LA PLACE hosts its second edition of Interpose, with Barbara Held and Benton C Bainbridge: Pausa (Casiverde), 2017. Pausa is an ongoing series of artworks and performances for flute, digital sound and analog Video Synth, here realized as a 4-channel media artwork of analog-synthesized video, acoustic and computer sound. Casiverde is presented as a four digital files, each uniquely “fingerprinted” via artHash, taken from residency sessions at CultureHub in NYC. June, 2019 Curated by Mayssa Fattouh
Near Mirador de La Corona /28°22’32.5″N 16°36’06.5″W/ 23.11.18, 8:10 PM
Prácticas Territoriales (visitantes con oídos), a series of interventions by foreign sound artists on the island of Tenerife Laboratorio de Acción – TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes Curator: Juan Matos Capote November 30-December 14, 2018
LAND-ING is a multi-channel sound installation by Barbara Held and Daniel Neumann that was developed exclusively from recordings they had made interacting with the landscape of the island of Tenerife during a two-week residency. During this time they undertook field trips to seek out acoustically interesting terrains and places. At those sites Held used her flute and flute-like instruments, and Neumann played test tones (pink noise, sine waves etc.) to articulate specific acoustic phenomena and to sonically relate to the land. Landscape becomes something very different when approached from an aural perspective.
The project was part of the series “Prácticas Territoriales” curated by Juan Matos Capote and shown at TEA, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (Santa Cruz, Dec 2018). The multi-channel installation became a new acoustic place, algorithmically meandering through the different recordings and different places.
Comisariado: José Iges y Manuel Olveira Coordinación: Helena López Camacho
Francesc Abad, Ignasi Aballí, José Luis Alexanco, Alain Arias-Misson, Armadanzas (Paz Brozas y Víctor Martínez), Elena Asins, Manuel Barbadillo, Llorenç Barber, Cristina Barroso, Ricardo Bellés/José Iges, Cathy Berberian, Josep Lluis Berenguer, José Manuel Berenguer, Denys Blacker, Jaap Blonk, Peter Bosch/ Simone Simons, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, José Luis Castillejo, Merce Cunningham, Darío Corbeira, Analivia Cordeiro, Philip Corner, Carlos Cruz De Castro, Maria Escribano, Pelayo Fernández Arrizabalaga, Esther Ferrer, Giovanni Fontana, Terry Fox, Laura Gibellini, Yolande Harris, Barbara Held/ Benton C Bainbridge, Joël Hubaut, Concha Jerez, Tom Johnson, Manuel Jular, Mauricio Kagel, Nader Koochaki, Elena Lavellés, Le Corbusier, Lugan, José Maldonado, Walter Marchetti, Abel Martín, Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny, Julie Mehretu, Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Luis De Pablo, Tatiana Parcero, George Perec, Ximena Pérez Grobet, Miguel Ángel Rego, Inken Reinert, La Ribot, Alyce Santoro, Eusebio Sempere, Álvaro Terrones, Valcárcel Medina, Jesús Villa Rojo, Christian Wolff, Iannis Xenakis, Zaj
Ventanas, expandiendo la música a lo visual Galería de arte & documentos June 13 – July 6, 2018
Scores and drawings by Llorenç Barber and a wide range of audiovisual work made since the 1970’s in collaboration with Carles Santos, Benton C Bainbridge, Seth Cluett, Eugènia Balcells y Pere Noguera.
