Posted on

Review – Data/Fields – Continent- Isaac Linder

Those readers on the part of a continent that involves something called “Arlington, Virginia” should be interested to hear about an exhibition of new-media installation and soundworks that opened last week at Artisphere and will be on display through November 27th. For those readers geographically dispossessed, this announcement can at least serve as an introduction to the work of those involved. Curated by the renowned composer, designer, and LINE imprint boss, Richard Chartier, the show collates new work by five transcontinental artists:

Caleb Coppock (U.S.)
Mark Fell (U.K.)
Andy Graydon (U.S./Germany)
Ryoji Ikeda (Japan)
France Jobin (Canada)

Originally conceived to take place four years ago at The University of Maryland, in the art department where my mother and father were to meet and fall in love, the project was waylaid by the turbulence of departmental budget cuts and postponements before production was finally halted. The show in its current incarnation should then be considered as a condensation and streamlining of Chartier’s original vision. The first presentation of any of the included artist’s work in the DC area, the show marks as well the first US exhibit for both Mark Fell and France Jobin.

Straightforwardly a foray into the now familiar tropes of interactivity and data visualization/sonicization in the arts (have the arts ever been anything other than dataviz? Ah, but that’s for a whole other post…), the show is of course not only that. With it’s investigations into the themes of transfinite mathematics, the perception of quanta, and incomprehensibility, the show remains keenly attuned to the sense of the body and percipience of the viewer. (Chartier charmingly describes the viewers of the show ‘percipients’.) In an interview about the opening, Chartier mentioned that it was the longest he had experienced viewers interacting with artworks at a show he had seen in the US; a good sign for those of us who bemoan the meat-packing pace of exhibition viewership today!

As is often the case with my interactions with art, the thematic of the observer stilled before incomprehensible magnitude takes me back to the perennially rehashed 2,400 year old question regarding the banishment of the mimetic arts from Plato’s Republic. For Plato the exclusion would have been a question of art’s capacity to besiege its witnesses with a sense of θεíος ϕοβóς. Construing a quick trinity, it’s a concept taken up in an in-depth, Continent.-friendly tenor by Rancière in his recent work on Hegel and Lyotard. (See The Future of the Image, Verso, 2007). Even more recently, for the art historian Donald Preziosi, this a/effect, translated variously as holy terror, fear, or awe, is named as such because it is directly proportional to the work’s ability to reveal the artifice intrinsic to art and by extension the artificiality of all sociopolitical and religious modes of organization. (See Preziosi’s forthcoming Routledge title, Art, Religion & Amnesia: Enchanted Credulities.) Not good news for those with vested interests in maintaining modes of organization as they stand!

With its exfoliations, redressings, and retunings of our data and sensoria, dependent as they are upon relatively recent developments within the technoaesthetic apparatus (gigabytes of processing RAM, LCD projectors, and touchscreen interfaces), I’ll be curious to hear from those who make it to data/fields the extent to which it manages to unearth this ancient, but by no means archaic, line of thought. As Paul touched upon in his recent post on The Shifting Imago of Sovereignty the high-speed, transactional nature of data would seem to occupy a unique place in it’s ability to leave us beset by the stupor of fear and trembling.

Posted on

Review – Data/Fields – Arlington Mercury – Steve Thurston

Data/Fields: What You See Is What You Hear
by Steve Thurston
September 30, 2011

DATA/FIELDS, New Media Installation Works, runs from Sept. 22 through Nov. 27 in the Artisphere’s Terrace Gallery. Free.

Data Fields: Mixing Sound and Vision
Artisphere
1101 Wilson Blvd., 22209
Phone (703) 875-1100

By: Steve Thurston, Mercury Editor
I hit the opening of Data/Fields at the Artisphere in Rosslyn on Friday, Sept. 23; I’m not totally sure what I was looking at, but it was fun just the same.  It’s the sort of show that people stayed to gawk over, and strangers talked with each other about what they saw, said curator Richard Chartier, and that was my experience as well.

