Open Days 2018
Tuesday 2 October
18:30 Talk @ Fundació Phonos (Sala 51.100, Campus UPF Poblenou, C/ Roc Boronat 138)
Pioneras de la música visual: Mujeres olvidadas entre la tecnología, la ciencia y el arte, by Blanca Rego
20:00 Performances @ Fundació Phonos (Sala Aranyó, Campus UPF Poblenou, C/ Roc Boronat 138)
Amber (aka Alpha Decay) // Barbara Ellison: CyberSongs, A trans-human song cycle
Wednesday 3 October
18:30 Talk @ Fundació Phonos (Sala 51.100, Campus UPF Poblenou, C/ Roc Boronat 138)
On sonic phantoms, by Barbara Ellison
20:00 Concert @ Fundació Phonos (Sala Aranyó Campus UPF Poblenou, C/ Roc Boronat 138)
Works by women in the Phonos Archive, selection by Estefania Aimar
Thursday 4 October
18:30 Talk @ Hangar (C/ Emilia Coranty 16)
Live coding fieldnotes, by Shelly Knotts
20:00 Performances @ Hangar (C/ Emilia Coranty 16)
Lali Barriere, Lina Bautista & Ceci Durán // Yolanda Uriz: Transitory presences #2 // Shelly Knotts
Friday 5 October
18:30 Talk @ Fundació Phonos (Sala 51.100, Campus UPF Poblenou, C/ Roc Boronat 138)
La combinatoria en l'art, by Lali Barriere
20:00 Performances @ NIU (C/ Almogàvers 208)
Cachichi presents... Schloss Mirabell & Martyna Poznańska
Description of talks and concerts
Pioneras de la música visual: mujeres olvidadas entre tecnología, ciencia y arte, by Blanca Rego
Tuesday, 2 October, 18:30 h. @ Fundació Phonos (Campus UPF Poblenou, C/ Roc Boronat 138), in spanish.
"We must reject a story that perpetuates a mythological female who occasionally glimpses without ever being heard."
Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film, 1910-1975, Lis Rhodes.
History in general, and the History of Art in particular, is a story of men written by men. This has caused that many female pioneers of different scopes, among them the visual music, have been relegated to the oblivion. Artists like Margaret Watts Hughes or Mary Hallock-Greenewalt are conspicuous by their absence in most histories of sound art and visual music. This talk recovers the work of some of those visionary inventors obsessed with seeing sound and listening to images.
Barbara Ellison: CyberSongs, A trans-human song cycle
Tuessday, 2 October, 20 h. @ Fundació Phonos (Campus UPF Poblenou, C/ Roc Boronat, 138)
Known for her explorations of ghostly presence and substance in a plethora of sonic realms, artist and composer Barbara Ellison’s work delves into the sonic intricacies of objects, manipulated instruments, voice avatars and sound environments from the Arctic to the Amazonian rainforest. In her work, the hidden and the phantasmatic reveal themselves as a reward for the engaged and attentive listener willing to take such a sonic voyage. Her new work for live performance ‘CyberSongs’ explores the simultaneous use of both computer text-to-speech synthetic/sampled voices and computer-like patterns with human voices - through the intensive and extensive use of repetition- as tools and materials to give rise to surprising audible phenomena of a fascinating odd musicality. Words, morphemes, phonemes, phrases and speech particles acquire constantly-shifting new aural meanings, turning into the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic patterns of the obsesively phantasmatic trans-human song cycle of the ‘CyberSongs’.
On sonic phantoms, by Barbara Ellison
Wednesday, 3 October, 18:30 h. @ Fundació Phonos (Campus UPF Poblenou, C/ Roc Boronat 138), in english.
Barbara Ellison will present an overview of her practice and creative research into sonic phantoms. "Inherent in all music –and perhaps in all sound- sonic phantoms lurk and stalk with the promise of mystery and elevation. We just need to conjure them." [from the liner notes of her Sonic Phantoms double album].
Women in Phonos, works by women at the Phonos Archive
Wednesday, 4 October, 20 h. @ Fundació Phonos (Campus UPF Poblenou, C/ Roc Boronat 138)
Estefanía Aimar has prepared an acousmatic music programme wit works by women found at the Phonos Archive:
- Ariadna Alsina (Barcelona) Vels vitris (2012)
- Graciela Muñoz Farida (Santiago, Chile) Lo que no das, te lo quitas
- Beatriz Ferreyra (Córdoba, Argentina) Souffle d’un petit Dieu distrait (1997)
- Anna Bofill (Barcelona) Espai Sonor VII
- Alejandra Hernandez (México) Aún
Live coding fieldnotes, by Shelly Knotts
Thursday, 4 October, 18:30 h. @ Hangar (C/ Emilia Coranty 16), in english.
For the last five years I have been exploring the potential of live coding as an improvisational performance practice across contexts and genres. I've performed in the free improv, DIY and noise scenes, academic electronic music contexts and at Algoraves, collaborating with other live coders, acoustic musicians, visualists, authors, and algorithmic beings. Through the trial-and- (often fortuitous)error process of live algorithmic design I’ve expanded my own musical limits, learnt more about SuperCollider than I did in seven years in the studio and came to see live coding as more than just a tool for flexible improvisation.
