Participants

Sam Auinger is a sonic thinker, composer and sound-artist. He is collaborating with cityplanners and architects, giving lectures and is a frequent participant of international symposiums on the topic of urban planning, architecture, media, and the senses. He was a visiting professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, running the Experimental Sound Design department at the Sound Studies Master Program from 2008 till 2012. Currently he is an associate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Since 1989 he works together with the composer Bruce Odland as O+A, exploring the central theme of hearing perspective. Over the years Sam Auinger has received numerous prizes and awards for his work: In 1997 he was awarded the Berlin Artist-in-Residence DAAD fellowship, 2002 he received the Kultur Preis der Stadt Linz to honor his body of work and in 2007 the SKE Publicity Prize. In 2009 he was a scholarship holder of the atelier Berlin at Cité International des Arts in Paris, 2010 he was awarded city sound artist Bonn of the year and in 2011 he was featured artist at the Austrian Ars Electronica Festival.

Listen to the Sonic Commons – Sonic works in public space by O+A

This lecture/talk deals with the way Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger (O+A) create their sound works.Using three examples: Harmonic Bridge (North Adams/MassMoCa/ since 1998), Blue Moon (NY/2004), and Sonic Vista (Frankfurt/ since 2011) it shows insights how they develop their works, which discussions develop from them, and how it contributes to the discourse of acoustic ecology.

Dariusz Brzostek is an associate professor of cultural studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. His main research interests are sound studies, science, technology studies, science fiction, and horror studies. His current research project is concerned with early Polish electronic music (Polish Radio Experimental Studio), counterculture in Poland, Communist Era science fiction, and history of jazz. He is also field recordist working in i.a. China, USA, Morocco, Jamaica, France and Portugal, and sound artist experimenting with electronic sounds.

Field Recording as the Technology of Self: Acoustic Ecology and the Ethics of Care

Foucault’s idea of the care of the self (epimeleia heautou) is a part of his larger concept of „the technologies of self”, „which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality”. Carrol Gilligan’s concept of the ethics of care, by contrast, emphasizes that: „caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web”. This paper discusses field recording practice as the technology of self and simultaneously poses the question about the possible transformation of the self-care into a care of a life-sustaining web. This research is based on the recordings, interviews and statements of the Polish field recordists.

Roberta Busechian is Founder of Spazio (T)Raum Sound Art in Milan, member of Errant Sound in Berlin. Artist and researcher: installations, conferences, work with istitutions in the context of Sound Art, electroacustic composition techniques and Sound Studies, audiovisual practice, new media, workshops and seminars about sound installations and contemporary audiovisual art practice and curatorial projects.

An analysis of a sound art educational project to introduce sonic activism to school students

The question about how to teach sound art as active participation in sonic activism involves schools alongside public artistic institutions. In a way, within the following project “Klangkunst im MV,“ this question was a focal point, as the project attempted to determine the best means for introducing students to sound art practice and to fascinate them with sonic research. This project was developed in Berlin at Atrium Jugendkunstschule Reinickendorf in cooperation with comX and the Bettina-von Arnim-Schule and funded within the “Kultur macht stark – Bündnisse für Bildung 2018” through Paritätische Bildungswerk BV e.V. and the Programm JEP – Jung Engagiert Phantasiebegabt. The theme of the project, created and developed by Roberta Busechian with the support by Atrium Jugendkunstschule, was sound art practice inside the urban area of Märkisches Viertel, where the school is located. The experience showed that it is necessary in order to work properly with young people in a way that allows them to approach sound in an active way but intuitively and without constrictions.

Raquel Castro is a PhD on Communication and Arts about Sound, Space and Acoustic Identity (New University of Lisbon). Among other films, she directed the documentary Soundwalkers which was presented in Subtropics Festival in Miami and screened at various conferences of sound art and documentary film festivals. She is currently working on a new documentary series called “Soa”, to be broadcasted by RTP2 in 2020. As aaquel is the founder and director of Invisible Places International Symposium and the environmental sound art festival Lisboa Soa. Currently, she is a fellow researcher at CICANT – Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies under the project “Aural Experience, Territory and Community”, funded by FCT.

Aural identity, neighborhood and community

Central to the notion of a sound ecology is the role of sound in the definition of place – more than a notion of diffuse and abstract space. One of its goals is to document this role and determine the daily rhythms of a community. What defines an acoustic community is the existence of soundmarks. The boundary of each community is defined precisely by the limits drawn by the acoustic horizon of these unique sounds. When noise is so intense that obliterates all the soundmarks, it prevents the exchange of words and does not create singular identity but solitary individualism, we are facing a non-place. Our thesis is that spaces occupied by an undifferentiated and insignificant sound mass – traffic noise, for example – where we tend to isolate ourselves, are homogeneous universes which eliminate the singular identity of the individual or the group.

Jozef Cseres lectures on aesthetics and the philosophy of music, visual arts and intermedia at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Main topics of his research are the problems of symbolism and representation in arts, the intermedia and multimedia, and the experimental and improvised music. Aside his scientific and pedagogic carrier, Mr. Cseres is active also as a curator and publisher. Since 1997 he is the director of the international project The Rosenberg Museum in Violín, Slovakia. In 1999 – 2010 he has been the editorial board member of the international journal for literature and arts Hungarian Workshop, and since 2008 he is the dramaturge of the international music festival Exposition of New Music in Brno, organized by Brno Philharmonic. Since 2001 he is running the Hermesʼ Ear label, devoted to the experimental and improvised music and intermedia creativity.

