Nigel, what are your thoughts in regard to the current status of sound art within electronic arts?
As far as the notion of a biennale of electronic arts per se being read as a biennale of digital arts I find that there is an amazing amnesia built into the whole history of artists working with the technological mode with sound and image or kinetics. There is a lack of a stable or thoroughgoing discourse surrounding those new forms of art. The history seems to evaporate as...
Sound artists Jon Drummond and “Dr Sonique” have done the unthinkable - rubber stamped the “melody” of every possible telephone number combination as their own.
Their Magnus-Opus is a playful way of challenging copyright law, which Dr Sonique - better known as artist Dr Nigel Helyer - says often benefits the “corporates” before creators of artistic works.
Sixteen two-note chords were thrown into an algorithmic generator, which produced 10 billion melodies. “It is not...
“Are we all on the way to ISEA?” asks a leather-clad man across the aisle, squinting at me suspiciously.
“Everybody with a laptop bag basically,” confirms his red-haired neighbor, without raising her head from Phénoménologie de la perception. I stuff my notebook into the locker and sit down to reread the website printouts in an attempt to make sense of the program. ISEA2004, “the biggest ever new media culture event” is open for all but aimed at creative practitioners...
Faced with the alternatives—come up with the money for separate, insulated spaces; alternate the operation of pieces; put them on headphones; or let them battle it out, the most boisterous wins—this is perfectly valid. It is a bit odd, however, given the institutional connection, since architecture at some point conjures up monumentality, the discarded shells of history lashed by weather and baked mercilessly for generations by the sun, the gaudiness of too many...
In a recent forum on globalism Documenta Director Okwui Enwezor himself admitted to a sense of exhaustion and internal rupture in the whole mechanism of the global exhibition, while Hans-Ulrich Obrist, one of the guest curators of the Venice Biennale, cited Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant’s call to resist the ‘fly-in, fly-out’ mentality where curators and artists arrive, install and dismantle the exhibition, repaint the walls white and migrate to the next...
Sound arts being what they are, a collection of disciplines ranging from post-digital music theory to film soundtracks, live performance to interface hacking, field recording to physical acoustics, it is difficult to find an institution which embodies these in a singular structure. The reality of the practical application of sound is that it is used in a variety of ways dependent upon the needs of individual projects. Yet the sheer variety of applications and their...
Some approaches to Sound and Listening.
My practice has a pluralistic approach to the sonic domain and embraces several strands of conceptual and technological development. These in turn are manifest in a variety of modes, which range from gallery based interactive works, to environmental public sound works to Research and Development programmes in spatially located immersive soundscapes. As an introduction this document outlines four broad areas of current activity.
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Sonic Voyages
My village of origin contained two significant buildings, significant not for their formal qualities, they were both simple cottages, but because one had been the home of Halley, the astronomer and the other the home of William Blake the poet. Without being conscious of the fact, I grew up in a cosmos in which the arts and science were intertwined, it has marked my endeavours ever since.
My main task as an Artist has been, to find a place for poetics...
I am electrical by nature, music is the electric soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents.
Ludwig von Beethoven
The Shadow of Your Smile… Theoretical papers often quote Plato’s Cave – such a nice, primitive dawn of consciousness image, with its shadowy representations flickering sootily across the cave’s rear wall and the line of onlookers warming their backs by the fire! Strangely there is scant mention of the crackle of burning wood, or the sounds...
Such was the concussive topic, which concluded a day of specialised presentations at the Sound in Space forum; this was the talkfest accompanying the first national survey of acoustic arts at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (May-July 1995).
That a debate amongst discipline specialists could mire itself in such a prosaic manner caused me to speculate that perhaps certain people in the hall were, as yet, unaware of the operations of the telephone!
More productively...