Sala Ricson, Hangar, Barcelona February 8-10, 2016
Alimentacióis a collaborative performance-based sound installation created by more than 20 artists under the direction of Barbara Held, as the final project of the Sound Installation course of the Master in Sound Art, University of Barcelona. It was conceived as a sonic mirror, a site-specific exploration of concepts of feedback (electronic and analog). The visually transparent glassed-in booth in the Sala Ricson creates an aural boundary. Sounds are performed live in the brightly-lit booth, and sent to a series of digital and analogue performers in the large, dark main space, where they are re-alimented and transformed. The sound performances are related to the celebration of art world rituals such as the opening of an exhibition. The ritual is a way in which we relate to our surroundings. There is an element of voyeuristic pleasure in the mis en scene.
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The process took place over the space of 3 days, with a live invited audience at the project’s “closing”.
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An improvised performance for a specific space that activates an evolving 4 channel sound installation. The flute tunes around a very soft high-pitched drone that seems to change location depending on the room’s acoustics.
Una performance improvvisata che “collabora” con lo spazio acustico, trasformandosi in un’installazione sonora in evoluzione continua.
Many musicians, improvisers, composers, and sound artists were asked to record 7 minutes of sound-making using any method familiar and/or exciting to them. Suggestions, meant to be helpful (and to be taken, or not), included: recording in one pass, devising one’s own structure, imagining shared sonic space, and incorporating stillness or silence. The music could be improvised, composed, or created with any combination of methods that suited the artist.
In this installation, four recordings by four different contributing artists play simultaneously, each recording through its own speaker. The four sound files are chosen at random from all contributed files, forming impromptu quartets. Each quartet lasts for 7 minutes, with a 30-second pause before the next one begins.
The speakers are Baritone Hemisphere Speakers, which produce localized sound emanating from each speaker’s position and interact with a room’s natural acoustics. Each speaker is suspended from the ceiling at equal distance to one another, allowing installation-goers to traverse the space of the installation to experience different mixes of the quartets. The display shows which artists are currently being heard in each speaker.
The format of QUARTETS provides an avenue for participation for those engaged with sound-based art practices, some of whom perhaps do not have a performance practice, do not sell music objects, and/or cannot physically be present at the OPENSIGNAL festival (May 2014), for which this piece was created. The installation denies the power structures common to music performance (such as headliners, openers) by giving everyone’s contributions the same weight and equal footing in a unique setting. Additionally, it provides a platform upon which four artists, who might not know one another, may perform together. The result is a series of incredibly compelling surprises from the chance-determined quartets, as their sounds share time together.
There are 86 artists featured in this installation, allowing for a total of 2,123,555 possible quartets. Listening to all possible combinations would require 30 years and nearly 4 months.
QUARTETS is a sound installation by Stephan Moore in collaboration with OPENSIGNAL. First showing at the inaugural OPENSIGNAL Festival on May 16-17th, 2014 at the Granoff Center. Created to celebrate the Spring 2014 OPENSIGNAL project at Brown University, led by Asha Tamirisa and Caroline Park.
CONTOUREDITIONS is pleased to present another installment dedicated to multi-channel sound installations, this time featuring two works – by Barbara Held and Kenneth Kirschner. Both pieces aim directly to the intersections of focused listening, experience, material, and space transforming the temporal make up of reception, and the perception of where the work is being presented. The listening situation is considered to be an integral part to the pieces, which is the general idea behind ContourEditions Installation. The label is committed to serve the pieces by ensuring adequate conditions for listening, care for the situation, attention to scale and space, its characteristics, layout, context (surroundings, conceptual framework), chosen equipment, and visitors flow. The programming of the label focuses on sound works that are consequences of a process, in which both content and format are equally relevant and conceptually intertwined. Topics of interest are sound phenomenology (perception, localization, physicality), sonic semantics (identity, meaning, context, structure) and topology (a broader study of spatial phenomena). ContourEditions Installation favors pieces that don’t compromise technically or aesthetically.
software development, Ariadna Alsina and Wolfgang Gil
“Observatory“ was originally made as part of a sound design project for the consortium of museums in Tenerife, Canary Islands. Using data obtained from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, it translates one natural phenomena into another by using the rhythm of wave motion on the sun to filter and artificially reinforce the intensity of frequencies of the upper partials of a flute sound. This is similar to the performance practice of instrumentalists who shape the timbre of a musical sound by changing air pressure with the lips, or the pressure of the bow on a string. The piece was first presented in “BioDervias” at the Museo de la Naturaleza y el Hombre, Tenerife with Yapci Ramos and Richard Garet.
