SightSonic Artist & Event Information
Template, curated by Joe Gilmore and Christopher Murphy, presents current tendencies in visual media by interdisciplinary artists working in the fields of digital music, generative art and graphic design. The exhibition features an exclusive edition of high quality fine art prints alongside supported digital imagery. Including work by 3.14..., Alorenz, Dextro, Mark Fell, Tina Frank, Nicholas Kove, Lia and Fairchild Semiconductor.
Template curators and artists:
Christopher Murphy:
Christopher Murphy is co-founder of Fällt, an independent publishing house specialising in experimental music, fine art, design and criticism. A multi-disciplinary artist with a background in exhibition design and event management he was responsible for curating, administering and overseeing all of Fällt's projects between 1992 and 2006. In addition to ensuring Fällt's design and promotional material remained consistent across the differing media Fällt dealt in, Murphy was instrumental in curating and realising 'Invisible Cities' and '35 mm » Design in Miniature' amongst other Fällt releases as part of his role in collective Fehler.
www.fehlergesellschaftmitbeschrankterhaftung.com
Joe Gilmore:
Joe Gilmore is a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer working in the fields of computer music, video and algorithmic art. His music has been published on various music labels including 12k, L–ne, Cut, Alku, Entr'acte, Fällt and Leonardo Music Journal. He is co-creator of rand()%, an automated internet radio station which streamed realtime generative music. His work has been exhibited at numerous digital art festivals and galleries including Lovebytes (Sheffield), Sonar (Barcelona), Ear to the Earth (New York), and ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medienteknologie, Karlsruhe).
joe.qubik.com
3.14...
3.14... are a mysterious collective allegedly from Japan. Their CD '?' originally published by Scandinavian record label 1,024, has recently been reissued by Fällt.
3.14159265358979323846264338327950.com
www.fallt.com/ferric/delta
Mark Fell
Mark is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Sheffield. He works with new technologies, sound, image and interaction, bringing together interests in experimental electronic musics, contemporary art, philosophy and computer science. Mark has performed and exhibited extensively at major international festivals and institutions including: Sonar (Barcelona), Mutek (Montreal), Siggraph (Los Angeles), Powerhouse (Sydney), ACMI (Melbourne), ISEA (Paris), Hong Kong National Film Archive, The Barbican (London), The Corcoran (DC), Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt), Volksbuhne (Berlin), Liquid Room (Tokyo) and many others. His published sound works quickly placed him at the forefront of new digital musics with critically acclaimed releases on Mille Plateaux (Frankfurt), Or (London), Line/12k (New York), raster-noton (Berlin) and others.
www.markfell.com
Alorenz
Angela Lorenz is a print designer with a substantial technical background in pre-press. She has been freelancing since 1993, mainly for clients in music and culture. Over the last couple of years she has increasingly worked with non-print media.
Dextro
www.dextro.org
Tina Frank
The works of Tina Frank cannot be reduced to a singular area: she is a »visual artist« – her name is internationally known as a synonym for experimental design as well as visualisations of music/for music. In 1995, Tina Frank started up her own business as a designer and was soon referred to as one of Austria’s shooting stars in web design. She designs packing for music. Many of her cover designs, especially those for music labels Mego (Austria) und Idea Records (USA) have been published in numerous design reference works and are considered influential. The book »Graphic Design for the 21st Century« (Charlotte & Peter Fiell, Taschen Verlag) listed her among the top 100 graphic designers worldwide.
www.frank.at
Lia
Lia has been working on digital art since 1995, after graduating from the High-school for Music Students in Graz, Austria. Living in Vienna since then, she splits her time between visual design, web art, video and realtime visual performances, apparently different activities that she manages to bind together trough her unique approach to creativity and production. Over the last years she has also been an invited teacher at the Fachhochschule Joanneum in Graz, the École Cantonalle d'Art de Lausanne, and the Fine Arts University in Oslo.
www.wofbot.org
Fairchild Semiconductor
Fairchild Seminconductor have collaborated with numerous artists and design collectives worldwide, including design collective Fehler, record label 1,024, and Fällt Publishing. Their work centres on design and digital arts. Recent works include '100 Days', a collaboration with design collective Fehler published by Fällt Publishing, and 'Spam Prints', published by 1,024.
www.fairchildsemiconductor.org
Nicholas Kove
Nicholas Kove joined Fällt in 2006 to assist with cataloguing and updating the archive, in particular playing an instrumental role in moving www.fallt.com from a static site to a more efficient database driven site.
A web developer with considerable expertise he has contributed to numerous online publishers including F0F and Takete. He also runs recons.tructed.info, an online space for the development of web inspired works.
