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

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.

Martin Howse (UK/D)

EDE is conceived as a sonic intervention and examination of different scales of communication, micro-events and larger material interactions. Micro-voltages generated by chemical and biological structures such as algae are sensed and physically amplified as a moving beam of light by a simple mirror galvanometer (mirror and coil) apparatus, coupled to a low power laser. A similar apparatus was used to sense tiny currents crossing the Atlantic on heavy underground cables; the first telegrapic systems bending reflections to signal communication, information transmission. The galvanometer beam is equally sensitive to structural movements in the environment and air currents. The laser beam is configured as a simple, ad-hoc interferometer allowing for measurement and sensing of nanometer movements of the beam to be appreciated directly as sound waves. Feedback through structure and air is unavoidable, as is any excitation of the original environment itself.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Relational Noise – 28. June 2013

workshop by Udo Noll (D)

this workshop is free, max 6-8 participants
26-30 June – please register!

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.

6-8 participants

workshop by Lukas Kühne (D) & Robyn Schulkowsky (US)

this workshop is free, max 6-8 participants
27-28 June – please register!

This workshop is about lively, pure acoustic space investigation with physical sound sources. Unique sub bass marimba keys equipped with monumental sized resonators will be utilized as instruments. The area of the site-specific sound sculpture setting includes different locations at and around the Brussels North Railway Station. The overall aim of this lab is to explore the symbiotic relationship between sound and space in order to create an auditory-spatial-musical-construction that “reads and reflects” the shape and content of the chosen site.

workshop language: English

http://spaceandfrequency.de/spaceandfrequency.pdf

Lukas Kühne (D) & Robyn Schulkowsky (US) and workshop participants

This performance will be a lively, pure acoustic space investigation with physical sound sources. Its format is exploratory with sensual and didactic interrelationships. Lukas Kühne and Robyn Schulkowsky, together with workshop participants, utilize unique sub bass marimba keys equipped with monumental sizes resonators as instruments. Architectonically, spaces at and around the Brussels North Train Station will be explored and mapped out according to their tonality. Acoustically, these findings will be included in a transient urban musical-sonotop installation. The aim is to explore the symbiotic relationship between sound and space, between music and architecture. The result is an auditory-spatial-musical-construction that can read and reflect the shape and content of the mapped locations.

for addition information on the workshop see Space and Frequency – Rhythm Lab.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Relational Noise – 28. June 2013

and other instruments by Wessel Westerveld (Der Wexel) (NL)
and Yuri Landman (NL)

The Intonarumori were a family of musical instruments invented in 1913 by the Italian Futurist painter and musical composer Luigi Russolo. They were acoustic noise generators that permitted to create and control different types of noises in dynamic as well as pitch. The invention of the Intonarumori reflected the ideas about the use of noises in music which Russolo expounded in his manifesto L’arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise). Der Wexel reconstructed a few Intonarumori based on patents, information from museum depots and letters. As new sound machines in which the visual aspect – the object – is a major principle, they illustrate his research into sound and shape.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Relational Noise – 28. June 2013

Felicity Ford (UK) & Valeria Merlini (IT)

Felicity Ford and Valeria Merlini will be exploring the sonorities of the city. Based on their first workshop series in March, they produced a radio show with the theme “Listening to Brussels from within and without”. Their second workshop series in June will be focusing on the sounds of the festival and how they intersect with previously documented sounds of the city itself. During the festival aural “refreshers” of the previous day are played at the start of each subsequent day.

