Category: [lang_de]projekte[/lang_de][lang_en]projects[/lang_en]

exhibition by Flavien Gillié, Alexia Goryn & Margaux Nessi (BE)

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

Udo Noll (D)

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

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

lecture by Timothy Morton (US)

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

keynote lecture by Gernot Böhme (D)

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

David Maranha & Patricia Machás (PT)

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

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

Guy De Bièvre (BE)
Meeting point: Maison du Peuple, start 12:30 and 18:00h
limited places – registration required, see below!

The sound-walk Passacaglia is an attempt to cast the urban sound-walk into musical form(s) by playing with time and motif or repetition and other, more detailed musical parameters. Passacaglia is a serendipitous reference to the Spanish origin of the word “streetwalk” and also “a” musical form that originated in the early seventeenth-century Spain and is still used by contemporary composers. It is usually of serious, slow character and often, but not always, based on a bass-ostinato and written in triple meter.

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

[EVENT_REGIS_CATEGORY event_category_id=”006″]

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 Situational Listening – 29. June 2013

installation by Pierre Berthet (BE)

This site-specific sound installation explores various ways to shake, vibrate and resonate dead plants and metal cans, eventually linked through steel wires nets. The length of the wires and the location of the chosen materials are adapted to the dimension of the environment. Transducers and small motors are integrated in the construction. Their movements and sounds make the wires vibrate. When these sounds are modulated (pitch, timbre, volume or density) the combined organic materials and cans produce various resonances. The sound installation is suspended so that listeners can circulate and choose different listening perspectives. Thanks to Patrick Delges (Centre Henri Pousseur).

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

Roberta Gigante (BE)

This intervention is about discovering urban acoustics. It brings the audience to the space with which it coexists on a daily basis, but of which it has no knowledge. Thanks to the uniqueness and buzz of the chosen place, the transition from a real world to a completely transformed reality takes place. Brussels is a layered city with a particular topographical formation. Its hidden, chthonic dimensioning can lead to another end of urban experience in which the body of each takes the utopian place of actual sensors. The visitor will be invited to enter the place and be confronted with escaping so invisible images.

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

Rie Nakajima (JP)

This site specific project has been tailored to the Ixelles Cemetery. Located in Ixelles in the southern part of Brussels, this cemetery is one of the major cemeteries in Belgium as it contains the graves of a number of famous Belgian personalities. As Far As Your Tortoise Goes includes compositions of sounds, objects and images that need to be experienced in the unique environment of the site. The work has been initially inspired by the grave of Marcel Broodthaers: he is buried at the Ixelles Cemetery under a tombstone of his own design. With this project, Rie Nakajima intends to observe the relationship between the physical and non-physical as well as the objective and subjective matters in our lives.

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

intervention by Sybille Deligne & David Zagari

Mobile phones allow us to be reachable at any time. They give us the opportunity to physically escape from where we are. In addition, they have become an indispensable tool for most people and are devices of control as well as geo-localization. As mobile phones emit radio waves with a very low frequency, those waves are inaudible to the human ear. The action of Les Porteurs consists of three performers interfering with the masses of walking people. Devices detecting low frequency emissions will be amplified by using loudspeakers. This action interrupts the flow of the arteries playing back the ubiquitous Hertz.

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

Lee Patterson (UK)

The City Tunes Itself explores the hidden sounds of the city – not the sounds that bounce off it’s many surfaces but the vibrations within it’s materials and structures. Presented in four parts on media players and headphones or available as a download, each movement is composed for located listening in specific parks and gardens in the south of Brussels, with the sounds gathered from the surrounding areas. Urban features such as tram pylons, metal railings and sign posts act as tuning forks embedded into the city’s fabric, filtering its’ sounds according to their resonant properties. Electro-magnetic fluctuations from passing cars and trams feature alongside the sounds of co-existent organisms such as plants, birds and fish. The City Tunes Itself reveals the musicality and inefficiency of energy flow through the urban environment as sound energy is transformed by the city’s resident materials. To the roadside railing or lamp post, a passing car or tram is like the bow to the violin.

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

Akio Suzuki (JP)
various locations, to be visited any time: description and map

only 29. June 2013, 17:00h – guided tour by Akio Suzuki
starting location at Maison du Peuple map >>>

limited places – registration required, see below!

Oto-date is probably the most telling example of sound-walks without any electronic or technology. These itineraries meander fleetingly and erratically through various urban centers such as Berlin, Paris, Turin and now Brussels. Pausing every now and again, the walk marks out sites interesting for their unusual acoustic or visual properties. Oto-date is a Japanese word: the ideograms which compose it – “oto” and “date” – respectively signify “listen” and “point”, hence “listening point”. Tracing upon asphalt, stone or any solid support a circular sign inscribed with two specular figures representing a pair of ears and two human footprints, Akio Suzuki marks out the site of an experience that promises to be literally “exceptional”.

