Bennett Hogg: The resistent violin
The project is to develop ideas for and build a violin that physically and electronically resists being played. It acts as a point of encounter between the player’s body and emotions, which have to physically struggle to produce a performance. The bow is connected to the violin at several points with very strong, elastic bands - up to 15 bands connected at different places on the bow and on the violin body. Each band has some kind of tension sensor at either end, which generates MIDI, or HDI data. The bands make it physically difficult to “express” oneself on the violin (and the violin is, of course, the symbol, par excellence of classical music expressivity!). The addition of the technology thus subverts the expressivity of the violin in the physical and the sonic dimensions, and results in a performance style that moves between an aggressive struggle with the instrument, and a shuddering paralysis.
I am currently a lecturer in the music department of the University of Newcastle, in the UK. I am one of the main representatives for music and sound art at the new research institute “Culture Lab, Newcastle” directed by Sally-Jane Norman. My background is in contemporary music composition, including notated music for voices and ensembles, electroacoustic/electronic music with and without live performers, and free improvisation.
I am also active as an academic researcher, focussing mainly on the psychoanalytic understanding of the recorded human voice; in terms of historical research I am particularly interested in the interrlationship between surrealism, technology and the writings of Walter Benjamin; in terms of more contemporary applications of these ideas, I am fascinated by the complex interrelationships between physical gesture, sound morphologies and the notions of “performance”. I am also working on ideas about how we understand misfunctioning machines, and decaying media like old vinyl and electromagnetic tape in terms of surrealist notions of “the marvellous” and “the ruin” where, rather than the man-made signal “fading”, it is the medium itself which “returns”.
I am the founder and director of a research centre based in the University of Newcastle for creative, practice-based research into “postvernacular” musical practices. By this, we mean forms of “popular” or “dance” or “folk” musics that have developed themselves (rather than through cross-overs with “art” musics) into their own experimental traditions - the extreme left-field of rock and techno, along with deconstructed froms of “traditional folk” musics.
www.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/staff/profile/bennett.hogg
profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=20608624&MyToken=989b7b70-e84e-4dd2-9610-019cbed0cdd4
Paul Bell
Paul Bell is a DJ. His is currently interested in VJing and he has been exploring the Ms Pinky VJ program built within max/msp/jitter. His research at STEIM is about the various DJ mixers and turntables capable of interfacing with the computer.
Whistle Pig Saloon
Whistle Pig Saloon is the live audio collaboration of Robert van Heumen (Computer/controllers) and John Ferguson (Guitar/effects).
Wide and disjointed, blending a fractured pulse with dynamic texture, this is an immersive and disorientating music, sometimes subtle, often invasive, always close. In capturing a moment and inscribing agency, the motionblur of the cover art offers a suitable metaphor for this duo’s musical interactions. Live sampled source sounds are gesturally manipulated and reworked within open ended narratives, sounding like an air whistle blasting out from an old steam locomotive as it emerges at speed from a tunnel. Whilst the whistle pig/groundhog (day) reference explores cycles of repetition beyond episodic improvisation, emphasising the value of revisiting and re-appropriating a previous moment. John configures the electric guitar as a site for multiple simultaneous points of interaction and queries the iconic cultural status of his instrument via feet, fingers and feedback. Robert crunches, growls and smashes both John's live sampled sound as well as his private stack of industrial bits and organic beats.
John Ferguson is an electronic musician. His work is inspired by notions of instability, and focuses on tactile approaches to the live manipulation of audio/visual materials. Predicated on listening and real-time (re)negotiation, his combinations of hacked electronics, wireless gaming controllers and custom software/mechanical systems are frequently loud and exuberant. But the resistance inherent within these instrumental ecologies significantly affects the compositional process, raising issues of causality, agency and legibility, whilst foregrounding ambiguity as an alternative to functionalism in interface design.
fergalstrandy.co.uk
Robert van Heumen works with sound: electronic, experimental, improvised, structured, composed. Recent works include the compositions 'Stranger', 'Fury', 'Silent' and '12 Bullets' which are performed in multichannel and semi-improvised environments as well as produced for release on CD. As a musician he uses STEIM's live sampling software LiSa and real-time audio-synthesis and algorithmic composition software SuperCollider. His soundworld is a mixture of digital crackles, heavy distortion, melancholic melodies, environmental sounds, voices, sounds from kitchen appliances, most of the time smashed beyond repair.
hardhatarea.com
Sabine Vogel
Sabine is working at STEIM for the development of footcontrollers to use with her flute.
