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 an installation 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.
listen performance at Studio PASS New York, 1981
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
photos by Adolf Alcañiz, Pere Noguera, Juan Naranjo, Vanessa Pey, Nil Tous