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

[EVENT_REGIS_CATEGORY event_category_id=”007″]

lecture by Joost Fonteyne (BE)

Joost Fonteyne talks about the art of sound walks. Sound Walks have a long tradition. Back in 1965, Max Neuhaus would take his audience outside in ‘LISTEN’, to listen to the city. Pioneer Hildegard Westerkamp described it as any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment. Does it still pay to organise sound walks if the practice of deep listening is as good as moribund? Are we, in fact, aware of the sounds around us? Or do the makers of sound walks invite us precisely to experience the often urban environment in a different way?

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

lecture by Brandon LaBelle (US)

“Diary of a stranger” (© Brandon LaBelle)

Sound supports a dynamic relationality between self and surrounding, imparting generative instances of contact and belonging, along with interruption and negotiation. From echoes passing across a given space to vibrations underfoot, disturbances from the neighbor to recollections of disappeared voices, this intense relationality can be appreciated as exceeding the sightlines of the architectural imagination, and the limits of the single body, to support alternative notions of shared space – of meeting the other.
Following theories of distributed agency and disagreement, I’m interested to chart out this “acoustics of sharing” by way of over-hearing. At stake is a concern for the potentiality of sound to foster collectivity in the (un)making, and how this may suggest new modalities of “being public”.

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

lecture by Francesco Careri (I)

Walkscapes deals with strolling as an architecture of landscape. Walking is considered as an autonomous form of art and a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory. It is – as to speak – an aesthetic instrument of knowledge and a physical transformation of the “negotiated” space that is converted into an urban intervention. From primitive nomadism to Dada and Surrealism, from the Lettrist to the Situationist International and from Minimalism to Land Art, this lecture revealing the notion of Walkscapes narrates the perception of landscape through a history of the traversed city. (http://www.walkinginplace.org/converge/iprh/)

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

lecture by DOC-team Szilvia Kovács (HU) & Carina Lesky (A) & Anamarija Batista (BiH)

The request for more diverse open public spaces supports the development of the walking culture and produces the need for more walking areas and pedestrian sites. It can be observed that “walking” as a practice and an everyday experience is not just a way of movement, but also an active awareness of environment. In the 1960s the Situationist International introduced “walking” as a method to change the city connecting it to the artistic practice. From their point of view, techniques such as the “derive” can stimulate, affect and alter urban structures. In this lecture DOC-team will focus on how the sound artistic practice connects to the practice of walking as well as to contemporary urban planning strategies.

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

workshop by Stalker/ON (IT)

this workshop is free, max 10 participants
June 26th – 28th – please register!

Refugees’ status is suspended in between acceptation and refuse, feeling of welcoming or rejected. Refugees’ gaze on our cities can tell us a lot, not just on them but more on us, on the state of our public sphere. Refugees’ every day life is shifting, in just one generation, in between the becoming familiar of the hosting land and the becoming imaginary of the land of birth.
At the crossing of those two perceptions, we want to propose the “Sound like home?” three days workshop with refugees, artists and anyone who is interested and a final public walk. The goal is to make visible and accessible the psychological and cultural gap experienced by refugees inhabiting European cities, and how this is becoming one of the most interesting and underrated emerging cultural visions of Europe, that should help us understanding how our cities are changing.
Stalker will lead a participatory workshop giving to the partecipants the tools and strategies that employ direct unedited forms of cooperative documentation to raise a better self-awareness of their community and of their environment; stressing the idea that participation in the walks is an active way to experience the city. Whilst on the walk you are not passive being led by a guide but you become an essential element of the walk and an active participant in debates about the city underlining the cooperation of its users to generate collective values.
Following the practice of reciprocal learning, the strategies to approach the territory will be defined together with the partecipants at the beginning of the workshop giving to everyone the autonomy to build paths and program; key elements will be casual encounters and spontenous chances of possibility and opportunity which will be the contents of the final narration of the public walk.
The preparatory workshop seeks to collectively explore the ongoing social and urban transformation of the urban space in the city of Brussels, facing and debating together the key words that are defining the today metropolitan areas, urban/rural, us/others, past/future, citizens/institution.

The workshop will be mainly on field.
The workshop will be mainly in English and French.
The workshop is open to refugees and anyone interested in facing refugees issues, experiencing
the proposed practice of crossing and debating on key words about the city of Brussels.