Through embracing live coding I came to perform technicality, becoming a visible example of a ‘woman who codes’. I became acutely aware of the narratives of live coding and the politics of embodying this position. I perceived the critique of feminine technicality that exists in music tech and computer science fields as amplified by the act of publicly ‘doing technical things’. Feminism as a performative practice became central to my work and resulted in projects such as ALGOBABEZ and OFFAL (Orchestra For Females And Laptops).
In this talk I’ll recount experiences from the wild of performing with and through algorithms, and expanding my own musical horizons through explorative coding. I’ll discuss embracing error and failure as part of the practice, using narratives around this to help diversify the live coding community, and the contribution of female live coders to reinserting women into the narratives of computing.
Yolanda Uriz: Transitory presences #2
Thursday, 4 October, 20 h. @ Hangar (C/ Emilia Coranty 16)
Transitory Presences is a series of performances and installations where the senses of sight, hearing and smell are integrated and interconnected. Transitory Presences #2 is the cinematic version of the project, an audio-visual performance with olfactory touches.
On a loudspeaker membrane there is placed an incense bar whose smoke is intermittently illuminated while moving according to the rhythms that we are hearing.
The close-ups of these ephemeral silhouettes are projected on a large screen, so that we can see how the aromatic smoke dances visually revealing spiral shapes and semi-regular patterns. The sound that generates these shapes comes from an analog synthesizer processed with the Pure Data programming environment.
La combinatòria en l'art, by Lali Barrière
Friday, 5 October, 18:30 h. @ Fundació Phonos (Campus UPF Poblenou, C/ Roc Boronat 138), in catalan.
Combinatorics is an area of mathematics of a very transversal nature. It was not established as a branch until quite late, in the context of the changes that occurred in science at the beginning of the last century, and in parallel with the technological developments that led, among others, to the appearance of computers. Combinatorics is at the basis of the workings of digital technologies. The transformation of the beginning and first-half of the Twentieth entury was not only scientific, it also occurred in philosophy and the arts, and affected our way of thinking and seeing the world.
Although combinatorics is present in art since antiquity, combinatorial thought is not expressed and made explicit until much later, with the arousal of the avantgardes and abtraction, first, and with conceptual art, later. Following examples of music, visual arts and literature we will observe the relationships between these two disciplines, as artists began to use combinatorics as a creative and conceptualizing tool in their work.
Cachichi presents... Schloss Mirabell y Martyna Poznańska
Friday, 5 October, 20 h. @ Espai NIU (C/ Almogàvers 208)
Cachichi is a platform for the diffusion of new music, founded in Barcelona in 2017. It contributes to the program of Phonos Open Days inviting two inspiring sound artists to present their work in Barcelona. Martyna Poznańska is a cross-disciplinary artist whose artistic research focuses on listening and hearing as a performative act of transformation in urban environments. In her work she conjures delicate and lyrical ambient atmospheres out of tenderly arranged soundscapes. Florina Speth aka „Schloss Mirabell“ has spent her early years playing piano and cello, solo and in orchestras all over Europe. Driven by a strong interest in contemporary music, her work unfolds in highly musical, yet liquid and bizarrely organised compositions, moving in hybrid environments that pulsate between form and abstraction. She is currently working as Postdoctoral researcher on Music, Machines and the Human hand, loves bridging experimental arts with science to get inspiring output.
Estefanía Aimar (Cordobe, Argentina). Bachelor of Fine Arts and specialized in Sound Art by the University of Barcelona. Starting her art formation with with ballet, she quickly gets interested in disciplines such as improvisation, architecture, visual arts, photography and video art. As a multidisciplinary artist, she is devoted to the investigation of the simultaneity processes in space, sound and movement, in relation to technology. Estefanía is an experimental composer and her works have been presented at concerts, festivals and museums around the world. She is a regular collaborator of the Sound Art Laboratory of the Faculty of Fine Arts (UB) and the Phonos Foundation (UPF).
Amber (aka Alpha Decay) is a French sound engineer based in Barcelona. In her free time, she enjoys herself trying out new melodies, breaking rhythms and looking for noises. One fortuite day, she came across the wonderful world of modular synthesizers, and ever since, she has been trapped there. For the Phonos Open Days, she has prepared a solo with modular synthesizers oscillating between Ambient and Experimental Noise.
Lali Barrière (Barcelone, 1964) is musician and mathematician. Professor and researcher at UPC, she develops her work on graph theory, communication algorithms and combinatorial geometry. She is currently interested in the relationships between mathematics, art and technology. She has collaborated in the Master of Sound Art at the Faculty of Fine Arts (UB), and is a member of the team of professors of the Master in Audiovisual Innovation and Interactive Environments (BAU School). She participates in the free improv scene in Barcelona, playing with amplified objects, homemade electronic devices, field recordings and computers. Currently, she works in three stable formations: A=B, with Ferran Fages; blaast, with Alfredo Costa Monteiro; and Un coup de dés, with Marta Sainz. Her latest projects include Lykt, a multisensory performance with Ferran Fages and Yolanda Uriz; and Sedimento, and audiovisual duo with Ferran Fages.
