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Workshop: March 12 – 14, 2025, 4-8pm (each day) at Emily Carr University (520 E 1st Avenue)
Performance: March 15, 2025, set up will take place in the afternoon (time TBC), performance at 8pm at ANNEX (823 Seymour Street, 2nd Floor) More info
Deadline to apply: Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Confirmed participants will receive notice by February 28 and will be required to confirm their participation by Wednesday, March 5.
For the 7th installment of Vancouver New Music’s popular Parallels series, Martin Howse (UK) will lead a 3-day community workshop that will conclude with a live performance at the ANNEX on March 15, featuring Howse and the workshop participants.
Across 3 days, the workshop will develop a series of performance protocols and hybrid physical/electronic instruments with the aim to open up human speech and vocalisation to foreign material processes, to other living and non-living beings and to the geologic. The research and instruments emerging from and developed in this workshop will be used as part of a collective collaborative public presentation with the workshop participants on March 15 that will be an extension of Howse’s live performance of his work Tract.
Guided by Howse, participants will explore through construction, prototyping and experimental situations, the physical subjection of human vocal expressions to other, multiple, material and algorithmic processes, such as dissolution, augmentation, growth, sedimentation, crystallisation, segmentation, decay, putrefaction, fermentation, disintegration and eating away, to slowly begin to define and play with a new non-human aesthetics of the vocal untied from human logic and experience; to concretise the utterances of other geo-logics.
Research and prototyping topics that may be explored in the workshop include:
Preference will be given to participants who have not previously taken part in a Parallels workshop and can attend all three workshop sessions, March 12-14 from 4-8pm, as well as the performance on March 15. No musical experience is required.
If you have questions or for more information please email submissions@newmusic.org
Martin Howse is an artist occupied with an investigation of the links between the earth (geophysical phenomena), software and the human psyche (psychogeophysics) through the construction of experimental situations (performances, laboratories, walks, and workshops), material art works and publications.
From 1998 to 2005 Howse was director of ap, a software performance group working with electronic waste, pioneering an early approach to digital glitch. From 2007 to 2009 he hosted a regular workshop, micro-residency and salon series in Berlin. Howse has worked and collaborated on acclaimed projects and practices such as The Crystal World, Psychogeophysics, Earthboot, Sketches towards an Earth Computer and Dissolutions. From 2016 to 2018 he initiated and led the large-scale artist research project Shift Register, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, examining the rendering experiential of the signs and markers of the anthropocene.
For the last ten years he has initiated numerous open-laboratory style projects and performed, published, lectured and exhibited worldwide. He has shown work as part of the Taipei Biennale, and in major venues such as ICA London, TEA Tenerife, HKW Berlin and Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon.
He is equally the creator of the ERD modular synthesizer series and founder of the Tiny Mining community.