Viewers just couldn’t help talking to one another at Ryoji Ikeda’s “data.scan.” We stared at a screen that looked just a bit like the old Pac-Man console screen (the ones you sit down to play, back in the day). A series of lines and dots scrolled over it. Three distinct types of screens developed, one looked like static, the other like empty space with red cross hairs shifting through. The final one looked like a video transcription of radio signals or something similar.
At the same time, the background sound that seemed random “ping”-ed every now and then, and those pings, we realized, announced that data had been organized or arranged in some way on the screen. It’s about then that someone looked down at the moving crosshairs and said that the ping comes when the crosshairs find a star, Alpha Centauri, for instance. It’s the heavens. That static, said someone else bent close to the monitor, is a string of numbers, tiny numbers. It’s mapping the heavens.

“This would be the coolest coffee table ever,” one man said.

Chartier told me in a phone interview after the event that Ikeda does not give interviews or talk publicly about his work, but that he is known for seeing data everywhere. Everything can be measured and turned into data, and by choosing the heavens, that sense of infinity increases.
“It’s almost like the work is about incomprehensibility. You can’t put your head around it,” Chartier said.
In another part of the cavernous room, where white noise and the occasional ping can be heard, people gathered around Caleb Coppock’s “Graphite Sequencer.”The modified turntable picks up electric signals from pencil lines drawn on heavy-stock paper. The graphite in pencil “lead” conducts electricity and sends the signals to the headphones.

“Percipients,” as Chartier calls the people who come to the installation, look at the disks hanging on the wall, think about what each might sound like, put a disk on the turntable and don the headphones to hear burps, buzzes, rasps and zzzzzzzzz-es in various patterns.
by Steve Thurston
September 30, 2011

Posted on

Review – Data/Fields – Washington Post – Michael O’Sullivan

Mark Fell’s “Tone Pattern Transactuality”; photo by Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post
Artisphere show delivers an eyeful and an earful
By Michael O’Sullivan
Friday, Oct. 7, 2011
When I showed up at Artisphere to check out “Data/Fields,” a five-artist showcase of new-media art, I encountered a tour for staffers who might need to know what to do should one of the high-tech pieces in the show burn out, blow up or otherwise need to be rebooted. It’s an occupational hazard for today’s plugged-in artist, whose work occasionally requires adjustments more complicated than straightening a painting on the wall.
Fortunately, everything in the show was humming and clicking as designed.
“Data/Fields” is a sharply installed and smartly edited mini-survey of cutting-edge contemporary art, selected and curated by Richard Chartier, a Washington-based sound artist whose work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Incorporating sound, light, drawing and, to some degree, a sculptural component – as well as various combinations of those things – the show isn’t just something you look at or listen to, but rather a little of both. As one of the wall labels puts it, you’re not just a viewer here, but a percipient.

The show demands – and rewards – close attention.

In the center of the darkened gallery is the show’s strongest piece, a computer-generated “painting” of sorts called “Tone Pattern Transactuality.” The Rothko-like video projection, by British artist Mark Fell, is constantly changing colors, sometimes subtly, sometimes abruptly, like some Brookstone gizmo that tracks the stock market by changing from, say, pink to blue. It’s accompanied by an audio track you listen to with headphones. The sound ranges from a quiet hum to what seems like a phaser on overload. It’s intense and, at times, scary. You don’t take it in; it takes you in.
Less frightening, yet more interactive, is Caleb Coppock’s “Graphite Sequencer.” The Nebraska-based artist has customized an old turntable to “play” his own abstract pencil drawings, 48 of which hang on the wall. Take one down and place it on the turntable; the size and shape of vinyl LPs, they’ve all got holes in the middle.

Graphite, you see, conducts electricity. So as you watch the drawings spin, electrical contacts on the tone arm – which replaces the traditional needle – create a music of staticky clicks, like Morse code. It’s cool, though it lacks the emotionally enveloping quality of Fell’s work.
Around the corner you’ll find Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda’s mesmerizing “Data.scan,” consisting of a computer monitor set into a console about the size of a Pac Man machine and accompanied by an electronic score that seems to emanate from everywhere – and nowhere. The speakers are very well hidden.
On the screen, the images alternate, rapidly, between data based on star-mapping – you’ll spot the name Alpha Persei, and others, if you look hard enough – and television static. But look more closely. That static is actually a screen full of apparently meaningless numbers. Ikeda pulls off an effective, and surprisingly compelling, tension between the cosmic and the everyday. Whose head isn’t filled with phone numbers, passwords and other ID codes these days?
Ikeda’s score is so pervasive – it’s the one bit of sound art in the show that you don’t need headphones for – that it spills over into Andy Graydon’s nearby sculptural installation, “Untitled [band pass Arlington].” That Berlin-based artist’s work is just a pile of rubble on the floor. But periodically, a bright, thin band of light, cast by a motorized projector mounted on the ceiling, sweeps over its rugged surface, illuminating its peaks and valleys slowly, like a scanner. Along with Ikeda’s borrowed soundtrack of spaced-out beeps, the work invites extended looking – and listening – for previously hidden details.
Taken together, the works in “Data/Fields” sharpen your senses, even as they blur the boundary between sight and sound.