John Cage’s Sound Ecology and Its Consequences to the Aesthetics

As we know from the writings by John Cage, Jacques Attali, Raymond Murray Schafer, and other thinkers, sound and noise are the primal semantic media and means of human communication. While Cage established the non-musical sounds as a basis for modern music making and sound art, and Attali treated the noise as an anthropologic constant, a social-political phenomenon of human expression and inter-human communication, Schafer grasped the noise environmentally, as an “unwanted sound signal”. The paper reveals the significant affinities between these three attitudes to sound, explaining them in broader context of actual philosophy, aesthetics and sound studies. Its author emphasizes especially the contribution by John Cage whom he finds an important forerunner of sound ecology.

Peter Cusack is a field recordist and musician with a special interest in environmental sound and acoustic ecology. His projects have included community arts, research into sound and our sense of place, and documentary recordings in areas of special sonic interest (Lake Bajkal, Aral Sea, the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the Caspian oil fields, or UK nuclear sites). The project Sounds From Dangerous Places explores soundscapes at the sites of major environmental damage. Cusack initiated the Favourite Sounds project in London 1998 with the aim of discovering what people find positive about their everyday sound environment. The project has since been established in Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Chicago, Prague and Birmingham. He lectures in Sound Arts and Design at the London College of Communication and was recently a DAAD artist in residence in Berlin.

Aral Sea Stories: Soundscapes of A Major Environmental Change

Sixty years ago the Aral Sea in Central Asia was the planet’s fourth largest lake. Today it has almost disappeared; a victim of vast Soviet irrigation schemes that divert too much water from its source rivers. It is one of the 20th century’s most significant, and least known, environmental disasters. However, since independence, Kazakhstan is successfully restoring a part of the Aral in its territory. Rising water levels and a reborn fishing industry are bringing obvious improvements to the local ecology and economy. It is a much needed positive example in the climate change debate and in re-thinking our relationship to the environment.

Since 2013 I have made several trips to the Aral and its watershed to make field recordings, take photographs, talk to people and to try to understand the impact of these major changes. During the talk recording of sounds from the region will be played, their stories told and the implications discussed.

Martin Flašar is an assistant professor at the Department of Musicology, Masaryk University in Brno. Among his specializations belong contemporary music and media, multimedia and electroacoustic music. In 2010 he reached the Ph.D. qualification with the dissertation Le Corbusier, E. Varese, I. Xenakis: Poème électronique (1958). Facts, contexts, interpretations awarded by the First Prize in the Best Master and Doctoral Interdisciplinary Thesis Competition (Olomouc, 2011), later published by Masaryk University and nominated for F. X. Šalda Prize. As an co-author he published several monographies focused on the contemporary audio culture in Central Europe and relations between art and science (for example Sound Exchange : Experimentelle Musikkulturen in Mitteleuropa. Saarbrücken: PFAU Verlag, 2012). He is an ex- member of the Grant commission for classical music of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and a long-term associate of the Czech Radio 3, Czech music journals and newspapers.

Teaching silence: Listening long before music

In 2009, in a review of Hana Adámková Heidrová’s book Music-Ecological Issues and Their Place in Contemporary Music Education, I wrote to Opus musicum that the concept of music education based on listening to “classical” authors and song singing (from folk to popular) is definitely outdated and that an understanding the sounds of our world proves to be a far more ambitious goal than the above- mentioned anachronistic “national revival” project. At that time my idea was criticized by traditional musicology. Today we find ourselves in a situation where it is obvious that Czech music education and musicology should have solved this problem long ago. Therefore, in recent years and decades, projects have emerged that realize that music – although it is a natural human activity – finds itself at the very top of sonic art.

Július Fujak works at the Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts Constantine the Philosopher University. He is an aesthetic scholar, a semiotician of music, experimental composer and multi-instrumentalist. He graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University, Bratislava (aesthetics and musical sciences, 1990); Later he became a researcher at the Institute of Literary and Artistic Communication in Nitra (1996-2007). Currently, he lectures at Department of Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra (since 2007).

His compositions and intermedia projects were performed and broadcasted in many countries of Europe, USA, and China. He has organised for twenty years the international series and festivals of contemporary, unconventional music and intermedia art Hermes´s Ear in Nitra and PostmutArt.

Sonic Photography as a Trace of Kairos

The paper is focused on the semantic existential ability of sonic, field (or private, personal) recordings to save and share a non-verbalised essence of the past moments in concrete space & time contexts. We can find certain parallels between Roland Barthes´ understanding of photography in his Camera Lucida (1980) and phenomenality of sonic photos/records (of seemingly banal situations in ordinary environments full of unexpected and unpredictable sounding events). The photographic dimension of sound recordings as a special (sometimes re-discovering) inner experiences could be interpreted also in the frame of ancient notion kairos, which expresses e. g. the non-linear temporality of “that right moment” (even if it could be somewhat very subjective). The question of temporal qualities in the perception process of “sonic kairos” will be related with the thoughts of Jaroslav Vančát (Photography as a time-creating concept, 2006).

Jeff Gburek Is a multi-instrumentalist, sound-designer and composer, field-recordist, radio artist and poet. He founded and worked for more than 10 years in the dance theater & butoh company called Djalma Primordial Science and held an artistic residency visa in Berlin, provided live and composed sound for this project. Jeff performed widely in the USA and conducted field research on trance-dance and music in Bali, Java and Sonoran Desert of Mexico and studied butoh in Japan with Min Tanaka, Kazuo & Yoshito Ohno (1998). More recently Jeff Gburek has played solo at DYM Festival in Gorzow Wielkopolska,  Festiwal Muzykofilia in Torun and performing with Ana Kavalis in Berlin at Tatwerk Performance Forschung as part of Berlin’s Performing Arts Festival. Jeff’s hoerspiel and radio art have aired recently on Radiofrenia Glasgow, where his work has been featured for 3 years running. Through musical collaboration and leading workshops on improvisational music and interpretation of graphic scores, Jeff also works with sound installations (including multi-channel diffusion), composing audio pieces for shortwave radio and curating concerts in Berlin and Poznan.

