beginning again is a repetitive performative action of volleying a balloon into space. Dull thuds of gloved hands against the balloon’s skin and footsteps of the performer occur again and again and again. The performer initiates but does not control the trajectory or speed of the balloon’s arc which is affected by its own resistance and the room’s air currents. Stein’s notion of time as a continuous present is of “more and more of everything, beginning and beginning and beginning.”[1] Time is the present, the now, not a continuum of the past-present-future. The present is repetition: the sense of difference lies with the perceiver. ArtLab Digital Features, Visual Art Department, Western University.
A collaboration with Helen Pridmore: With mutual interests in sound, resonance, and the body in the world, Helen and I explore and experiment with human sound and acoustic materiality through structured improvisation for a collaborative performance using indeterminacy and improvisation as our process. Our performance occurs in separate locations: my sound and actions are transmitted to the space where Helen is performing, allowing her to see and hear me. I have no access to her sound. The post-performance version of the work presents an installation-instrument that invites interaction. The project was developed during a residency at PAVED Arts, Saskatoon, in 2019.
A collaborative performance of sound and moving image with Eeva Siivonen, grounded in experimentation and exploration. Video projections of the natural micro-environment extend over the gallery walls, floor and ceiling creating a tactile and layered yet ambiguous impression of an undefined, nameless space. Sound is generated using materials, digital signal and actions resulting in tonal and percussive textures. Together, sound and image create an embodied, primordial, intimate and sensorial environment of natural and constructed elements and affect as presence, absence, transience, spatial and social relations.
Performance Detail, Forest City Gallery, London
Posted by ellen at 8:51 pm on January 4th, 2019.
Categories: PERFORMANCE.
Objects perform in response to low frequency signal, their actions suggesting forces and noise of the everyday as a form of little theatre or anarchic Dadaist performance. Digital signal is transferred indirectly to objects via physical interfaces and vibra-tactile transducers, functioning as a trigger that causes sonic-kinetic events. The project was a web commission by the Remai Modern.
Posted by ellen at 8:15 pm on December 28th, 2018.
Categories: PERFORMANCE.
Surface : Signal is a 4-channel performative installation using objects and physical interfaces, low frequency signal and vibrotactile technology. Table interfaces are “stages” for objects (glass bowl, whisks, metal funnel), materials (garlic skin, pebbles, aluminum foil, road salt) and object-assemblages. Signal generated in Max/MSP is transferred via puck transducers to physical interfaces, activating the surfaces directly and the objects indirectly. Objects perform variably as harmonic, staccato, cacophonous or drone sound.
Sounds Like Audio Festival, Saskatoon. Curated by Eric Mattson.
Interdisciplinary collaboration (dance, new music/theatre) and independent projects using Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons as source material and influence. Stein shifts the identity and stability of words as perceptual, spatial and playful experiment. Her emphasis on sound and rhythms over rational sense privilege the body, sound and the mind state over conventional meaning.
Book Chair Table (2014): a new media chamber music theatre piece for oboe, double bass, voice and electro-acoustic instrument by composer and vocalist, Lia Pas. My instrument uses materials, objects and actions for sound and image creation. The composition involves fixed and improvisational elements, repetition and experimentation with polyphonic sound and projection. Performed in Core Series V, a collaboration of PAVED Arts and the Saskatoon Symphony.
Book Table Chair (2013): a sound and movement research intensive with dancer Kathryn Ricketts. Our inquiry into text, character, sound and story uses physical objects, and live and spoken word (female and male) recordings of Stein’s text to explore relations of objects, movement, sound, space and performative actions. Experimentation and improvisation opened up our process as interdisciplinary investigation. The project was supported by Nightswimming Theatre’s Pure Research.
Durational live collaboration with Robert Luzar using objects, architectural features of the gallery, extended techniques and bodily actions for sound-making. Our actions included bowing, dragging and pouring with glasses, bowls, lids and other assorted items. Our bodies perform objects and materials within fragile structures, uncertainty and shifting decisions. Reverberating materials, frequencies and frictions transform the gallery into an acoustic chamber of resonance, dissonance, experimentation and perpetual (un)quiet.
Performance at G Gallery, Toronto, coordinated by Yam Lau. The work occurred within the context of Alexandre David’s project, My work has no meaning unless it is used.
Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn, New York
Collaboration with interdisciplinary artist, Lezli Rubin-Kunda using live action, drawing and sound. Marking Space is an interaction in and with a space, materials and media through mark-making and sound. Our conceptual inquiry is the relationship of the sound of drawing / the drawing of sound using the gallery as a laboratory space for in-situ production. As artists, we bring our independent practices and our shared philosophical and poetic investigations into questions of knowing/not knowing, presence/absence, visible/invisible, doing/undoing and not doing.
Epcor Centre Calgary & Sounds Like Audio Festival, Saskatoon
Strung is a collaboration with Jeff Morton for AKA’s inaugural Sounds Like… Audio Festival. Four 8-foot long horizontal interfaces are equipped with musical and industrial materials, strings, resonant materials and objects. Analogue sounds are captured with pickup mics; spoken word sound files are triggered by specific actions. Sound is output to four speakers as recursive, spatialized sound. Seasonal Waves, a 14-channel work for the +15 Soundscape at the Epcor Centre in Calgary used the same physical interfaces, without spoken word sound, and a structural approach to the composition. The work was installed for one year, until August 2012.
Posted by ellen at 6:22 pm on December 16th, 2011.
Categories: PERFORMANCE.
MOO is a collaborative site-specific sound project with sound artist, Jeff Morton. We constructed an eight-station percussive instrument with agricultural objects, organic substances and in situ field recordings. Participants modulate objects, sound and materials as spatialized composition in real-time. Sound is captured and amplified using contact microphones; in addition direct manipulation of the objects triggers field recordings as a secondary order of sound. MOO was a residency project of the Saskatchewan Arts Board.
