In collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum and STEIM, Sonic Acts will host a series of masterclasses as part of this year’s festival edition Travelling Time.

The masterclasses provide a unique opportunity for artists, musicians and other creative professionals to work with 5 internationally renowned artists whose work critically reflects on time and timing. In a concentrated and intimate setting, participants will gain insight into the artists‚ concepts, work processes, and methods of composition and production through hands-on workshops and seminars.

TO PARTICIPATE

Deadline for applications is 12 February 2012. Please send a biography and a short motivation outlining why you would like to take part in a specific masterclass to: masterclass at sonicacts.com.

Attending multiple classes is possible. Late or incomplete applications will not be considered. You will be informed about the result of your application by 14 February.

A detailed schedule as well as more information about the preparation for the masterclass will be sent to successful applicants with this notification.

FEE

There is a fee of 25 Euro to participate per masterclass. Catering will be provided.

DATES & LOCATIONS

The masterclasses take place at STEIM, SMART Project Space and De Balie, in Amsterdam
20 February: Olaf Nicolai
21 & 22 February: Catherine Christer Hennix
22 February: Peter Kubelka
23 February: Pauline Oliveros
23 February: Tino Sehgal

These masterclasses are made possible with the support of the Mondriaan Fund.

ABOUT THE MASTERS

CATHERINE CHRISTER HENNIX (US/SE) is a composer, philosopher, mathematician and visual artist. In the 1960s and 1970s she worked with illustrious figures such as La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath who were very important for her own work. She has frequently collaborated with the American anti-art philosopher, composer and violinist Henry Flynt. Hennix also drew inspiration from Japanese Gagaku music and the early vocal music of Perotinus and Leoninus. All her major compositions, including The Electric Harpsichord, are regarded as part of an ongoing, endless cycle.

PETER KUBELKA (AT) is a multifaceted artist and theoretician who has worked in film, cooking, music, architecture, speech and writing. He communicates through lectures, which also use non-verbal elements Œto free our world view from being the exclusive property of language‚. Kubelka‚s cinematographic work is short and highly condensed. His ŒMetric Films‚ preceded and laid the foundations for structural cinema. Kubelka will lead a masterclass on film & cooking.

OLAF NICOLAI (DE) is a German artist whose conceptual approach and use of diverse media question the way in which we view our everyday environment. He also translates theories from science and the arts into aesthetic-artistic idioms, rendering them accessible in a new context. His works deal with the perception of time in the reception of art. Nicolai has participated in international solo and group exhibitions. His works were shown at Documenta X, and at the 49th and 51st Venice Biennales. Several of his works can be found in public collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art / New York; Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary /Vienna; Friedrich Christian Flick Collection / Berlin and Migros Museum / Zürich.

PAULINE OLIVEROS (US), composer, performer and humanitarian, is an important pioneer in American music and electronic music. She has explored sound for five decades, breaking new ground for herself and others. Through improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation she has created a body of work with such breadth of vision that it profoundly affects those who experience it. Pauline Oliveros will lead a Deep Listening session.

TINO SEHGAL (DE/UK) is a British-German artist whose works, which he calls Œconstructed situations‚, involve one or more people carrying out instructions conceived by the artist. What all of Sehgal’s works have in common is that they reside only in the space and time they occupy, and in the memory of the work and its reception. The artist himself describes his works as ‘constructed situations’, whose materials are the human voice, language, movement, and interaction, without the production of physical objects. His pieces are choreographies that are regularly staged in museums or galleries, and continuously executed for the entire duration of a show. In 2012, he will present a newly commissioned work for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London.

Transcript episode #1.1. Continue :: Transcript episode #2.1. Systems :: Transcript episode #3.1. Determinacy and indeterminacy :: Transcript episode #4.1. Time :: Transcript episode #51. Duration

Generative music is a term used to describe music which has been composed using a set of rules or system. This series of seven episodes explores generative approaches (including algorithmic, systems-based, formalised and procedural) to composition and performance primarily in the context of experimental technologies and music practices of the latter part of the twentieth century and examines the use of determinacy and indeterminacy in music and how these relate to issues around control, automation and artistic intention.

Recently relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

Artists Mendi and Keith Obadike describe the Stereo Helix for Sally Hemings, part of their American Cypher project, as a sonic drawing created for the lobby of the ELC. The primary sound source for this work is a small antique bell that belonged to Sally Hemings, given to her by Martha Jefferson (her half-sister and Thomas Jefferson’s wife).