The story behind ‘Entre-Deux’

You can’t see France Jobin’s contribution to “Data/Fields.”
“Entre-Deux” (“Between Two” in French) is a sound installation, created specifically for Artisphere’s outdoor terrace and pumped through three sets of stereo speakers mounted along the wall. A fractured sonic collage created from recordings made by the Montreal-based sound artist at Artisphere and elsewhere, the piece includes the noise of airplanes flying to and from nearby Reagan National Airport as well as the gurgle of rainwater running into the terrace level’s drains. (Jobin was there with her recorder on a rainy day.)

The recorded sounds mix with the real ones, tricking the ear in a delightful way. The best time to visit, according to gallery director Cynthia Connolly, is at dusk, when street noise quiets down and you can look across Wilson Boulevard to see computer monitors twinkling in the windows of office buildings just across the street.
Come to think of it, maybe “Entre-Deux” does have a visual component after all.

— Michael O’Sullivan (Friday, Oct. 7, 2011)

Posted on

Akousma

AKOUSMA_8

Du 12 au 15 octobre 2011
1345, avenue Lalonde
Montréal (QC) H2L 5A9
Billetterie 514. 521.4493
www.usine-c.com

Le 12 octobre : Pierre-Yves Macé (FR), Roger Tellier Craig (QC)
Le 13 octobre : Hélène Prévost (QC), Stephan Mathieu (DE)
Le 14 octobre : France Jobin (QC), Robert Hampson (GB)
Le 15 octobre : Marc Behrens (DE), Horacio Vaggione (FR)
Programmation détaillée
Mercredi 12 octobre • 20 h • Usine C
TRANS_FORMATION: Roger Tellier-Craig (QC) • Pierre-Yves Macé (FR)
Roger Tellier-Craig est un musicien de Montréal. Ces dix dernières années, il s’est investi dans de nombreux projets, s’inspirant d’un spectre de références contradictoires pour explorer de nouveaux contextes musicaux. Il a été parmi les cofondateurs de Fly Pan Am, de Et Sans (aux côtés d’Alexandre St-Onge), de Set Fire to Flames et de Pas Chic Chic, ainsi que guitariste au sein de la formation Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Sous la signature Le Révélateur, il développe actuellement une esthétique élaborée in extenso à partir de synthétiseurs analogiques, une manière qui n’est pas sans rappeler les beaux jours de la « computer music ».
(titre à venir) création mondialePierre-Yves Macé est un compositeur dont le travail se situe au croisement de la musique électroacoustique, de la musique contemporaine et de l’art sonore. Il est l’auteur de quatre disques solo : Faux-jumeaux (Tzadik, 2002), Circulations (Sub rosa, 2005), crash_test ii (tensional integrity) (Orkhêstra, 2006) et passagenweg (Brocoli, 2009) et il collabore avec de nombreux artistes, dont l’écrivain Mathieu Larnaudie, avec qui il mène depuis 2003 un travail de coécriture qui se décline en plusieurs projets parallèles : chanson pop, lecture/performance et composition électroacoustique ou radiophonique.
MINIATURES/Song Recycle (2010) – 40 minutes

***** Soirée en co-diffusion avec Le Vivier (www.levivier.ca) • Pierre-Yves Macé est l’invité d’Ekumen

Jeudi 13 octobre • 20 h • Usine C

RADIO_DIFFUSION: Hélène Prévost (QC) • Stephan Mathieu (DE)
Hélène Prévost a longtemps été réalisatrice et animatrice d’émissions consacrées aux musiques nouvelles à Radio-Canada (1978-2007). La radio et la diffusion occupent toujours une place de choix au cœur de ses préoccupations et, pour sa performance, plusieurs appareils radio sont utilisés comme source continue de matériau, flux indéterminé qui réagit à l’environnement. L’artiste poursuit son travail d’exploration et développe pour ce faire un instrument singulier, qui est un croisement entre le studio radiophonique et le laboratoire électroacoustique.
U/ONZE – 35 minutes création mondialeDesigner acoustique de premier ordre, Stephan Mathieu est considéré comme l’un des plus importants « musiciens de laptop » du moment. Il fait partie de ces artistes du son qui ont également une formation en arts visuels et dont l’inspiration peut aussi s’incarner sous forme d’installations sonores. Cela dit, au-delà des a priori conceptuels, la musique de Stephan Mathieu comporte indubitablement une grande sensualité.
Music for Columbia Phonoharp (2011) – 50 minutes création nord-américaine

