Open Sound 2014

Exhibition Details

In BogScape, Surrey-based Matt Smith creates a "naturalistic" sound installation based on data gathering systems, such as traffic counters, located in or near Burns Bog. This artwork invites the listener to reconsider the limits of landscape, and the relationship between information and nature.

Read more about this project in the exhibition brochure.

Stephanie Loveless' installation Cricket, Tree, Crow is a quadraphonic sound piece in three movements that investigates the voices of the cricket, the maple tree, and the crow. All of the sonic material in the work is based on her vocal mimicry of the sounds produced by members of these species.

American composer John Cage, who was also an expert mycologist, often quipped that music and mushrooms have nothing to do with one another except for the fact that they often appear next to each other in the dictionary. Paul Walde’s Indeterminancy and Myclophonia combine Cage’s interests in mushrooms and music to put Cage's assertions to the test, while examining Cagean concepts of silence, indeterminacy through graphic notation, spore prints, and live performances.

Artists:
Matt Smith
Stephanie Loveless
Paul Walde

Sound Thinking 2014
Conversations in the Field—Sound, Ecology, and Reciprocity

Musicians and artists have long incorporated “field recordings” of the natural and human world into their compositions and performances. Likewise, researchers like biologists and anthropologists have long relied on sound recordings to preserve knowledge of the natural and human worlds for future generations.

Traditionally, these phonographic practices, musical traditions and forms of sonic research have positioned themselves as uninvolved observation. In doing so, these practices have tended to reproduce systems of power and control through preservation and presentation that has deep roots in the colonial projects of centuries past.

The Sound Thinking 2014 symposium features musicians, sound artists, and researchers who use sound to actively participate in a “conversation” with their areas of interest. The symposium discussions examine this more multidirectional approach as it is situated within a number of new sound practices including: artists whose work is created collaboratively with fauna, flora, fungi and the microbial world; researchers and artists who use sound who engage in acts of translation with non-human sounds; and sound projects that examine trans-species communication.

Participants: David Dunn (keynote), Stephanie Loveless, Matt Smith, Paul Walde, Jennifer Schine, Experimental Music Unit

Conveners: Gabriel Mindel Saloman & Jordan Strom

View the program and participant bios.