VNM 2019 Festival: Resonances
Resonances – artistic transformation, mapping and sonification
October 17 – 19, 2019; 8PM each night
ANNEX (823 Seymour Street, 2nd Floor)
Free pre-show chat at 7:15PM each night.
Offering broad exploration of practices of artistic transformation, this year’s festival brings together artists who approach this idea with a wide understanding of its inherent possibilities. Taking inspiration from predecessors, or mining non-sound related data and information, these artists trace paths through sound and performance that diverge into new forms, expressions and ideas. Their sonic embodiments and sound mappings offer up different ways of understanding and seeing the world.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17
Linda Bouchard, Gord Grdina, François Houle, Kenton Loewen (Montreal/Vancouver)
All Caps No Space
All Caps No Space is composed for three live musicians, live video, and live electronics. It is a unique work that invites audiences to actively reflect on their role as consumers of information. Musicians perform and interact with a table that projects live video onto a large screen. The audience is also invited to integrate comments into the visual flow of the work. Using a graphical score, stock and prerecorded material and live processing, All Caps No Space explores the amplified solitude we experience within the media barrage of information that besieges us.
This work is conceived to capture a moment in time and geographic location. In every city where it is performed, topical elements from the news are integrated into the visuals and sonic experience, like prompts. The experience is visceral, lyrical, and political.
Linda Bouchard, concept, music and video
Keith Turnbull, dramaturgy
Kim Collier, Stage Direction
Grdina – Houle – Loewen Collective
Brady Marks (Vancouver)
Goldilocks fights off Pareidolia
Pareidolia is pattern recognition gone wrong, seeing something significant where there is nothing but random noise.
Goldilocks is a girl in a nursery rhyme who gives her name to the so-named Goldilocks Planets that are neither too hot or too cold, but just right for water to be liquid and perhaps for life to be supported or to form.
In sonification we map data into sound, the rules for making these mappings are an art, not a science. We extract features, we use metaphor and symbology, any mapping is possible, some are misleading, but the object is the same as in science – an attempt to understand natural phenomena. Scientists also use analogies and hand waving explanations, to communicate intuitions to their colleagues. This performance crosses back and forth trying to find the sweet spot.
Interspecifics (Leslie Garcia + Paloma López) (Mexico)
Interspecifics is a multispecies nomad collective and independent artistic research bureau founded in Mexico City in 2013. Their research uses sound and Artificial Intelligence to understand the bioelectrical and chemical signals of different living organisms and their geometrical patterns as a nonhuman form of communication. For this purpose we’ve developed a collection of experimental research and educational tools we call Ontological Machines. Their work is deeply shaped by the Latin American context where precarity enables new forms of creativity and ancient technologies to meet cutting edge forms of production, always looking for the most suitable way to produce in terms of social inclusion, cross-disciplinary practices and open knowledge.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18
airborne extended (Austria)
Founded in 2013, airborne extended is an all female contemporary music ensemble featuring harpsichord/keyboard, flutes, recorders/Paetzold flutes, with and without electronics. This unusual instrument combination creates possibilities for a wide range of inspiring new sounds and tonal colours.
For Resonance, airborne extended’s program selections playfully explore musical transformations and transcriptions – “an exact musical transcription of a person’s irritation” (Alexander Kaiser, The difficulty of crossing a field); “the transformation of the baroque piece´s harmonies into wild frequences” (Matthias Kranebitter, pancrace royer – the harpsichord pieces); “transformation of the textures of an ancient, fragile jewellery method into music” (Aya Yoshida, filigree); and more.
PROGRAM
airborne extended is
Elena Gabbrielli, flutes; Sonja Leipold, harpsichord/keyboard; Ruth Dyson, recorders/Paetzold
Matthias Kranebitter, pancrace royer – the harpsichord pieces / Pancrace Royer: la sensible & marche des skythes (2017)
– transformation of the baroque piece´s harmonies into wild frequences
Onur Dulger, La résistance sert le son – une histoire de métamorphose (2018)
– transformation of a harpsichord into a sound-machine of screaming tyres
Dmitri Kourliandski, parasite pieces: maps of non-existent-cities. Moscow (2018)
– invading an existing piece as a parasite.
Alexander Kaiser, The difficulty of crossing a field (2016)
– exact musical transcription of a person´s irritation.
