Artist talks: Elin Øyen Vister and Benjamin Thigpen
Published
Elin Øyen Vister
For two weeks Elin Øyen Vister has been artist in residency at BEK, working on the installation “Soundscape Røst for Insomnia”. The installation will be presented at Tromsø Kunstforeningfrom October 19 onwards as part of the Insomnia festival of electronic music.
Child of Klang aka Elin Øyen Vister is a Norwegian artist, composer and DJ. She has studied sound-engineering, music technology, and popular musicology in Norway and England. She is currently doing her MFA at the art academy in Trondheim and has followed a joint study program called Nordic Sound Art.
She is also known under the alias DJ Sunshine, one of Norways most versitile and eclectic DJ´s. In the 90s she was one of the pioneers of the Norwegian drum´n´bass scene. She has organized, curated and run festivals, festival programs and club program nationwide and she has played records all over the world from Svalbard to Costa Rica.
In June 2009 she relocated to Kjerringøy, an island on the north coast of Nordland where she begun working with field recordings as the basis of her art practice. Child Of Klang creates works based on her interest in areas such as soundscape, deep listening, deep ecology and bioacoustics. She uses sound as a sculptural element and a narrative, and is deeply fascinated by the acoustics of spaces. Child of Klang also does live performances.
”Soundscape Røst – a sound-documentation project about the changing soundscapes of the Røst archipelago, home to an endangered pelagic seabird population such as Kittiwakes, Guillemots, Puffins and Razor Bills, is supported by The Arts Council of Norway, Komponistenes Vederlagsfond and the City Council Of Nordland.
Benjamin Thigpen
Benjamin Thigpen, nomad, born in the United States, with degrees in English Literature, Comparative Literature and “Esthetics, Technologies and Artistic Creations,” immigrated to Paris at the age of 31. Since then, he has composed at GRM (Paris), at Musiques et Recherches (Belgium), at SCRIME (Bordeaux), at EMS (Stockholm), at the Visby International Centre for Composers (Sweden), at STEIM (Amsterdam), at Djerassi (California), at l’Espace Totem (Montreal), in his bedroom and in the train.
After 6 years at Ircam (Paris) and 7 at the Conservatory of Cuneo (Italy), he currently teaches computer music and (psycho)acoustics at Arts2 (Mons, Belgium), while also working as a free-lance programmer and musician.
He makes music for loudspeakers: electroacoustic works (composed on electromagnitic support); pieces for live computer performance; interactive music for computer and acoustic instrument(s); computer improvisation. His music is concerned with issues of energy, density, complexity, movement, simultaneity and violence, and he often works extensively with space as a primary compositional parameter. He thinks that music does not exist in time but rather creates it, and considers that music is not the art of sound but the art of the transcendence of sound.
Benjamin Thigpen currently has a short-term artist residency at USF.