative city walks and mobile FM transmitting. It creates a link between the radio aporee soundmap of Brussels, recent recordings from actual city surroundings and live activities at various festival venues. It delivers a daily sound stream in between documentation and artistic radio practice, embedded into the city’s urban atmospheres.

According to its notion of an interface, fmwalks/bx is open for participation. It encourages engagement and collaboration with the other Tuned City projects and artists. During festival hours, transmissions can be received on http://radio.aporee.org.

appearance at Tuned City Operative Atmospheres – 30. June 2013 ]]> http://www.tunedcity.net/?feed=rss2&page_id=3883 0 http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3875 http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3875#comments Mon, 27 May 2013 10:49:12 +0000 rik http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3875 lecture by Jean-Paul Thibaud (F)

What does urban ambiance tell us about current sensory lifeforms and ways of living together? In order to answer this question we need to develop a socio-aesthetic approach of urban ecology. Working towards such a sensory reading of city environments involves closely observing changes underway. In addition, it also involves taking a critical look at their effects and implications. This lecture will therefore highlight the topic of urban ambiances as sensory lifeforms. We will be concerned with the future of urban public spaces and of conceptions about our ability to live in a shared and common world.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Operative Atmospheres – 30. June 2013

We’ve all heard earworms, those irritating tunes or parts of tune that seem to live rent free in our heads. Why do they do that? Answering that it’s because they are so compelling begs the question. How and why are they so compelling? In this talk I’m going to explore the strange, loopy logical structure of earworms, and explain why it’s better not to try to get rid of them, but rather to coexist with them and possibly embrace them.

A sentence has its own logical DNA, and is mind independent. It is a kind of entity, an “object” in the terminology used by Object-Oriented Ontology. Likewise, a sentence has its own grammatical, syntactical and sonic genome. In this sense, a sentence is like a virus. Viruses are chronologically subsequent to bacteria, in evolutionary time. But they are logically prior, since they encapsulate the strange loop that exists between a physical system and a semiotic one.

In the same way, what is called a riff (sruti, lick, chop) has its own logical, semiotic and physical DNA. A sound, considered in this sense, is like a virus—which is why the term earworm is highly appropriate. We could think of ideas as viral structures for which minds are vectors. In the same way, earworms are spread by humans and other related vectors, such as MP3 players. Riffs are logically prior to the tunes (and so on) in which they find themselves.

This means that distinctions such as natural/unnatural, sound/noise and so on fail when subjected to enough analytical or musical pressure. This failure is not due to the fuzziness of (human) perception or subjectivity, or the context in which sounds appear. This failure has to do with the deep ontological structure of entities as such: they are riven from within between what they are and how they appear, even to themselves.

It is better to think sounds as entities in their own right, coexisting in an ecology of sonic hosts and parasites, in which the host/parasite distinction is neither thin nor rigid. My talk examines the implications of thinking this way. Ambient phenomena are an ideal way to probe this thought.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Operative Atmospheres – 30. June 2013

In this lecture about atmospheres, Gernot Böhme will lay out the cornerstones for the discussion of ephemeral qualities of place. Ecological aesthetics in the acoustic realm is not an embellishment of natural science-based ecology, but acquires its own métier, namely the recognition, the maintenance and the structuring of acoustic space. The question of what constitutes a human environment becomes a question inquiring the character of acoustic atmospheres. And here too it is a matter of overcoming the narrow natural science based approach which remains at best capable of grasping noise as a function of decibels, and to ask instead what type of acoustic character the spaces in which we live should have.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Operative Atmospheres – 30. June 2013

The optical phenomenon penumbra is a partial shadow, as in an eclipse, between regions of complete shadow and complete illumination. This work alludes to it and deals with the projection of light and sound in its simplest form and in a specific architectural space. It builds itself on the relationship between time and space in a circular process where the sound echoes in the location structure and is simultaneously feed by it. The light, like a magnifier, reveals and defines the focus as a drawing, in an ambiguous space made of light and shadow: “…and then, when darkness arrived, and the sound of silence became perceptible, I could see…”.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Situational Listening – 29. June 2013 ]]> http://www.tunedcity.net/?feed=rss2&page_id=3863 0 http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3861 http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3861#comments Mon, 27 May 2013 10:36:06 +0000 rik http://www.tunedcity.net/?page_id=3861 performance by Franziska Windisch (BE)

This 30-minute performance is conceived for one performer and mobile loudspeakers. Franziska Windisch discloses what will happen as “public is the voice, public is the step, public are all sounds, under an open sky”. Therefore, Sonata For 4 Cardinal Points paces along the thresholds of a sensitive sphere and interacts with its changing dimensions: the public. Eventually emerged from spoken words, the performance is constantly altering through individual walks and expanding by the noises that reach our ears, as a zone that is never static.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Situational Listening – 29. June 2013