| News
from the Sonic Arts Network |
Bursary Winner
Justin Wiggan has been awarded the first Barry Anderson Bursary after his proposal ‘Language is a raft’ gained the most votes on our online public poll. Justin plans to walk to Leicester city museum from his house in Birmingham, documenting sound in certain locations and leaving cassettes along the way. He describes it as audio graffiti, which is then photographed and documented. Inside the envelope with the cassette is a card questioning the finder and an address where the tape can be sent.
However, despite the initial enthusiasm for the Bursary, there was only one entry for April, which has been awarded by default to the sole proposal. This follows what seems to be a trend in Music funding. This week PRS Foundation announced that its Live Connections scheme, which offers grants of between £500 - £5000 to electronic music artists, for a one-off performance of their work, had ‘worryingly low’ levels of applications, ‘especially from musicians outside of the London area’.
This seems surprising, as it is a regular complaint from practitioners, that the resources to stage new work or challenging events are not available. There are various possible reasons for this
indifference. One could be distrust for the often elaborate process that must be gone through just to qualify for a chance at selection. Secondly it could be an ignorance of such awards or thirdly that no new work of interest is being made. I doubt the latter but it does seem to demonstrate a certain degree of apathy from practitioners.
Details can be found in the opportunities section of the PRS Foundation grant.
The Barry Anderson Award is detailed on the Sonic Arts Website www.sonicartsnetwork.org
Stockhausen in Britain
Karlheinz Stockhausen will return toBritain this month to perform several works at this year’s Triptych Festival, to be held across the Scottish cities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Professor Stockhausen is the Honorary patron of Sonic Arts Network and we are pleased to welcome him back to the UK. See the listings for more details.
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20 April
n.one:
Alejandro Viñao
(concert)
The VENUE,Leeds College of Music, Leeds
Concert featuring Alejandro Viñao, who has featured in international festivals such as the Tanglewood Festival and the London Proms. n.one is an electroacoustic music ensemble based at Leeds College of Music, that incorporate analogue and digital technologies.
tel: 0113 2223434
20 April
Berlin Anticonformiste Festival 2005
(Live performance)
93 feet east, London
A festival bringing together three bands who have been involved in and represented the Berlin music scene since the mid-nineties, including Stereo Total, the German-Franco duo of Francoise Cactus (formerly of Lolitas) and Brezel Goering. Jeans Team, who spearheaded the early Berlin underground and Cobra Killer who were the precursors of Electroclash.
http://www.lumin.org/
Sunday 24 April
Sonic Art @ Lewisham Arthouse
(performance)
Lewisham Arthouse, London
Alan Wilkinson (saxophones) and Tony Moore (cello) join Jeff Cloke (electronic processing of sounds in the gallery, and the reverberations & resonances of the gallery space itself).
jeffcloke@hotmail.com
27 April – 1 May
Triptych
(festival)
Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow
Diverse festival featuring a rare performance by SAN Honourary Patron Karlheinz Stockhausen, who will perform his pieces Kontakte, Octophonie and his recent Mittwochs- Grüss and Mittwochs-Abschied. Other performers are just too numerous to mention.
www.triptych05.com
29 April - 1 May
Cybersonica
(festival)
Various venues
Includes a symposium, keynote addresses, live performances, a soundtoys.net exhibition, sonic installations, workshops and presentations
http://www.cybersonica.org
Tuesday 3 May
Music/Video Collaboration
(Concert/event)
Academy Concert Hall, RSAMD, Glasgow
Concert/presentation/event in the Academy - collaborations between composers and video/animation artists including postgraduate collaborations between RSAMD and Glasgow School of Art.
alistair@rsamd.ac.uk
6 May
Wildlife Sound Recording
(seminar)
RGS-IBG, London
Wildlife sound recording adds a great deal to the value of conservation research, especially in remote places. This one-day workshop is an introduction to the special techniques and equipment for capturing the sounds of insects, amphibians, birds, mammals, and other natural sounds. It is designed to equip participants with the essential knowledge to select and use equipment correctly and to achieve results quickly and effectively.
