SightSonic Artists Platform 2008 – Participating Artists
Mike Marcus
Mike Marcus is a 35 year old multi-disciplinary artist and photographer, born in London and living between the UK and Tel Aviv. For 12 years he worked as a commercial artist for clients such as Coca Cola, L’Oreal and Orange. More recently he has been involved in political art on the streets of Tel Aviv resulting in both TimeOut Magazine and Economist.com labelling him as Israel’s answer to Banksy. Mike has also been credited as a digital artist on seven feature films including “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2007”.
In addition to Mike's solo shows which have been critically acclaimed by the Israeli national press and television networks, he has also launched a number of high profile street installations and contributed to two Tel Aviv group shows.
Now permanently resident in the UK, Mike's work has already began to appear on the streets of London and a number of new projects are scheduled for the near future.
Statement:
The work's title; “Exogamy” is used by Anthropologists to refer to the practice of breeding outside of one’s cultural or ethnic group. Influenced by his own experiences growing up in a closed and xenophobic religious community and, more recently, as a witness to the violent tension between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian refugees, the artist set out to “exogamisze” or metaphorically reach out to a wider population by digitally merging his own self-portrait with those of others.
The creative process used (known as "morphing" in the visual-effects industry where the artist worked for many years) mirrors the genetic creation of a child, synthesized from both parentsDNA. In this case however, the raw material of life is contained within pixels rather than chromosomes. The facial features of each “digital child” do not belong to either one parent or the other but possess an entirely new and unique form, derived from information contained in a pair of photographic "parents". Sexless and often without clear gender, the resultant beings appear real in all ways but in actuality have never existed outside of a single photographic expression.
Markus Jones
Designer of sound, musician and phonographer Markus Jones was classically trained and educated at the RNCM, studying the Violin.
Based in York his primary aim is to create work that in many ways challenges the listener. His major audio works deal with a variety of themes within Dance, Short Film and installation, he collects sound based on its original source before twisting it into what he calls ‘his interpretation of the original sound’.
His music has been played across Europe including Belgium, Holland, Italy, Germany, and Austria. Current residence includes spending a year as an Artist in residence at York St John University, collecting sounds heard across campus using a mixture of lo-tech means and digital plug-ins.
Sympathetic Vibration (prolongation of sound by reflection)
Developing over a period of 1 year a number of recording devices were set up in key areas across York St John University. Adopting a slightly voyeuristic approach to the collection of the audio, focusing on telephone conversations, delivered teaching sessions and inserting a small microphone into an Internal mail envelope. Also, the interviewing of a number of YSJ students and staff, asking key questions about their experiences of studying and working at the university and how sounds effects them.
In addition to several audio microphones in use, photoelectric sensors were used. The sensors were hooked up to the eye piece of a Telescope, emitting a small pulse of electricity generated from the light they receive which will then be converted into sound. The idea behind using the sensors is to reflect not just the audio we hear but the light we obtain.
Daniel Rodrigo
Spanish artist Daniel Rodrigo, now resident in the UK, will be showing his AV installation Fashion Death.
www.danielrodrigo.com
Artists Statement
Daniel Rodrigo is a human being, living in the Earth - at least the martians said that- and a multi-disciplinary artist as well.
What do the martians understand for multidisciplinary artist?
Painter: monsters, women, muses, figures all in a kiss
Photographer: blood, attempt, pleasure,vertigo , all in a kiss
Graphic Designer : a desire to die for life, for laugh, all in a kiss
Video Artist: Vertigo of myself hidden in the fancy dress of life, all in a kiss
Writter: Can you guess who wrote all the above?
Jenny Kadis
Yorkshire based digital artist Jenny Kadis combines the use of new media technologies with traditional art forms to produce work that challenges the pre-determined use of such technologies.
Jenny holds a strong interest in feminist ideology and her work often focuses upon the role of women within (a technological) society.
Jenny studied Music and New Media Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University where she gained a 1st class honours degree. Her work has most recently been exhibited as a short listed entry within the Northern Design Awards 2007.
Jenny is currently focusing upon her visual work, where she is developing her graphics work for use as video projection.
Her installation “Quantify Me” explores issues relating to the medicalisation of childbirth, in particular the "need" for medical "quantification" of the female body. Still and moving images have been created using digital technologies but are presented alongside and projected upon non-digital objects that represent the power of "natural" childbirth. The work explores feminist ideology relating to control over the female body through control over the birthing process. By using objects such as birthing pools and cloth nappies, the trend towards reclamation of the birthing process by women is also explored.
jennykadis.moonfruit.com
Joe Cutting
Joe Cutting has been working in creative digital media for over 15 years but it was in his previous employment at the Science Museum that he became interested in digital art. While at the museum he worked with many notable artists such as Yinka Shonibare, Mike Stubbs and Christian Moeller. Since leaving the museum Joe has set up his own practice and created a wide variety of digital exhibits and installations for museums and other clients. He lives and works in York and has a web site at www.joecutting.com
Joe will be showing a new web-driven work entitled Search Engine
Adrian Firth
Biog
Adrian was born in 1975 in Chelmsford, Essex but was brought up in Doncaster, Yorkshire. He attended Doncaster School of Art and Design before studying Printmaking at Wolverhampton University where he won the Mander Award for excellence in printmaking. Since graduating Adrian has lived and worked in London.
