AudioSpace – seminar
Published
Seminar
AudioSpace is a yearly seminar at KHiB about the relationships between sound, music and art. This year it will focus on the question of the instrument. Guests are artists who address this issue in different ways, from domestication of casette players to installations that perform, to text scores. Lecturers include Trond Lossius, Atle Selnes Nilsen, Pedro Gómez-Egaña, John Lely and Icaro Zorbar.
AudioSpace – seminar
Rom 8
Vaskerelven 8, Bergen
Friday 11th of September
from 10.00
Volt presents in collaboration with KHiB:
LOS PANCHOS – Icaro Zorbar, John Lely, Pedro Gómez-Egaña and Karen Skog Orkester
Los Panchos
a performance with music
Rom 8,
Vaskerelven 8
Friday 11th of September
at 19.00
Free entrance
“Los Panchos is a musical trio that plays and sings typical nostalgic Latin-American music. They are especially popular amongst a generation of people who idenify with an old-fashioned sense of romance, where relationships are enjoyed through a sense of endurance. I find that the works in this performance are all about experiencing the limits of a relationship between the performer and the objects he operates on, and even between the materials that make musical production possible.” Pedro Gómez-Egaña
This year’s AudioSpace seminar at KHIB will explore the question of the instrument as it appears in art, sound art and contemporary music. The seminar includes a performance, Los Panchos in which the guest artists will exercise this question in different practical ways. John Lely is a composer and researcher who lately specialises in text scores and uses them in order to activate musical pieces with a variety of everyday objects. Icaro Zorbar is a Colombian artist who “domesticates” tape-players and other music reproduction machines and ends up with deconstructed characters that play back songs. Karen Skog is a visual artist who plays the role of an instrument maker taking her models from visual parameters more than working as a luthier. These artists and their different practices seem to all inhabit the borders of the instrument and our relationship to it: the object that stands between the body and the music, the decipherable apparatus, the audible mechanism.
BIOS
Icaro Zorbar
is a Colombian artist who works with machines and songs. His work is of a performative character; using cassette tapes, fans, and music boxes, sometimes his presence among machines and sound takes on the form of “assisted installations”. Icaro holds an MFA from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He has shown in Buenos Aires’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Galería Vermelho in Sao Paulo, New York’s younger than Jesus exhibition at the New Museum of N.Y, and the Beijing Biennale. His work is in the collection of the Cisneros Fontanals Arts Foundation, which awarded him a Grant Award in 2008. Zorbar currently lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia
About his work Zorbar writes: “I work with machines in circumstances that relate to sentiments between people. This is what really inspires me. I intervene, give voice, a fate, I propose conversations, formulate encounters and separations. I seek to deploy and enhance the fragility of certain connections in which I find a constant tension. I find that disillusionment in the face of a technological reality is important in that it evidences human nature and everyday life.”
http://icarozorbar.wordpress.com/
John Lely
is a composer and performer based in the UK. He studied composition at Goldsmiths College, London with Roger Redgate and John Tilbury, and privately with Michael Parsons. In 2007 he was a resident composer at Ostrava New Music Days. His music has been featured internationally at festivals such as MaerzMusik, Ultima, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Cutting Edge and Open Sound Systems (Tate Modern, London). Broadcasts have included BBC 4 Television, BBC Radio 3, DeutschlandRadio and Resonance FM. He performs in various groups including Apartment House, LelyWhite (electronic chamber music with composer John White) and the ever-populous 9! with Eddie Prévost. Three improvised CDs are available through Matchless Recordings. Alongside composers Tim Parkinson and Markus Trunk, he co-curates the annual Music We’d Like to Hear concert series. From 2007-8 he was responsible for the digitisation of the Daphne Oram Collection at Goldsmiths College. Presently Lely is engaged in a research project spanning over two years, named Words and Music, and financed by the British Arts and Humanity Research Centre (AHRC). The project is based at Bath Spa University and examines textual scores, an alternative notation where text replaces notes and other conventional musical symbols. He also teaches experimental acoustic art at the Chelsea College of Arts. Digital expressions and interactivity are central elements in several of his works. A common trait is also the use of mp3 player and dictaphone and/or involving the audience from the stage. John Lely will show his performance “Time Travel at the British Museum” at Litteraturhuset, 17th of September at 7:00 pm as part of Ultima.