http://www.rgs.org
8 May
Ministry of Defiance
(live performance)
Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
Avant-gardist David Handford indulges in sinister organic synth instrumentals. DIY electronica compared to Throbbing Gristle and Mount Vernon Arts Lab.
http://www.postofficerecords.com
May 10 - May 15
Elektra Festival
(festival)
Montreal, Canada
International festival featuring Autechre, SND, Rob Hall, RedSniper, Ryoji Ikeda, D-Fuse, Scanner, Richard "Dr." Baily, Kevin Tod Haug, MK12, Etienne Auger, Georges Fok, Frédéric Bourque, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Les Platinistes numériques among many others.
http://www.elektrafestival.cal
13 May - 3 June
Cut And Splice: Dots and Lines
(festival)
Jerwood Space & LSO St Lukes, London
SAN and BBC Radio 3 present Cut and Splice. Spanning concert performances, a gallery show, an online exhibition and BBC Radio 3 Broadcasts and featuring names such as Carsten Nicolai, Yasunao Tone, Robert Ashley, Mauricio Kagel, Peter Ablinger and many more.
www.sonicartsnetwork.org
27 May - 31 May
Radio Taxi
(broadcast)
Radio and Net
Taxi Gallery presents its final major project - RADIO TAXI - which will integrate a 3 mile radius analogue FM broadcast with a worldwide digital transmission via a server capable of handling multiple streams. Containing a mix of locally originated programmes and interventions, a curated programme of invited sound works and a schedule of sonic art from all over the world.
http://www.taxigallery.org.uk/
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“Enter Left, Gnome Playing Bicycle” – Trevor Wishart’s Beach Singularity
“A singularity is a special type of environmental event. It is an event which remains in keeping with the environment in which it is set, while going beyond it in a particular way. It is best understood by reference to the mathematical concept of a singularity which might be loosely defined as a point in an otherwise unexceptional field at which the field behaves in an exceptional manner (takes on infinite values). By analogy, therefore, we may create an environmental singularity by first deciding on the natural, social and/or symbolic characteristics of a given environment and then staging an event at a location in the environment such that these characteristics are expanded beyond the normal.”
Trevor Wishart, from the score for Beach Singularity
I was four years old in 1977, so I can’t even lie about remembering Star Wars or going to the 100 Club to see the Pistols as some of my friends do. I do remember sitting on a float in Kirdford in Sussex in some kind of bizarre costume celebrating the Silver Jubilee. It’s all a rather distant memory though. If I had been on holidaying on the beaches of the North West of England that summer I could have had my first experiences of both sonic and performance art courtesy of the Palm Beach Orchestra as they performed Trevor Wishart’s Beach Singularity. I wasn’t, so I had to wait a little longer for those particular pleasures.
Not so the unsuspecting public on Scarborough South Beach on the 19 June 2005. This classic public sound intervention is to be revived for the SAN Expo 966 festival. It promises to be one of our most extraordinary public art events to date. In my efforts to coordinate this production I have been trying to get a feel for how this piece originally worked in performance. The existing documentation consists of a 2 page score with details of a particular realisation, a series of slides and a CD. The images are the most telling, revealing performer costumes, instruments and a large body of public watching and participating in the event. I needed to fill in the blanks so I decided to ask Trevor if I could visit him at his home in York to discuss the piece.
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"the tone of Scarborough’s reply suggested that it was a ridiculous waste of tax payers’ money" |
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“In 1977 we approached various borough councils along the North West coast with a view to presenting a performance of Beach Singularity on their beaches,” Trevor recalls as we sit in his conservatory. “Six years earlier I’d suggested a similar project called Seaside to Scarborough council on the North East coast.” I am returning from a meeting in Scarborough. I’ve just been soaked in a downpour. I’m really hoping this is not a bad omen for our staging of the piece. “They turned us down….. in fact the tone of Scarborough’s reply suggested that it was a ridiculous waste of tax payers’ money so we ended up on Filey Beach instead !”
As a front line advocate of challenging public art for all, Trevor was no stranger to this kind of philistine response from British institutions or the press.