Vendredi 14 octobre • 20 h • Usine C

SENS_ACTION: France Jobin (QC) • Robert Hampson (GB)
France Jobin (aussi connue sous l’alias i8u) explore les franges atmosphériques d’un vaste territoire acoustique dans lequel défilent des images qui témoignent de sa sensibilité aux arts visuels ; certains observateurs décrivent ses œuvres comme de véritables sculptures sonores. Avec Event Horizon, elle propose, dans le cadre d’AKOUSMA, un beau voyage dont le titre évoque la frontière entre la matière et le vide.
Event Horizon (2009) – 35 minutes création mondiale
La diffusion d’Event Horizon est rendu possible avec l’appui aux activités de diffusionle d’Oboro.

Robert Hampson provient du monde de la pop psychédélique et du shoegazing. Toujours actif avec son projet collaboratif Main, il se consacre également depuis les années 2000 à un travail davantage axé vers l’exploration sonore et la diffusion acousmatique. Sa musique démontre une qualité d’écoute qui se traduit par une grande finesse d’écriture dans laquelle prend forme une trame narrative mystérieuse et inouïe.
Ahead – Only The Stars (2007)
Commande du VIBRO (13 mins) – Published by Touch Music création nord-américaine
Dans Le Lointain (2008)
Commande du GRM (20 mins) – Published By Touch Music création nord-américaine
Repercussions (2011)
Commande du GRM (20 mins) – Published by At The Surface création nord-américaine

Samedi 15 octobre • 20 h • Usine C

ORGANI_SON: Marc Behrens (DE) • Horacio Vaggione (FR/AR)
Marc Behrens est un artiste sonore en perpétuel renouvellement. Son expérience musicale éclectique (musiques industrielle, concrète, minimal glitch, paysage sonore, etc.) et ses nombreuses collaborations témoignent de la diversité esthétique de ses œuvres, dont le point commun est une évidente sensibilité.
Queendom (2009) : 8:07
voice: Yôko Higashi création nord-américaine
Sleppet (2–3): Avalanches, Water and Stones (2008) : 9:35 création nord-américaine Sleppet (4) Glacier (2008) : 10:00
Irregular Characters (2010) : 19:41
using material by: Yasunao Tone création nord-américaineHoracio Vaggione fait partie des pionniers de l’électroacoustique, mais son œuvre ne porte pas le poids du passé, bien au contraire ; nous sommes ici devant une musique d’une grande vivacité. Son intérêt envers le caractère énergétique du son est au premier plan de son travail. La virtuosité du compositeur nous permet d’entrer dans ce monde invisible où matière, durée et énergie sont en pleine convolution. Ses œuvres se présentent sous forme de grandes fresques abstraites qui diffusent leur beauté au travers de la cohérence du discours et de la forme musicale.
Arenas (2007) : 15’ création nord-américaine
Ash (1990) : 15’
Points critiques (2011) : 16’ création canadienne

Posted on

Akousma at Empac

AKOUSMA at Empac

Friday October 7, 8:00 PM – Studio 2

EMPAC is located at the corner of 8th Street and College Avenue, in Troy, NY.

Presenting international works across the spectrum of electronic music, this concert highlights selections from this year’s eighth annual AKOUSMA festival in Montréal. Pierre-Yves Macé (France), France Jobin (Canada), Horacio Vaggione (France/Argentina), and Louis Dufort (Canada) will be interpreting their works live over a 16-speaker system surrounding the audience.

AKOUSMA is produced by Réseaux, a composer-run organization dedicated to presenting and commissioning electroacoustic music since 1991. Montréal is the North American hub for electronic music, offering a wide range of festivals spanning dance music, acoustics research, and everything in between.