Through an imaginative use of mathematics and linguistics Kove's work primarily challenges two independent principles: the concept of post-mechanical reproduction, and the nature of the supposedly random.
Kove has contributed his considerable technical expertise to a number of Fällt's code-related works, helping to update and upgrade them. Notably collaborating with Fällt designers Fehler to create Imbecil Version 1.1, utilising the GD Library to create a more efficiently coded version of the work (delivering a considerably better quality work in less than 1% of the previous version's code).
A hacker in the truest sense of the word, his contribution to Fällt is ongoing.
Festival launch: The eighth SightSonic festival launches with an opportunity to meet some of the artists on this year’s bill. Have a drink and enjoy some low key sounds.
Christophe Charles - (born Marseille 1964), works with found sounds, and makes compositions using computer programs, insisting on the autonomy of each sound and the absence of hierarchical structure. His work has been described as “always unfolding in an organic way” and “making … seamless, constantly transforming soundscapes”.
Currently Associate Professor at Musashino Art University (Tokyo), he has released music on the German label Mille Plateaux / Ritornell ("undirected" series), and on several compilations (Mille Plateaux, Ritornell, Subrosa, Code, Cirque, Cross, X-tract, CCI, ICC, etc).
An album with Kozo Inada is due for release and the two will perform together after their solo sets.
Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) During a five month fellowship at NASA's Space Sciences Laboratory, Semiconductor explored the work of the scientists, specifically their visualisation techniques and the philosophies they employ to discover and experience near space. For this show they will present several award winning works made as a result of their time there, which reveal worlds beyond our sensory awareness bringing to light remarkable manifestations and probing the limits of human understanding.
Semiconductor make moving image works which reveal our physical world in flux; cities in motion, shifting landscapes and systems in chaos. Since 1999 UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have worked with digital animation to transcend the constraints of time, scale and natural forces; they explore the world beyond human experience, questioning our very existence.
Their work has been exhibited and performed in many venues in the UK (including the ICA and Tate Britain) and in the USA, Australia, France, Israel, Italy, China, Spain, Canada, Finland and Germany.
This year they will be performing live soundtracks to their monumental pieces ‘Brilliant Noise’ and ‘Magnetic Movie’ and showing other works.
Website: www.semiconductorfilms.com
Artists’ Platform Returns: Maggie Hall, from the 2006 Platform, brings new video installations in which mundane aspects of her own surroundings, including doorways as transitional states, have been re-created with a unique sense of creative energy.
People Like Us (Vicki Bennett):
For 16 years Vicki Bennett has been making CDs, radio, and A/V multimedia under the name People Like Us. By animating and recontextualising found footage collages Vicki gives an equally witty and dark view of popular culture with a surrealistic edge. People Like Us does an ongoing experimental arts radio and podcast show on WFMU, called "DO or DIY", which, since it began in 2003, has had over half a million Realplayer hits.
Vicki has shown work at, amongst others, Tate Modern, The National Film Theatre, Purcell Room, The ICA, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre, Sonar in Barcelona, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the BBC and Channel 4. She has also performed radio sessions for the BBC's John Peel, Mixing It, and also CBC, KPFA and many more in the US.
People Like Us will play a solo set and a joint performance with Ergo Phizmiz.
Kozo Inada (first UK performance) – Japanese sound artist Inada creates his music by ignoring all conscious sensory input, leading to a feeling of harmony without perception. His work has been described as ‘austere minimalism’ : “if you thought Ikeda was minimal, then check this one out!” (VITAL, Netherlands). He will play a solo set and a joint performance with Christophe Charles.
“All of my music is ruled by one philosophy. The best way for me to create my music is to ignore all conscious sensory input, which places me in a type of subconscious realm with stillness and motion, giving me a feeling of harmony without perception. Through my music I express and hide all of the elements that bring about this feeling. This sounds like a contradiction, but there is a niche for us to enter where this fine balance exists. After you discover this niche, you will identify a feeling that can totally devastate you afterwards.
The feeling I get at that moment comes from an inorganic energy, which controls all things. With the aim of expressing this feeling, I use symbolic and realistic sounds, which are very different from each other, while maintaining harmony. With a computer, utilizing natural rules, I continuously strive to make music that produces a perfect audio stream that will carry the listener to this place of harmony.”
Inada’s work has been described as ‘austere minimalism’ : “if you thought Ikeda was minimal, then check this one out!” (VITAL, Netherlands). He has performed in his home country, Japan, and in Germany, Taiwan, Spain, Australia and the Netherlands and more.
An album with Christophe Charles is due for release and the two will perform together after their solo sets.