The shorts will last 7 – 13 minutes in length, and will be played daily as aural ‘echoes’ from the day before. The shorts will be produced by participants on the Listening to Tuned City from within and without workshop, and will relate the new sounds introduced into Brussels by the festival with the existing soundscape of the city. Interior and exterior perspectives on Tuned City will come in the form of recordings made inside and outside buildings, and in the form of listeners and recordists both native to Brussels and just visiting for the festival.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / daily symposium intro 28–30. June 2013

Will Schrimshaw (UK)

illustration by Rob Pybus

Charles Babbage wrote in The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise “What a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe! Every atom retains at once the motions which philosophers have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.” Turning an ear to the atmosphere, this installation traces imperceptible lines and patiently decodes this vast archival substrate upon which every utterance is impressed. Obscure and confused signals are rendered sensible in the form of speech and broadcast for the pleasure of the passing pedestrian.

appearance at Tuned City 28–30. June 2013

site specific work by Lisa Lapierre (F), Audrey Lauro and Patrick Farmer (UK)

This work is tailored to a large underground space with different levels in the neighborhood of the Brussels Government Administration Centre (RAC). The space offers three distinct dimensions – a sonic, a spatial and a psychological one – in which various ways of sonic interaction and communication take place. As our universe is full of contradictory tensions, our daily environment is certainly polluted. This enables us to long for silent places or introspection and explains why distances and intervals between sounds offer you a moment of alienation and the experience of calm. Feedback through concrete, water and air is unavoidable and illustrates how well the sonic intervention is matching the spot.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Relational Noise – 28. June 2013

performance by Kabir Carter

Report is a spatial and architectural investigation of resonance. Using only a microphone, mixer and speakers, Kabir Carter establishes the acoustic character of a room through the impact of microphone against architecture. By touching, rubbing, scratching and striking surfaces within the selected environment, he generates reverberant, plosive sound events and nodal excitations that form an acoustic sketch of the room. The microphone can also be turned inwards towards the body where clothing, skin and corporeal matter become another set of locations for modifying and supplementing acoustic resonances. The result creates a direct connection between the performing body and the architectural body that contains the event.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Relational Noise – 28. June 2013

Christina Kubisch (D)

Since the end of the 1970s Christina Kubisch works with the system of electromagnetic induction, which she developed from the basic technique to an individual artistic tool. In 2003 she started her research on a new series of works in public space, which trace the electro-magnetic fields of urban environments in the form of city walks.The first Electrical Walk took place in Cologne in 2004. Electrical Walks is a work in progress. It is a public walk with special, sensitive wireless headphones by which the acoustic qualities of aboveground and underground electromagnetic fields become amplified and audible. . The transmission of sound is made by built-in coils which respond to the electromagnetic waves in our environment. The palette of these noises, their timbre and volume vary from site to site and from country to country. They have one thing in common: they are ubiquitous, even where one would not expect them. Light systems, wireless comunication systems, radar systems, anti-theft security devices, surveillance cameras, cell phones, computers, streetcar cables, antennae, navigation systemes, automated teller machines, wireless internet, neon advertising, public transportation networks, etc. create electrical fields that are as if hidden under cloaks of invisibility, but of incredible presence. The sounds are much more musical than one could expect. There are complex layers of high and low frequencies, loops of rhythmic sequences, groups of tiny signals, long drones and many things which change constantly and are hard to describe. Some sounds are sound much alike all over the world. Others are specific for a city or country and cannot be found anywhere else. Electrical walks is an an invitation to a special kind of investigation of city centres (or elsewhere). With the magnetic headphone and a map of the environs, upon which the possible routes and especially interesting electrical fields are marked, the visitor can set off on his own or in a group. The perception of everyday reality changes when one listens to the electromagnetic fields; what is accustomed appears in a different context. Nothing looks the way it sounds. And nothing sounds the way it looks.

In March 2013 Christina Kubisch, together with students Pierre Lizin, Lucas Derycke, Annelies Moons, Maarten Coosemans, Misha Koole, Bert Beauprez, Sander Gillis and Joren Carels, explored the Botanical Gardens’ electromagnetic field. In the course of the workshop they drew up a map indicating electromagnetic hot spots that would allow visitors to hear the normally hidden fields of current by means of special wireless headphones. The way we perceive the Botanical Gardens is fundamentally altered by listening to its electrical currents. The known appears in a different context and nothing looks like it sounds.
Is it a Jardin botanique or a Jardin électrique?