“During an environmental workshop we were staging in a wood in Chorley in 1977, Sun reporters in grey suits turned up looking for a scoop. They had been tipped off that a potentially titillating artistic money-squandering event was taking place. We asked them if they would like to join in with the event but they declined, preferring to stand in the relative safety of a car park with their notebooks on the ready to document any financial abuses that might be taking place.”
Beach Singularity was originally staged with funding made available from North West Arts in Morecambe, Cleveleys, St. Annes and Southport in a hectic week of performances in early August 1977. It transpires during our conversation that the SAN presentation in June will be the work’s East Coast debut. I’m pleased. Trevor recalls that the public reaction was positive, “the use of costumes helped a lot. Children came running up straight away to ask what we were doing and they became involved in setting up the set for the performance.” The performances involved the erection of a maze (the ‘singularity’ of the piece’s title) on the beach that became a focal point for musical performances and sound games. Photos from the event show Trevor leading groups of children in the circle games that are documented in his well-known Sounds Fun books. A costumed marching band promenaded around the beach, as they approached the singularity their music became more bizarre, eventually incorporating electronic elements as they performed inside the maze. The basic musical material of the piece was made up of traditional seaside tunes. “We included How Much is That Doggie in the Window,” Trevor tells me when asked about some of the original material. “For the ‘woofs’ in the song we used real dog barks played back from tape. A fantastic unforeseen consequence of this was that all the dogs on the beach went nuts, running around the maze searching for these phantom dogs and they joined in on the chorus with their own barks. There was a satirical element to the performances as well, inspired by the tone of the media build up the Silver Jubilee.”
As previously mentioned, Beach Singularity was not Trevor Wishart’s first performance experiment in such a setting. Many lessons were learned from the 1971 staging of Seaside that contributed to the success of the later Beach Singularity performances. “For Seaside, we had various home made gongs and long swathes of muslin cloth that were erected on the beach in the face of the incoming tide. The piece didn’t work as well as was hoped because it felt like an intrusion into the normal activities on the beach. It was more like we, the artists, were imposing something alien into that context and recreating that old model of active artists and passive, receptive public which is not a model that I believe public performance art should aspire to. The public have to be creatively involved in the piece itself. Creativity is something that I have written about at length over the years and I still strongly believe that if you can release an individual’s creativity through involvement in artistic activity then that is a truly positive and liberating political result.”
The original line up for Trevor’s Palm Beach Orchestra that performed Beach Singularity in 1977 was made up of crack improvising musicians. It featured Robin Coombes (clarinet), Lyn Dobson (saxophone), Martin Mayes (horn), Melvyn Poore (tuba), Poppy Holden (vocals), Dick Witts (percussion) and Trevor himself on “tapes and sound-source miscellany”. “Melvyn’s tuba was a real hit with the kids,” he recalls “he always had a small procession of children following him around the beach as he played.” The events lasted for around two and a half hours and concluded with a “Fight-on-the-Beaches” Finale, for vocal tape-loop and anarcho-militarist brass and percussion. Deckchairs proved to be a perfect substitute for programme notes.
“Melvyn’s tuba was a real hit with the kids...he always had a small procession of children following him around the beach as he played.” |
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Somehow I didn’t see an event of this nature as naturally arising from the emerging UK electroacoustic studio scene of the day. My suspicions were confirmed. “There was a strong Fluxus influence,” Trevor informs me. “There were a lot of performance artists based in Yorkshire and the North at the time who were incorporating sound elements into their performances. I worked particularly with artists from the John Bull Puncture Repair Kit during the early 70s. They too were passionately committed to live public performance. In these groups I was one of the few artists who was coming from a specifically music based background though” he admits when pushed.
“Some of my own events were more visual / situational, like ‘Ecological Enterprises’ where I remember, as a small part of the event, being dressed as a gnome and fishing into a toy pond in shopping centres in Scunthorpe, Birmingham and elsewhere. We also performed music on upturned bicycles (using them as harps) amongst many other things. The Daily Telegraph’s take on this and related events was ‘Enter left, gnome playing bicycle’ and questions were raised in the House of Commons.”
