Helyer’s progress: fusing art & science

John Potts

The tape was in the recorder, and it was a long tape. I knew Nigel Helyer would have a lot to say, because even before winning the Helene Lempriere National Sculpture Award earlier this year, he had been busy. And since taking out that prize he’d been overseas, interstate, here and there, on the move, working on projects, collaborations, schemes and dreams. So I came equipped with my trusty mini tape recorder. 

Seeking resonance: Interview: Nigel Helyer: SonicDifference

Bob Percival

I had been looking forward to meeting Nigel Helyer; sculptor, sound artist and currently an Artist in Residence at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Geneva. Anyone whose reputation precedes them with such enthusiasm, respect and good humour must be special and, it has to be said, Dr Sonique is a great a.k.a.

Nigel has enthusiastically agreed to an interview and we meet over coffee in an appropriately noisy café in inner city Perth. Nigel is the curator of Sonic-Difference: Re-sounding the world, one of five exhibitions that make up BEAP 04. In the interview I was keen to explore his thoughts on the current developments in sound art as well as his curatorial thinking in his selection of works for the exhibition.

Magnus-Opus (Nigel Helyer, Jon Drummond. Australien)

Phone users be warned. Each time you dial a number, you have performed a musical piece and may have infringed the international copyright of the composers.

ISEA 2004 Layers of Performance
By by Stanislav Roudavski

People play with “the algorithmically controlled quadraphonic soundscape and its visual manifestations” in Sonic Spaces, an installation by Shawn Pinchback. Photographs by Stanislav Roudavski.

Aboard flight 18.45, London – Helsinki, people scan each other for the happy signs of genius. And no wonder. According to the unflinching authors of the official introduction to the 12th International Symposium on Electronic Arts, “ISEA2004 CRUISE is a great party where you can talk, dance, drink, eat, sunbathe and relax with the most innovative group of people that have ever set on sail.” Modest and convincing if you ask me.

Architecture does sound

Douglas Kahn

The cross talk of the title no doubt refers to the way sounds from the different pieces ‘bleed’ (ouch!) into one another when placed in close proximity. Often, in exhibitions involving sound, ‘cross’ could apply to the antagonism of competing sounds, but here there is no anger, no claims staked, nobody out of control, no rude interruptions. The installation strategy of Cross Talk is to only include works that are so gentle and unobtrusive that, even as they share the same space, they don’t get in each other’s way.