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| 2007 Tenth Annual Festival of Sound Art First Chapter The Exploratorium, San Francisco January 26 & 27, 2007 7pm The Exploratorium and 23five Incorporated presented two nights of performances by local and international sound artists as part of the annual Activating the Medium Festival. This innovative showcase for sonic art celebrated its tenth season, on Friday and Saturday, January 26 & 27, 2007, at 7pm in conjunction with the Exploratorium's new Listen: Making Sense of Sound collection. The Festival's theme centered on field recording, especially when documenting the enigmatic boundary between the natural and the artificial. Featured performances included Bay-Area artist Keith Evans' debut of a multimedia portrait of Marin County's Mount Tamalpais, evocative sonic landscapes from Australia's Camilla Hannan, Sweden's BJ Nilsen (a.k.a. Hazard), whose work explores the effects of natural sounds on perception of time and space, as well as sonic offerings from Olivia Block, Steve Roden, Matt Shoemaker, Tarab, and Aaron Ximm. Friday, January 26 BJ Nilsen Tarab Camilla Hannan Aaron Ximm Saturday, January 27 Steve Roden Olivia Block Matt Shoemaker Keith Evans |
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Chapter Recombinant Media Labs January 28, 2007 8PM Activating The Medium continues for a second installment; this time in conjunction with Recombinant Media Labs. Complete with state-of-the-art surround-sound 5.1 technology and surround-video screens, Recombinant Media Labs foster the creative evolution and development of cutting edge techniques for real time spatial media synthesis; techniques which incorporate and push the formal aesthetic/technical boundaries of surround cinema, immersive audio/visual environments and live musical performance. While the focus upon the manipulated field recording remains, the unique environment of RML will provide another facet to the presentation of sound works. Sunday, January 28 Hazard Scott Arford Joe Colley |
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| Third Chapter San Francisco Art Institute, Lecture Hall 800 Chestnut Street February 16, 2007 8pm 23five concluded it's three part Tenth Annual Activating The Medium festival at the San Francisco Art Institute. As with the previous events, the central thesis to the festival is the art of field recording, especially when documenting the enigmatic boundary between the natural and the artificial. For the final installment, performances will include an acoustic performance by Jeph Jerman (AZ) sounding only objects found in nature, evocative sonic landscapes from Portland's Seth Nihil, and sonic offerings from local sound artist Xopher Davidson and sonic alchemist Jim Haynes. Friday, February 16 Jeph Jerman Seth Nehil Antimatter Jim Haynes |
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| Artist's Information: Antimatter is the work of Xopher Davidson who began his experiments in electronic sound from a basis in painting, film, and installation art, mixed with a long-time interest in electronics. Scott Arford is one of the leading figures of new media arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has produced numerous works for sound and video including multichannel installations, live performances, CD and DVD projects. He was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica. Arford has shown his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Sounding Festivals in Guangzhou, China and Taipei, Taiwan, the LEM festival in Barcelona, Spain, Liquid Architecture in Melbourne, Australia, the Festival de Video/Arte/Eolectronica in Lima, Peru, Sonic Light in Amsterdam, and the Center for Contemporary Arts in Kitakyushu, Japan. Olivia Block is a contemporary composer and sound artist who combines field recordings, scored segments for acoustic instruments, and electronically generated sound. Her recorded work seeks to introduce and ultimately reconcile nature with artifice in the realms of music and sound. Block has released a handful of CDs, performed live in festivals and tours throughout the US, Europe and Japan, and created installations for galleries and museums. Joe Colley explores the multiple conceptual possibilities of sound, through music production, installations, or collaborations with video artists, dancers, and even prisoners. His latest installations attempted to dissimulate the artist by concentrating on the instigation of unstable situations unique to the composition of random sound. Colley first began recording under the moniker Crawl Unit in 1993, and later dropped the name in favor of his given name in 2001. He's released numerous recordings for Auscultare, Antifrost, ERS, Manifold, C.I.P, and his own Povertech Industries. In 2006, Colley won an Award of Distinction for the 2006 Prix Ars Electronica in Digital