Website : http://snd.jp.org/
Artists’ Platform An exhibition of exciting new digital works by emerging artists from across the UK. Participating artists were selected from a large number of submissions and represent the best in new British talent.
Jonathan Green, from the 2005 Platform and a returnee in 2006, brings a new work – “Piece for Large Metal Sheet”. This will be both an installation during the festival and a live performance by Jonathan. Jonathan will also perform two other works: Lightpipe for Kinetic Instruments and Spacebar for Motion Sensors.
A composer based in Cambridge, UK. Jonathan studied jazz, composition and technology at Leeds College of Music, Birmingham Conservatoire and the Academy of Music in Cracow, Poland, and has won numerous composition prizes.
As a music technologist Jonathan has worked throughout the UK and Europe, most notably at AGON (Milan) with composer Luca Francesconi, Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) with Martin Creed, Art Angel (London) and the BBC Proms with composer Julian Anderson. Jonathan regularly works with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group as a technologist.
As a composer Jonathan has been featured on BBC Radio 3 and has appeared at several leading festivals and concert series including the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Corsham Festival, and the BMIC Cutting Edge Series. Future performances are planned for Brighton, Birmingham, London and the Aldeburgh Festival. Jonathan was a NESTA Music Technology Entrepreneur Fellow, a Medici Fellow and is
currently a research and technical assistant at the Centre for Music and Science, Cambridge University.
Jamie Wyld. Jamie is a curator and professional in arts development, he has worked as visual arts officer for the Arts Council in London, Yorkshire and the South East, and has supported artists’ development through a number of roles, including as Digital Arts Programmer at Showroom, Sheffield. He has been guest curator at Lovebytes International Digital Arts Festival, and is co-director and founder of moving image platform, videoclub. He is currently Head of Media Arts at Lighthouse, Brighton, developing the commissioning programme, exhibitions and contextual events, as well as the professional development programme for artists. He is a Fine Art graduate, and has an MA in Arts and Cultural Management from the University of Sussex.
Over the past six years Ergo Phizmiz has developed a reputation as one of the most inventive and imaginative composers working in the world today. Across albums, radio-pieces, soundtracks, and installations, his work has been disseminated across the world and media to widespread acclaim. His work is marked out by a playfulness and mischievousness, coupled with an inside-out and upside-down knowledge of his medium. Although often associated with the sampling and plunderphonics movements, his music takes in a much wider scope of ideas, and can veer between 3.5 minute Dadaistic pop songs, 3.5 hour sound-collages, deranged multimedia installations, radio comedy-adventures, improvised and ambient music, solo instrumental compositions, visual collages, and text works in all sorts of contortions. Despite the breadth of his practice, the sound and spirit of the productions is always unmistakeably that of Mr Phiz.
His music has been released by many labels including Womb Records, Soleilmoon Recordings, The Wire, Vivo, Sonic Arts Network, Match My Foot, Egotwister, Sonore, and his own imprint Mukow, with forthcoming releases coming on Gagarin Records and Slag Records. His music has been performed at the Tate Modern, the Dutch Academy of Fine Art, the Royal Festival Hall, La Terra Trema Cherbourg, Kraak Festival, Worm, Extrapool, Teatru Ariel Transylvania, and Cologne Kulturbunker, and broadcast on stations including BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 3, KunstRadio, Resonance FM, WFMU, WRFL, VPRO, WDR3, DFM, Cherryade Radio, and Channel 4 Radio. Ergo also mixes and presents a weekly radio show 'Phuj Phactory' on New York radio station WFMU. Listen online (with a complete archive of past shows) at www.wfmu.org/playlists/ER. He has been awarded grants from Arts Council England, the PRS Foundation for New Music, and the residency scheme of the Leverhulme Trust. Among the artists with whom Ergo has collaborated are People Like Us (with whom he released the critically lauded "Perpetuum Mobile" album on Soleilmoon, and the innovative "Codpaste" podcast on WFMU), David Fenech, Felix Kubin, Satanicpornocultshop, Safety Scissors, Martha Moopette, Jack Phoenix, members of The Bees, Margite Zalite, Vernon Lenoir, and Irene Moon. He has composed music for films by Namaiki, Zenith Pitts, Erik Bumbledonk, Martha Moopette, and Christian Marclay.
Ergo's live performances are chaotic soundclashes of pop performance-art, and he has performed around the world to enthused audiences. One-man, a minidisc, a megaphone, some instruments, some horns, and some toys. Most recently he toured Europe with David Fenech.