Video: Yapci Ramos
Flute: Barbara Held
Media: 2 Digital Video HD
Duration: Indeterminate
pared left 3´49´´ / pared right 3´35´´
Year: 2014
Fuerteventura
Ed 3 + A/P
Video Editor: Adolf Alcañiz
Sound Mastering: Ferran Conangla
Created for La Isla Imaginada II, Centro de Arte Juan Ismael, Fuerteventura in 2014, the island was imagined by capturing an image of one concrete point in the landscape of the island. Like the wall of volcanic rock that once separated the island of Fuerteventura into two Guanche (the ancient natives of the Canary Islands) kingdoms, “la pared”, these videos picture two sides of an imaginary line, one to the right and one to the left. The soundtrack was composed to be heard on headphones only. The sound was recorded in close proximity to a stereo microphone, with the flutist moving from one side to the other. The listener will experience the sound intimately, as it moves just behind and on either side of his or her head.
Directional pattern, Neumann microphone
La Isla Imaginada II, Centro de Arte Juan Ismael, Abr 10, 2014, Fuerteventura – LOOP#14, Barcelona
2 Monitors mounted horizontally as one piece / diptych
2 Digital Media Players Loop system
closed stereo headphones mounted at the midpoint of the two monitors, with cable long enough to be able to see both monitors at once
Observatory Movement II, generative sound installation by Barbara Held software created by Ariadna Alsina
The roots of the natural sciences lie in the fertile soil of discovery and an embrace of the unknown. At their core, the sciences mediate the surprising mysteries and mundane realities of the world around us. Through careful observation, we collect, catalog, and translate from geographic region to socio-cultural region, from ecosphere to biosphere, crossing boundaries of language and discipline to arrive at an understanding of the complexities of the environment. BioDerivas presents the work of three artists, Richard Garet (USA/Uruguay), Barbara Held (Spain/USA), and Yapci Ramos (Spain). The core activities of these artists has a strong resonance with the mission of the museum; by observing the world around us, they use technology to collect and present images and sounds that re-contextualize how we perceive the world. Through close-listening, focused sight, and careful attention to perception Garet, Held, and Ramos have created a micro-environment in the museum that rewards active exploration and encourages thoughtful contemplation of how we understand the world around us through our senses of sight and sound.
These pieces present a continuum between the environment we inhabit and the mechanism through which make sense of it. The work of Yapci Ramos shown here is forceful in its subtle simplicity. In Bruma, her soft, stark images of pino canario printed on cotton paper are juxtaposed against their slowly moving video counterparts on the opposite wall. The moment captured by each is deeply engaged with its site, drawing on the tension between the viewer’s memory of similar locations and the limits of perception.
These works were developed in collaboration with the composer, performer, and sound artist Barbara Held. Her focused and unfaltering audio work occupying half of the space both emphasizes the stillness of these works and draws attention to their movement. In, Observatory, Ramos and Held create an evolving immersion that highlights the sublime quality of flora. The up-facing camera, the smooth, faster than walking pace, and the steady careful development of Held’s sound work sonifying the gases of the sun creates an other-worldly distance from which to contemplate the source material. Held’s headphone sound work Bucio on the other hand has a documentary approach, employing the conch shell to investigate the manner in which the pre-Hispanic Guanches communicated across the terrain of the islands through sound.
In contrast Richard Garet’s work explores concepts of transformation and translation between audio and visual information in its raw form. The silent vertical video works were developed using computer algorithms that took sound as an input and after generating the video the sound was taken away, creating a visual image that mirrors sound in its manner of movement. In the two audiovisual works, Garet explores the relationship between a desirable signal and an undesirable noise. Esion – Nothing is Something uses computer processes to degrade image and sound creating a form of data erosion while IP, Iota Expansion Varation I builds up from a simple black and white frame that results in almost planetary imagery suggesting the emptiness of space.
The common link between the earliest Cabinets of Curiosities of the renaissance, the natural history museums of the 17th century, and the modern centers of discovery common today is the thoughtful display of objects that implore the public to appreciate the experience of the new. Both on their own and in their interaction, the work of Garet, Held, and Ramos simultaneously draws attention to perception while presenting the unfamiliar alongside the commonplace and expanding our understanding of sound and image within our environment.
Seth Cluett
Las raíces de las Ciencias Naturales nacen de la tierra fértil donde crecen los descubrimientos y se abraza lo desconocido. En su esencia, las ciencias concilian los misterios más sorprendentes con la realidad cotidiana. A través de la observación minuciosa, recopilamos, catalogamos y transferimos de la región geográfica a la socio-cultural, de la ecosfera a la biosfera, cruzando los límites del lenguaje y la disciplina para llegar a comprender las complejidades de nuestro entorno.
