People and Projects
This section is devoted to individuals who are actively engaged in a variety of endeavors within the field of acoustic ecology. We welcome news of projects related to the ecology of sound.
Street noise, office murmurs, field recordings merge in "The Gathering of Sounds"
An audio installation by Susie Kozawa
July 12-September 3, 2004
9am to 6pm, Monday-Friday
Lobby of the Jack Straw Productions offices
4261 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA, USA
Susie Kozawa is a composer and sound artist. She is interested in how sound moves and dances in a space. "The Gathering of Sounds" is a collage of field recordings—children’s laughter, cawing crows, sewing machines, and pounding raindrops gathered and arranged randomly into multiple layers of varying sonic densities.
The audio composition is intended to interact with the environmental noise at the Jack Straw Productions office—traffic from the busy thoroughfare; compression brakes from the buses that stop outside the door; music from the recording studios within the building; voices of children in Jack Straw’s youth classes. Each visitor’s own experience and awareness of the space will depend on the ebb and flow of sounds in the University District.
The compiled field recordings for "The Gathering of Sounds" are a celebration of everyday spaces and spirit of people. The sounds are not altered and the sonic textures reflect the cacophony of everyday objects.
Kozawa's work has been presented at Bumbershoot, the New Music Across America Festival, the Center on Contemporary Art, Empty Space Theatre, On the Boards, the Goodwill Arts Festival, Soundwork Northwest, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle Asian Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Aquarium, and the Jack Straw New Media Gallery.
She is a past Seattle Arts Commission Individual Artist award and Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship in Theater and Artist Trust GAP Award recipient. She is a previous Ford Foundation Collaborating Artist with Northwest Asian American Theatre’s International Artist Collaboration Project. She just completed the SAC (now called Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs) Emerging Public Artist.
"The Gathering of Sounds" is supported in part by the Mayor's Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. For more information about the installation, please call (206) 634-0919.
Silk Threads - A Journey Along the Silk Roads and Virtual Museum
In August 2004, artists Denise Bryan and Adrian Wilkins set off to travel from Italy to China along the ancient Silk Roads. They expect to travel through the following countries Turkey, Syria, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Pakistan, and India. The project will take at least 1 year. During their journey they will be collecting images and sounds which will be made available on their website www.silkthreads.org.
In the 17th and 18th Centuries rich people made collections of exotic objects from Europe’s new trading posts and colonies, these were then displayed in ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’ in their homes. We hope that this project will produce a 21st Century “Cabinet of Curiosities” that will be on show to everyone via the Internet. The Artists would like people who log on to their site to contact them with requests for items to collect. Maybe you have always wondered what the Sunday Market in Kashgar sounds like, or what kind of hats Kyrgyz shepherds wear. This project will give people the chance to email the Artists and request that items are added to the collection. Unlike collections in the past nothing will have been removed from its country of origin, only photographs and sound recordings will be displayed on the website.
It is hoped that the collection will reflect contemporary life in countries along the Silk Road and that people that the Artists meet along the way will have the opportunity to request sights and sounds that they would like to share with “the rest of the world”. The site will act as an educational tool raising awareness of the regions that the journey will take Denise and Adrian through. There will be specific links to the education departments of the British Library and The Silk Museum in Macclesfield (UK), school children will be able to email Denise and Adrian and ask them what life is like along the Silk Road.
Denise Bryan is a visual artist. Since graduating with an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, her practice has involved making objects and using photographic images, she has also used video and recently made a performance piece at Modern Art Oxford. Her work has been exhibited in the UK, Europe and the USA. As well as lecturing in Fine Art she has been involved in numerous educational and community arts projects. Denise’s work deals with issues that she has become aware of through traveling. She will use this trip along the Silk Road to explore the idea of colonialism as collecting, travel as collecting and issues relating to a post colonial/communist world.
Sounds recorded while traveling have a great potential for creating new works. Over the last few years sound artist Adrian Wilkins has been making recordings in countries that he has visited including Morocco, Mexico, Germany, Egypt and Turkey. These sound recordings evoke memories in a very different way to those evoked by photographs. Until recently Adrian’s worked as an Estimator within the construction industry. He will be using the Silk Threads project as an opportunity to develop his work as a sound artist, exploring the connections between traveling, memory and sound, as well as making more detailed sonic studies in the areas visited.