Call for New Animism, Received, Listening for the Reply

(paper)

Working title for an inquiry into how constructed spaces for listening may or may not be functioning to bring about sensitivity to the actual winds of the cosmos, global problems and the limits (of controlling) interspecies communications. Also known as Where Does the Listening Really Begin? which is also the working title for the sound performance I will present at this conference, which shares some material with the aforementioned essay, but which is composed rather of field recordings, tones, timbres and a series of notebook entries made by synaesthetic eardrum talking to itself over the party line of forest, mycelia and jungle, meditating on the limitrophes and liminal experiences. With friendly voices.

Csaba Hajnóczy is a musician, composer, musicologist, and teacher at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest, living and working in Budapest. He is the main initiator and organizer of the first CENSE Conference. His recent artistic interest is field recording based composition and the use of spatial sound systems. Since 2013 he has given numerous talks and workshops in the field of acoustic ecology, including soundwalks, in Hungary, Poland, Belgium, Turkey.

Teaching Acoustic Ecology

My paper is motivated by practical interest in education regarding acoustic/sonic ecology. I’m going to focus on three questions:
1. The history of soundscape education
2. The recent academic situation in the world
3. Possibilities at my university, Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design Budapest, in collaboration with other universities and institutions in the region, in accordance with the programme of CENSE.

Jarosław Jaworek is historian and musician, instrumentalist; PhD student at the Department of History, Adam Mickiewicz University (UAM) in Poznan (Poland). Studied history at the Department of History, Wroclaw University, historical anthropology at the Sorbonne, Paris IV in Paris, as well as at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Music in Wroclaw. His dissertation focuses on the role played by sound and soundscapes in the historical research.

Soundscape Ecology in the Perspective of Environmental and Sound History

Drawing inspiration from environmental history (especially environmental history of sound and noise) and from non-­‐anthropocentric approaches, in my paper I will be tracing the agency of sound in terms of human-­‐nature relations and will focus especially on destructive impact of anthropogenic sound on ecosystems’ soundscape. As scientists point out sound and soundscape can cause physical and mental problems (including sound-­‐death on mass scale caused, for example, by noise). This issue I will consider as a part of soundscape or acoustic ecology, but also as an interesting topic for historical soundscape studies. I will be stressing that sound history (as a new sub-­discipline of historical science) can be used to raise awareness of the destructive force of sound.

Karolína Kotnour is an architect and artist dedicated to an architectural spatial and audio-visual production. She is focused on creating and initiating evolving architectures by transforming methods from neuroscience, machine learning, immersive and sound spatialisation research. In her projects and installations, she connects and synchronizes architectural and sound structures. She the reciprocal confrontation of sound waves as is a liberated contour of space’. She works with space as evolving over time, in parallels and mutual confrontations and reflections. A significant role plays human acoustic presence and performance. She observes extreme space phenomena e.g.: „acoustic black holes“ and transformation of sound vibrations in their surroundings. She is Ph.D. research fellow at FLOW studio at Faculty of Architecture CTU in Prague.

Evolving Architectures – Spatial Adaptation and Extreme Dynamic Environments

The project proposes a new strategy for creating the evolving architectural structures with spatial sound prints as behavioural patterns and unique intuitive architectural environments. Evolving Architecture employs physical and virtual processes that are transformed and assembled into structures with the respect to the environmental qualities and capabilities, energy transmission and communication flow. Significantly expanding existing research, the project creates a meta-learning model useful for testing various aspects of continuous adaptation of agents in complex dynamic environments. This refers to the difficulty of designing artificial agents that can respond intelligently to evolving complex processes. The model can modulate the overall system transitions and predict its possible long-term outputs e.g.: the fact that important long-term consequences of human activity could follow from events that at first may seem marginal.

Balázs Kovács, Dr. Habil. is the hungarian philosopher and sound artist, head of the Electronic Music and Media Arts BA study programme on the University of Pécs, Faculty of Arts. Since 2013 he works on introducing and realizing a decentralized media art and nature project, called Hangfarm (Soundfarm).

Hangfarm Project Presentation

In this presentation I’m going to discuss the contacts of electronic media arts and nature in the frames of the Hangfarm (soundfarm) project started in 2013. The project covers installations, compositions, performences realized on abandoned fields, forests, village houses in and around Ellend (a south hungarian small) village, concluding in yearly artist camps, symposions. Hangfarm’s general approach is against the traditional acoustic ecology methods: we feel points of cooperation between technology (or simply: electricity), noise, and nature, as we feel it in nature itself as well.

Anna Kvíčalová graduated in religion studies in Brno (MU), Amsterdam (UvA) and Berlin (FU), where she graduated with a dissertation on hearing and media communication in early modern Calvinism (awarded the summa cum laude). Between 2013-17, she worked as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (within the projects Making the Acoustics in the 16th to 19th Century Europe and the Epistemes of Modern Acoustics). She is a member of the Berlin Center for the History of Epistemology and Material Culture (Knowledge in Motion) and is engaged in interdisciplinary research into the history of senses, media, science and religion in early modern Europe. Her current research project follows the construction of the deafness category and the changing definition of proper hearing and sound in 16th and 17th century Europe.

Manufacturing Nature? How to Do Things with Sounds in the Anthropocene

The paper will examine how the sounds of nature, both imaged, re-created and recorded, helped to reinforce a specific notion of nature in opposition to human culture and industrialization. The discussion shall be framed by contemporary debates about the „Anthropocene“, which is approached not only as a new geological, environmental and cultural-historical epoch, but also as a specific perspective, a new way how scientists, scholars, artists and different publics look at the world and describe it. In the debates about the Anthropocene, the modern binary distinctions between the natural and the cultural, subjects and objects, and sciences and the humanities, are being effectively reconsidered.

