Ephemeral Sustainability. A conference on Sound Art

A conference in Norway, on – what else? – sound art, is the first big, public event of the new, the second, two year round of RESONANCE activities. Organized by Lydgalleriet in Bergen (one of RESONANCE’s current co-organizers), the event goes by the name of Ephemeral Sustainability. As the buzz words that make up its title indicate, the Bergen conference invites and intends to thoroughly reflect on the presentation and documentation, the collecting and archiving of the fast growing corpus of sound based contemporary art.

“Is it only through documentation and human witness reports that this sound based, and hence fundamentally ephemeral, form of contemporary art can be appreciated in hindsight, or are there other strategies to strengthen its bonds to the past?,” the organizers ask. “Is this field of art in its nature and ideology impossible to transport, collect and re-act, or does it have a potential in more traditional art collections and museums? Do we need a new practice and new venues to collect and present it, or can this be done within the frames of already existing structures and organisations?”

On the first three days of November, a large group of ‘conveyers, artists, curators and thinkers within the field’ will gather in Bergen to look at these questions from many different angles. Together the contributors make for an impressive list indeed, too long to be clearly readable on the image above, which is a reduced version of the announcement of the Ephemeral Sustainability event in the current issue of The Wire.

Among the invited speakers we find David Toop, Edwin van der Heide, Gruenrekorder, Christina Kubisch, Origami Boe, Carsten Seifarth, Seth Cluett, Helga de la Motte-Haber, RESONANCE artists Aernoudt Jacobs, Signe Lidén, Maia Urstad, and many, many more.

The conference program for Thursday November 1st includes a performance/lecture by Seth Kim-Cohen, the author of In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art This contribution to ‘Ephemeral Sustainability’ bears the title “Knifey Through My Buttery Silence” and if the following short video of a recent performance of Seth’s at the Diapason Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, is anything to go by, we might be in for a fun surprise.

It will not be the only one…

Ephemeral Sustainability. A conference about presenting, documenting, collecting and archiving sound based contemporary art. Bergen, Norway. November 1st-3rd, 2012. Click here for the detailed program.

“Meanwhile, in Shanghai … (berlin)”

Following installments in Kortrijk, Riga, Maastricht and Bergen, Resonance‘s German partner Singuhr is currently hosting the fifth installment of Norwegian artist Maia Urstad‘s “Meanwhile, in Shanghai …”

In the Berlin version of her work, Maia Urstad continues her gathering of sonic details about time and place from local radio stations around the world, which are woven together in a subtle polyphony of voices, tones and white noise, transmitted via local FM-frequencies by a spiraling, labyrinthine collection of some 40 portable radio’s…

“Meanwhile, in Shanghai … (berlin)” opened on Wednesday April 25th in Kunsthaus MEINBLAU, Pfefferberg, Haus 5, Christinenstraße 18/19, Berlin. It can be experienced there each week from Wednesday till Sunday between 14h and 18h, until May 27th.

Sounding City: Public Sound

The final presentation of the first two year-phase of Resonance, before continuing for (at least) another two years with a new series of commissioned works of sound art by European artists, will be part of this year’s Sounding City, the sound-art-music program of the yearly Festival van Vlaanderen (Festival of Flanders) in Kortijk, Belgium.

Alongside works by Chris Watson, Jana Winderen, Christoph de Boeck & Patricia Portela, Leif Brush, Guy de Bièvre & Sofie von Bustorff, Erik Nerinckx, Alvin Curran, Dawn Scarfe, David Helbich and Bent Sørensen, the 2012 edition of Sounding City will present installations by Stefan Rummel (the Kortrijk installment of his Resonance work Articulated Chambers) and Evelina Deicmane.

This year’s edition of the Festival of Flanders’ Sounding City focuses on the relationship between sound and the public space. It opens on Saturday April 28th, with a guided tour, starting at 16h from the Budascoop, Kapucijnenstraat 10.

The Sounding City sound art works can be experienced in Kortrijk on Saturdays and Sundays, until Sunday May 13th.
For details, see the Sounding City web pages.

‘Extended Drops’ in Liège

While the first two year-phase of the European Renonance project is drawing to an end (the ‘final’ – with works by Evelina Deicmane & Stefan Rummel – will be part of this year’s Sound City at the Flanders Festival in Kortrijk, Belgium), this April month provides a chance to once again experience Pierre Berthet‘s Resonance installation Extended Drops.

Pierre’s piece will be on show at the Archéoforum de Liège, Belgium, from March 30th until April 29th, every day (except on Mondays), from 10h – 17h.
The opening is on Thursday March 29th, starting at 18h.

You are all invited, cordially …

‘But what about the children?’

Maia Urstad and Paul Devens at the Lydgalleriet in Bergen

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Friday February 24th saw the opening of a second Norwegian Resonance event, staged by the Lydgalleriet in Bergen, one of the network’s associated partners.

An indoor version of Stefan Rummel’s Resonance piece Articulated Chambers, and Extended Speakers, one of the components of Pierre Berthet’s Extended Drops piece, were part of the sound art exhibition Extensions (curated for the Lydgalleriet by Carsten Seiffarth) that could be seen and heard in Bergen last summer.

The coming five weeks the Norwegian sound art gallery will showcase the Bergen installments of Resonance works by Maia Urstad (“Meanwhile, in Shanghai…”) and Paul Devens (City Chase), in two rooms of the gallery’s temporary premises, at Skostredet 16.

“There were a lot of interested people, a good response and a very nice atmosphere,” Maia Urstad reported about the opening of the exhibition in Bergen, which continued to attract quite decent numbers of visitors during its first days.

A lot of people.
Maybe almost all of the inquisitive art loving people of Bergen.
But what about their children?

There was at least one visitor who wondered why they weren’t at Friday’s opening. In his ‘Wyatting’-blog entry on the event, Sven Sivertsen, who shot the pictures of the opening of Lydgalleriet’s Resonance exhibition, observes that there are hardly ever any children around when he visits Bergen’s Lydgalleriet. Even though, Sven writes, “much of what can be seen and heard there seems to be perfect for inquisitive people of all ages”. I think he raises an interesting point. Children – and maybe even especially children – will surely love to watch the little sounding cars move along the tracks of Paul’s City Chase, and wander through Maia’s suspended forest of old, whispering transistor radio’s… So let them see and let them listen. This is the music of the future, it dearly needs our childrens’ ears.

Paul Devens’ and Maia Urstad’s works can be experienced in Bergen every day, from 12h till 18h, until April 1st. If you are in or near Bergen, be sure not to miss them. And do bring your children along…

Paul Devens and Maia Urstad at the Lydgalleriet, Skostredet 16, Bergen, Norway. February 24th-April 1st, 2012. Open daily from 12h-18h.