Hannes Kerschbaumer, not.to (2017)
– a transformation of instruments: Paetzold played with sand paper, styrofoam, piccolo and Paetzold-Kontrabass only heard through pick-up-mics.
Aya Yoshida, filigree (2019)
– transformation of the textures of an ancient, fragile jewellery method into music
airborne ensemble recognizes the support of Austrian Embassy – Ottawa and Bundeskanzleramt.
chdh (France)
Deciban
In Deciban, a new audiovisual piece by chdh, hypnotic visuals that resemble “snow” of old analog TVs, are accompanied by their sonic alter ego to propose a new type of synaesthetic experience. The noise acquires a structure, a topology, patterns. Shapes emerge, visual and sound movements appear. We are invited to lose ourselves in the perception of this world full of illusions. In Deciban, phenomena are drowned in a noise universe: noise is information.
Elvira Hufschmid and Vancouver Electronic Ensemble (Vancouver)
Portrait of the Ensemble
Portrait of the Ensemble is a perceptual study of the ensemble through a sensory drawing process which is immediately rendered by the ensemble’s sonic response. With eyes closed, Elvira Hufschmid draws images as they emerge while sitting across from the ensemble. The drawing process is simultaneously projected as the ensemble follows the process on the screen and responds instantly with an improvisation that resonates with the visual, spatial and audible situation, extending portrait drawing as a 2D genre into a time-based, multi-dimensional form of aesthetic experience.
Featuring: Adrian Avendano, Soressa Gardner, Peki Hajdukovic, Sasha Langford, Julian La Brooy, Giorgio Magnanensi, and Kimia Yazdi.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19
Sammy Chien (Vancouver)
W(e)aves 0.6 (work-in-progress)
W(e)aves is an ongoing research-creation of a solo performance work that investigates migration, race politics, transcultural identity, queerness and spiritual philosophies using digital technologies, audiovisuals, text, contemporary dance, and qigong. With this particular research phase, Sammy Chien aims to further develop the relationship between gestures, motion tracking, electroacoustic music, Shamanism and ancient Chinese pictograms in the current sociopolitical context.
Atau Tanaka (US/UK)
Concrete Corps
Concrete Corps is a piece created for performer and BioMuse – a bio-electrical interface as musical instrument. BioMuse’s sensor interface captures electromyogram (EMG) biosignals that reflect dynamic muscle tensions. Biomedical electrodes make electrical contact with the skin, detecting electrical impulses of neurons as the brain commands voluntary muscle contractions. The BioMuse amplifies and converts these micro-voltages, and transmits them as digital information that is manipulated live by Tanaka, who creates mappings that shape and sculpt the sound.
Kite (Oglala/Lakota) with Elisa Thorn (Vancouver)
Everything I Say Is True
Everything I Say Is True is a multi-media performance work by Southern California-based, Oglala/Lakota artist Kite, aka Suzanne Kite. In the performance Kite constructs a complex narrative through the use of her own family’s ephemera and historical documents as well as through a new body of work in various mediums, including video, sound and sculpture. Everything I Say Is True considers concepts of truth in relation to Oglala Lakota knowledge systems.
This piece was commissioned by the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and was curated by Jacqueline Bell.
NIGHTLY
Nicolas Teichrob (Ucluelet) and Giorgio Magnanensi
Spun Spectra
Nicolas Teichrob’s projects seek to expand the collective awareness of environmental issues while encouraging outdoor recreation and exploration of our wild places. His installation Spun Spectra is a photographic sound series of illuminated prints backed by resonating cedar panels that explore the diversity and simple complexities of spider web structures by capturing the refraction and diffraction of sunlight.
SPECIAL EVENT
Resonances – the appearing of something new
Saturday, October 19, 9:30AM – 11:30AM
Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Integrated Motion Studio – D1400, Ground Floor – Northeast Corner (520 East 1st Avenue)
FREE EVENT – OPEN TO ALL
A table-ronde discussion with festival artists, and ECUAD/Leaning Out of Windows artists and researchers; moderated by Randy Lee Cutler, Ingrid Koenig and Giorgio Magnanensi. This discussion will explore ideas about emergence and perceptual emergence within different embodied forms of resonance. Participating artists include: Linda Bouchard, Leslie Garcia, Cyrille Henry, Elvira Hufschmid, Suzanne Kite, Paloma López, Nicolas Montgermont and Atau Tanaka.
Top photo: Sammy Chien, W(e)aves 0.6 (work-in-progress), photo by Janina Schabig.