Music for his album Psychic Stress Soundtracks. Keith Evans is a Bay Area multimedia artist working with sound, film, and video focusing upon the continuums of perception and the ephemeral, often drawing attention to our connection to the earth itself. For the 2006 Activating The Medium festival, Evans debuted an aggregate portrait of Mount Tamalpais through sound, drawn graphics, video, and film. For Australian sound artist Camilla Hannan, sound is a potent psychological tool that alters mood and perception. Through her radical reinterpretations of field recordings of abandoned spaces, factories, and other industrial sites, she collects remnants from those cold environments and transforms them into paradoxically romantic landscapes of textures and drones. Camilla Hannan is supported by the Australian Network for Art and Technology. Describing his work through the pithy phrase, "I rust things," Jim Haynes is a San Francisco based artist who has developed a poetic vocabulary of decay that he has applied to photography, sculpture, installation, and sound. Haynes is one of the Directors for 23five and is the lone occupant at the Helen Scarsdale Agency. He has previously collaborated with Loren Chasse, irr. app. (ext.), and Steven Stapleton. Over the past two decades, Jeph Jerman has actively pursued a pure connection with sound through electronics and improvisation through numerous outlets, including Hands To, The Animist Orchestra, and Blowhole. By the mid '90s, he began giving solo performances using only natural found objects (stones, shells, bones, driftwood, pine cones, etc), as soundmakers, a practice which continues to today. He defines his current pursuits as a growing interest in listening, in what happens when one listens, and aconcomitant disinterest in contextualizing sound. Seth Nehil is a visual, performance, and sound artist. He started to work with sound around 1990 using found objects and instruments, old records, reel-to-reel machines, discarded magnetic tape, and other detritus. Nehil centers his sound constructions upon the topographical contour of an immense plain, what he refers to as "a balanced field." He also worked with N D magazine from 1995-2000 as a writer and artistic contributo, and is currently the editor of F OA RM magazine. He continues collaborations with John Grzinich, Olivia Block and Michael Northam in sound, performance, and organization. BJ Nilsen / Hazard lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Influenced by the early pioneers of tape manipulation, he released his first recordings at the age of 15. In 1996, Nilsen adopted the moniker Hazard, recording for the seminal UK experimental labels Touch and Ash International. His work focuses upon the sound of nature and its effect on humans; and through an electronic abstraction of field recordings, Nilsen manipulates the perception of time and space as experienced through sound. BJ Nilsen is supported by Konstnärsnämnden, Sweden. Steve Roden is a Los-Angeles-based artist whose work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, and sound. In his sound works, Roden abstracts and activates his source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings through humble electronics. The performances are generally quiet and reflective, directing the activity of listening towards the creation of a kind of audio architectural space, or "possible landscape." Seattle's Matt Shoemaker describes his work as an obsessive interest in the artifice of sound. Through his research into natural and electronic phenomena, Shoemaker constructs imagined landscapes of grotesquely exaggerated details that conversely tumble into encrypted drones. The German sound art label Trente Oiseaux has published two of Shoemaker's recordings to international acclaim. Tarab has been working on the fringes of the Melbourne sound world, primarily examining the interplay of field recordings and sounds generated from found objects. His work explores the possibilities of personal chartings and reactions to the urban environment, revelling in the decay and detritus to be found there. He has performed and exhibited at various galleries, festivals and other spaces around Melbourne, and has collaborated with, among others, Ernie Althoff, Rod Cooper, and Tim Catlin. Aaron Ximm is a San-Francisco-based field recordist and sound artist. He is best known for his composition, installation, and performance work as Quiet American, much of which can be found at www.quietamerican.org. From 2001 to 2005, Aaron curated and hosted the Field Effects concert series, which, like his own work, sought to showcase the quiet, fragile, and lovely side of sound art, particularly that working with found sound and field recordings. Along with his wife Bronwyn, Aaron produces the occasionally popular One Minute Vacation podcast at www.oneminutevacation.org. |