Ventanas, “windows”, suggests a sense of a multitude of activity in the world that can be experienced in its different interactions, putting together pieces from different eras, recent and not so recent collaborations. “You cannot recreate the moment”,as Bill T. Jones said in a recent article for the New York Times about how artists revisit their past works, but in combining them, I have composed aninstallation in which everything, sound and the visual, is interconnected. Barbara Held
La exposición revisa una parte de la amplia producción de los compositores Llorenç Barber y Barbara Held que iniciaron sus actividades en la década de 1970, periodo de gran efervescencia artística y de cambios radicales en la forma de entender la creación artística y musical. Los dos compositores han partido de diferentes planteamientos, aunque sus caminos se han cruzado en muchas ocasiones. A lo largo de los últimos cuarenta años, sus composiciones, actuaciones y performances se han ido expandiendo hacia lo visual y los ha convertido en dos importantes figuras del arte sonoro realizado en España. La exposición está compuesta por partituras originales, dibujos y documentos de Llorenç Barber; de Barbara Held hay un conjunto de videos e instalaciones que ha realizado en colaboración con Carles Santos, Benton C Bainbridge, Seth Cluett, Eugènia Balcells y Pere Noguera. Juan Naranjo
Carles Santos:682-3133, Buffalo Minnesota (1977)
16mm film, video copy restored by Adolf Alcañiz
682-3133 Buffalo, Minnesota is a film/composition for solo flute, a piece of music constructed with elements of film. An example of what Tom Johnson calls Santos’ passionate, romantic minimalism, the piece uses the musical rhythm of film’s repeating frames in parallel with a gradual expanding of the phrases played on the flute.
Seth Cluett: the bifurcation of nature (2018) performance, score and sound sculpture
A form activated by air, a cylinder filled with turbulence, carefully splits human breath with technology. 19th century aesthetics and the concurrent developments in the physical sciences tie structure, nature, and system in the design of the flute. If it can be said that musical language approaches creative exhaustion through the use of the flute as a machine of expression, what languages exist inside the flute itself? What formal possibilities are latent in its design? This work considers the modularity of the instrument, normally a convenience for transport, as a point of departure for a new engagement with this icon of historical music making as an object to be seen at work adapting to the strangeness of the present. This piece is part of a series of works where the acoustical and mechanical design of classical musical instrument are pitted against themselves by 3D-printed modification, calling into question the perfection of tuning, the virtuosity of performers, and the physical form of the instrument themselves.
Seth Cluett’s work is supported by Nokia Bell Labs
Barbara Held / Benton C Bainbridge: Pausa (Casiverde), 2017 (installation view) Digital media – SD video | 4 CRT monitors, headphones video
Pausa is an ongoing collaborative project by two multidisciplinary artists who are exploring the live creation of images and spatialized sound while extending the traditional time frame of performance. A performed installation or durational performance, Pausa activates space with multi-channel generative sound and live analog video. Our performances have created a body of recorded images in different formats including single channel video with stereo sound, and 4 channel video variations that interact with generative sound in an installation format. The project has been presented at the University of Minnesota at St. Cloud, Studio Z in St. Paul, Harvestworks in New York City, Subtropics Festival in Miami, and Barcelona’s Sampler Series.
Barbara Held and Benton C Bainbridge’s Pausa (Casiverde), 2017 is a series of digital media artworks excerpted from rehearsal sessions during a micro-residency at CultureHub in New York City.
Eugenia Balcells: Clear Music (1981) score/book-object realization as video (2018)
Clear Music is an object/score that consists of 13 pages of transparent plastic that contain different shaped transparent plastic objects that can move freely inside the pages, relating in different ways to the lines of the musical staff. The musician plays the different configurations, distortions and reflections as musical notation. In performance, large photographic images of the score are projected on the wall or screen, illuminating the space with pure light.
This graphic score has been realized by Barbara Held (Performance A-Z Storefront for art and Architecture. New York. 1982, Symphony Space, New York. 1982, Film in the Cities. St.Paul. 1983), Malcolm Goldstein (Experimental Intermedia Foundation, New York. 1982, Neue Galerie Linz. Austria. 1982), and by Llorenç Barber (Otras Músicas, Teatro Pradillo, Madrid. 1993,Imágenes para Sonidos. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. 1995) It was presented as part of Possibility of Action. The Life of the Score, an exhibition curated by Barbara Held and Pilar Subirà, MACBA 2008.