There is an intriguing mention of a second realisation of the singularity concept in the works list on the cover of the Beach Singularity score that I was keen to ask about. Forest Singularity is described as ‘an environmental music event for a wood’. “That was done with Open University students at a Summer school at the University of Sussex in 1977. The piece was done at dusk. We had marked out a passage through the wood for the audience to follow with white materials. I was working on Red Bird at the time and we used a lot of the animal recordings that I had assembled. Maybe someone will revive that piece as well one day,” he adds.
The wider awareness of Trevor Wishart’s work is something that has always been a pleasant surprise to me, whether from grizzled community arts veterans or the current generation of hardcore DSP heads. I distinctly remember how gutted Russell Haswell was when arriving at the SAN 25 year retrospective concert in Belfast last year to discover that Trevor couldn’t make it over to the gig. Recently I happened upon a copy of the Vox cycle in the cassette rack of a motorway service station next to Steps, Geri Halliwell and various other corporate muppets. Imagine an unsuspecting parent trying to pacify their travel-weary children with Vox 6!
I’m leaving Trevor’s house now and thankfully it has stopped raining. I’m rather glad about this because I am now carrying with me two pages of the original score to Anticredos that he has kindly lent us for the Cut and Splice gallery show. They are rather valuable and he has had to withdraw them from the bank. The sun is coming out now. God, I hope the weather holds for the Scarborough landings on B-Day.
Richard Whitelaw
Sonic Arts Network Programme Director
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PRS FOUNDATION GRANTS AVAILABLE
This year the PRS (Performing Rights Society) Foundation has broadened the scope of its Live Connections scheme by offering grants of between £500 - £5000 to electronic music artists, for a one-off performance of their work.
This money could be used for anything from a live PA as part of a club night or as a small part of the funding towards a grander scale event. Applicants can be individual artists or collaborators but they do need to be working closely with a promoter/organisation/club or with a sound system that will help them deliver their chosen performance.
Previous recipients of Live Connections grants including: Kreepa, Brian Duffy, Plaid, Adam Freeland, London Elektricity and I am the Mighty Jungulator, have been able to put on dynamic and unusual performances, from electro-acoustic installations to full-on techno and breakbeat events.
"Thanks to support from The PRS Foundation we were able to rehearse and promote our show extensively which contributed to us selling out the Jazz Café in Camden on a Tuesday night! We devised a method of playing our drum and bass show completely live, because it became clear when we were rehearsing that relying on playback from computers or sequencers would take away some of the energy and excitement of the live performance. Although I was a bit nervous about delivering a completely live performance I think it really paid off as we had a fantastic response from the audience. We aimed to break new ground in live electronic music with our show and, with the help of the PRS Foundation, we definitely succeeded."
Tony Colman, London Elektricity
For more information and details of how to apply please visit:
http://www.prsfoundation.co.uk/funding/liveconnections.htm
EXTENDED INSTRUMENTS WORKSHOP
19th, 20th and 21st April 2005
10am - 4pm
The Hebden Bridge Trades Club, Holme Street, Hebden Bridge, West
Yorkshire HX7 8EE
To book places contact Linda Whiteley on [01484] 471091
This workshop, led by members of ixi-software, questions how new
digital technologies can help and inspire us when working with music.
Extended Instruments investigates how open source software tools
[such as Pure Data and Supercollider] can extend acoustic instruments
and become part of their being, as well as how real-time software
interfaces can be seen as musical instruments.
The computer can perform many more functions than just being an audio
effects toolbox: it can learn about the musician, respond and
improvise with the musician, and inspire him or her to take new turns
into unknown territories through new musical environments.
The workshop will explore the audio and visual qualities of the
computer for multimedia work; communication between visuals and audio
has become increasingly relevant for live performance. Participants
are invited to bring along an instrument or instruments of choice and
explore how that instrument can take on new musical meanings in this
context.
ixi-software will be joined by musicians working with African
drumming, gamelan, tuned instruments, percussion and circuit-bending
[hacking electronic circuits in toys and electronic instruments].