Curator: Micah Silver

Bios:France Jobin, aka i8u, is a Montréal-based sound/installation/web artist and curator. Jobin’s audio art can be qualified as “sound-sculpture,” and her installation/web art incorporates both musical and visual elements.

France Jobin has created solo recordings for ROOM40, NVO, and Bake/Staalplaat, among others, and has had many collaborations, including with Goem, Martin Tétreault, David Kristian, and Tomas Phillips.

She has participated in web work/installations in Québec and Toronto, and in various music and new technology festivals in Canada, Europe, and the United States, including Silophone, MUTEK, Le Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, Ver Uit de Maat, send + receive, Les Digitales, Club Transmediale, velak, Shut up and Listen!, ISEA2010 RUHR, and immersound, as well as a soundtrack with Bubblyfish for the film Swordswoman of Huangjiang (Huangjiang Nuxia), presented at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Her latest endeavor, immersound, is a concert event/philosophy that proposes to create a dedicated listening environment by focusing on the physical comfort of the audience through a specifically designed space. The premise is to explore new perceptions and experiences of the listening process by pushing the notion of “immersion” to its possible limits. The first immersound was produced in February 2011 at the OBORO gallery in Montréal.

Jobin’s work continues to evolve as technologies enable her to create in new environments.

Montréal composer Louis Dufort’s music ranges from a cathartic form of expressionism to a focus on the inner structure of sound matter.

Dufort developed his style through electroacoustic music, and then turned his attention to mixed music and multimedia art, and has worked with a wide range of organizations, including the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ), the Ensemble contemporain de Montréal (ECM), the Quasar saxophone quartet and Bozzini string quartet, the Ensemble de flûtes Alizé, Réseaux, the Quebec Association for Creation and Research in Electroacoustics (ACREQ), and Chants Libres, for which he wrote the music for the 2005 opera, L’Archange

In 2007, Dufort was commissioned by Société Radio‐Canada (SRC) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to make a video and acousmatic remix of Glenn Gould’s recordings for the pianist 75th birthday.

In 2001, Dufort received a mention from Prix Ars Electronica (Austria); in 2005, he was invited to work at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Germany, and in 2007, he was a guest of Recombinant Media Labs (RML) in San Francisco. He has worked with choreographer Marie Chouinard since1996, and their collaborations have been regularly acclaimed, including Body_Remix, which premiered at the Venice Biennial in 2005.

Dufort teaches at Montréal’s Music Conservatory. He was named artistic director of Réseaux in 2010, and he begins his first season with a concert at EMPAC.

Pierre-Yves Macé is a French musician whose musical practice encompasses improvisation on machines, a background in piano and classical percussion, jazz-rock/prog-rock bands, dance accompaniments, and an interest in literature and musicology. He received his PhD in musicology in 2009, which explored phonography and the “sound document” in contemporary music. His first recording, Faux-Jumeaux, was released on John Zorn’s Tzadik label in 2002. Subsequently, he released Circulations (Sub Rosa, 2005), and Crash_Test II (Tensional Integrity) (Orkhêstra, 2006) for a string quartet. He has held residencies at CalArts in Los Angeles, CNMAT in Berkeley (2004), and GRM in Paris (2006, 2008). Macé has performed in the Octobre Festival in Normandie, MIMI, Villette Sonique, Brocoli, Transnumériques, and Présences électronique. His artistic collaborations include projects with ON (Sylvain Chauveau & Steven Hess), That Summer, Louisville, artist Hippolyte Hentgen, and writers Mathieu Larnaudie, Philippe Vasset, and Christophe Fiat. He is also a member of the Encyclopédie de la parole, a speech encyclopedia crew whose goal is to constitute a compositional plan through which different forms of recorded speeches may be compared.

Horacio Vaggione is an Argentinian-born electroacoustic and musique concrète composer who specializes in micromontage, granular synthesis, and microsound, and whose pieces often are for performer and computer‐generated tape. He studied composition at the National University in Córdoba and the University of Illinois, where he first gained exposure and access to computers.

Vaggione visited every electronic studio in Europe during the 1970s. From 1969 to 1973 he lived in Madrid, Spain, where he was part of the ALEA group. He also co‐founded an electronic studio and music and computer projects at the Autonomous University of Madrid with Luis de Pablo. In 1978, he moved to France, where he still resides, and begin work at GMEB in Bourges, INA‐GRM and IRCAM in Paris, where his music moved from synthesized and sampled loops (as in La Maquina de Cantar, produced on an IBM computer) toward micromontage. Since 1994, he has been a professor of music at the University of Paris VIII, where he organized the Centre de recherche Informatique et Création Musicale (CICM).