Barbara Held / Pere Noguera YGREGA / Entre Motiu i Resultat, (1995) Installation 10 photos with photocopies (copigrafia) 4 channel audio, (4 small speakers, 2 stereo amplifiers, 2 mp3 players)
In 1995 we made several experimental performances in the soundscape of a pile of industrial refuse in la Bisbal d’Emporda. Barbara Held made a 4 channel recording. We first presented the installation at Galeria l’Angelot in Barcelona with 10 “copigrafies” or photo/photocopy collages next to the sound, as a form of resonance of the collaborative work. The small speakers act as filters, reproducing only a limited range of frequencies.
Barbara Held / Benton C Bainbridge Observatory / Lisa Joy (X), 2013-2018 Generative audiovisual installation, modified video game console, modular synthesizer
Observatory / Lisa Joy W(2013-2016) is a media installation artwork, an interface that transforms one energy system into another. Observatory, a sonification of helioseismological measurements, translates numeric data into another natural numeric structure: the overtone series of a sampled flute note, filtered and reinforced in the rhythm of the sound waves produced by solar oscillations. Like an oscillation between a microscope and a telescope, Held varies the intensity of harmonics (the building blocks of sound) to highlight the rich deep abstraction of pure tone and the immediacy of the breath, while Bainbridge’s system divides the sound into component frequencies that are visualized onto the display, creating calligraphic patterns from the same electronic signals.
Bainbridge’s Lisa Joy generates electronic drawings with an analog video synthesizer and a modified video game console. He assembled a set of unique Eurorack modules into a custom system to create electronic calligraphy. Lissajous patterns emerge from the relationship of 3 signals which guide the electron gun from left to right, top to bottom, and up and down in brightness. The shapes vary as the 3 waves dance in relationship to each other and the sound frequencies.
Observatory was first created in 2013 for Bioderivas, Museo de la Naturaleza y el Hombre, Tenerife, and was presented by Contour Editions at Eyebeam in New York City.Observatory / Lisa Joy was shown as part of “Escuchar con los ojos. Arte sonoro en España, 1961-2016”, a group exhibition of Spanish Sound Art from the past half century at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid in 2017.
Audio software created by Ariadna Alsina Data thanks to the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias
Concert + audiovisual installation
Sampler Series, l’Auditori, Barcelona 05/18/2018
Barbara Held, flute
Benton C Bainbridge, video
Josep Aymi, custom audio software
Stereo mix of multi-channel live performance
“Pausa” is an A/V synthesis system that generates variations in the timbre of live flute and layers abstract forms, building a multi-channel installation work in live performance. Part of my series of pieces shaping subtle variations in the intensity of harmonics of the flute, the generative sound composition pauses or holds flute sounds as a static image, using simple studio effects that make slight variations in the stereo image of the sound and an “overdrive” that awakens or enhances high partials, creating a fluid and shimmering sound texture that is further modified by control voltages and other data being received from the video instruments. The performed sound and video create a generative installation.
Benton C Bainbridge & Barbara Held: Casiverde), 2017 Video sculpture (CRT monitors, media players, digital media) Singular Edition Barbara Held and Benton C Bainbridge: Casiverde, 2017, derives from Pausa—an ongoing series of artworks and performances for flute, digital sound and analog Video Synth. Casiverde is realized as a 4-channel media artwork of analog-synthesized video, acoustic and computer sound, presented as a four digital files, each uniquely “fingerprinted” via artHash, taken from residency sessions at CultureHub in NYC.
Ruidos, silencio, acciones, poesía
Música experimental y arte sonoro, 1950-2017
Barcelona 15 / 06 / 2017
Durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX se dio una importante interrelación entre música y arte, siguiendo las corrientes iniciadas, a principios de siglo, por músicos y artistas futuristas o dadaístas. Los artistas de la nueva vanguardia, frecuentemente, tuvieron un carácter interdisciplinar, se sintieron atraídos por diferentes medios y, los músicos, por los nuevos programas artísticos, produciéndose una desintegración de los límites y de las fronteras entre disciplinas.
