The COVID lockdown did not shut down the desire to share sound with the world. While the pandemic closed concert and exhibition venues worldwide, undoubtedly damaging many artists financial prospects, it has not kept them from sharing their work. Numerous venues have created platforms for sharing adventurous sound – some of them free, some of them requiring a donation to help the performing artists.
Originally from the Navajo Nation, Raven Chacon is a composer of chamber music, a performer of experimental noise music, and an installation artist. He performs regularly as a solo artist as well as with numerous ensembles in the Southwest and beyond. He is also a member of the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity, with who he recently premiered the two-mile-long land art/border intervention, Repellent Fence.
Kevin Beasley engages with the legacy of the American South through an installation that centers on a cotton gin motor from Maplesville, Alabama. In operation from 1940 to 1973, the motor powered the gins that separated cotton seeds from fiber. Here, the New York-based artist uses it to generate sound as if it were a musical instrument, creating space for visual and aural contemplation.
Believe it or not, there’s a long history of plants and sound.
Here’s an article in the great art blog Hyperallergic that talks about the exhibition Sonic Succulents: Plant Sounds and Vibrations by Adrienne Adar at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden
Two Postcommodity members, along with composer Guillermo Galindo, are partnering with members of a fast-gentrifying Santa Monica neighborhood to produce a sound-based artwork of contested histories.
Oliver Beer’s “Vessel Orchestra” includes 32 objects, ancient to modern, chosen for the sounds hidden within them.
The global engineering firm Arup and BLOXAS Architects collaborated on a soundscape installation to demonstrate what our everyday environment might sound like to a dementia sufferer.
In her visual and audio work, Jennie C. Jones revels in the affective power of silence and lack, staging encounters with forgotten histories and extra-visual phenomena through the bodies of her viewers.
In honor of May Day, Ultra-red release the PDF of our latest workbook for militant sound inquiry, “Five Protocols for Organized Listening” (5.8MB). The workbook compiles protocols for collective listening developed by multiple teams of investigators from 2009 to 2011 in cities across North America and Europe. “Five Protocols” is also accompanied by links to related sound objects on the School of Echoes Soundcloud page. Please feel free to download and distribute. We only ask that you send us feedback on your experiments with organized listening and militant sound investigation.
Hong-Kai Wang is an artist who works mainly with sound. Her practice includes processes involved in the production and performance of sound as well as their political and social contexts, and, not least, the organisation of listening. In several of her pieces she has employed collective processes, discussions and workshops.
Anna Mlasowsky is a German-born glass artist who works across many media including video, installation, and performance. As the description below for the project “Resonance” attests, her work with sound emerges from her own challenges with hearing perception.
Humans come into contact with sound all the time. Our first tactile listening experience is in the womb, feeling our mother’s heartbeat. This kind of physicality continues into our everyday: We feel our own hearts beating, we hear the sound of our footsteps. By its very nature, direct contact with music through its natural vibrations introduces us to an experience we’ve been missing, one that is crucial to our proper understanding of it.
The ground is in motion. GROUND acts as a LOOKING GLASS, as an AMPLIFIER for what we normally can´t perceive – tectonic plates are continously shifting … the permutations of landscapes constitute an infinite process of becoming… geosphere is a complex system that interferes with biosphere but also with anthroposphere, that part of the environment, that is made and modified by humans.
GROUND is moved by immense mechanical forces. The motion can be felt, heard and seen. Rough sounds are mechanically produced through friction between the concrete elements … visitors might experience the loss of their visual reference points, it becomes unclear what is still and what isn´t… there is an afterglow of a moving ground in the visitors physical memory after leaving the installation.
A 40-metre wall with a 1.5-metre gap at each end is built to bisect the gallery. Hidden
inside the wall are a series of microphones connected to a PA system. The entrance side of the gallery is empty. On the other side of the gallery, coming out from the bisecting wall a baseball bat is attached to a steel chain. The audience is invited to strike the wall. Their action is amplified at 120db.
In the often derelict but delicate works of Rolf Julius, subtle noise vibrations become palpable, physical things.
Bohyun Yoon is from Korea and currently living in Richmond Virginia. He is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Inspired by the idea of sound from clear glass, he choreographed avenues for this glass to become a sonic instrument. His residency at Harvestworks included the use different materials like multi channel audio, contact microphones and amplifiers. His recent projects include Glass Helmet (2004), Glass Tube (2012), and Glassorganism (2013).
The idea behind Sonic Pavilion (2009) was this: boring of a 200-meter-deep well in the ground in order to install a set of microphones to capture the sound of the earth. By way of a sophisticated system of equalization and amplification, this sound is played in real time inside the empty circular pavilion, which was designed to create equivalence between the audio experience and ones relation to the surrounding space.
JUNE 16, 2017 – JANUARY 8, 2018
Featuring work by more than 20 artists, The World Is Sound juxtaposes new site-specific commissions and works by prominent contemporary sound artists with historical objects from the museum’s collection of Tibetan Buddhist art to encourage reflection on how we listen and to challenge entrenched ways of thinking.
Using simple and functional components, Zimoun builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound. Exploring mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems, his installations incorporate commonplace industrial objects.
Pressure sequence is an exploration of movement, a question of presence, a reconnaissance of body language. Pressure Sequence started out as a question: Dancing is body language at its purest. But can you transform, translate this language?