Sabine Vogel is born in Munich, studied jazz-flute at the Anton Bruckner Conservatory in Linz, Austria. She focuses on sound and improvisation, using extended techniques both acoustic as well as electronic, creating a very personal contemporary language for the flute. In 2000 Vogel moved to Berlin, since 2005 she has been living in Potsdam. She has a busy concert schedule with performances in Europe and throughout America, working privately in group ensembles as well as collaborating with New Music composers, a.o. Alex Nowitz, Swedish composers Malin Bång, Mattias Petersson and the Japanese composer Shintaro Imai. She played with the Anthony Braxton 12tet, which had its worldpremier on the Free Music Festival in Antwerp in August 2005. She has played and worked a.o. with Arto Lindsay, Tony Buck, Jim Denley, Chris Abrahams, Jack Wright, Axel Dörner, Andrea Neumann, Chris Dahlgren, Schwimmer, Ensemble Zwischentöne and the Walter Thompson Soundpainting Orchestra.
www.sabvog.de/
Alex Nowitz & Jamie Griffiths: Hybrids
Interactivity has been named numerously within the context of art, but we have rarely the chance to really discover its actual potential. The term interactivity became a substitute for some kind of interdisciplinary approach. So, what does interactivity actually mean? This is something I'm very much interested in exploring and examining in detail. We both, Jamie Griffiths and I will cross-fade our skills and abilities. The research will be about the relationships and interdependencies of movement and visuals, movement and music/sound as well as music/sound and visuals. When and how is the voice controlling the color of the lights? How can we control the video imagery by our movements? What compositional tools do I have to apply in order to get an analogy either in music or in video? We all once heard about counterpoint in music. Now, we want to examine the "counterpoint" between music/sound, visuals and movement. It's very complex once we start thinking about it. However, the final and main task of an artistic residency should be creating duo pieces, so-called "HYBRIDS", cross-breedings of music/sound, visuals and movement.
Alex Nowitz is working as composer, singer and performer. Since October 2008, with the help, support and know-how of STEIM he created a setup for live electronics as an extension of his vocal solo performances using two Wiimote controllers as gestural controllers, STEIM software (junXion, LiSa) and a computer (MacBook Pro). Since February 2008 he presented his vocal work with the set-up many times: Wolfsgeheul (Feb. 2008, fabrik Potsdam), a concert with the stringquartet KUSS+ (Feb. 2008, RBB -Radio Berlin Brandenburg), DIE STADT und DER SCHNITT (March-May 2008, Schaubuehne Berlin) and a concert presenting two solo pieces voicescapes and studies for a self-portrait (April 2008, DNK Amsterdam).
www.nowitz.de/english/index_engl.html
Jamie Griffiths ia a new media and video artist and film director.
Jamie's visual creativity and technical fluency with interactive technology combines projected media with performance commissions for orchestra, new music, opera, dance and theatre projects.
A self-taught technology artist, Jamie came into this work after leaving a successful career as a photographer, and walking off onto the streets for a year... a kind of spiritual mid-life crisis. She gave away all her belongings and let the wind carry her. When she arrived back into the mainstream world a year later, a commission from Vancouver New Music brought Jamie into interactive film-making. She fell in love with the ideas of composer Edgard Varèse, and took the 'interactive' bull by-the-horns in his honor... Jamie hacked into some screen-saver software, embedding video clips that would respond to sound and made her first interactive film for live performance with a 24 piece orchestra in 2001. Since then, Jamie has had many commissions and discovered a deep love for music visualization, and using technology to harness the power of motion and sound. Jamie is a performing member of Nu:BC, a new music interdisciplinary collective based in Vancouver, Canada.
www.jamiegriffiths.com