Statement
Through my work I aim to subvert the everyday, bringing importance and grandeur to things that are thought to have little or none. Stripping power from the mighty and empowering the weak. This could be aesthetic, political, media lead or whatever is in my remit at the time.
I like the sentiment certain objects/situations can hold and the memories they can evoke. I like to play with the idea of an object/person/situations spiritual significance compared to its physical presence.
Through living in a big western city I’m strongly influenced and informed by consumerism, advertising, fashion and in the case of art – historic teaching and approval from the establishment.
My end aim is to create beautiful, sensitive works that evoke an emotive response and provoke questions about humanity whilst containing what I consider to be, high artistic values.
Adrian will be showing his work Made of Money, a portrait of Mohammed Al Fayed created using digital image manipulation and projection and 1p coins.
Simon Whetham
Simon's work using field recordings began when he was invited to join a group of visual artists on a trip to Iceland in December 2005, with a view to producing a piece to accompany the work the visual artists would create.
He gathered the sounds of waterfalls, footsteps in snow, ice cracking, gangplanks of whaling ships creaking – anything that would inspire composition. However, the recordings themselves were the perfect soundtrack, a sonic portrait of Iceland.
The finished pieces were released as a download album, by netlabel Filament Recordings, in June 2006.
These recordings from Iceland have also been exhibited in galleries in Iceland, Southampton, Bristol and Manchester, and further work has been included in exhibitions in Plymouth and Portsmouth.
Simon's second composition, ‘ascension_suspension’, a sound piece composed using recordings of cablecars, was released in July 2006 by Entr’acte, to extremely positive reviews.
Simon's work has lead him to assist the sound artist Scanner in producing work for ‘Night Flight’, an outdoor performance piece in the hills of North Wales, soundtracking a short film by Phil Toy, performing a site specific work at the Collision Festival in Peckham and now to join a residential workshop in the Amazon region of Brazil run by Francisco Lopez, his participation funded by the Arts Council England.
There is much interest in the work that has resulted from the residency. The work has already been hosted as an installation at the Hat Factory in Luton and performed at Sprawl (London) and Unmeasured (Bristol), with future installations at the Eden Project and The Living Rainforest, and performances for The Rainforest Foundation and at Sightsonic, Faster Than Sound, Zeppelin and the Venn festivals.
Simon will be showing Amazonas:
'Amazonas'
Audio recordings of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil
The work is the result of a two week residential workshop that ran through
November 2007, namely the Mamori Sound Project. The workshop was run by leading field recording artist Francisco Lopez, and only accessible by boat – a five hour trip from the nearest town. The participants were all noted sound artists from around the world, Simon being the first British artist to take part.
Recordings were made at all times of the day, as the rainforest is never quiet, just a constantly shifting orchestra of sounds.
On entering ‘Amazonas’, you will be transported to another place. You will be led into the rainforest, not knowing what is waiting for you a few steps in any direction, not knowing for certain what it is that is making that sound, either in the distance or close by. The sound environment is dense, unrelenting, but also beautiful and enchanting.
Dawn Scarfe
Dawn investigates subtle details in our perceptual engagement with the world around us. She works with sound to explore its dynamic relationship to location and the process of listening. Through her work Dawn hopes to reveal how the act of perception involves a creative, reciprocal engagement with the environment. She works with electroacoustic composition, video, site-specific installation and live performance.
Dawn has exhibited in sites ranging from exhibition spaces and concert halls to a lighthouse and a tree. She has recently shown work at the Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Britain (London), Green College Observatory (Oxford) and Modern Art Oxford, Smeaton's Lighthouse (Plymouth), Contact Theatre (Manchester), South Hill Park Arts Centre (Bracknell) and Videotage iHong Kong).
Dawn is working on an MPhil entitled 'In the Surround: Sound and Phenomenal Experience' at Goldsmiths, London. She has an MMus in Composition and BA in Fine Art.
Title of work: Lenses, 2008
'Lenses' is a multi-speaker sound installation that explores the sculptural and textural possibilities of sound radiation from different combinations of wine glasses. Listeners are encouraged to move around the work to explore how their position affects their experience of the piece.
Inspiring the work is an interest in the bright, reflective quality of glass, and its potential as a 'lens' to focus and propagate sound. It encourages the phenomenon of sympathetic vibration by playing sounds taken from the glasses back through small speakers hovering over the rims. It is informed by the history of our understanding of such acoustic effects, which in the absence of modern scientific explanation was linked to mysterious and occult forces.
An additional influence is the experimental work of Seventeenth Century scientists such as Robert Hooke who used musical instruments as means of extending the range of the senses and demonstrating physical laws.
Artist website: www.dawnscarfe.co.uk
Stuart Andrews
Biography
Stuart Andrews is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Hull Scarborough Campus. His performance/research work explores site-specific representations of place and the past. Recently he has focused particularly on sustained collaborative installation projects, which include Tide* (London, 2006), perhaps these are the beginnings (Scarborough 2006), Walking Between (Victoria, Canada, 2006), Call Centre** (Leeds, 2007/Digital Scarborough launch artwork, 2006) and please wait with me** (Scarborough, 2008).
