Sound [In]Formation
Curated by Kóan Jeff Baysa M.D.
NO GALLERY
Museum of Contemporary Art
Dubrovnik Avenue, 17, Zagreb, Croatia
Friday, 5. 4. 2013 at 7.00 pm
Artists: Igor Molochevski, Mark Bolotin, Jiayi and Shih-Wen Young, Blake Shaw
Organization Branko Franceschi
In the catalogue for his noteworthy exhibition, When Attitudes Become Form (1969) Harald Szeemann stated, “In order to entertain certain ideas we may be obliged to abandon others upon which we have come to depend.” As sentient beings, we experience and acquire knowledge of the world through our senses, but it is ultimately the “perceiving” organized by the neural networks in the brain that constitute our “realities.” The title’s double entendre alludes to the sculptural and physical i.e. space-occupying, impactful and haptic qualities of sound, as well as its Frankensteinisation: the digital reassemblage, the reorganization and blending of sensory data on a unitary level into neo-languages and new experiences.
The selected artists in this exhibition abandon expected trajectories and reinforce the legitimacy of sound as a creative medium. Contributing to the emerging technoculture of interactive, cross-platformed, and immersive installations and performances, they evince the shifting of foci from objects themselves, instead, to the very processes of their perception. The aural colludes with the visual to create new, abstracted, emotional, and imagined spaces. Cognitive neuroscience investigates how these physical properties of the world are organised in the brain to yield conscious perception.
Igor Molochevski is a New Media artist, documentary filmmaker, and photographer. His work is based on mixed media and technology reintegration. His workflow includes live coding, interactive and generative programming, kinetic sculptures, sound design and digital imaging. His work is defined by de-structuralization of visual and conceptual paradigm.”Invisible Beast” examines contextual structure of sets of conditional imperatives that define metaphysical experience: a generative audiovisual installation with tensions between a Buddhist singing bowl activated by an audience member and a dynamic self-generating digital painting.
Mark Bolotin is an award-winning Australian multimedia practitioner, inventor and the founder and artistic director of the leading interactive arts company, Synarcade Audio-Visuals. He creates unique new multimedia works that fuse music, film and theatre together and invents innovative forms of audience/performer participation. Central to his artistic practice is a focus on how interactive technology can celebrate and challenge notions of human identity, creativity and genetic mutation at the beginning of the 21st century. His current major project is The Lumiphonic Creature Choir: a giant twelve-headed audio-visual creature that sings or recites prose when triggered by a performer or audience member.
Jiayi and Shih-Wen Young are California college professors in mathematics and physics at The American River University in Sacramento, California. They thank Dr. Barbara Block and Dr. Randy Kochevar of Stanford University for generously granting permission for them to use TOPP data and for working with them to provide specific datasets to facilitate their artistic vision. This data sonification installation utilizes data extracted from the live tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) project that is a project began in 2000 as one of 17 projects of the Census of Marine Life, a 10-year, 80-nation endeavor to assess and explain the diversity and abundance of life in the oceans, and where that life has lived, is living, and will live. Tagged animals send back data via satellites such as Argos, a polar-orbiting satellite. Intermingled in this sound installation are migration tracks of one Salmon Shark and three Northern Elephant Seals spanning the time duration of roughly two years (2011-2013). Through sound, they attempt to reveal a sense of the relative spatial and directional relationship between predator and prey. Their reference point is set on the shark. Each track is mapped into a two-channel sound clip, then the sound clips are superimposed to create a tapestry of interweaving journeys that contribute to the complex ecosystem in the Pacific.
Blake Shaw, a 24 year old award-winning media artist who’s work has been exhibited at numerous museums, galleries, festivals and art fairs across North America and Europe, presents Papa Francis and the Rodeo an audio-visual work that explores the first three months of the new year through found sounds and video recorded since December 21st, 2012. Shaw creates audio-visual purkinje patterns — repetition in light and sound with slight periodic offsets that have been shown to modulate brainwave frequency — to create an immersive media landscape. The installation makes use of holophonic sound to create the binaural 3D sound effect.
Exciting current explorations into expanded technologies are evident in this select quartet of works in Sound [In]Formation that engages the audience with exquisite presentations of immersive, contemplative experiences.
Kóan Jeff Baysa M.D.
Exhibition is opened till April, 13, Tue – Fri & Sun 11 am – 6 pm, Sat 11 am – 20 pm, Mon closed
Exhibition was made possible thanks to the grants by Trust for Mutual Understanding and Ministry of Culture Republic of Croatia, and assistance of CEC ArtsLink.