La exposición está compuesta por unas 70 obras y documentos relacionados con la música experimental y el arte sonoro: instalaciones, partituras, discos, cassetes, discos compactos, libros, fotografías, dibujos, litografías, videos y películas de algunos de los creadores más relevantes de los últimos sesenta años. A traves de sus obras y documentos que conforman la exposición, podemos hacer un recorrido visual y sonoro de los últimos 60 años de experimentación.
Creadores presentes en la muestra: John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Katrin Stockhausen, Mestres-Quadreny, Luis de Pablo, Juan Hidalgo, Walter Marchetti, Eduardo Polonio, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Francesc Abad, Carlos Santos, Barbara Held, Jordi Benito, Concha Jerez, Richard Hamilton, Dieter Roh, Llorenc Barber, Francesca Llopis, Tacita Dean, Ana Solano, Hugo Westerdahl, Badouin Oosterlynk, Jordi Cerdá, Raoul Hausmann, Henri Chopin, Joan Brossa, Vicenç Altaio, Badouin Oosterlynk, Christina Kubisch, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, Brian Eno, Pedro Garhel, Robert Ashley, Bob Wilson, Giacinto Scelsi, Llorenç Balsach, Llorenç Barber, Hugo Westerdahl, Pelayo Arrizabalaga, Clónicos, Juan Belda, Victor Nubla, Arte Moderno, Fatima Miranda, Do the print, Irma Marco, Josué Coloma , Laura Llaneli La fura dels baus, Lawrence Weiner, Wolfgang Tilmans, Marcel.li Antunez, Giuseppe De Mattia, Jaume Plensa, entre otros
Actos durante la inauguración 15 de junio
20: 15 h Barbara Held inaugura Pausa, un performance/instalacion generativa con video de Benton C Bainbridge.
21 : 30 h Cena con la actuación de Iván Telefunken en el restaurant El Ninot, C/ Casanova, 133, 08036 Barcelona
Actos día 22 / 06 a partir de las 19 h
Ana Solano proyectará y comentará la video instalación La oscuridad es blanca que realizó con el compositor Iván Solano
Presentación del CD de recopilación musical de Pedro Garhel de Entourage y proyección de fragmentos de video de su obra Prótesis
Hugo Westerdal, nos ofrecerá una selección de músíca experimental española de las décadas de 1980 y 1990
Jordi Cerdà, proyectará Acte directa, art brut
Do the print, Irma Marco, Josué Coloma y Laura Llaneli presentarán su instalación Acaso hubo búhos acá
Barbara Held, sound
Benton C Bainbridge, video
Custom audio software by Josep Aymi
As a generative, multi-channel installation, Pausa was premiered at Kiehle Gallery in St. Cloud, Minnesota in March-April 2017. Curated by Godfre Leung, the artwork includes 4-channel generative sound by Held and 3 video paintings by Bainbridge. The moving picture artworks were made live in New York City and Minnesota, including a performance in Kiehle Gallery for the exhibition opening. The exhibition also includes unique art objects used to make the sound and image: the Binary Pattern Generator, and Lisa Joy (W) – a modified Vectrex and custom modular synthesizer which together make electronic light drawings.
Pausa is a collaborative composition by media artist Benton C. Bainbridge and composer Barbara Held pairing acoustic and electronic sound with realtime image processing in which sound and image “conduct” each other. A unique Binary Pattern Generator creates rhythms that are interpreted by an A/V synthesis system, generating variations in the timbre of a live flute performance and layering abstract forms into moving pictures. Held and Bainbridge co-designed the system, with custom audio software by Josep Aymi and Binary Pattern Generator by Brendan Byrne.
Part of a series of pieces shaping subtle variations in the intensity of harmonics of the tone of an acoustic instrument, the generative sound composition pauses or holds flute sounds as a static image, using simple studio effects that make slight variations in the stereo image of the sound and an “overdrive” that awakens or enhances high partials, creating a fluid and shimmering sound texture that is further modified by control voltages and other data being received from the video instruments.