Current projects include a large scale radiophonic work "The Faust Cycle" (using the Faust legend as the starting point for a radio-adventure in various dimensions and spaces), an ongoing residency at Dimbola Lodge on the Isle of Wight (using Victorian photography as the starting point for a new body of sound and multimedia works), and a number of new collaborations. He is currently fishing for a label to release his recently completed double-album "Things to Do and Make".
Ergo Phizmiz will play a solo set and a joint performance with People Like Us.
SightSonic Club Our regular late night club/bar event is back, presenting a more informal approach to digital music and visuals. This year in the revamped Kennedy’s Café Bar Basement – featuring Mr76ix, project dataline, Ed Martin, and sk3ks1.
Artists’ Platform Presents . . . In the tour around the Platform, the participating artists showcase their work and discuss its development with a live audience.
Angie Atmadjaja. Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, Angie Atmadjaja studied composition under Daryl Runswick at Trinity College of Music in London. In 1998, she attended the International Course for Professional Choreographers and Composers under the direction of Jonathan Burrows and Kevin Volans. This initiated a series of collaborations with choreographers such as Akram Khan, Melanie Clarke and Henrietta Hale.
With Akram Khan, "loose in Flight" has toured to Spain, New York and Singapore and been filmed for Channel 4 programme "4dance". Her most recent works include Man or Fish for the place Prize 2006 and Odd Honesty Code premiered as part of Spring Loaded 2007 at The Place Theatre. Further collaborations with dance companies and choreographers have included Compagnie Post Data (FRA) and Commerce (GER).
Angie Atmadjaja has been involved in a number of radio projects, notably for "And 1...", (2001) a BBC radio 3 programme by Duncan Fraser and Simon Dove detailing close relationships between composers and choreographers.
She has recently been chosen as a shortlisted composer with SPNM until 2010. She is currently living in York (UK) as one of the first holders of the Sir Jack Lyons Research Scholarship at the University of York and is working on minimal sound installations, influenced by James Turrell, Bridget Riley and Fred Sandback. They explore extreme audio perception and its impact on the apprehension of forms and space.
For SightSonic, Angie presents ‘States of Being’, a sound painting that celebrates the notion of being in a moment. Using only synthetic sound materials, the work aims to paint quiet still and moving ephemeral landscapes.
Craig Vear is a composer and musician working predominantly in contemporary, improvised and electroacoustic music for the concert hall, installation and theatre. In 1997 he co-founded the pop group Cousteau, which made 300,000 sales worldwide and gained a gold disc; as part of the duo ev2 he has been working with improvisation since 1992. During 2003-4 he held the Arts Council England Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey, which resulted in a large-scale composition created from field recordings. In 2006 Play: Antarctica was commissioned by Unicorn Theatre London about these experiences. Singing Ringing Buoy, an installation currently at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, was shortlisted for the 2005 PRS New Music Award. He currently holds a Leverhulme Fellowship as artist in residence with the Centre for Environmental and Marine Sciences at the University of Hull.
www.ev2.co.uk
Maggie Hall:
I produce versatile work that is developed mainly through experimentation. I intend to produce work without narrative and verbal content, work which exists to be experienced and that is not a reaction to theory. I use an amalgamation of different mediums and I am particularly interested in how the boundaries of video work can be relayed and understood.
My work has recently led me to consider ideas surrounding originality, foresight and synchronicity, control, the development of ideas and creative processes. I have become more interested in the process of creative work and produced work which shows an occurrence taking place and that is also suggestive of its own construction. These works also intend to try to compress or contain the initial creative energy and tensions that reveal them selves in their creation.
I am interested in the act of creating work but also the in-between, the construction of thought and finding ideas. In this work I have used structures reminiscent of plinths to convey various thoughts or ideas. For the external structures and some of the videos I have used mundane aspects of my own surroundings, including doorways as transitional states, and re-created them with a sense of creative energy. Some show clear imagery others appear more abstract and broken.
Recent works shown at Patrick Studios-Leeds, North East Office-Arts Council. Christs Hospital Boarding School-Horsham, Space 44-London.
For the festival, Maggie brings new video installations in which mundane aspects of her own surroundings, including doorways as transitional states, have been re-created with a unique sense of creative energy.
www.maggiehall.co.uk
www.da-n.org
Science City York and SightSonic seminars An informal day of learning about the digital world with Vicki Bennett [People Like Us] on sound and video manipulation, Semiconductor on their use of digital graphic technologies, Craig Vear on field recording and sound installations, Jamie Wyld on developing professional practice and getting your work shown and Joe Gilmore and Chris Murphy discussing creative curatorial and practical aspects of their 2D visual exhibition ‘Template’. Free refreshments will be provided.
SightSonic Late Breakfast Join us for pre-concert coffee and croissants at the Music Research Centre.