Irena Pivka new media artist, scenographer, producer. She is co-founder of gallery Stekleink produced by Cona institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia. In her artistic practice she colaborate with Brane Zorman. Their performative works investigate urban space through sound, listening and new media. These works constitute perception of a space in a new way and strengthen the interaction/awareness of the landscape and listening. The authors are working on locational sound works and sound maps for the past few years.

Sound Ecology within Contemporary Art Practice

Steklenik, gallery for sound, bioacoustics and art is an art programe in the space of Tivoli Greenhouse in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It addresses works that are connecting art and science practices through sonic research of nature and environment. Presented artworks range from bioacoustics, sound ecology, soundscapes, sound art, etc. They are intended for curious public, interested in joint experience of botanic observation and listening to the current artwork from Steklenik programe.

Tomáš Šenkyřík is a musicologist with interest in field recordings. He is interested in acoustic ecology and discovering musical structures in nature. He is fascinated in finding musical qualities in dialogues between natural and unnatural sounds. He likes listening to nature without noise pollution, especially fragile and quiet sounds. From 1999-2008 he worked in the Museum of Romani culture as an ethnomusicologist.  He is a member of Skupina, an artist group interested in field-recordings, soundscape, oral & aural history, and acoustic ecology. He is a founder of a soundmap, www.soundscape.cz

Soundscape of South Moravia, Virtual Field Recording Trip from the Confluence of the Morava and Dyje Rivers to the Peak in the Wild Carpathians

The landscape’s current sound environment often reveals more than a picture. In my fieldrecordings I can very clearly observe the increasing noise level. Especially the noise that isattacking us from heaven (aircraft pollution). Heaven is increasingly filled with airplanes every year, and our forests and meadows are increasingly exposed to increasing unpleasant noise. Through the recordings I will show how one of our oldest rare forests is humming. Then I will introduce how such a forest sounds when there is complete silence. It is obvious that the noise free interval (Gordon Hempton’s term) still getting shorter. I will also ask these questions in my lecture: What can we do about it? How can we ourselves positively influence the landscape. I will also emphasize that creating positive changes in the landscape means creating a new soundscape. I will illustrate my opinion with sound samples.

Jan Trojan graduated in music composition at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he finished his postgraduate studies focusing on acoustic ecology and soundscape. He participated in a study programme at the Universität der Künste in Berlin (2011-12). In 2015-16 he was a Fulbright-Masaryk visiting scholar at the Centre For New Music and Technology, University of California, Berkeley. Jan works as recording director and sound designer at Czech Radio and as tutor at the Faculty of Composition at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, specialising in electronic music. Jan is interested in sounds, silence and the space in between them.

An Acoustic Signal Articulated by Musical Instruments in a Form of Musical Composition or Sound Performance

The Fire Horns presentation covers three perspectives:
1. own composer’s and performer’s approach to an acoustic signal of a fire horn,
2. the Music for Fire Horns – a focus on a project of Czech radio Vltava and the Berg Orchestra from a music director’s view,
3. a musical inspiration focuses on an acoustic signal of a fire horn in a public space inside of an artificial space – the Mobile Acousmonium HAMU project.

Aleksandar Vejnovic is an art educator, media ecologist and author. He studied sound and media culture in Darmstadt and Corfu. He currently teaches Acoustic Ecology, Intercultural Audience Development and Media Philosophy at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. Furthermore he conceptualizes media art projects for elementary and secondary schools, participates in international conferences and writes for trade journals. As a research member of the Soundscape and Environmental Media Lab at the Darmstadt UAS, he focuses on media aesthetics, 3D audio and soundscape studies.

Facilitation and empowerment for open public exemplified on a case study

Acoustic Ecology in 21st century is facing a transition of generations in art and science. With the emergence of new digital media technology and running discourses about Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, new approaches of listening and awareness of the sonic environment leads towards a rising field of interest. The leading question is: How can artists, educators, soundscape researchers facilitate awareness to the auditive sense and sonic environmental issues to the general public through digital media technology? The opening of this listening path for the general public will be by the end of September 2019 and counts as a sustainable project. This exemplifies a method of Audience Development in the frame of Acoustic Ecology and a strategy to bring the public closer to the sonic environment by the use of digital technology.

Sławomir Wieczorek, PhD., graduated in cultural studies and musicology. He is a lecturer at the Institute of Musicology at the University of Wrocław. Member of the Soundscape Research Studio, editorial staff of the journals: “Res Facta Nova” and “Polish Soundscape Journal.” Author of the book On the musical front: socialist realist discourse on music in Poland 1948–1955 (Wrocław University Press 2014), coeditor of the book Sounds of War and Peace. Soundscapes of European Cities in 1945 (Peter Lang Verlag 2018). His interests focus on the history of twentieth-century music and soundscapes.

Sonic Ecology and a Big City. The Soundscape of Paris according to Des Coulam

Des Coulam is the author of the field recordings of Paris. For almost 20 years, he has been carrying out systematic recordings of the city. In his practice, Des Coulam chose as his patrons Georg Perec, Ludwig Koch and photographers of Paris from the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Perec is invoked by him as an enthusiast and recorder of everyday life, who taught him to observe “what is happening when nothing is happening”. In my talk I would like to present a portrait and describe Des Coulam’s achievements in the context of questions about sonic ecology: what is noise pollution?, what is and how to preserve the uniqueness of soundscape of a city like Paris?, how to define the aims of sonic ecology in the context of big cities?