The workshop is limited to fifteen participants who will each have
access to a laptop for the duration.
http://www.ixi-software.net
Tom Holley | Creative Director | Media Centre Network |
http://www.mcnetwork.co.uk/creative.html
ICT IN MUSIC
ICT in Music – Reaching Out, making Connections
During the month of May, NMMG will be hosting a music discussion forum on the Spotlight section of the Becta website on a theme connected to the personalised learning agenda. [http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/ then look under highlights]
National Music Management Group (NMMG) have identified a range of key issues for embedding ICT in music. Many of them are to do with making connections across the boundaries within the subject, across the whole curriculum and beyond the immediate classroom environment. Young people engage with music across a broad spectrum of opportunity – formal and informal, given and elective. We need to explore ways of making sure that experiences gained in any one of these areas will foster enthusiasm and progress in the other areas.
A team of experts have been appointed to deal with questions as they arise. Please consider contributing to the debate in what promises to be a fascinating discussion area!
David Ashworth
Lead Consultant
National Music Management Group
01347 878746
PRIVATE VIEW COMMISSIONS
Private View is a unique commission from the BBC and Arts Council England. It offers two awards of £20K for works that will be launched in September 2005.
Private View will commission two works of outstanding innovation and vision from visual artists experimenting with live technologies in the public realm. These proposals can be from individual practitioners or production teams. The commissioners are particularly keen to encourage works that engage the public and offer a dynamic or interactive role within the work of art. They will prioritise projects that illustrate a knowledge of contemporary trends in practice in the realm of live media and visual arts, such as the uses of immersive technologies, augmented reality, networked performances, explorations of emerging software, wireless and networked media or other interactive platforms and also reflect wider media trends such as flashmobs, bluejacking and reality TV.
The commissioners are looking for strong conceptual works rather than technology driven projects.
The works should address issues such as: How do we experience and interact with public and private space in the era of wireless networked environments and how do technological transformations reflect broader cultural changes in the way we perform in private and public?
This is the latest BBC Arts Council England collaborative commission. For examples of previous commissions from the Shooting Live Artists series you can visit an archive: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/shootinglive/2003/
For complete guidelines and application form:http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/privateview/
www.artscouncil.org.uk
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CALL FOR INFORMATION
The JISC funded ARIA project is currently looking for information from researchers from all arts and humanities communities about good examples of how ICT resources and tools are being used in your subject area of research and about what ICT skills and tools you may need to acquire in future to support your research e.g. word processing, databases, linguistic analysis, web search engines, image enhancement tools and so on. We would be very grateful if you could spare 10 minutes to take part in a short online survey at http://aria.dmu.ac.uk (follow the Questionnaire link) your help with this could help to make a significant contribution to ICT provision in arts and humanities research. When all the responses have been collated the results will be posted on the website.
CALL FOR PAPERS, PERFORMANCES AND CREATIVE WORKS
COLLISION: A SYMPOSIUM ON INTERARTS AND INTERDISCIPLINARY PRACTICES
University of Victoria, BC, Canada
September 8th-11th, 2005
Submissions for papers and proposals for performances, installations and other creative works are now being accepted for the COLLISION Symposium to be held at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada from September 8-11, 2005.
It is sometimes assumed that Interarts and Interdisciplinary creation involves a seamless integration of two or more distinct artistic practices, and ideally that these practices will easily fuse into a work that can be viewed as an integrated whole. However, as artists who attempt this fusion find, it is often far from easy to integrate disparate media. For the Collisions Symposium we seek presentations and artistic works that examine these difficulties, conflicts, rough seams, uneven mixtures, and the debris and detritus resulting from artistic collisions, as well as
presentations that question how artists approach these acts of integration/disintegration. We are seeking proposals for conference-length papers and performances that address the issues of Interarts creation/collaboration as a collision between artistic elements and forms. For this symposium we seek to create an atmosphere of interaction between academic discussion and artistic presentation. Consequently, we also encourage presentations that fall between the standard academic paper format, including discussing your interarts/interdisciplinary practice, lecture-performances, and creative works that engage critical interaction. We welcome papers that examine theoretical concepts and/or the development of artistic processes, as well as performances and creative works from within the following areas:
Sound Art
Instrumental Theatre
Immersive Environments
New Music Theatre
Interactive Works
Visual Theatre
Live Art
Video/Visual Poetry
Dance Theatre
Performance Art
Intermedia
Experimental Theatre
We also welcome presentations that examine the following topics or artists:
Fluxus
Dada
Happenings
Gesamtkunstwerk
Total Theatre
Sound Walks
Dramaturgy for Interarts/Interdisciplinary Creation
Collaborative Processes for Interarts/Interdisciplinary Creation
Directing Interarts/Interdisciplinary Creation
Pedagogy of Interarts/Interdisciplinary Creation
Heiner Goebbels
George Aperghis
John Cage
Robert Wilson
Pina Bausch
R. Murray Schaffer
Meredith Monk
Dieter Schnebel
Mauricio Kagel
For Paper Submissions (20-30 minute presentations), please forward an abstract (.doc, .rtf format) of no more than 300 words to Dylan Robinson at dylanr@uvic.ca
For Performances and Creative works please mail submissions to:
Dylan Robinson
Department of Visual Arts
University of Victoria
PO Box 1700 STN CSC
Victoria BC V8W 2Y2
CANADA
For Artistic works and Performances Please Include:
1. Documentation of the work including slides, video, DVD, or recordings
2. A short description of the work including requirements for the type presentation space and length of the performance
Please note that we are only able to provide minimal technical support, and no financial compensation for travel or transportation of materials.