The video system is a custom analog and digital set of modules that generates and combines lines and shapes, yielding rich textures and palettes. Custom audio software created by Josep Aymi, Binary Pattern Generator by Brendon Byrne.
As a generative, multi-channel installation, Pausa is currently on view at Kiehle Gallery in St. Cloud, Minnesota through Monday, April 10, 2017. Curated by Godfre Leung, the artwork includes 4-channel generative sound by Held and 3 video paintings by Bainbridge. The moving picture artworks were made live in New York City and Minnesota, including a performance in Kiehle Gallery for the exhibition opening. The exhibition also includes unique art objects used to make the sound and image: the Binary Pattern Generator, and Lisa Joy (W) – a modified Vectrex and custom modular synthesizer which together make electronic light drawings.
This project was produced in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts’ Electronic Media and Film Presentation Funds grant program, administered by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes.
The generative audiovisual installation Observatory / Lisa Joy by Barbara Held and Benton C Bainbridge was shown as part of “Escuchar con los ojos. Arte sonoro en España, 1961-2016”, a group exhibition of Spanish Sound Art from the past half century at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid. Held’s software system, a sonification of helioseismological measurements, translates numeric data into another numeric structure: the overtone series of a sampled flute note, filtered and reinforced in the rhythm of the sound waves produced by solar oscillations, varying the intensity of harmonics. These frequencies are used as control voltages to shape sinuous lines from Bainbridge’s modified video game console, creating calligraphic patterns from the same electronic signals.
ESCUCHAR CON LOS OJOS
Arte sonoro en España, 1961-2016
Fundación Juan March, Madrid
14 octubre 2016 – 15 enero 2017
14 October 2016 – 15 January 2017
“Escuchar con los ojos”, Visionary Film October 2016
……… a show that includes the main artistic expressions in Spain using sound by artists such as the ZAJ group, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Walter Marchetti, Francisco López, Esther Ferrer, Juan Hidalgo and Barbara Held.
Observatory, recorded at Eyebeam, New York
Encuentros AVLAB: Octubre 2016
Presentación de un proyecto audiovisual generativo en diálogo con música en directo 29.10.2016 18:00h Place: Auditorio (2ª planta)
Os presentamos una propuesta nueva para animar nuestros encuentros AVLAB del mes de octubre. En esta ocasión contamos con la presencia de Barbara Held, Andrés Sanz, Javier Adán y Santiago Rapallo. El encuentro tendrá lugar el próximo 29 de octubre a las 18h en Medialab-Prado. Barbara Held (USA/Esp) y Benton C. Bainbridge (USA)
Para este encuentro presentamos la instalación sonora Observatory / Lisa Joy que fue creada como parte de un proyecto de diseño sonoro para el consorcio de museos en Tenerife, Islas Canarias. En ella, Barabara Held trabaja junto con Benton C. Bainbridge en una obra que funciona como una oscilación entre un microscopio y un telescopio. Mientras que Barbara varía con su flauta la intensidad de los armónicos (los elementos mas básicos del sonido) para poner de relieve una rica y profunda abstracción del tono puro y la inmediatez de la respiración, el sistema de Bainbridge divide el sonido en sus frecuencias componentes que se visualizan en la pantalla, creando una caligrafía a partir de sus mismas señales electrónicas.