Nathan Wolek is Professor of Digital Arts and Music Technology. Nathan Wolek is an audio artist and researcher whose work encompasses advanced signal processing techniques, multimedia performance, and electronic music history. Wolek completed his Ph.D. in Music Technology at Northwestern University (2005), and is currently Professor of Digital Arts at Stetson University in DeLand, FL. He is known primarily for the Granular Toolkit and LowkeyNW package, both popular extensions to Cycling74’s Max.

DeLeon Springs: Listening at the intersection of geophony, biophony, and anthrophony

In The Great Animal Orchestra, Bernie Krause describes three categories of sound sources in a natural environment: “(1) nonbiological natural sounds – the geophony; (2) sounds originating from nonhuman, nondomestic biological sources – the biophony; and (3) human-generated sound – anthrophony – where it intrudes and, in a few cases, blends (Krause 2013, 80).” His choice of the verb “intrudes” conveys the default perspective of many field recordists who try to avoid anthrophony while capturing natural soundscapes. In contrast, my recent field recording has focussed on locations where people intentionally go to be in closer contact with nature. As I have learned and will share in this presentation, these are places where Krause’s three categories intersect in interesting ways. In addition, the act of field recording in close contact with people leads to opportunities for informal education about the soundscape.

Šárka Zahálková is a curator, cultural manager and artist, at that time at the Fulbright – Masaryk scholarship in New York, USA. She is primarily interested in the topic of art in relation to public space, whether in physical or figurative terms. She is a co-founder and member of the Offcity Association and since February 2018 she has been the Program Director of the Pardubice City Gallery. Since 2019 she studies PhD program — Visual Arts — on Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Sound as a Way to a Memory

Listening as an important part of upbringing and education. Sound activism. I would like to introduce how conscious listening and field recording can be used in educational processes both with youngsters and adults or elderlies. I will present on different examples how sound education can work as a tool to reveal hidden memories, to open dialogue on certain topics related to issues of public and social space.

Jadwiga Zimpel graduated Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, where she currently works as an assistant professor. She deals with contemporary culture issues, primarily strategies for interpreting urban space.

Deep Listening, Place Sensing and the Sense of Place

The presentation focuses on the practice of deep listening, introduced to the field of acoustic ecology by Pauline Oliveros, and aims to explore its performative as well as therapeutic qualities in relation to the concept of place. Conducting such an endeavour, presentation takes the perspective of topographical philosophy, proposed by Jeff Malpas, according to whom sense of place is a necessary condition of agency. She will try to provide a theoretical framework in which the problem of the relation between listening and place may be formulated and thought through.

AVA kolektiv connects adventurous music with extraordinary places and community vibe. Experimental music from contemporary club electronics to electro-acoustic production meets the atmosphere of unrivalled spaces – from abandoned warehouses to old houses’ roofs.

Moving Spaces

Moving Spaces is a site-specific project from AVA kolektiv. It’s members are Martin Bukáček (Snediggen Snurssla), Matěj Kotouček (Thistle, Sky to Speak, Sun Drugs), Andrej Nechaj (Tatratank) and Marek Salamon (Spectral Index). The most frequent result of their cooperation is an audio intervention on the edge between performance and installation, which is being created right on the spot in consideration to the architectonic, social and geographical context. Usually there are improvisations with field recordings that come from a shared archive of all four project members. In Moving Spaces all individual approaches are essentially melted into one mutating final form. Each resulting situation is being preceded by deep listening, sounds collecting, archive completing summarized with a final 4-channel audio improvisation. Spatial collage stimulates the listener to a movement between the speakers, and become an active part of improvisation. Moving Spaces are moving their activities to authorial compositions. One of them is STEPS composition (Radiocustica, 2017), which reconstructs a movement through a soundscape and it’s central topic is walk. Similar approaches can also be heard in their output from residency in Žipa for Mappa label as a part of Ušami project (2018).

Ali Chakav is an interdisciplinary artist and sound researcher/performer, based in London. He graduated his Diploma with a focus on environmental sound and urban auditory culture at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne-Germany. Through the use of different methods and mediums, his works concentrate on artistic investigations into the echoic collective memory in indistinguishable layers in the environment. His work has been experienced through solo and group exhibitions and performance at various galleries, museums, concert spaces and festivals, including Schnütchen Museum Köln, Kunstmuseum Celle, Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl, Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin, Landesvertretung NRW at the European Union in Brussels, European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, Galerie Royal in München, IKLECTIK-art lab in London

Indistiguishability

The segregated room of the mind has a collective sound memory, being everywhere at a single time, with ears that don’t just hear but are creating diverse concepts in the enigmatic angles of the mind. Psyche and body are reflected facing the sound. Your mind absorbs the words of sounds (sound-word), and the voices of the words combine with your mind, The definitive moment of Sound and resonance. The rupture of the sound in the contract of silence. Sound events and incidents of sounds, the computing system of incidents and the incidents that computes us. Creating words and attracting the vocabulary of the sounds surround us in combination with your mind. And your mind means our mind.

Jeff Gburek Is a multi-instrumentalist, sound-designer and composer, field-recordist, radio artist and poet. He founded and worked for more than 10 years in the dance theater & butoh company called Djalma Primordial Science and held an artistic residency visa in Berlin, provided live and composed sound for this project. Jeff performed widely in the USA and conducted field research on trance-dance and music in Bali, Java and Sonoran Desert of Mexico and studied butoh in Japan with Min Tanaka, Kazuo & Yoshito Ohno (1998). More recently Jeff Gburek has played solo at DYM Festival in Gorzow Wielkopolska, Festiwal Muzykofilia in Torun and performing with Ana Kavalis in Berlin at Tatwerk Performance Forschung as part of Berlin’s Performing Arts Festival. Jeff’s hoerspiel and radio art have aired recently on Radiofrenia Glasgow, where his work has been featured for 3 years running. Through musical collaboration and leading workshops on improvisational music and interpretation of graphic scores, Jeff also works with sound installations (including multi-channel diffusion), composing audio pieces for shortwave radio and curating concerts in Berlin and Poznan.