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Relational Noise – 28. June 2013

Joanna Baillie (UK)

A darkened room functions as a giant camera (obscura) as the scene from the street outside is projected upside-down onto a screen. The sound consists of live microphone feed from the outside manipulated by a max patch and shaped into a pattern of alternating segments of untreated sound and ‘freezes’, where a split-second of sound is ‘horizontalized’ and stretched into a sustained chord.

The idea of the ‘frame’ as manifested concretely by the projector screen, and temporally by the patterns of alternating frozen and unfrozen sound, is central to the work. The presence of these frames asks us to consider at what point in the process of creative mediation/interference, the raw sonic and visual materials might be considered a work to be contemplated and experienced as art, rather than just a live streaming of reality. The sonic element in particular teeters on the edge between music and non-music. On one hand the sound is coaxed into a fixed rhythmical framework of accelerandos and deccelerandos, and its spectral content broken open and exposed in the frozen chord segments, while on the other, it is clearly at the mercy of the ‘accidental dramaturgy of what happens’ be it the roar of traffic, planes passing directly overhead, children shouting or very little at all (a general sort of background noise).

An element of nostalgia also pervades the work. The camera obscura cannot help but remind us of the early days of photography (and the point-zero of mechanical image-capturing) while the image itself has a painterly quality that might make us think back even further to the interiors and exteriors of 17th century European (and especially Dutch) artworks. The process of freezing the sound also relates to photography and the act of fashioning a split-second of time into an object with a duration that is independent of the transient flow of reality. Freezing the live sound material has two possible outcomes: it may sentimentalize what has just passed by sustaining it artificially and fashioning a kind of nostalgia from it, or conversely, create an ominous atmosphere that casts doubt over future events- something we might term ‘suspense’.

Text: Joanna Bailie.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Relational Noise – 28. June 2013

intervention by Dawn Scarfe (UK)

This sculptural installation invites people to use acoustic glasses to discover musical tones in the sound of their environment. Listening Glasses are hollow spheres with a funnel on one side (inserted into the ear) and an opening on the other. Each glass is calibrated to a particular musical tone. If this tone sounds in the surrounding air, the glass resonates and amplifies it. Scientist Herman von Helmholtz (1821-94) developed glass resonators to help him discern subtle partial tones in the sound of musical instruments. Listening Glasses remembers his work and explores the appeal of finding “music” in the ambient sound of our cities.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Relational Noise – 28. June 2013

Mattin (E/BASK) in conversation with Kobe Matthys (BE)

An “stranged conversation” between Stockholm based artist Mattin and Brussels based artist Kobe Matthys. Through this conversation they will be sharing their different experiences regarding their contexts while looking at the  relationship between conflicts and struggles, changes in politics and
economics and the role of culture within these processes. Conversation as a form of improvisation exploring current social noise and how artist can learn from it.

In the book “Noise & Capitalism” Mattin published in collaboration with Anthony Iles (2009), he explores contemporary alienation in order to discover whether the practices of improvisation and noise contain emancipatory moments. He questions how these practices point towards social relations and wonders how we can turn our backs to an environment that is constantly claiming our attention. In a more recent project he deals further with the topic of gentrification and its acoustic markers as well as imprints. In this lecture-performance he will present some new insights in that regard.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Relational Noise – 28. June 2013

lecture by Shelley Trower (UK)

