Sound Reasons Festival VI | ReINSTALL – 3rd Session | SYMPOSIUM

Thursday 15 November 2018

Symposium, talks, workshops | 3pm onwards

Live performances | 7pm onwards

Korean Cultural Center, New Delhi 

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The 3rd ReINSTALL of Sound Reasons Festival VI includes a new selection of installations and Sound Art works that adapt the content of the ongoing exhibition at the Korean Cultural Center. With a dedicated symposium exploring the critical content of the works, the event features a workshop by Lisa Hall along with talks/presentations by Cathy Lane, Ish S and Salomé Voegelin, and directed listening sessions, creative engagements with listening perspectives that engage the artworks included in the festival.

The second and the third ReINSTALL sessions engage with the possibilities of sound and its capabilities to make unseen connections, to hold un-assumed narratives and produce curative and creative tensions. While expanding upon the spectrum of the potentiality of sound, we want to initiate listening experiences using artistic explorations and inter-media intersections. These re-installations produce a curative dialogue with other mediums in which the listener is invited to explore generative phenomenological possibilities rather than preserve/observe the actuality of the sonic event(s) – listening into a world, in order to hear what all it could be, to reconsider the frame of current actuality and explore the complexity of its sonic perceptions.

This iterative curation reveals a thin slice of the sonic spectrum and also opens up newer worlds for a listener, where the aim is to illuminate and generate plural possibilities and not to just categorise and preserve a soundscape. With an 8 Channel Audio Room and 4 multi channel installations by various artists, the works featured in the show involve an interplay of text, video, synthesis, sampling, narratives with other creative practices and musique concrete processes.

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3rd ReINSTALL Programme

• 3pm – ‘Listening for instruction’– workshop with Lisa Hall**
• 4pm – Lisa Hall | talk/presentation
• 4pm – Salomé Voegelin | talk/presentation
• 5pm – Cathy Lane | talk/presentation
• 6pm – Multi channel directed Listening sessions
• 7pm – Live Performances by Shun Owada, Cathy Lane and diFfuSed beats

** “Listening for instruction” workshop | Lisa Hall

This workshop connects with the piece Virtual Voices, which is exhibited at Sound Reasons Festival, is part of the ongoing project “Listening for Instruction” by Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch - a sonic survey that investigates the automated sounds of our urban environments. Attempting to hear between the lines, the project deciphers the beeps and bips of automated machinery, listens beyond the words of the synthetic voices and imagines a new future of automation.

The Listening for instruction project includes a printed zine “Dictionary of Beeps” that catalogues and defines the automated, non-verbal sounds heard in the city. During this session you’re invited to add an entry into a new edition of the dictionary for Delhi during a short workshop. Starting with a short sound walk around the local area we’ll record and visualise these sounds with spectrograms, then back at the gallery we’ll discuss the meaning and description of these sounds for inclusion in the dictionary.

/(pu) (pe) (pu) (pe) (pu) (pe) /

/ (e) (aaaaaaa) /

The Dictionary of Beeps was created to better understand the automated sonic landscape that is becoming more and more present in our urban spaces. These sounds of automation are often described simply as ‘beeps’ and ‘sirens’ yet they differ wildly and can convey complex information. They are designed to grab our attention, yet their ubiquity means they often fade into the background. In effect they form a language of the machinery that we interact with in our urban spaces, becoming the voice of the moving electronic limbs, objects and buildings around us.

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Works included in ReINSTALL 3 exhibition

Cathy Lane
PREPARATION OF AN IMAGINARY CONFLICT 
8 channel audio

‘We are concerned here not so much with the almost natural phenomenon of identifying an enemy who is threatening us, but with the process of creating and demonizing the enemy’ – Umberto Eco

Sound and language are powerful tools in the construction of imagined conflict scenarios and their aftermaths. ‘Preparations for an Imaginary Conflict’ was commissioned for Staging Disorder, an exhibition addressing the relationship between photography, sound art and modern conflict. The work uses UK public information media recordings, oral history, archival news, texts and specific geographical areas to examine the warlike rhetoric used by several generations of politicians to prepare the population to a possible attack or to construct the idea of a hostile "other" in a large number of real or imaginary situations.