DEADLINE FOR ALL SUBMISSIONS: May 27, 2020
Successful applicants will be notified of their acceptance in early June.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
SOUNDSCAPEpgh is a collaborative project of sound installation and
performance within the downtown Cultural District of Pittsburgh, PA
from June 3-19, 2005. This project will place soundworks within the
exterior spaces of this area with a goal of engaging an audience in new
ways, bringing the experience of the soundscape to a focal point in
this downtown business district.
We are designing a series of playback systems that will be installed
throughout this area and are seeking submissions of audio recordings
for this purpose. Three primary categories can be considered to suit
our specific playback systems:
1) two-channel recordings meant for intimate, quiet experience.
2) two-channel recordings intended for louder volume.
3) 5-channel recordings designed for linear separation of speakers
along a passageway (DVD).
As well, we are very interested in proposals and ideas that do not fall
within these specific parameters and strongly encourage submissions
that might stretch these formats. We will be programming a performance
schedule to be integrated into this two-week period of exhibition and
encourage proposals for performance that investigate, address or
explore sound and its relation to the city.
Please email with inquiries and submissions:
PGHsound@earthlink.net
SOUNDSCAPEpgh
PO Box 99341
Pittsburgh, PA 15233
CALL FOR WORKS
NewTown Pasadena and SCREAM (Southern California Resource for
Electro-Acoustic Music) announce a call for works integrating video with
electro-acoustic music scores. Works in which the visual and sonic elements are co-equal and/or generated from the same or similar conceptual elements will be looked upon favorably, though this is not an absolute requirement.
Works submitted must be no longer than 15 minutes, recorded on standard DVDs (playable on region 1 players or encoded without a region flag), and with a stereo soundtrack. Works may be created by one or more artists.
Selected works will be presented on a New Town Pasadena program on Saturday, October 8 and will also be shown at CalArts at a later date. Artists of works chosen for presentation will receive an honorarium from New Town Pasadena.
Artists who wish their DVDs returned should send an SASE with submissions. Works not selected and submitted without SASEs will be destroyed after the curating process. Please include a brief biographical sketch and short program notes with each submission. Also, be sure to include an e-mail address for contact purposes with each submission.
Works must be received by July 18, 2005. Send submissions to:
Barry Schrader
NewTown/SCREAM Program
CalArts School of Music
24700 McBean Parkway
Valencia, CA 91355
USA.
For more information, please e-mail Barry Schrader at schrader@calarts.edu or contact Richard Amromin at NewTown - newtownarts@charter.net or call at (626)398-9278.
CALL FOR EXPRESSION OF INTEREST
The AV Festival is a new bi-annual international festival of digital art, moving image, music and new media convergence which takes place in the North East of England. The second AV festival - AV.06 - will take place across three cities in the North East of England during the first two weeks of March 2006. It will examine one of the key issues within creative and scientific practice - life.
AV.06 will include internationally renowned artists, filmmakers, researchers, technicians and musicians as well as emerging practitioners. Concerts, performances and exhibitions will be complemented by a conference and an education programme.