This project supported in part by:
Arts Council England
The British Library
The Silk Museum in Macclesfield
Lifesystems
Maxell
Hot Creative
Artist Run Limousine Collective
Vancouver, B.C., Canada
http://www.firstfloor.org/ARL/
http://www.firstfloor.org/ARL/html/upcoming.html
The Artist Run Limousine Collective in Vancouver (Jean Routhier, Matt Smith, Jeremy Turner, Sandra Wintner) would like to update you on its progress in securing exhibitions for the AUDIOMOBILE project.
ARL member Matt Smith was in residence at Paved Art+New Media (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) from July 10 to 31, 2004. During the residency, he will refine AUDIOMOBILE by creating a navigational sonic map for Saskatoon, which can be explored by driving in the Artist Run Limousine. Audio will be provided by local artists who are selected by Paved Art+New Media. The residency will conclude with a series of rides in the Artist Run Limousine, where the local audience is invited to experience the resulting site specific audio works.
Members of the ARL will participate in this year's Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria) which takes place from September 2 to 7, 2004. AUDIOMOBILE will be part of the "Re-inventing Radio" events, organized by the ORF Kunstradio. Additional audio material will be contributed by local artists. We have recently received confirmation that we have been granted funding from the Chancellor's Office for the Arts in Austria to support this endeavor.
Matt Smith and Sandra Wintner are also invited to produce AUDIOMOBILE at the annual Send+Receive Festival of Sound (Winnipeg, Manitoba) from October 16 to 24, 2004.
Elements Gallery consultation workshops.
Contact: Jack Shuttleworth,
E-Mail: Jack.Shuttleworth@coventry.gov.uk
A series of workshops exploring sound made with natural objects and native landscapes are being run at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, in Coventry, England. They are part of a consultation programme for new Natural History Gallery planned for 2006, which will focus on sensory experience.
The series of 10 workshops will be with local groups representing different aspects of the spectrum of disability. (This is work in progress, so will develop): the sessions will involve recorded natural sounds, natural materials (nuts, stone, logs, shells, antlers etc) which will be explored for their sensory qualities, later focusing on what sounds they can make. The sounds will then be 'scored' using a landscape (real or constructed by the group) to sequence a soundscape.
They are taking place during September on October: it might be possible for single observers to attend, but they are targeted at local communities.
Any comments or ideas are most welcome: contact Jack Shuttleworth
"Shuttleworth, Jack" <Jack.Shuttleworth@coventry.gov.uk>
Soundscape Website. Yannick Dauby manages a website which is largely devoted to soundscapes.It is orientated from an trans disciplinary perspective and provides both theoretical texts and sounds experiments available on-line.
Dauby's master degree thesis,"Paysages Sonores Partagés", explores the concept of "shared soundscape" and deals with acoustic ecology and transduction/ transfer and cooperation processes in sound art media.
There are also works of Olivier Feraud, a student in anthropology, which are related to soundscape and similar topics. For example, there is a full work about market's calls.
The website is in both in English and French, with the theoretical textes written in French only.
Web page URL: http://www.kalerne.net/
Endangered Sound Project.Web Site
Dr. Garth Paine, Head of Program - Electronic Arts
Senior Lecturer in Music Technology
School of Contemporary Arts
College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences
University of Western Sydney
This project sets out to list and then collect evidence of the presence of these protected sounds in public and private space.
I shall soon be issuing a call for volunteers to collect internationally, samples of the sounds listed on the site as patented or trademarked. The collection will be facilitated by me sending you the volunteer a test tube with label, cork and wax seal - the volunteer will be asked to collect the sound by placing the test tube close to the source (thereby capturing air through which the sound traveled) and then complete the label, documenting the time, place and nature of the sound (including a volume level).
These test tubes will be collected and displayed in chemistry racks in the gallery, illustrating the frequency and diversity of the environment into which these 'private', protected sounds have been released. The means of exhibition plays with the scientific requirements of the patent application, the scientific method for analysis and quantification, and the farce of collecting a sound in a test tube even though the label on the sample does document the presence of the sound and it's locale in the world.
The exhibition will also contain 4 large glass vacuum desiccators vessels, containing a loud speaker in a vacuum - Patented sounds would be played into these vessels, in theory breaking the legal protection of the patent, but being inaudible due to the vacuum, questioning the conditions under which the patent has validity.
A third stage of this project will be the creation of a grave yard for 'dead' sounds, raising aural awareness in line with the other sections of the work of the ever changing nature of our sonic environment. This will be done by providing a card index so that visitors to the exhibition can add sounds they remember and rarely hear anymore.