About the artists:
BARBARA HELD es flautista de formación clásica. Su trayectoria como compositora ha ido evolucionando a partir de colaboraciones con compositores experimentales como David Behrman, Alvin Lucier o Yasunao Tone, cuyo trabajo se basa en crear situaciones experimentales en las cuales el intérprete tiene libertad para explorar las posibilidades sonoras. Fue colaboradora fundadora del “Bowery Ensemble”, conjunto con estrechos vínculos con los compositores Morton Feldman y John Cage durante los años 80 en New York City, y en España, vivió el proceso de cambio con el “Grup Instrumental Català” con Carles Santos y Joan Brossa. Como flautista y artista sonoro, ha realizado muchos trabajos de instalación audiovisual en colaboración con otros artistas como Paloma Navares, Francesc Abad, Pere Noguera y Eugenia Balcells. Sus composiciones colaborativas de vídeo y música con Francesca Llopis, Adolf Alcañiz, Toni Serra y Benton C Bainbridge se han presentado en entornos muy diversos, desde el “Z to A Festival” organizado por el Storefront for Art and Architecture en las calles de New York hasta el Festival LOOP de videoarte en Barcelona. Fue comisaria de “Lines of Sight”, un ciclo de siete programas para radio web macba, la radio web del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, desde el que se explora diferentes ideas alrededor de la transmisión y el radioarte como medio de expresión creativa. Tambien por encargo del MACBA, se creo la exhibición “Posibilidad de acción. La vida de la partitura”, una exposición dedicada a la exploración de la notación musical entendida, en sentido amplio, como un soporte de transmisión a la vez musical y visual. Se reunió tanto partituras históricas como composiciones contemporáneas y también creaciones de artistas no estrictamente procedentes del campo de la música, entre las que se cuentan obras experimentales de los ámbitos del arte sonoro, el noise/art/rock experimental y los territorios fronterizos entre estos y otros medios de creación. Fue creadora del festival “Musica a Metronom”, donde desarrollo un laboratorio de creación artística en colaboración con científicos del CSIC.
BENTON C BAINBRIDGE es un artista del Bronx, New York City, que trabaja con sus propios sistemas personalizados para crear ambientes de inmersión, instalaciones interactivas y obras de arte con video en tiempo real. Como residente en el Experimental Television Center, Bainbridge hizo obras que aplican las estrategias formales y prácticas de la música a las imágenes en movimiento. Ha sido VJ para 2 giras mundiales de los Beastie Boys, e creo efectos especiales de vídeo para “Mirar el Sol” de On the Radio. Proyectos recientes incluyen Kaki King / Resplandeciente Imágenes “El cuello es un puente para el Cuerpo” y dos colaboraciones con Jin HI Kim, “Ghost Komungobot” y “Digital Buddha”. Bainbridge ha sido artista residente de One Step Beyond desde su creación; esta serie mensual de música y obras visuales esta en su novena temporada en el Museo Americano de Historia Natural de New York. Bainbridge es profesor del School of Visual Arts facultad de informatica. Su navegador generativo “justasecXYZ # 3” se mostró recientemente en la exposición de MFACA “Techtonic Shift” y en línea en justasec.XYZ.
Observatory / Lisa Joy is a generative audiovisual installation created by two multidisciplinary artists, Barbara Held (USA/Spain) and Benton C Bainbridge (USA). It is currently on view as part of “Escuchar con los ojos. Arte sonoro en España, 1961-2016”, a group exhibition of Spanish Sound Art from the past half century at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid. Tones and flute from Held’s software system (coding by Ariadna Alsina) are used as control voltages to shape sinuous lines from Bainbridge’s modified videogame console.
Observatory, a sonification of helioseismological measurements, translates numeric data into another numeric structure: the overtone series of a sampled flute note, filtered and reinforced in the rhythm of the sound waves produced by solar oscillations. Like an oscillation between a microscope and a telescope, Held varies the intensity of harmonics (the building blocks of sound) to highlight the rich deep abstraction of pure tone and the immediacy of the breath, while Bainbridge’s system divides the sound into component frequencies which are visualized onto the display, creating calligraphic patterns from the same electronic signals. Observatory was first created for Bioderivas, Museo de la Naturaleza y el Hombre, Tenerife. (Data thanks to the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, audio software created by Ariadna Alsina).
Benton C Bainbridge’s Lisa Joy generates electronic drawings with an analog video synthesizer and a modified video game console. Bainbridge assembled a set of unique Eurorack modules into a custom system to create the abstract moving paintings. The lissajous patterns emerge from the relationship of 3 signals which guide the electron gun from left to right, top to bottom, and up and down in brightness. The shapes vary as the 3 waves dance in relationship to each other and the sound frequencies.
Carles Santos: 
Barbara Held / Pere Noguera
