[All 3 Days, Music Building]
seah (Chelsea Heikes)
CONDUITS OF THE HYDROSPHERE: DINOSAUR PISS RUNS THROUGH OUR VEINS
Abstract
The provocation of this title comes from a statement I made nearly 15 years ago while intensively studying Butoh, Body Weather Laboratory, and Noguchi Taiso. My basic premise is that all the water on the earth is all the water that ever was and ever will be – the “closed” nature of the hydrosphere. With this in mind, and that humans are in fact watery flesh bags, we are conduits of the hydrosphere – dinosaur piss runs through our veins.
This concept courses through my recent album/book release, “conduits of the hydrosphere”. The five tracks were all made using field recordings of watery spaces (lakes, rivers, archipelagos, puddles) using hydrophones and cameras hanging from my water body it engaged in intra-actions with these outer water bodies, hydrophones have also been placed in my mouth and as far back down my throat as I could handle it, as well as various mostly handmade instruments. Each track has video work that is meant to be projection mapped into a space (for example, ova 1 was mapped into a stairwell at RE:Sound in 2019). Video stills have been culled from the videos to create a 60 page book of images and fragments of writings related to the tracks.
My work evolves at the intersection of the human body, environmental bodies, and technology. I am deeply invested in examining intra-actions amongst these three entities in the scope of Critical Feminist Posthumanism and New Materialisms. My practice begins at the human body, through somatic movement practices (Butoh, Body Weather Laboratory, and Noguchi Taiso) and spirals out from there. These practices open the practitioner to experiencing their human body as “other-than-human”. It is through these movement practices that I investigate the terrain, using field recording technologies that I then bring back into the studio. I am less interested in “pure” field recordings. Rather, the final audio-visual compositions reach toward evoking the felt experience of place, porosity, and being a body. These field recordings are then rendered into audio-visual compositions which can be experienced as live performance, immersive installation, or on a flat screen. I draw on the concept of indeterminancy and the fluidity/porous nature of bodies in the creation of this body of work, connecting this to larger issues of listening, sounding, and performance.
Biography
seah (Chelsea Heikes) composes sound and video for installation and performance art. Trained in Butoh, Body Weather Laboratory, and Noguchi Taiso, the compositions are an expression of somatic experiences housed deep within the sinews of the body. seah’s solo work and collaborative project (post doom romance), have been reviewed by several experimental sound art writers. The art duo dismantles notions of linear time/space through layered audio-visual assemblages culled from inner and outer psychogeographies. Seah has a BFA from California College of the Arts, an MA from European Graduate School and has guest lectured at CCA in San Francisco, Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary (Canada), and University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Artistic work and philosophical writing have been presented throughout Europe and North America.
Sebastian Adams
Stolen Music
Abstract
Stolen Music is a performance and online repository which aims to be both a work of art and an ideological attempt to overthrow copyright law by making the case that associating ownership of intellectual property with an individual is misguided and outdated.
Following the tradition of Plunderphonics and other musical piracy, it is composed of uncleared samples and is illegal in the European Union (although covered by fair use provisions in the United States).
In the existing version of Stolen Music, written for the closing concert of the IRCAM Cursus programme, material from pieces presented by other composers on the Cursus was stolen and combined with a corpus of 1000s of YouTube videos to create audio-visual collages. Most were approximately 1 minute long, serving as transitions to cover the production changeovers needed between pieces in the concert and undermine the feeling that the concert comprised multiple pieces composed by individuals. The final part involved a presentation, followed by kazoo karaoke sing-along with the audience where I tricked them into believing that the U2 song I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For was an ancient Irish folk song (and the kazoo an Irish instrument), and that we were playing along using an AI-driven karaoke machine (really a fixed-media video file).
However, Stolen Music is designed to be context-dependant and any new performance situation will require an entirely new version which hewn from the same collection of Max patches and Python scripts. For the Instruments, Interfaces, Infrastructures: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Musical Media conference, I present a new version of Stolen Music as a standalone video/sound installation.
Biography
Sebastian Adams is an Irish composer and performer. As an undergraduate, he founded Kirkos, an experimental music ensemble which runs Dublin’s only DIY music venues as well as creating major projects of its own. Current projects include Stolen Music (a concert and web-based exploration into the chilling effects of intellectual property law: stolenmusic.org) and Chat Music (real-time conversion of Twitch chat streams into music, in collaboration with Carl Ludwig Hübsch). As a viola player Sebastian is active in improvisation, new music and early music. He recently completed the IRCAM Cursus, and previously studied in Dublin and Vienna.
Stefanie Egedy
BODIES AND SUBWOOFERS (B.A.S.)
Abstract
Pursuing the idea and practice of a ‘vibrational experience’ and the therapeutic effects (reduction of stress and anxiety) of low-frequency sound and subwoofers, Stefanie Egedy builds a body of work entitled BODIES AND SUBWOOFERS (B.A.S.) – a series of site-specific installations and concerts with compositions produced for each location. Analyzing the space specificities, she arranges subwoofers and selects low-frequency sound waves with consideration to their transparency (only noticed through tactile perception) and to the ones that create other sounds such as resonances and reverberations while interacting with the space architecture. A proposition for the whole body to be in contact with and shaken by different types of sonic vibrations, experimenting with bodily and perceptional impacts.
Each B.A.S. has its own subwoofer arrangement that is calculated following the space dimensions and subwoofer type. With these measurements, one can create ”living zones’’ (with higher or variations of acoustic pressure) and ”dead zones’’ (no acoustic pressure). The liveliness of an area is determined by the expression of the acoustic pressure throughout a region, where bodies can or cannot perceive the acoustic signal with their skin/body parts.
Invisible to the eye yet immediately noted by the body, the sonorous touch embraces bodies and spaces. These long sound waves are capable of filling the air with pressure while caring for the bodies. To feel touched and hugged by sound waves, the skin feels and the body listens to a sound massage enabled by low-frequency sound waves and subwoofers. The invisible touch of sound.
Biography
Stefanie Egedy investigates sound as a composer of conceptual pieces, music, commissioned works, and electronic music. Using analog and digital synthesis, she researches possibilities with low-frequency sound, bodies, and subwoofers. Her work stems from installations to live performances as sonic propositions – building a body of work entitled ‘BODIES AND SUBWOOFERS (B.A.S.)’. Sub-bass, bass, infrasound, subwoofers, and their capacity to be present in space, are the foundations of her artistic practice. Besieged by this scenario, Egedy articulates the cross-over between sonorous and musical language to investigate sonic communication between beings.
Egedy has presented in Berlin at CTM Festival, Berghain, KW Institute for Contemporary Art; Kunstfest (Weimar); Zentrale (Viena); Patchlab Festival (Krakow): Museu de Arte Moderno (Buenos Aires): in Brazil at museum MIS and Festival Novas Frequências (Rio de Janeiro); and is part of the EU Creative Europe-supported SHAPE+ 2022-2023 artist roster.