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Lisa Hall & Hannah Kemp-Welch
VIRTUAL VOICES
8 channel audio

Listening for Instruction is a survey of how sounds are used as signifiers in public spaces in the UK, focusing on London as the case study. Collecting beeps, hisses, tones and automated voices, this work looks at how human workers are replaced by recorded sound, how sound is used to direct our behaviour, and how the voice is positioned within that. Probing current debates around the potential changes automation brings to working lives this study advocates for an automated future, supporting the anti-work movement’s call for ‘the right to the idle’ - the artists commit their own voices into a hybrid synthetic persona in support of this.

Virtual Voices is one third of the survey to date, made in conjunction with audio work Journey and zine Dictionary of Beeps.

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Marcus Maeder 
LASTA /NIGALANA
8 channel audio

Lasta/Nigalana was originally composed for a 20-channel, ambisonic loudspeaker array in a dodecahedron. The piece, which had its premiere in 2008 in Dubrovnik/Croatia, has now been reworked for the 2018 SoundReasons Festival and adapted to a conventional ambisonics system. Lasta/Nigalana is based on the observation of countless numbers of swallows, which in summer fly over the city of Dubrovnik in large flocks, providing a special spatial-acoustic spectacle.

The Lasta/Nigalana piece selects as its model the cries made by the swallows as they move extremely dynamically in the air, and sets them into a sound image intended to musically reproduce the impression of shady and cool alleys within the thick, medieval walls of the city and the light reflections of the sea.

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diFfuSed beats 
FAR AWAY
8 channel audio

There is always a stepping into our works and exploring spatial perception by opening up the listening perspectives by moving the sonic material generated into space. Most of the source material for this work was generated live though improvised processes, these include both synthesis and other live sampling techniques. In reflection one must plunge into this sonic world instead of surveying it and in the words of Merleau-Ponty ‘it (the reflection) must descend towards it as it is - instead of working its way back up towards a prior possibility of thinking it’.

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Venzha Christ
EVOLUTION OF THE UNKNOWN #07
8 DIY antennas, 8 DIY signal receivers, 4 speakers, 2 frequency visualisations

The art installation here results from the science of radio astronomy. The installation presents radio waves from space, sent and collected through self-made radio antennas gathering precise data from astronomical objects in space. The transmitted signals received from the planets and stars are then visually displayed and decoded into audible sounds which constitute the soundscape present in this gallery. Radio waves, together with light waves, have changed the way we view the Universe and dramatically increased our knowledge of it.

The Indonesia Space Science Society, shows us that that space is a continuous source of inspiration that compels practitioners from all fields to understand the universe we are within, using both tools and ideas of science, and those of art.

This collaboration project between ISSS and Sound Reasons, will continuing to International SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Conference in Yogyakarta Indonesia November 2018.

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Suvani Suri 
PRELUDE TO A PUNCTURE IN LISTENING II
2 mics / 2 speakers / 1 mixer

The project is one of a series of sonic experiments that probe into the nesting of the uncanny, within the everyday. A round of acoustic interpenetrations home in on the ambiguous zones between the inside and outside, the familiar and the unfamiliar in a bid to tease apart occurrences of the uncanny leak(s) in-between. Floating between the listening zones, one is looped into an endless feedback, a continuously mutating reflection borne of peculiar sounds intruding into spaces that have been held separate so far suggesting that at the very point of closure, there is an opening.

The flight of stairs that only goes up and down evokes the seduction of the strange and becomes the site of the uncanny encounter with that which is familiar and yet not. The useless staircase alludes to the Muyō kaidan, also know as a pure staircase, a Thomasson relic discovered by the Japanese artist Genpei.

The intervention serendipitously takes on the form of a conversation with the instrumentarium generated by the radiowaves in Venzha’s work 'Evolution of the Unknown'. As the sonic realms of the works criss-cross into each other, speculations of the acousmatic uncanny that dwell in each of the inquiries, abound.

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For further information about the symposium, please see Sound Reasons Festival VI