VNM E-Fest 2021

Electric Fields.

E-Fest 2021: Electric Fields

Electric Fields – gestural sonic expansions

Performance-Videos-on-Demand available October 28 to November 10, 2021

Live online artist chat November 6, 2021; 2PM PST

 

Featuring exclusive, on-demand video performances by…

HAI Trio (Italy/Austria/Korea)
Aiyun Huang (Toronto)
Mari Kimura (US/Japan)
Suzanne Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta)
Laetitia Sonami (US)

For 2021 we set aside our traditional festival format for one more year in favour of a virtual gathering – and “E-Fest”. From October 28 to November 10 we invite you to take in five new, on-demand performance video pieces created specially for this festival.

Each of the featured artists play with unique intersections of body and technology, exploring and transforming the blurred boundaries that define autonomy and creative agency. Each of the performances blend motion and sound – some using custom-built technology that extends the body as instrument; some using devices that become ‘performers’ in their own right.

Electric Fields – Artist Chat

Saturday, November 6, 2021; 2PM PST

FREE but registration is required. Register at Eventbrite.

Join us on Saturday, November 6 at 2PM PST for an online chat and Q&A with artists from the Electric Fields E-Fest.

Featuring HAI Trio (Isak Han, Alberto de Campo, Hannes Hoelzl), Aiyun Huang, Mari Kimura, Suzanne Kite, and Laetitia Sonami; moderated by Giorgio Magnanensi.

HAI Trio (Austria/Italy/Korea)

introverture to monopolyglottism
World Premiere

(2021, 34 minutes)

 

 

HAI Trio. Three men manipulate objects connected to laptops.The main actors in the introverture to monopolyglottism are Isak, Alberto and Hannes and their more and less autonomous, or intelligent?, music machines. Most of these diverse devices – they range from acoustic to electroacoustic, analogue and fully digital – are self built or coded.

 

Without defining a prior protocol to orchestrate all these agents’ behaviour in tandem, the goal of the game is to merge digital, electric, telematic and telepathic codes so that a common language evolves, which lets the actual flow and structure of the piece emerge in the moment of its creation.

 

Videography and editing: Fang Tsai.

 

Isak Han is an artist, composer, programmer, and product designer.

 

Raised by Korean punk music and an academic education in sculpture, he came to Berlin to study product design and ventured into the Berlin club music scene as a DJ.

 

After immersing himself into generative arts practices, he composes his music mainly by means of hardware circuit bending, software programming and personal instrument design. All these aspects are being developed through continuous experimentation and research. Currently, he is establishing his own company with Hannes Hoelzl and focusing on developing new digital music instruments.

http://airborneinstruments.eu

 

Alberto de Campo is a musician, composer, and artist, and since 2009, Professor for Computational Art at the University for the Arts Berlin (UdK). He studied composition, jazz guitar, and computer music, and is giving talks, workshops and concerts internationally at universities, conferences and festivals.

 

At UdK Berlin and with the Society for Nontrivial Pursuits, he explores the possible spaces of programming as an artistic practice, often by creating systems with complex behavior that can be influenced by performers.

http://www.udk-berlin.de/en/people/detail/person/show/alberto-campo

http://s4ntp.org

 

Hannes Hoelzl studied Sound Engineering at IEM Graz (A) and Audio Design at the HKU Utrecht (NL). The encounter with Michel Waisvisz during his internship at STEIM in the late 90’s sparked his passion for computer based instruments with direct, gestural bodily influence that match acoustic ones in flexibility, maneuverability and sonic potential.

 

Hannes has performed his compositions and installed his sonic artworks internationally. He likes teaching advanced audio coding and physical interaction both internationally in workshops, and at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he is an assistant professor.

www.earweego.net

 

Hannes, Alberto and Isak enjoy performing together as the HAI Trio.

Aiyun Huang (Toronto)

Performance and talk

(2021, 32 minutes)

 

 

Aiyun Huang. Woman plays large drum with dots of light n overlaid.

Using gesture as the connecting tissue and active ingredient integrating percussion and technology, Aiyun will take you on a journey exploring how gesture is used to trigger sound, enact dance choreography and tell a story about a little man who lives inside the bass drum!