BioDerivas presenta las obras de tres artistas multidiciplinares: Richard Garet (Estados Unidos/Uruguay), Barbara Held (España/Estados Unidos) y Yapci Ramos (España), cuyo trabajo artístico guarda estrecha relación con la misión del museo. En este sentido, en su afán por observar el mundo que les rodea, se valen de la tecnología para captar y mostrar imágenes y sonidos que permiten re-contextaulizar nuestra percepción del mundo. A través de la escucha atenta, la mirada focalizada y del complejo proceso de la percepción humana, Garet, Held y Ramos han creado un micro-hábitat en el museo que premia la exploración activa y promueve la contemplación reflexiva para llegar al entendimiento del mundo que nos rodea a través de los sentidos de la vista y el oído.
Estas piezas presentan una continuidad entre el entorno que habitamos y el mecanismo a través del cual éste cobra sentido. En el caso de Yapci Ramos, la fuerza de la obra que mostramos aquí radica en su sutil simplicidad. En Bruma, las imágenes delicadas y sobrias del pino canario impresas en papel de algodón se yuxtaponen a las que, con movimiento lento, aparecen proyectadas en la pared de enfrente. El momento capturado por cada una de estas obras está estrechamente ligado al lugar que ocupan en su espacio natural, generando una tensión entre el recuerdo de localizaciones similares del que observa y los límites de la percepción.
Esta creación artística se llevó a cabo en colaboración con la compositora, intérprete y artista sonoro Barbara Held. Su trabajo con los sonidos, focalizado y constante, inunda la sala enfatizando la quietud de estas obras y resaltando, al mismo tiempo, su movimiento. En Observatory, Ramos y Held crean una inmersión evolutiva que destaca la naturaleza sublime de la Flora. La cámara orientada hacia arriba, el ritmo regular y fluido −ligeramente más rápido que los pasos del ser humano en su caminar− y las emisiones sonoras constantes que sonifican el sonido de los gases del Sol −fruto del trabajo minucioso y concienzudo de Held−, nos transportan a otra dimensión etérea donde poder llegar a contemplar el objeto original. Por otro lado, Bucio, trabajo sonoro de Held basado en auriculares, parte de un enfoque documental en el que se emplea una caracola para investigar el modo en que los Guanches −pueblo aborigen prehispánico de las Islas Canarias− se comunicaban a lo largo de la topografía de estas islas a través del sonido.
En contraposición, la obra de Richard Garet explora los conceptos de transformación y conversión de sonidos en imágenes en su forma primigenia. La obra que se plasma en el vídeo vertical sin sonido se creó utilizando algoritmos informáticos que tomaban el sonido como punto de partida. Una vez elaborado el vídeo, este sonido se omite, creando una imagen visual que, en su movimiento, refleja el elemento sonoro que ha dejado de existir. En estos dos trabajos audiovisuales Garet explora la relación entre una señal deseable y un ruido de fondo. En Esion – Nothing is something, por ejemplo, utiliza procesos informáticos para degradar la imagen y el sonido creando una forma de erosión de datos, mientras que IP, Iota Expansion Varation I surge desde un simple marco en blanco y negro que produce imágenes casi planetarias que sugieren el vacío del espacio.
El nexo común entre los primeros Gabinetes de Curiosidades del Renacimiento, los museos de Historia Natural del siglo XVII y los modernos centros de investigación de hoy en día, es la cuidada exhibición de objetos que imploran al público que disfrute de la experiencia de lo nuevo. El trabajo de Garet, Held y Ramos, tanto individualmente como en su conjunto, resaltan la importancia de la percepción al mismo tiempo que nos muestran aquello que nos resulta diferente y desconocido junto con lo que podría resultar más habitual y cotidiano, expandiendo, de este modo, el conocimiento que tenemos del sonido y la imagen dentro de nuestro entorno más inmediato.
Seth Cluett
Fragment of installation sound, 2 open audio-visual works by Richard Garet and generative sound installation by Barbara Held
Catalunya Musica joins the Ars Acustica Series of the EBU Euroradio Season. This is the first time that Catalunya Musica collaborates live with the EBU Ars Acustica Group on a collaborative concert with the Czech Radio. The concert titled AETHERART will be played live in 2 studios, Prague Improvisation Orchestra in Studio HRDINU in Prague, and members of the Orquesta del Caos in the studio of Catalunya Musica in Barcelona. The program consists of two collaborative group compositions by each ensemble, separated by 3 short interludes performed virtually via radio transmission by several musicians from each group.
Performers:
From Barcelona: Barbara Held, flute; José Manuel Berenguer, live electronics; Tom Chant, saxs; Míriam Fèlix, violoncel and Pilar Subirà, percussión. Gerard Font, sound engineer.
From Prague: PIO : Jirí Durman, bass clarinet; Petr Vrba, trumpet and loudspeaker; Ivan Palacky, amplified sewing machine and voice; Lucie Vítková, acordeón and voice; Jorge Boehringer, violin; George Cremaschi, double bass; Michal Matejka, guitar; Ken Ganfield, live electronics; Michal Zboril, live electronics; Matthew Goodheart, piano