AV.06 will feature:
- new commissions of film, digital arts, music and games
- outdoor projects which will transform landmark public buildings or spaces
- live performance events at the Sage Gateshead and other concert venues
- a major strand of activity focussing on computer games
- a screening programme
- exhibitions and installations
- an international conference featuring international and local speakers
- an education programme of workshops, seminars and lectures
- a programme of club events and parties
- a radio station broadcasting on-air and online
- digital projects for the region's public transport system
AV.06 is providing creative practitioners with an opportunity to contribute ideas to the programme. If you have an existing project which could fit the thematic context of the programme, or an idea for a new work, we would like to hear about it.
AV.06: thematics
The theme of AV.06 is Life. The festival will explore the interplay between digital and biological life as explored by audiovisual practitioners from all disciplines.
In an increasingly technologised society, we find ourselves surrounded by and immersed in virtual and artificial worlds. Evolutionary computational techniques and genetic algorithms correlate the processes of the computer with the processes we observe in biology. Digital technology has allowed for entire environments to be modelled within the computer. The internet has created a culture, where societies of users can inhabit these synthetic environments. Games, online communities and immersive interactive environments have become worlds within worlds.
At the same time, genetic engineering is allowing for the creation of synthetic biological worlds, which are constructed in the laboratory. Biotechnology raises passions, hopes, fears and fascinations. On the cutting edge of science and ethics, it offers many promises, but prompts anxiety also. Fields such as stem cell research, genetic modification and reproductive cloning intrigue and perturb us, provoking questions about the status of life itself. The North East of England has become a bioresearch centre of international repute, with scientists at the Centre for Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics at the University of Newcastle engaged in human embryonic stem cell research, and medical researchers at the James Cook Hospital in Middlesbrough working on reproductive treatments for patients. The often troubling ethical and political implications of this work are considered and communicated by organisations such as the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre (PEALs) and the Centre for Life.
Artists also have a role to play in considering the changing nature of life. Artificial life and emergent systems have long been subjects for new media artists, exemplified by the work of Kenneth Rinaldo (USA), William Latham (UK/USA) and Jon McCormack (Australia). Now, practitioners such as the Critical Art Ensemble (USA) and Oron Catts & Ionat Zuur (Australia), are beginning to work directly with living biological systems. With artists and scientists alike fabricating new life-forms and ecologies, our understanding of what life is and where it can happen is shifting, evolving and mutating.
AV.06 will explore and present new ways of thinking about Life. The festival will interrogate the boundaries of what is 'natural' and what is 'synthetic' in this context, aiming to extend and rework these notions. It will probe digital and biological 'lifeforms' and 'living systems', and ask such questions as: what do these 'creations' look, sound and feel like? What is it like to 'inhabit' these systems? Who are the demiurges of the artificial age?
Areas which may inform the exploration of Life within AV.06 include (but are not restricted to):
- bioscience and biotechnology
- artificial life
- evolutionary computation and genetic algorithms
- technologically mediated ecosystems, ecologies and environments
- virtual or networked spaces as social 'living' environments
- life processes as tools for discovery and learning
- evolutionary approaches to narrative within film
- algorithmic techniques within music composition and audio environments
- philosophical and ethical explorations of the boundaries of nature
AV.06 will also include a major strand on gaming, which will explore, as part of its focus, the way that multi-player games, are increasingly evolving into highly complex social "living" environments.
AV.06: submissions
AV will be commissioning new works especially for the festival, as well as presenting creative work which already been produced. AV is now calling for expressions of interest from artists, filmmakers, musicians, DJs, VJs, designers, games developers, theorists, technologists, scientists, philosophers and others interested in this field.
You are invited to submit a short proposal for:
- a new work which you would like to make specifically for the festival
- an existing project which you would like to present at the festival
AV.06: contacts
Honor Harger
Consultant Director
AV Festival
c/-Tyneside Cinema
10 Pilgrim Street
Newcastle Upon Tyne
NE1 6QG
UK
Telephone: +44 (0)191 232 8289, ext 112
Email: honor@avfest.co.uk
http://www.avfest.co.uk/contact.html
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