Collaborations: *with Chris Newell / ** with Chris Newell and Ian Gibson
Artist’s Statement
My current practice is particularly concerned with creating work that destabilizes the present moment in a range of ways, often by appearing to locate one site or story within or over another. In so doing, I create work that engages with the location of participation/perspective and that often seeks multiple interpretations of place and the past. I work particularly with written text for performance/installation and with audio soundscapes. Increasingly this work has drawn in a range of media, of which audio and the spoken word have become the most enduring influences. By working with colleagues in computer science, I have been able to develop this work so that the voice of the written word is itself destabilized and dehumanized, thereby extending the questioning of location/perspective.
Stuart will be showing his installation piece please wait with me:
In please wait with me, Stuart Andrews collaborates with scientists Ian Gibson and Chris Newell on an installation based around a retro-telephone connected to a simulated international call centre. The voices and sounds experienced by participants are generated in real time using a mixture of speech synthesizers and midi sensors within the telephone. The project responds to Mashiro Mori’s notion of the ‘uncanny valley’ in which participant satisfaction of anthropomorphic beings collapses when the anthropomorphism is excessively literal. By unsettling the drive to anthropomorphism and to realism, the project reveals new opportunities for meaning and experience.
Two versions of the ‘conversation’ alternate, which tests participant reactions to specific treatments of a synthetic voice. Data is gathered, both the duration of participant’s engagement with these treatments but also the participant’s spoken responses: thoughts and ideas that are told only to a synthetic voice. The project creates an environment in which to question perceptions of technology, the assumptions of call centre culture and the (de)stabilisation of place and individual identity.
Annetta Wormald
Artist's Statement
The ever changing city landscape provides the material of my art practice. Through the documentation and recording of the sites and spaces of urban working life I explore themes of absence and missing presence. My response to any site is wholly intuitive and personal, at the same time through my work, I invite the audience into a shared experience of memory.
Work Submitted for Sightsonic Artists Platform:-
'Terry's Chocolate Works'
3 Screen Video and Audio installation
The recently redundant Terry's Chocolate Works is the focus of this 3 screen video installation. An iconic landmark in York's social and economic life since 1926, production at the works finally ceased in 2005. Ambient sound recorded within the empty and evocative spaces within the factory have been digitally layered to create the soundtrack.
Amie Slavin
Statement
My work is informed, to a very large extent, by my visual impairment, which has led me to a point of frustration that sound, as a medium in its own right, has not been accorded more consideration and respect, historically. I have spent years relating to the world via the medium of sound, and find a wealth of rich experience, emotional, intellectual and spiritual, readily available to the listener, without recourse to visual imagery.
My aim, in producing sound-centred work, is to stimulate an absorption in and appreciation of the many and various ways in which sound can be used to represent and illuminate ideas, issues and voices. I hope to make my audience laugh, cry and think, through their ears (so to speak!).
My work includes a range of approaches, combined by means of digital processing, used in varying combinations. At its root, my methodology is to make use of an audio palate consisting of human and other voices, found and designed sounds, both tuned and untuned, to weave a semi-abstract whole.
Amie will be showing Sophia’s Web: a ninety-two voice piece, featuring ten-second samples, edited from interviews with 92 family members, focussing on their relationships with one new and tiny baby, my daughter, Sophia, born in November 2005.The samples are recorded onto tiny playback devices attached to the inside of an aluminium pyramid. Each sample is triggered by means of a large and friendly green button. The buttons are arranged within an engraved web, representing Sophia’s family ties.
www.roughdiamondproductions.com/sweb/
Kate Sicchio
Biog
Kate Sicchio is a media artist, choreographer, interactive systems designer, and performer. Her work includes dance performances, installations, web and video projects and has seen shown in Philadelphia, New York City, Germany and the UK. She started combining dance and media at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, USA where she was awarded the Promising Artist Award. In 2005 she completed her MA in Digital Performance at University Centre, Doncaster, UK where she continued to explore dance, video, and interactivity within a live performance setting. Since then she has continued to create, research and lecture at University Centre Doncaster, focusing on digital media and the performing arts.
Artist Statement
My work explores performance, media, and creating relationships between the two. Through real time systems, web devising projects, or video pieces, I attempt to look at how the creative process can be changed, manipulated, and reordered by the use of digital technologies. I investigate space, movement, and bodies and how they respond to interactive video or sound in a performative environment.
Kate will be performing Study 2:
Study 2 is a short solo dance performance, which uses an interactive video tracking system, to allow the dancer to control video in a performance space in real time. Gesture and location become key to the piece, as they trigger and change video projection. The piece was originally devised at a co-production residency at Banff New Media Institute, in Alberta Canada.
Study 2 is part of an ongoing investigation of movement, interactive systems, and the implications of using the two together in a performance context. The main focus of the research looks at the use of space, body, and movement in relation to the interactive system and media, from the perspective of the maker/performer.
www.sicchio.com
www.youtube.com/ksicchio