February 03, 2005
Echo Ricochet
The Ebb and Flow of Perth
Cre8ive Challenge is an Awesome Arts initiative designed to engage young people in an open-ended, process-based exploration of identity. In 2003 their project included the collection of significant sound samples for a collaborative project with Scanner. The latter became a soundscape accompaniment for a journey through Perth’s urban environment.
As part of the Festival in central Perth Echoricochet was presented from an orange transit van. The public borrowed headphones and CD players and embarked on a sound-walk through the city, guided by instructions. Perth ebbed and flowed with its usual rhythms as the soundscape evolved around the listener, offering a relaxed yet heightened awareness of the urban environment’s passing details. [Read an interview with Scanner on neural.it]
Found Mobile Phone Conversations
Scanner: This British audio auteur, composer and sonic spy trawls the hidden noise of the modern metropolis to create absorbing, multi-layered soundscapes. Scanner's already vast body of work spans from early controversial compositions using found mobile phone conversations to a more recent focus on trawling the hidden noise of the modern metropolis as a symbol of the place where hidden meanings and missed contacts emerge.
Scanner's diverse practices include audio CDs, soundtrack composition for films, performances, radio, and site-specific intermedia installations. He has performed and created works internationally including SFMOMA USA, Hayward Gallery London, Pompidou Centre Paris, Tate Modern London, Corcoran Gallery DC and the Royal Opera House London. He has collaborated with artists from numerous genres including musicians Bryan Ferry and Laurie Anderson, The Royal Ballet and Random Dance companies, composers Michael Nyman and Luc Ferrari, and artists Mike Kelley and Derek Jarman.
Scanner continually seeks unconventionaly environments for his works: in 1999 he performed Surface Noise on a London Bus around the city, in 2000 he performed over 20 KM of beach in Italy on the public speaker system, re-soundtracked Jean Luc Godard's seminal film Alphaville, and wrote the soundtrack to a working morgue in Paris in 2002.
Among his recently completed works are Into The Blue, a gallery installation using 10,000 latex balloons, soundtracks for The Royal Ballet's Qualia and Random Dance Company's Nemesis, a string quartet entitled Play Along, three feature film soundtracks, and CD releases of 52 Spaces commissioned for film director Antonioni's 90th birthday, and Warhol's Surfaces, commissioned for German Radio.
Scanner's work can be heard on permanent display in the Science Museum London (Sound Curtains) and the Raymond PoincarÈ hospital in Garches France as part of the bereavement suite (Channel of Flight). His BBC radio production of Jean Cocteau's 'The Human Voice' won the prestigious Prix Marulic Award and most recently he won First Prize Neptun Water Prize for his installation Wishing Well in Germany. In 1998 he became 'Professor Scanner' at John Moore's University in Liverpool.
Posted by jo at February 3, 2005 05:56 PM