Sound Strangers

Sound Strangers is an audio performance, a concerted commentary on the borderlessness of sound art in the form of Jeff’s literal praxis. For some years Jeff has been mixing his theoretical (ethical) and poetic concerns with his electro-acoustic music and field recordings to create sound worlds for all listeners, on all levels. Jeff’s works combine essay, found sound, citations, concrete and acousmatic sound with location-oriented phonography. In this way I arrive at the title for an ongoing series called “audible frontiers”.

Slavek Kwi is a sound-artist, composer and researcher interested in the phenomena of perception as the fundamental determinant of relations with reality. He has a longstanding fascination with sound-environments, developing what he terms ‘electroacoustic sound-paintings’ that oscillate between sound only works and interdisciplinary works exploring social, spatial and temporal processes. These complex audio-based situations are created mainly from site specific recordings, resulting in subjective reports for radio broadcast, ‘cinema for ears’ for multi-channel playback, sound installations integrated into the environment and performances. From the early nineties Slavek has operated under the name Artificial Memory Trace. He facilitates experimental sound workshops with autistic children and those with learning disabilities. The workshop technique emphasises extensive listening and the stimulation of creativity through observation and the support of natural tendencies. Slavek was born in former Czechoslovakia, lived 14 years in Belgium and has been based in Ireland since 2000.

Exploring the Option of Teleportation as an Alternative Strategy for Solving of Carbon Print Problem

“Artificial Memory Trace”, conceptual and experimental performance is an attempt for teleportation using sound-matter as media. An attempt to design portal in between one’s “mind” and sound-realm in distant locations. Performance is exploring simultaneously extrasensory communication (as telepathy) and teleportation possibilities as an idea / concept.

Jiyun Park is a media artist based in Germany. She explores sensory and synaesthetic state through experimentation with materials in search of hidden and inherent sounds, spatial sound, and performances. Her works are mostly influenced by crossing the threshold of space and time in her surroundings. She is actively doing collaboration performances to expand her frame, e.x communicating by data, and human-sonic interaction.

Invisible Indicator

4 Channel Audio Performance. Trapped time inside clouds, reflected portraits on raindrops. This piece is composed of field recordings and electronic effects to design a space  andpersonal experience at middle of massive nature. Especially it is drafted of recordings from Iceland. This piece has own narrative and lead audience to be in spaces which can be a virtuality or reality / Inner or outer sound. It comes up with an experience of the artist, when she faced a perfect isolation, harsh environment and death by nature. The nature is never kind to human, but it exists just what it is.

Boštjan Perovšek, musician, composer and soundscape artist, composes experimental, electro acoustic music. He specialises in creating bio-acoustic music based on the sounds of animals, especially insects. He plays on his own or with the band SAETA, which performs experimental music. He also creates music for film, theatre, performances and multimedia installations, as well as soundscapes for museums and galleries. He works also as sound engineer for film and video. He has published a number of CDs, some as a solo artist, some with the band SAETA. His first vinyl LP entitled “Bio, Industrial Acoustica (green)” reveals compositions from his bio-acoustics and urban noise opus.

Pavilion for Spiders Sound Tour

The main material is comprised of sounds made by spiders and insects, all originally recorded as vibrational signals. These are then combined with purely electronic sounds, whose sound structure, for example in rhythm, or pitch is similar to insect and spider noises. Next, the original sounds of nature are electro-acoustically transformed and combined as a sort of “live electronics” with urban and industrial sounds. All this combines to form a giant web of communication between humans and the rest of nature.

Studied philosophy at University Pardubice and Charles University, research stays at UKIM, ISSH Skopje and Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. Writing and translating for bi-weekly journal A2 and on-line magazine HIS Voice. Articles on themes like experimental electronic music, relationship between gender and music, music piracy, field recordings. Workshops about DIY electronics and open source software.

Listen to the Sounds of Electromagnetic Fields

Mixtape of various sounds of electromagnetic fields, recorded with DIY equipment or open source software.

Tomáš Šenkyřík is a musicologist with interest in field recordings. He is interested in acoustic ecology and discovering musical structures in nature. He is fascinated in finding musical qualities in dialogues between natural and unnatural sounds. He likes listening to nature without noise pollution, especially fragile and quiet sounds. From 1999-2008 he worked in the Museum of Romani culture as an ethnomusicologist. He is a member of Skupina, an artist group interested in field-recordings, soundscape, oral & aural history, and acoustic ecology. He is a founder of a soundmap, www.soundscape.cz

From Lowlands to Highlands, Sound Journey around South Moravia Region

What is the sound of Southern Moravia? What are the sound messages of the South Moravia fauna in the air? How does the dawn chorus sound from the highest places of South Moravia and how does it sound in the lowlands at the confluence of Dyje and Morava?

Barry Yuk Bun Wan (Hong Kong) is a diverse musician, Czech-based composer, sonic artist and guitarist Barry Wan’s music has been performed in USA, Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, Belarus, Italy, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Spain, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. He awarded and featured in different international festivals and competitions such FORO 2012 and 2013 in Mexico City, finalist at SIME 2015 in Lille, France and First prize at Musica Nova 2018.

After Life

Yomi or Yomi-no-kuni (or Yellow springs/wells”) is the Japanese word for the land of the dead (World of Darkness). According to Shinto mythology as related in Kojiki, this is where the dead go after life. Once one has eaten at the hearth of Yomi it is impossible to return to the land of the living. Yomi is comparable to Hades or Sheol and is most commonly known for Izanami’s retreat to that place after her death. Izanagi followed her there and upon his return he washed himself, creating Amaterasu, Susanoo, and Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto in the process.

