“Quintetto” is a nice little installation based on the study of the movement of goldfish used as input for the production of sounds. The fish’s movement is motion captured and translated into sound – each fish representing a different musical instrument.
Another great work on show this week in Berlin is Coincidence Engines, a series of work treats the seemingly mundane event of a clock’s tick as a building block for the construction of rich and complex acoustic structures. The work pays homage to the Poème Symphonique of 20th-century Hungarian composer György Ligeti, who used metronomes not for their intended utilitarian purpose of keeping musical time, but as musical instruments in their own right.
Coincidence Engines, which has been nominated for the 2010 Transmediale Prize, is the work of The User – Montréal-based architect and installation artist Thomas McIntosh, and composer and sound artist Emmanuel Madan.
Beautiful station ID for Finnish TV by Jopsu Ramu and Tokyo artist and designer and Shun Kawakami.
Check out Shun Kawakami’s other great stuff on his personal site: www.shunkawakami.jp.
Kawakami’s work if very much based in electronic music. And reminds me to an extend of another artist I really admire and have been meaning to post for a while – Carsten Nicolai who is exploring similar themes to myself in his artwork – light, sound and minalism.
Nicolai is well known in Germany for his sound and light specific installations, and his giant dream machine – called Rota, which has recently been turned into an iPhone App. Nicolai is also part of the pioneering record labelRaster Noton. I was recently lucky enough to attend their label showcase night at the WMF in Berlin to witness the future sound of music – a hybrid of dancefloor friendly electro and electronica that made the room and your body vibrate.
Here is Aoyama Spaces, spaces illuminated through a play of sound and light:
Nick Cave’s (no, not that Nick Cave) soundsuits are reminiscent of African ceremonial costumes. Clothing to rejoice in. Love the twig suit. Added to my wishlist.
Went to see Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Murder of Crows at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art today. Was pretty inspiring.
98 speakers scattered around the room for an emotive aural experience. The songs were beautiful. Reminded me of Pink Floyd.
From the Gallery’s site:
In the otherwise empty historical hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof, 98 loudspeakers are installed. These emit the sounds of voices, music and soundscapes generated by special stereophonic recording and replay techniques, creating a composition that has a direct physical impact on the listener. The special Ambisonic soundfield system generates a greatly intensified aural and emotional space, so that the acoustic events that transpire in the three-dimensional soundspace have a startling, disconcerting immediacy. The installation is conceived like a film or a play, but one whose images and narrative structures are created by sound alone.
The installation’s title, “The Murder of Crows”, refers both to the English term for a flock of those birds and to the strange occurrence known as a ‘crow funeral’: when a crow dies, many other crows converge around the body and caw, perhaps in lament, for over 24 hours. The work also references the etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” by Francisco de Goya.
Wasn’t really feeling the rest of the stuff at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Didn’t really grab me at all – pretty abstract.