http://www.johnlely.co.uk/
Pedro Gómez-Egaña
is a Colombian artist who is currently based in Norway. Trained both as a composer and visual artist at Goldsmiths College and the Bergen National Academy of Arts, his practice varies from sculpture, to performance, video, installation and sound works. Gómez- Egaña’s recent artistic output is part of a broad scale project called Calligraphies, supported by the Norwegian Artistic Fellowships Programme, that could be seen as an exploration of motion in relation to fundamental forces like gravity, repetition, accidentality, or anxiety. His pieces often include compositions of text and phonographic material, as well as mechanical or video animations of simple drawings. Although his practice involves multiple technical resources and artistic disciplines it appears to construct worlds of particular simplicity.
Prior to Calligraphies Gómez-Egaña carried out a 3 year research project on the relationship between musicality and physicality sponsored by the British Council of England that rendered a variety of collaborative and solo exhibitions, performances and papers. He has been involved with art, music, and dance venues, exhibitions and festivals such as the South Bank Centre’s Purcell Room in London, Brussels Biennial 2008, Kunstraum Kreuzberg-Bethanien-Berlin, FACT Liverpool, Rencontre International d’Art Performance de Quebec, Multipistes-Amsterdam, 66East Amsterdam, Institute of Contemporary Art London, DareDare Montreal, Tanz Quartier Wien, BMIC London cutting edge series, La Source de Lion-Casablanca, and L’appartement 22 Morocco amongst others. This autumn Pedro will show at the Marrakech biennal, Bogotá’s art fair and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires.
Gómez-Egaña has been guest and resident lecturer at the MA programme in visual arts at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Goldsmiths College London, and the Laban Centre London.
http://www.pedrogomezegana.com
Karen Skog Orkester
One text about an Orchestra by Karen Skog:
“One cello, one organ, one violin and one theremin standing in a room. Three people playing improvised concerts. This project started about one year ago, with me attempting to make my own cello. There are possibly many things in thisworld, and even the big ships are made by slowly forward working hands.
Many years ago, when people built what they needed, no standard existed. And in some old books you can find all kinds of different instruments. When doing something you have never done before, new observations may appear. And this late evening, about one year ago, I tuned the four strings before slowly sending out the sound. There are these moments when your mind moves backwards and without knowing you can travel hundreds of miles away. I saw my orchestra sitting in a big hall tuning their instruments.
From my mind to the sound of this four instruments, which I called «She was talking about this Orchestra». An orchestra with three musicians Sivert Nikolai Nesbø the cellist and organist, Erik Andreas Røkland the organist and cellist and me Karen Skog the violinist and thereminist. One person starts playing and the others appear slowly. We are standing listening to each others´ instrument, carefully tuning in to one universe of sounds.“
Karen Skog
has a MA in art from Bergen National Academy of the Arts (2007-2009). She is part of the new atelier group Bergen Ateliergruppe and was last participation in the art project C/O Visningsrommet at Visningsrommet USF the summer of 2009. She works with installations and the inbetween spheres of space, scenography and sound art. In november she will participate in a new festival NEU/NOW Festival in Vilnius the cultural capital of 2009.
The evening is a collaboration between Pedro Gómez-Egaña, KHiB and Volt. The program is funded by Bergen kommune Byrådsavd. for kultur, næring og idrett, Seksjon for kunst og kultur and KHIB fellesfagligmidler.
Volt
– galleri for samtidskunst
http://www.gallerivolt.no + 4791111309