This sound recording has been manipulated in order to derive multiple textures, pitches, colors, and effects from this source. The bell sounds have been mixed in the installation in real-time with ambient field recordings from Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. The sound plays from moving speakers in the stairwell, emitting an extremely narrow beam of sound in a spiraling double helix-like pattern. This project uses the genetic code of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson as a musical score input into custom software to generate an original evolving soundscape.

Mendi and Keith Obadike are interdisciplinary artists whose music, live art, and conceptual Internet artworks have been exhibited internationally. Their album The Sour Thunder was released on Bridge Records. Their work generated much discussion online and offline when they offered Keith’s blackness for sale on eBay in 2001. In 2002 Mendi and Keith premiered their Internet opera The Sour Thunder, which was the first new media work commissioned by the Yale Cabaret and they launched The Interaction of Coloreds (commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art). Keith received a BA in Art from North Carolina Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University. Mendi received a BA in English from Spelman College and a PhD in Literature from Duke University.

Using a multichannel soundsystem throughout the entire space, a handful of sound artists activate the unique acoustics of Roulette’s new 1920’s Art Deco theater with multi-channel spacialized sound.

Featuring: Maria Chavez, Mario Diaz de Leon, Sabisha Friedberg, Alfredo Marin, Zeljko McMullen, Daniel Neumann, Tristan Shepherd, Doron Sadja, Ben Vida.

For more information here.

From the interview:

Why did you choose to work with mosquitoes?

Male mosquitoes serenade potential mates with a ‘love song’ by vibrating their wings. They synchronize their wingbeats with those of the females to mate in mid-air. … The constant glissandi — gliding from one pitch to another — and ‘tuning in’ of mosquito wingbeats reminded me of dhrupad, an ancient form of Indian classical music often sung by brothers in unison. My collaborator Ali Momeni and I played male mosquitoes some dhrupad and, sure enough, they tuned in.

Kris Perry will start each sculpture from an industrial machine that has been taken out of use. I will travel to scrap yards, auctions, and industrial suppliers to seek out machines that have a combination of visual appeal and functionality. Grinders, shakers, lathes, presses, mills, compressors, saws, and specialized machinery will be the starting point for my works

You can help support his project here.

The next {SØNiK} event will take place February 25, 2011. {SØNiK} takes place over two nights, and submissions are open to all works in sound, new media, performance, and video. Please email sonik@sonikfest.info if you would like to submit your work.

Submission Guidelines: Submissions are accepted via email, by linking to a website or an online audio/video account where the works can be viewed, if available.

To submit, send an email to sonik@sonikfest.info that includes the following information in the body:

-Your contact information (name, email address, phone number, website)
-The details of the work you are submitting (medium, length, title, date)
- Form of submission (video, mp3, etc.)
- Technical needs
- A brief bio/artist statement
- A brief statement about the specific work you are submitting. State if the work has been previously exhibited, and if so, where.
- Links to online samples of your works, if available.

Showing samples of other works is highly encouraged, though not required.
-For performance works, supplemental still images are encouraged and a more detailed explanation of the project proposed is required.

For any works that are unavailable online, please contact sonik@sonikfest.info, with “Submission Inquiry” in the Subject line, for further instructions on submitting.

Link: http://sonikfest.info/call/

bitforms gallery is pleased to announce Volume, the first solo exhibition in New York by Swiss artist Zimoun. On view will be an immersive, site-specific sound installation based on prepared dcmotors and cardboard boxes.

Part of a series that received its U.S. debut in a solo exhibition at the Ringling Museum of Art this Fall, the installation emphasizes the grid as a method of visual organization. Precariously balanced rows of cardboard boxes form an architectural space containing a rumbling din produced by mechanical motors humming in unison.

Pulsing rhythmically, each unit in the system reverberates with its own sense of purpose and timing. Temporal microstructures emerge and shift, made visible by collective behavior. With minimalist and low-tech means, Zimoun constructs a blank zone of play utilizing repetition and the physical pressure of vibration.

As an author, Zimoun uses scale and tools of amplification to transform our associations with commonplace industrial objects. Tuned into kinetic and acoustic detail, his obsessive displays of collected materials unlock emotional potential in otherwise banal and chaotic gestures. In his work static volume permeates a space, yielding reductive clocklike operas of the everyday.

For the duration of the show, the gallery’s project room on the 6th floor will also feature four mechanical works by the artist and a video.

“Zimoun: Sculpting Sound” (2011) at the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL from bitforms gallery on Vimeo.

“200 prepared dc-motors, 2000 cardboard elements 70×70cm” (2011) by Zimoun + Hannes Zweifel from bitforms gallery on Vimeo.