Aloïs is a media artist and experimental musician who explores the relationship and interaction between people, sound and the outside world. His work is influenced by both scientific approach and human imperfection in understanding nature. Alois uses a wide range of media, from interactive installation to “speculative design” and live audiovisual performance. Among the important milestones of Aloïs portfolio are the artistic residence at the Institute of Spatial Sound 4DSOUND in Budapest (2017) or the honorable mention from the Austrian festival Ars Electronica (2016). Besides European countries such as Great Britain, Iceland, Sweden and Finland Yang also presented his work in Taiwan, Japan or as part of an artistic residency in Brazil, where he developed the Micro Loop Macro Cycle performance. This series of installations, performance, video and audio production explores the environmental system through studies of different water formations. Aloïs Yang grew up in Taiwan, currently oscillating between Berlin and Prague.

Sonic Animism: The Emergences of 30-Feedback-System

is a body/sound performance that investigates the state of the sentient-being on the non human agency brought by technology.The framework of the performance is an artificial environmental cycle system that incorporates each element as the whole. It consists of 5 inputs of various types of wearable microphones, and 5 outputs of speakers covering each corner of the exhibition room. From the inner space of the machines which are processing the system– the unique sonic characters are revealed by electromagnetic sensors. To the outer space of the exhibition room– the spatial informations are manifested through audio feedback loops. They are all inter-connected as chains of cause and effect forming as many as 30 individual “sonic happenings” that mirror the dynamic states of present time-space. With this performance, Yang challenges the separation between the “objective existence” and the “subjective experience”. He aims to transform the hierarchic relationship between man and the man-made preconception of machines and physical phenomena to a coexistence of self-reflections within each other.

Martin Zet is a visual and performance artist. In his work, Zet enlists the aid of replicas of specific visible features to reference their meaning. He makes use of the possibilities of the mutual interchange between the nearby and faraway, the known and unknown, the spoken and unspoken, and the concrete and abstract.

Songs With One Breath

Right, such a weird word. What right do I have to occupy the sound space? If I make a sound how long it can be not to take too much? Maybe I should follow my anthropometry, limits of my body, the capacity of my lungs. Not to make my songs longer than my breath. Short compositions: 8 times inhale, 8 times exhale. How many it gives-8, 16?

Félix Blume studied sound in Toulouse and at the famous Institut national supérieur des Arts du Spectacle (INSAS) in Brussels. He has mainly worked as a sound engineer for independently produced documentaries and with video artists. He records sounds on his travels and shares them on the internet, mainly using Freesound and Soundcloud. Blume currently lives and works in both Mexico and France. His work is focused on listening, and it invites us to live sonic experiences that bring about a different perception of the surroundings. He often works collaboratively with communities, using the public space as a context within which he explores and presents his works. He is interested in myths and interpretations, in human dialogue in both inhabited natural and urban contexts, and in what voices can say, going beyond words.

Blume’s sound works have been broadcast on the radio around the world and exhibited in places such as the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Orsay (Paris). He was awarded the Soundscape prize for his last video work Curupira: Creature of the Woods and the Pierre Schaeffer prize for his work Los Gritos de México at Phonurgia Nova.

http://www.felixblume.com/

Raquel Castro is film documentarist, curator and sound artist, currently lives and works in Lisbon. In 2003, a video project about oral memory made her travel around Portugal and live in several regions of the country, collecting voices, images, sounds and children’s drawings. She started to think about the way sound relates to the identity of a place, so she decided to start a research on sound studies. She directed the documentary Soundwalkers which was presented in Subtropics Festival in Miami and screened at various conferences of sound art and documentary film festivals. She collaborates sporadically with live visuals for theater and concerts. As a freelancer, she regularly directs and edits tv commercials, videoclips and other institutional works. As a teacher, she taught Direction and other disciplines at Universidade Lusíada, in Lisbon. She has a Phd in Communication and Arts titled Sound, Space and Acoustic Identity. She created and curates the festival of sound art Lisboa Soa and the international symposium Invisible Places.
lisboasoa.com
invisibleplaces.org

https://vimeo.com/raquelcastro

Peter Cusack is a field recordist, musician and researcher with a long interest in the sound environment. Projects include community arts, researches into sound and our sense of place and documentary recordings in areas of special sonic interest (Lake Baikal, Siberia). His project Sounds From Dangerous Places explores soundscapes at sites of major environmental damage – Chernobyl exclusion zone; Caspian oil fields; UK nuclear sites. This project continues and is currently researching the regeneration of the North Aral Sea, Kazakhstan. He describes the use of sound to investigate documentary issues as sonic journalism. He initiated the Favourite Sound Project in London 1998. It aims to discover what people find positive about their everyday sound environment and has since been carried out in Beijing, Berlin, Manchester, Southend-on-Sea, Prague, Birmingham and Taranto. He co-produced the environmental sound program Vermilion Sounds for ResonanceFM, London and was a research fellow on the multidisciplinary ‘Positive Soundscapes Project’ 2006/9.
https://favouritesounds.org/

