To Co Zni Za Rohem / Listening Around The Corner
Thursday
18 June, 2015
18 – 21:30h
Galerie Tranzitdisplay
Dittrichova 337/9
12000 Praha 2
Listening Around The Corner is a mini-symposium featuring notable artists and scientists.
Please view the full Program and schedule below:
Introduction Miloš Vojtěchovský, Dagmar Šubrtová
Frontiers of Solitude
The international and intercultural art project confronts the septentrional in the context of unprecedented transformation of northern ecosystems. “Frontiers of Solitude” is a joint initiative between three partners: Gallery Školska 28 in Prague, Atelier Nord in Oslo, and Skaftfell Centre for Visual Art in eastern Iceland and is planned for one year 2015 – April 2016.
Our Sonic Playground: A Model for Active Engagement in Urban Soundscapes
Eric Leonardson
The presentation describes a public event that proposes a model for active, public participation in soundscape awareness. For those who are new to acoustic ecology and the experiential basis of its pedagogy, this practical template or ‘recipe’ may help others organise their own events aimed at active engagement in sound, listening, and environment. While offering practical suggestions for getting started, I also address some relevant issues regarding a broader cultural discourse of sound in the arts and sciences.
Bio:Eric Leonardson is a Chicago-based composer, radio artist, sound designer, instrument inventor, improvisor, visual artist, and teacher. He has devoted a majority of his professional career to unorthodox approaches to sound and its instrumentation with a broad understanding of texture, atmosphere and microtones. He is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Sound at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, President of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, founder and co-chair of the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, and co-founder and Executive Director of the World Listening Project.
Re-planting the sound(s), where sound and location collide.
Brane Zorman
The aspects and possible interpretations / understanding based on CONA’s soundwalk and soundmap projects (Hodi mesto – Walk the City) and Field Frequency Field” (created by Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman). ”I want to highlight a phenomenon which I call “A process of Re-planting the sound(s)” with this scenario: carefully chosen recorded content (sounds, narration, effects, …) relate to historical, social, political, cultural facts or interpretations. They are combined to form and open reflection on context, content, location, time and when, as such, are re-planted on the same (or other locations) in the form of a soundwalk or soundmap, they merge and un-hide different layers of reality, form new shifted relations, transposed contexts, pitched understandings.”
Brane Zorman (born and based in Ljubljana, Slovenia) is a composer, sound and radio artist, sound manipulator and producer. His work examines and explores the possibilities of processing, presenting, perceiving, understanding, positioning, manipulating and reinterpreting the sound and space. By employing old (analogue), digital technologies and techniques his work traverses the fields of music, multimedia and visual space using both sophisticated and simple tools, strategies, methods, dynamic and interactive interpretation models, soundscapes, electronic and acoustic evolving sound sculptures. With Irena Pivka he cofounded CONA Institute for contemporary art processing which produces radioCona, Field Frequency Flux projects among others. He is programe selector for ZVO.ČI.TI (so.und.ing) series project, curates sound art exhibitions, publishes artist’s books.
www.branezorman.si
www.cona.si
www.radiocona.si
Aral Sea Stories: Dariga, golden carp, untraceable artists who restore fishermen to ships stranded in the desert and other tales
Peter Cusack
The Aral Sea project is an example of sonic journalism – the aural equivalent of photojournalism. It asks ,”What can we learn of places by listening to their sounds?”
Fifty years ago the Aral Sea in Central Asia was the planet’s fourth largest lake. In the decades since it has virtually disappeared; a victim of the irrigation schemes that extract most of the water from its feeder rivers. However today Kazakhstan is making a surprisingly successful attempt to restore the small part of the North Aral within it’s territory. Water levels have risen, native fish species have spectacularly increased, wildlife is returning and, although there is a long way to go, improvement to the environment are obvious. The fishing industry is employing local people once more, bringing work into an impoverished and depopulated region.
Since May 2013 I have made three trips to the Aral to make field recordings, take photographs and talk to people there. It is an extraordinary region, a huge body of water in a vast open, mostly flat, landscape. There are no trees for thousands of kilometres, a strong wind usually blows. The weather is extreme. Horses are rounded up using ancient Soviet Ural motorbikes. What little sound there is just disappears into the atmosphere. It is a difficult, but fascinating, place to try to record. During this talk I will tell stories, play recordings, show images from my visits.
Peter Cusack works as a field recordist with a special interest in environmental sound and acoustic ecology. Projects include community arts, researches into sound and our sense of place and documentary recordings in areas of special sonic interest (Lake Bajkal, Siberia). His project Sounds From Dangerous Places explores soundscapes at sites of major environmental damage – Chernobyl exclusion zone; Caspian oil fields; UK nuclear sites. He describes the use of sound to investigate documentary issues as sonic journalism.
http://www.petercusack.org/
Project Nula
Lloyd Dunn
is the creator of nula.cc, a regular series of filecasts and an online presence, which he began in 2009. Each filecast consists of an assemblage of sounds, images, or words, each made available for download, sharing, commentary, and further manipulation. Filecasts are generally, though not exclusively, created from found material, assembled together with field recordings or other original source material. The tendency at nula.cc has been to let the works speak for themselves as much as possible. However, each individual filecast is accompanied by more or less detailed clues as to the significance, context, or possible interpretation of the works offered. These descriptions generally take brevity to be a primary virtue.
Lloyd Dunn is a founding member of the experimental intermedia group The Tape-beatles, and publisher and editor of several small-circulation magazines such as Photostatic and Retrofuturism. Starting in the 1980s, he has worked in many mediums, including film, video, audio, print, and web applications. He studied Linguistics, and later did masters work in film, photography and intermedia. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, USA. Since 2009 his main project has been nula.cc, which is continually updated with new sound works, movies, photographs, and essays.
Arctic Ecology, or Alaskan Warming
Helena Štorchová
What is the significance of the extreme, rather than average temperature for the ecology of the North and what is its impact on ecosystems?
RNDr. Helena Štorchová, PhD is a specialist in plant molecular biology and she works at the Institute of Experimental Botany of the Czech Republic. She mainly concentrates on the genetic basis of flowering plants, research of mitochondrial DNA and on general evolutionary biology. She accomplished her postgraduate studies at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in the laboratory of Dr. George Doskočil, MD who was the founder of Czech molecular biology. From 1995 to 1998 in the Institute of Botany Průhonice she founded the Laboratory for DNA analysis. From 2002 to 2003 she received a Fulbright scholarship, which allowed her to stay at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and still cooperates intensively with this northernmost university in the world. Externally lectures at the Faculty of Charles University in Prague and at the University of South Bohemia in the Czech Budejovice.