 

Program:

  • Windward by David Bithell (2018)
  • Iron Bird by Mari Kimura (2021, Canadian Premiere)
  • Aphasia by Mark Applebaum (2009)

 

Aiyun Huang enjoys a musical life as soloist, chamber musician, researcher, teacher, and producer. Globally recognized since winning the 2002 First Prize and Audience Prize of the Geneva International Music Competition. She is a champion of existing repertoire and a prominent voice in the collaborative creation of new works. Huang has commissioned and premiered over two hundred works as a soloist and chamber musician. The Globe and Mail critic Robert Everett-Green describes Huang’s playing as “engrossing to hear and to watch” and her choice of repertoire as capable of “renovating our habits of listening.”

 

Born in Taiwan, Aiyun holds a DMA degree from the University of California, San Diego. Between 2004 and 2006, she was appointed as Faculty Fellow at UCSD. Between 2006 and 2017, she led the percussion program and held the position of William Dawson Scholar at McGill University. She currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Music at the University of Toronto where she heads the percussion area and directs the percussion ensemble and TaPIR lab. She also serves as the Artistic Director for soundSCAPE Festival in Cesena, Italy.

Mari Kimura (US/Japan)

Listen to the MUGIC®

(2021, 30 minutes)

 

 

Mari Kimura. Woman in glasses holds square electronic chip between thumb and forefinger.Mari Kimura will present the history of her work for more than 10 years using a motion sensor in performance, which she started back in 2009 with the Sound Music Movement team at IRCAM. She just released her own motion sensor MUGIC® last year, which is now used by musicians, artists, dancers, actors around the world, and by universities such as Harvard, University of Toronto, Miami Bowling Green, Peabody Institute and Juilliard.

 

Mari Kimura is at the forefront of violinists who are extending the technical and expressive capabilities of the instrument. As a performer, composer,  researcher, and entrepreneur, she has opened up new sonic worlds and new musical possibilities for the violin. Notably, she has mastered the production of pitches that sound up to an octave below the violin’s lowest string without re-tuning. This technique, which she calls Subharmonics, has earned Mari considerable renown in the concert music world and beyond. She is also a pioneer in the field of interactive computer music. At the same time, she has earned international acclaim as a soloist and recitalist in both standard and contemporary repertoire. Her most recent efforts involve entrepreneurship, bringing her prototype motion sensor MUGIC™, (pronounced “mu” as in music +”gic” as in magic) to the market.

 

As a composer, Mari is a recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Fromm Award from Harvard, residencies at the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund and IRCAM in Paris. Mari’s commissions include the International Computer Music Association, Harvestworks, Music from Japan and others, supported by grants including New York Foundation for the Arts, Arts International, New Music USA/Meet The Composer, Japan Foundation, Argosy Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts.  She was named one of 45 “Great Immigrants” by the Carnegie Corporation, and has been featured in major publications including the New York Times written by Matthew Gurewitsch, and in Scientific American written by Larry Greenemeier.

 

As a violinist, Mari has premiered many important works, including John Adams’s Violin Concerto (Japanese premiere), Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIII (US premiere), Tania Léon’s Axon for violin and computer (world premiere), and Salvatore Sciarrino’s 6 Capricci (US premiere), among others. In 2007, Mari introduced Jean-Claude Risset’s violin concerto, Schemes, at Suntory Hall with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. The cadenza she wrote for the concerto, incorporating advanced Subharmonics, was subsequently published in STRINGS magazine.  In 2019, she gave the world premiere of Dai Fujikura’s “Motion Notions” for violin and a motion sensor at her solo recital at the International Chigiana Festival in Siena, Italy.

 

As an educator, Mari is the Founding Chair of the Future Music Lab at the Atlantic Music Festival in collaboration with IRCAM since 2013. The program focuses on high-level instrumental performers, who explore composition, improvisation and performance using the latest technology. Since 1998, Mari has been teaching a graduate course in Interactive Computer Music Performance at Juilliard. In 2017, Mari Kimura was named Professor of Music at UC Irvine’s “Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology” (ICIT) program, Music Department at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts.

 

As an entrepreneur, Mari is the President of Kimari, LLC creating MUGIC™.  In September 2020, after developing a new MUGIC™ prototype at Calit2 at UCI for two years, she released MUGIC™ commercially. MUGIC™ is now available at http://mugicmotion.com/ 

 

Mari studied the violin with Armand & Margaret Weisbord, Toshiya Eto, Roman Totenberg and Joseph Fuchs. She studied composition with Mario Davidovksy.

Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta)

Take Care, My Boy

(2021, 18 minutes)

 

 

Suzanne Kite. Woman in long skirt kneels on ground and holds long braid of hair wound with electronics.

Listener, Kite, 2018. Performance in Linz, Austria. Photo credit: vog.photo

A newly developed A.I. hair-braid interface performance, created with a collage of text and field recordings taken over the past six months. This piece includes experiments with A.I. text and machine learning interactions. 

 

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University. Kite’s scholarship and practice investigate contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fibre sculptures, immersive video and sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Kite has also published in several journals and magazines, including in The Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), where the award winning article, “Making Kin with Machines,” co-authored with Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pechawis, was featured. Currently, she is a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar and a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow.

http://kitekitekitekite.com/

Laetitia Sonami (US)

Magnetic Memories: Song of Tsar
World Premiere

(2021, 23 minutes)

 

 

Laetitia Sonami. Woman stands behind metal circle with crossing wires.Song of Tsar is a new work belonging to the Magnetic Memories cycle.

 

The cycle started in 2017 as an exploration of the Spring Spyre, the instrument Sonami built following the lady’s glove.

 

The focus in Song of Tsar is on the emptiness of the circle, which is crossed by three long springs. What comes out of this emptiness as its surface vibrates? The title refers to the Tsar Bell bell in Moscow, completed in 1735 and which has never been rung. The sound has since been “re-created” through analysis and synthesis. This led Sonami to imagine the sound of objects and places which were never sounded, or which were silenced.

 

Three thin springs are attached to spring reverb pick-ups on the metal wheel and generate audio signals when touched, rubbed or plucked. While not heard, the features extracted from these audio signals are sent to the Machine Learning software which controls the audio synthesis in real time.

 

Camera work: Dustin Schultz.

 

Laetitia Sonami is a sound artist, performer and composer.

 

Sonami’s sound performances, live-­film collaborations and sound installations focus on issues of presence and participation.  Best known for her unique instrument, the elbow‐length lady’s glove, she currently performs with her latest instrument, the Spring Spyre, based on the application of neural networks to real-time audio synthesis. Sonami currently teaches at the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College.  

http://sonami.net

A note from Giorgio Magnanensi

Electric Fields – gestural sonic expansions

This year VNM is presenting an electronic festival series of online events by artists who come from different practices and places to explore, share and exchange forms of instrumental and energetic sonic expansions with a variety of procedures and behaviours. What all of them seem to have in common is what Hannes Hoelzl (HAI Trio) describes as a “fascination to design interactive systems that delegate structural control to a degree where the performer is forced to become herself an observer, and [their] actions come to resemble navigation maneuvers at the borders of instability”. Like a process of losing yourself when realizing we don’t belong anymore to or within a planet regarded only within a paradigm of pure disposable profit.

 

It seems relevant to remember that we are still unable to regain full touch with our physical presence at this time. The longing continues, and it is a great exercise in holding attention, while trying to dismiss the pain. As such our lives and relationships (of any kind) become more visibly mediated by many external technological expansions (prosthesis?). Is there a way where embodying artistic energy we can maneuver that “instability” in creative and engaging ways? What is the “political” value, if any, of a creative gesture? What kind of polis will arise (in its most meaningful and original formative process) and how will it resonate within an emerging community?

 

If artistic energy manifests itself beyond intentionality, how can artistic behavior offer transformative experiences in sharable (real or virtual) spaces, without needing to become another object of curiosity or consumption? I guess this is the question everyone here is trying to answer, while offering possibilities, visions and inventions. “Gates” might finally open up to the emergence of the unimaginable, the nonsense of wanting. We don’t write books or symphonies because time and energy are burning fast, like lightning, in a crumble of time. We burn and freeze, textures and long loud breaths, solus – sonus – solis.

 

Thank you to all the wonderful artists, to the VNM staff, volunteers, funders, supporters and everyone who came to listen, to watch and to enjoy these events! If there are changes around us it is because we are that change, so thank you for being and staying with us.

– Giorgio Magnanensi