Nineteenth century science and technology brought vibration to consciousness in new ways, in the form of siren sounds, railway shocks, and the noises experienced on city streets. At certain speeds, people could now perceive vibration as both multiple (separate, individual impulses or shocks) and singular (like a ‘tone’). At a specific point of rapidity, the separate impulses are lost to consciousness, joining together into a singular tone, but there is a moment between speeds, when the multiple is perceived within the singular.
This lecture considers how certain speeds of vibration exist on the edges of the sensory thresholds. It will present a selection of examples of how vibration became conscious in new ways: how physicists used the siren to demonstrate how separate vibrations become a singular tone; how spiritualists used auditory technologies to speed up spiritual vibrations thereby making them audible; how medical writers attempted to count the separate vibrations or ‘shocks’ experienced on the railway, each of which was presumed to damage the nerves even when not consciously perceived. I will finish with some reflections on contemporary siren noises, especially those of the New York based ‘Rumbler’, and how these frequencies continue to exist on the thresholds of our auditory perception.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Relational Noise – 28. June 2013

lecture by Christoph Cox (US)

Theorists of sound and music tend to distinguish “hearing” from “listening”, the mere registration of acoustic signals from the intelligent understanding of sound. Animals can certainly hear, but only humans can genuinely listen. However commonplace, this idea is rooted in an age-old and highly problematic metaphysics that elevates humans above the rest of the natural world. In this talk, Christoph Cox challenges this metaphysics arguing that a genuinely naturalist and materialist theory of sound must collapse the distinction between listening and hearing and extend the latter not only to animals and other living things, but to inanimate nature as well.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Relational Noise – 28. June 2013

keynote lecture by Hillel Schwartz (US)

History is as much an account of what is no longer around as an accounting for what is present. Not only is this particularly true with regard to sound, ephemeral as sounds can be. It is critical to the experience and ongoing redefinition of noise. Making sense of noise – tuning in to its frequency as well as its frequencies, its fractiousness as well as its fractions – demands more of us than sound meters or earbuds, oscilloscopes or advanced circuitry, ear cleaners or anechoic chambers. We must attend to what is masked, what is mourned and what is missing.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Relational Noise – 28. June 2013

Marina Rosenfeld (US) & Okkyung Lee (KR)

photo: William Lamson

Marina Rosenfeld’s P.A. for solo performer belongs to a series of installations, of idiosyncratic sculptural sound-systems she’s called simply P.A., that Rosenfeld has mounted in disused and monumental sites since 2009. Equal parts tuned atmosphere and active performance, P.A. has featured an evolving suite of custom loudspeakers, and has been mounted in such places as New York’s Park Avenue Armory and Liverpool’s Renshaw Hall. Cumulatively, the work proposes a kind of alternative history of amplification in space, seeding architectural sites with distortion and reflection, and challenging fantasies of sonic intelligibility, publicness and broadcast. An album version of the project, titled P.A./HARD LOVE, featuring Lee and legendary Jamaican vocalist Annette Henry, a.k.a. Warrior Queen, was recently premiered at The Kitchen in New York and is forthcoming on Room40 in late summer 2013.

appearance at Tuned City
Brussels / Opening Night – 27. June 2013

walk by David Helbich (DE)

For Drag + Drop, David Helbich and guides will pick you up at the Kaaistudios and get you to the location of the next event. They bring you from one point to the other, an apparently simple task, but at the same time an open field for interventions. Together with the audience, they will collectively execute a narrow score that guides all attendees towards a structural experience of this very particular environment: the typical Brussels topography with its very quick rhythm of social and urban changes. The walk will be highly scored, but still inviting the chaotic. A space where individual experience hits the ground of a collective restriction: the city.

appearance at Tuned City Opening Night – 27. June 2013

workshop by Valeria Merlini (IT) & Felicity Ford (UK)

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

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/

The second workshop series in June will be more focussed around the sounds of the festival, and how they intersect with the previously documented sounds of the city itself. This second series of workshops will be much more focussed on documenting Tuned City in real time, and turning radio shorts around overnight, in order to create aural “refreshers” of the previous day, to be played at the start of each subsequent day. The focus for these workshops will be on the practicalities of editing audio to create descriptions and documentation of sound art events.

Experience: This workshop is most suitable for people with some previous field-recording experience; attendees will also need to have some basic editing skills.