“121 prepared dc-motors, cardboard elements 8×8cm” (2011) by Zimoun from bitforms gallery on Vimeo.

Hence Where Labour is part of an ongoing series of text settings of an English translation of Marx’s 1858 manuscript Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Stretched horizontally across the floor of the gallery, a solo performer sings a subtly developing musical setting of the text hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased — composed entirely through the use of a computer algorithm. Marx’s fragment — designated in historian Moishe Postone’s analysis as outlining the material conditions for the full development of all of humanity — is layered against the inert labor of a single performing body occupying the time and space of the musical frame. Performed by Fahad Siadat.

G Douglas Barrett’s work considers music as part of a critical arts practice in which performance and conceptuality figure as integral components. Drawing equally from the contemporary gallery arts and the performing arts traditions, he has exhibited, performed, and published throughout North America and Europe: Diapason Gallery (New York), the Wulf (Los Angeles), Theater Perdu (Amsterdam), Universität der Künste Berlin, Phoebe Zeitgeist Teatro (Milan), Université de Paris-Est Marne-La-Vallée, Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast, UK) and Neutral Ground (Canada). BARRETT’s writings on music and art are published in the interdisciplinary literary journal Mosaic and Contemporary Music Review. A recent discussion of his work appears in an essay by eldritch Priest in the journal Postmodern Culture.

This event will feature two pieces in the Vigilance Improvisations framework: “Mutability” performed by Bryan Eubanks and Eric Laska; and “Recursion” performed by Bonnie Jones and Reed Evan Rosenberg and presented by the Philadelphia Sound Forum.

Vigilance Improvisations is a series of structured frameworks for improvising electronic musicians. The archetypical design consists of two musicians, one working with computer and the other with non-computer electronics, improvising together while following unique visual scores. Each score corresponds to material changes related to the opposing musician’s instrumental sound source. The musicians are instructed to watch a designated meter vigilantly over the course of an improvisation all the while remaining conscious of the possible visual correlations that may or may not be provoked by a chance correspondence between a reading of the meter and the score. The scores are hosted in a folder online and the visual content therein is entirely sourced from the Internet. No recommendations are made concerning sound.

Eric Laska is a musician and assorted media artist from New York, currently living and working in Philadelphia. Examples from recent work and works-in-progress focus on the proliferation of sounds from localized material processes (Chicago Equinix, ProRemote), arranging improvised music for extended periods of time (Extended Improvisation for Gallery Hours forthcoming), and the composing of electronic music based on material considerations such as power consumption (Vigilance Improvisations).

Recent projects for the Internet include the sound application Impulse Blasts and the streaming installation Quartet With Pyramid Scheme, the latter conceived in collaboration with the respective members of said quartet- Jordan Topiel Paul, Richard Kamerman, and Reed Evan Rosenberg, and commissioned by turbulence.org In addition he is part of the internet surf club Double Happiness, who are represented in the New Museum of New York’s Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory, and an editor/co-founder of the websites Lateral Addition and funvac. Ruez is an infrequent recording/production alias.

Bryan Eubanks (b. 1977, WA.) is a musician focused on collaborative improvisation, solo musical projects, and sound installations. He is primarily active within the tradition of live electronic music and has performed his work across the US, Europe, Japan, and Korea since becoming musically active in Portland, Oregon in the late 1990’s. Originally a saxophonist, his interests have expanded to include computer music, generative composition, sound localization, and the development of instruments that incorporate open-circuits, samplers, radio transmission, feedback, and other electronics. In 2001 he co- founded Rasbliutto to distribute and present music. He is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.

Bonnie Jones is a Korean-American writer, improvising musician, and performer working primarily with electronic music and text. Born in 1977 in South Korea she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, MD. Bonnie creates improvised and composed text-sound performances that explore the fluidity and function of electronic noise (field recordings, circuit bending) and text (poetry, found, spoken). She is interested in how people perceive, “read” and interact with these sounds and texts given our current technological moment. Bonnie has presented her work in the US, Europe, and Asia and collaborates frequently with writers and musicians including Ric Royer, Carla Harryman, Andy Hayleck, Joe Foster, Andrea Neumann, Liz Tonne and Chris Cogburn. She received her MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

Reed Evan Rosenberg - American male from New Jersey. Works in areas of radical computer music, improvised music and installation art. Recent projects include chaotic map synthesis studies, artificial intelligence driven composition systems, generative compositions for laser and LED lights, and networked improvisation driven computer music systems. Co-creator of funvac.net , an experiment in web based experimental music curation.