John Grzinich has worked since the early 1990s as a freelance mixed-media artist and cultural coordinator with various practices combining sound, image, site, and collaborative social structures. His primary interest is working with sound, combining such divergent methods as field recording, filmmaking, electro-acoustic composition, performance, acoustic perception and listening awareness. He has performed internationally and regularly conduct workshops using sound as a collaborative medium. CDs of his compositions have been published on such labels as SIRR (PT), Staalplaat (NL), Edition Sonoro (UK), Mystery Sea (BE) CUT (CH), CMR (NZ), erewhon (BE), Intransitive Recordings (US), Digital Narcis (JP) Taalem (FR) Semper Florens (RU), and Cloud of Statics(CH). Additionally, Grzinich has worked in experimental video since 2000, often in combination with his audio work. In 2010 he completed his first two film works, mimema and a treatise on sound and site-specific activity Sound Aspects of Material Elements, both of which were screened internationally and then published on DVD by the US label and/OAR (2012). He is continually attempting to rethink the cinematic format with an emphasis on the sonic experience, leading to a more living, animistic view of landscapes, objects, the built environment and those who interact with them. Since 2003 an event and project coordinator at MoKS, an artist-run international residency center and project space in southeast Estonia.
http://maaheli.ee/main/

Ibra Ibrahimovič is an award-winning Czech documentary photographer. He shoots landscapes of areas destroyed by industry and takes portraits of the people whose lives are simultaneously being ruined. The subject of his photography would be called environmental justice. His portrait of the Libkovice town can be seen as one of the most famous example of engagement of artist in the issues of human rights. http://www.ibraphoto.net

Daniel Hanzlík lives and works in Prague and North Bohemia. By training a glassworker has been involved in various different media since the start of his career. These include paintings, photography, site-specific installations and audiovisual performances. New media play a pivotal role in his projects and light appears everywhere as a thematic, technical or expressive component. Much of Hanzlík’s work is characterised by an interest in the urban space. This might involve site-specific installations or photography, especially taking advertising as its theme as a source of light and as a symbol of modern post-industrial civilisation.
https://www.danielhanzlik.cz/

Zdeněk Košek was a self-taught artist who – In the 1980s a deep psychological trauma gradually changed his perception of the world; he was diagnosed as psychotic and had to retire in 1989. From then meteorology and weather became the main themes of his works on paper. He thought that his duty was to master the meteorological phenomena. As the ‘brain of the world’, Košek spends his days creating the weather. Sitting in front of his window, he made clouds, storms, rain, snow and tornadoes over planet Earth. He meticulously noted and draws everything around him: the direction of the wind, the flight of the birds, every little sound, the changes of temperature, infinite combinations of numbers and chemical elements, his thoughts, the thoughts of others. He calculates, deciphers, explores, deducts. His diagrams served him as a direct means to influence weather – an indispensable ritual dictated to him, to which he abandoned himself in order to avoid his biggest fear, the irreversible chaos. By sticking his schemes onto the window of his apartment, he communicated with birds, which he believed to be superior to man.
(source: Barbara Safarova and Terezie Zemánková)

Michal Kindernay is an intermedia artist working with interactive connections of sound, image, and other inputs, living and working in Prague. His works include video performances, installations and interactive projects. He received a Bc from the Faculty of Fine Art at VUT Brno (2004-08) and an MA from the Center of Audiovisual Studies at FAMU, Prague (2009-12). His early works include cooperations on audiovisual stage performances and a series of photographs, videos and installations inspired by insect morphology. Since 2006 he has been also working with live video (Opthalmodensis). With the artist Guy van Belle he collaborated on the research of interrelating the image, sound and atmospheric processes using modified recording devices (Noise Calypsos, 2008; Art Pollution Kit, 2009; Wind[cam], 2010). He is a co-founder of the artist collective yo-yo, member of RurArtMap, školská 28, Agosto foundation in Prague.

Polina Khatsenka is a new media artist from Belarus. Dominant part of her artworks is based on a wide variety of aspects of sound, such as sonic environment, field-recordings, electroacoustic music and spatial sound. Living and studying arts in Usti nad Labem, she fostered the knowledge in the field of multichannel audio formats and electronic music during a study exchange at Media and Design Faculties at University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf in 2018. Polina Khatsenka is currently getting her Master’s degree at Faculty of Art and Design, Time-based media studio, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University, Czech republic.

Jan Krombholz is a mixed media artist, who has been recently focused on developing a system of knowledge mediation of physical aspects of sound and sonic media arts at high schools and universities in relation to multichannel sound systems and field-recordings. In mostly every his artwork you can clearly see a site-specific approach, awareness of the historical and cultural contexts and deep relations between them, the artwork itself, and current social and cultural situation. Jan Krombholz studies his PhD. at Faculty of Education at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Usti nad Labem, with previous master study at both Faculty of Education and Art and Design faculty.

Slávek Kwi is sound-artist, composer and researcher whose main interest lies in the phenomena of perception as the fundamental determinant of relations with Reality. Slavek Kwi was born in former Czechoslovakia, has been living 14 years in Belgium and from 2000 he is based in Ireland. Currently works in St.Brendanís Psychiatric Hospital and for The National Concert Hall in Dublin. He is fascinated by sound-environments for 30 years, focusing on electroacoustic sound-paintings. These complex audio-situations are created mainly from site specific recordings. In last years he was fascinated by tropical rainforest, resulting in subjective reports for radio broadcast, cinema for ears performed on multiple speakers, sound-installations integrated into the environment and performances. Interested also in free-music research as part of social investigation and employing the space and any objects it contains as musical instrument. His works oscillates between purely sound based and multidisciplinary projects. From the early nineties Slávek works under the name Artificial Memory Trace. He has published many CD/LP-albums and contributed to numerous international compilations.He facilitates experimental sound-workshops with autistic children and those with learning disabilities. The workshop technique places emphasis on extensive listening and the stimulation of creativity through observation and the support of natural tendencies.
https://artificialmemorytrace.bandcamp.com/

Marie Steinerová was born in Jilemnice, lives in Olbramov and Prague. She graduated from Applied Art school for Glass in Železný Brod. She is engaged with poetry, painting, design, photography and garden architecture. She exhibited since 2001 in many galleries across Czech Republic and published a poetry book Rosenbaum.