About EMPAC

The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) opened its doors in 2008 and was hailed by the New York Times as a “technological pleasure dome for the mind and senses… dedicated to the marriage of art and science as it has never been done before.”

Founded by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, EMPAC offers artists, scholars, researchers, engineers, designers, and audiences opportunities for creative exploration that are available nowhere else under a single roof. EMPAC operates nationally and internationally, attracting creative individuals from around the world and sending new artworks and innovative ideas onto the global stage.

EMPAC’s building is a showcase work of architecture and a unique technological facility that boasts unrivaled presentation and production capabilities for art and science spanning the physical and virtual worlds and the spaces in between.

Posted on

DATA/FIELDS

DATA/FIELDS

“I am pleased to announce that, by popular demand, Data/Fields exhibit has been extended two weeks…through Sunday, December 11th!” – Richard Chartier due to popular demand, DATA/FIELDS has been extended until December 11th, 2011!

“Sharply installed and smartly edited mini-survey of cutting-edge contemporary art… the works in “Data/Fields” sharpen your senses, even as they blur the boundary between sight and sound.” – The Washington Post

New Media Installation Works

Sep 22 – Nov 27
Terrace Gallery
Opening reception: Fri Sep 23 / 7-10pm / Free
Gallery talk: Mon Sep 26 + Wed Sep 28 / 12:30pm /Free

Data are points that flow through fields. We can pause in these fields and extract the information. If data fields are those set boundaries in which we place, consider, and collect information, then a gallery might be a great plane of these fields. Or, leaving the natural world for the subjective, it could become an index, compiled by artist and viewer together. Created by five noted international artists, the works in Data/Fields utilize the thematic implications of the data field as they transform gallery space into hubs of sensory information: sites of signal, noise, presence, and absence. The viewer/listener becomes another connection, another point, in the flow and transferral of data.

Data/Fields is curated by renowned sound artist Richard Chartier.

These selected and commissioned works at Artisphere are the artists’ gallery debut in the Washington, DC area and include two premiere exhibitions in the United States.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Caleb Coppock (U.S.)
Mark Fell (U.K.)
Andy Graydon (U.S./Germany)
Ryoji Ikeda (Japan)
France Jobin (Canada)
About the Curator

Richard Chartier (curator) (b.1971), sound and installation artist, is considered one of the key figures in the current of reductionist electronic sound art which has been termed both “microsound” and Neo-Modernist. Chartier’s minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception, and the act of listening itself. Chartier’s sound works/installations have been presented in galleries and museums internationally, including the 2002’s Whitney Biennial. He has performed his work live across Europe, Japan, Australia, and North America at digital art/electronic music festivals and exhibits.

In 2000 he formed the influential recording label LINE and has since curated its continuing documentation of compositional and installation work by international sound artists/composers exploring the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism. In 2007 he curated the sound/video program Colorfield Variations, a collection of works influenced by the Color Field painting movement. This program continues to screened and exhibited and digital/film festivals, museums, and art galleries around the world. In 2010, Chartier was awarded a Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship. 3particles.com + lineimprint.com

France Jobin

photo by Richard Chartier

Entre-deux, 2011, 6-channel site specific sound installation, 144 minute cycles

“Between notes and sounds lie rests and silence. I have come to regard these as the most fragile parts of music.” – France Jobin

Created entirely with actual field recordings from across the globe and on location around Artisphere, Montreal sound artist France Jobin’s site-specific work Entre-deux explores acts of systemic, yet subjective, information gathering. Spaces and times are chosen for their inherent beauty, then processed and reformed as location and experience itself becomes transposed. Entre-deux is the re-placing of data. This site-specific work is the first gallery exhibition of Jobin’s installations in the U.S.
Entre-Deux is supported in part by the Canada Council for the Arts.

CAC_Logo_FR_coul

 

On view in Data/Fields, a new media exhibition in which the viewer/listener becomes another connection in the flow and transfer of data. The artworks presented act as hubs of sensory information—sites of signal, noise, presence, and absence.  The exhibition features works by five noted international artists, Caleb Coppock (U.S.), Mark Fell (U.K.), Andy Graydon (U.S./Germany), Ryoji Ikeda (Japan), France Jobin (Canada), and is curated by renowned sound artist Richard Chartier.

