In Australia he most recently featured as one of the 5 finalists of the new Contempora 5 art competition, now Australia’s largest (in monetary terms) art prize, the winner receiving A$100 000 over two years, this year awarded to Fiona Hall. Helyer’s piece, Silent Forest was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria and, somewhat controversially, publically received a personal commendation by Victoria’s Premier and Arts Minister, Jeff Kennett.
The harder you listen, the...
The Royal Botanic Gardens, set in thirty luxuriant hectares on the shores of Sydney Harbour’s Farm Cove, is the main centre for enquiry and information relating to the study of botany and horticulture in the state of New South Wales. It is also promoted as a cultural and historical site of some significance. This is appropriate, given that this is the place where seven months after the First Fleet sailed into the Aboriginal Cadigal’s Warrang (Sydney Cove) in 1788,...
Four brief ‘Treatments’ representing user experiences for AudioNomad mobile locations sensitive augmented audio systems.
Visit the Gallery A Walk Through Pere Lachaise, An AudioNomad user experience. The sun filters weakly through the remaining leaves as I enter the Cemetery, the day is still and the moist air carries the scent of the earth. I pass the Caretakers Lodge and walk slowly up the incline of the Avenue Principale towards the Monument aux Morts, it is here...
Wild2000
http://www.year01.com/issue10/australia.html
Magnus-Opus
http://www.swr.de/swr2/audiohyperspace/engl_version/audioart/projects/magnus_opus.html
SonicLandscapes + AudioNomad
http://www.unsw.edu.au/news/adv/uniken/uniken0308/page4.html
http://www.gmat.unsw.edu.au/snap/new/sonic_demo.htm
http://www.isea2004.net/mainframe.php?id=hot_syren
NoiseFloor
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/february19/sound-219.html
LifeBoat.
http://www.life-boat.org
...
Artists have been looking at what scientists of the day are up to since art critic and social commentator Ruskin’s time. Many have frowned at the notion of artists working with scientists, but artists have always worked with technology of some kind. And modern science, like contemporary art, produces knowledge through ideas. Concept and theory precede method, results are scrutinised critically, and occasionally outcomes are celebrated in public through the market place,...
Composer and sonic performance artist Cat Hope (WA) is inspirational. Her works encourage the listener to hear sound anew, creating a magnified soundtrack to a mundane world and giving sound equal status with the visual and encouraging sound to train the eye. In Unravelled, worms are delicately loosened from luxurious hair to the nightmarish sound of lubricous worm activity and in Drive a subwoofer pulses a moist kangaroo skin to the disintegrated sound of a fatal car...
The distinct survivalist tone was kicked started by exhibition curator and conference convener, Nigel Helyer in his opening address where he dwelt on hearing as our most basic sense designed to warn us of approaching danger. Our ears offer 360 degree perception while our eyes are limited to 180, but that in our general perception “the eye is master, the ear is slave.” This sense of embattlement floated through the discussions of the day occasionally escalating to...
The sound created is like rain on a roof, in fact looking up it is exactly what I imagine rain would sound like on the corrugated iron roof of the Moores Building. Beginning lightly, almost imperceptibly, the rapid staccato tap of the motors on the wires builds in momentum, becomes a torrent, eases away, falls momentarily silent and starts again. There seems to be infinite but minute variation between the tiny individual sounds. The experience involves my whole body. A...
Entering the historic Moores Building in Fremantle with its uneven wooden floor, rough hewn, whitewashed walls and exposed rafters takes us back to the 19thcentury. It is most apt as Dr Paine’s apparently silent installation has overtones of both an old-fashioned laboratory and a museum. We step into an era when the enlightenment tradition of describing, collating and displaying phenomena according to categorisation was still intact. Paine is at pains to present not...
Which didn’t work! Press Record or Play and all you got was a blast of nasty static. White noise is fine in its place, but this wasn’t it. No worry: surely Nigel himself, a technician/engineer/acoustician (these sound artists are such polyglots) could fix the recalcitrant thing. He jiggled, he coaxed, he gave it a whack, he held it to his ear, he looked into its soul—but the rascally machine just wouldn’t cooperate. So there we were, on the verge of discussing the...