Lina Bautista studied musical composition in Bogotá, Colombia. Since 2010 she lives and works in Barcelona, where she finished her studies of musical composition and new technologies, Design of Interactive Music Systems at the Pompeu Fabra University and Sound Art at the University of Barcelona. She currently works with Familiar DIY, offering workshops on the construction of electronic instruments; and with Orchestra del Caos, an association and research project about experimental music and sound art. She is also a member of Sons de Barcelona, a collaborative group of artists who work to encourage interest in sound and sound technologies. Lina develops an artist-in-residency project at Hangar, TOPLAP, focused on using code for creative purposes. She is technical coordinator at Mediaestruch and teaches at institutions such as SAE Institute, and the Master in Sound Art at the University of Barcelona.
Ceci Durán (Buenos Aires, 1988) is a musician, singer and researcher of ancestral singing and sound. Her aesthetic path is oriented towards three fundamental axes, including technology (electronic sound, sound composition), voice in its more unconventional aspect (vocal sounds, free improvisation, exploration), and popular songs of South American and native roots. She currently resides in Barcelona, where she develops activity related to singing and its ceremonial practice. She works at Befaco, volunteers at Fab Lab Barcelona, and is starting a training stage in vocal performance and choreographic theater with Enrique Pardo at the Roy Hart School in France.
Barbara Ellison is an audiovisual artist living and working in The Hague. Her work explores ghostly presence in a plethora of sonic and visual realms. Her performances play with ritualistic forms giving rise to sonic structures emerging through a hypnotic repetitious exploration of simple sound-producing actions. Through her work, she explores states of auditory and visual ambiguity with materials that are either naturally ambiguous or have been ‘composed’ to attain this quality, bringing with it what she calls a ‘phantasmatic’ presence. Ellison has presented her work at festivals such as L’Audible (Paris), Volumens (Valencia), Modern Body (The Hague), Fringe (Amsterdam), Sónar (Barcelona), Monotak OT3 (Amsterdam), Liquid Architecture (Melbourne/Sydney), Winter Solstice Festival (Oslo) and the Venice Biennale. She has a PhD from the University of Huddersfield, and currently teaches at the Conservatory in The Hague.
Shelly Knotts produces live-coded and network music performances. She holds a PhD in Live Computer Music (Durham University) with a focus on the social dynamics of collaboration in Network Music. She was Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence at the School of Chemistry (Newcastle University) exploring live-coded data sonification. She is currently a Research Fellow at SensiLab (Monash University) working on ARC funded project Improvisational Interfaces. She performs at numerous Algoraves and Live Coding events, collaborating with improvisers across a spectrum of styles. Her current projects include algo-pop duo ALGOBABEZ (with Joanne Armitage), international laptop ensemble OFFAL (Orchestra For Females and Laptops), and audio-visual, generative live-coding performance with Alo Allik. Her music has been released on Fractal Meat and Chordpunch labels. In 2017 she was a winner of The Oram Awards for her innovative work in music.
Martyna Poznańska is a cross-disciplinary artist who works with different media across disciplines, building connections between the intangible medium of sound and solid matter. This includes the practice of listening and field recording in tangent to working with various visual tools, mixed media, found objects, and writing. She has exhibited and performed in shows at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin (DE), Deutsche Oper, Berlin (DE), Aperto Raum Berlin, among others. In addition, she has worked with renowned artists such as Hans Peter Kuhn (Übergang, Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum, Berlin, 2017), and Peter Cusack. Martyna completed a master’s degree in Spanish Language and Literature at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, 2010. She studied Sound Art at the University of the Arts, London (LCC/UAL). In 2016 she obtained an MA in Sound Studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK). Martyna lives and works in Berlin.
Blanca Rego (aka _blank) is a digital artist and researcher specializing in visual music. Her work focuses on the relationship between image and sound, influenced by both classical experimental cinema and current electronic music. Her audiovisual pieces have been exhibited in festivals and art centers such as the ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany), the Barbican Center (London, UK), the IotaCenter (Los Angeles, USA) and Fundación Telefónica (Madrid, Spain).
Florina Speth (aka Schloss Mirabell) started playing cello and piano at the age of 6, and began studying music at the “University Mozarteum Salzburg” when she was just 11. At the age of 20 she turned into electronic music composition while studying cognitive musicology and neuro-linguistics. She holds a PhD on research about the role of sound in robotic rehabilitation. Currently, she works as a futurologist and leads a long-term study that looks into possible futures of the next 100 years in an experimental setting with ten kids. She has performed with musicians such as Dasha Rush at Berlin Atonal Festival and at e-Elbphilharmonie, with Nicholas Bussmann, Hannes Hoelzl and Oliver Greschke. As one can hear in her music, she loves complexity in art and science and she seeks channels to express the unspeakable. In current live performances she plays electronic instruments, cello, voice and a variety of sound toys.
Access to all talks and performances is free.
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