Posted on

Audio Screening & Conversation with the Muses

 

Audio Screening & Conversation | In Conversation with the Muses…
Lucia H. Chung (Convenor) with i8u, Miki Yui & Peter Hodgkinson | 02

August 2011 | 7:30-9pm | £2

at SoundFjord
Unit 3b – Studio 28, 28 Lawrence Road, N15 4ER
London, United Kingdom

In response to an invitation to hosting an audio screening at SoundFjord, artist Lucia H Chung conducts an exchange project with artists who have inspired her artistic journey in sound and music making.

This 8-week long exchange between Muki Yui, i8u and Lucia started from a collective contemplation on Yoko Ono’s instruction Secret Piece (1953), first sent by Lucia to the other artists respectively. Responding to the material that they received, Miki and i8u returned their thoughts in the form of text, image and sound. Through this to and fro correspondence, the three artists shared a close and intimate conversation on time, space, memory and sound. This journey of exchange will be presented as a collaborative work that is exclusive to SoundFjord.

The event will also be the premiere of an audiovisual work created out of a collaboration between Peter Hodgkinson and Lucia H Chung.

Finally, Lucia will talk about her forthcoming solo work on murmur records in Japan.

Posted on

Chain Letter

 

Chain Letter
Curated by Christian Cummings & Doug Harvey

Summer 2011 Group Exhibition

Venue:

Shoshana Wayne Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave # B1
Santa Monica, CA 90404-4031

Date: July 23 – August 25, 2011
Opening Saturday, July 23 / 6-8 pm

Works by Yann Novak, Robert Crouch, Heather Cassills and i8u’s 29 Palms
released on DER will be part of the exhibit +  many more artists!

Chain Letter is a group exhibition based on admiration.  Initially
conceived by Christian Cummings and Doug Harvey in 2006, inclusion in the
exhibition is based on invitation by someone who admires one’s work.  Each
artist invited, then invites ten other artists whom they admire, and so
on.  This email invite will circulate for thirty days, at the end of which
each artist will install their own work on the floor at Shoshana Wayne
Gallery.

This exhibition is rooted in the ideals of inclusion, and highlights the
social nature of the art world.  It is the hope of the curators that the
response will be vast and that the artists represented will be an
exponential representation of all artists that are currently working and
admired by their peers.

Chain Letter mimics communication today; and the way in which information
is passed.  The outcome will be a testament to the power of connectivity
within society at present.

Other cities worldwide will be participating in the Chain Letter
exhibition including New York City, London, Paris, Johannesburg,
Philadelphia, Boston, Seoul.

facebook

Posted on

Bring to light NYC

 Bring to light NYC – Nuit Blanche New York

October 1st 2011 in Greenpoint

The Festival

Bring to Light is a free nighttime public festival of art in New York City that takes place simultaneously with “nuit blanche” events in cities around the world. Inviting emerging and established artists to make site-specific installations of light, sound, performance and projection art, the event creates an immersive spectacle for thousands of visitors to re-imagine public space and civic life. Bring to Light will transform streets, parks and the industrial waterfront of Greenpoint, Brooklyn set against dramatic views of the Manhattan skyline.

JiKU

Translated from the Japanese as “space-time”, JiKU (jeekoo) is an audiovisual, interactive experience as well as a video mapping installation and projection. While listening to a live music stream, audience members view an intricate visual projection, programmed by the artist to respond specifically to the music. Displayed overhead, the projection distorts the space of the immediate area as it showers light over participants. JiKU will energize a dormant location within Greenpoint, as the artist manipulates the space based on the real time reactions of the individuals inhabiting it.

Projection by Chika

Audio by i8u

Posted on

io sound – “evp.re” on Unearthed from Airwaves

New cd on io sound May 2011

scant intone
richard chartier
tomas phillips
jeff carey
coingutter
i8u
*saibotuk

 

The movement of air currents are capable of causing a candle to quiver or waver. Air currents are the providence of the breath of the dead. The spirits of the deceased traverse the River Styx as souls of air. In Sanskrit, prana; in Greek, psyche or the pneuma of the aura; in Latin, the animus and spiritus of being. Gathering the spirits of the dead – their disembodied voices – into a wind capable of influencing a candle’s flame demonstrates the telekinetic power of the beyond