Featuring handmade Sizzling Semiconductor instruments built and played by: Ken Decker, Elvezio Del Bianco, Miranda Firmston, Dan Kibke, SJ Kirsch, Pinyao Liu, Clément Llobet, Pamela Subia and Erin Winkelmann.

The Parallels series returns in spring 2024 with guest artist Ioana Vreme Moser, a Berlin-based, Romanian sound artist engaged with hardware electronics, speculative research, and tactile experimentation.

In her practice, she uses rough electronic processes to obtain different materialities of sound. She places electronic components and control voltages in different situations of interaction with her body, organic materials, lost and found items, and environmental stimuli. From these collisions, synthesized sounds emerge to carry personal narrations and observations on the history of electronics, their production chains, wastelands, and entanglements in the natural world.

On March 16 Ioana Vreme Moser will present Screaming Minerals, a sonic lecture-performance that follows the rise of information technologies and their environmental decay. As algorithms become intelligent exponentially, the project delves into their transistorised hardware bodies their materialities, entangled politics, fragility and toxicity. This lecture-performance is enhanced by a collaborative installment-style performance featuring participants from Sizzling Semiconductors, a 3-day workshop taking place in advance of the concert.

Extending the Sizzling Semiconductors workshop, Screaming Minerals enacts an improvisation part with instruments from ‘transistors’ made of waste, collectively forming an orchestra. Noises and tones emerge as radiosensitive stones and pieces of scrap metal are scratched with needles. Oscillation occurs at a precise touch of a burned spot rendering the instruments in highly impredictable sonic landscapes.

With guidance from Ioana, Sizzling Semiconductors workshop participants will construct oscillating instruments from scratch to investigate the multifaceted history of electronic parts, semiconductive stones, their presence in electronic devices, and environmental decay.