MA Sound Art at LCC

“The character of artistic identity is always open, altering and evolving, consistent in its non-stop changing and progressing, stable towards its non-stability, renegotiated and seen from different, even contrasting, perceptions. Through research, practice and self-reflection the artist does not create a fixed and non-changeable identity but a gateway leading into the infinite world of knowledge and fantasy.”

Yiorgis

I got my hands dirty!

A.N.Y.

‘I don’t care!’ Her noise.

Canteen cafe toilet. Her noise.

Gender. Archive warning.

Gardner gesturing inviting completion.

Lectures wandering. Minds wondering.

Arguments flowering discords of beauty.

Crunch of pastry. Her noise archive.

Mingling cultures, quiet ones give respite.

Library; worlds in shelves

all not felt nor heard but their existence

their mere possibility, exciting.

Her noise, sound piece

multichannelvideoidentityfuturisthiphophypnosis13thfloorarchivesociosonicfeedbackHeideggerpornpieceA(*&C#’!

Belonging yes

discourse yes

sound artist?

Sunil Chandy

On this weekend at the Barbican Centre is Playing the Heygate, an audiovisual installation by LCC MA Students Sophie Mallett and Robbie Judkins. Made specifically for Nick Muhly’s A Scream and an Outrage, it explores new modes of orchestration and documentary. More info below or on the Barbican website 

Playing the Heygate 

Sophie Mallett & Robbie Judkins

Audiovisual Installation: Two channel sound (20 minute loop) + HD Video (11 minute loop)

“Something that’s hideous has become beautiful;

and something that’s beautiful has become hideous.” 

- Nico Muhly

In 1974 the Heygate Estate offered a utopian possibility for urban living. Nearly forty years after its construction, it’s been both voluntarily and forcibly abandoned. For the past ten years the Heygate has been moving towards demolition as part of the Elephant and Castle Regeneration Scheme. As it stands now, it has no functional purpose but to await its own regeneration. 

While the estate is no longer allowed to function as social housing, over the past few years it’s become the site of very different engagements with the space: an attempt to make the most of the past before it’s destroyed for the possibility of the future.

Playing the Heygate is an audiovisual installation created for Nico Muhly’s A Scream and an Outrage. Artists Sophie Mallett and Robbie Judkins make the estate both the instrument and the player: using contact microphones to turn surfaces, objects and spaces in to an urban orchestra. The installation not only documents these performances, but combines them with sound recordings and original footage from the estate in its current state of abandon. 

Playing the Heygate seeks to explore how unique interpretations of scoring and instrumentation can offer insights in to familiar landscapes.

Cinematography by Beth Atkinson

Thanks to 

Jez Riley French

LCC

Barbican Centre

If you’d like to find out more about the Heygate Estate and the regeneration scheme:

http://betterelephant.org/

http://www.southwark.gov.uk

Robbie Judkins and Sophie Mallett are both completing their Masters in Sound Art at London College of Communication. Sophie is a audiovisual producer with a background in radio and improvisatory music. Her work explores emerging forms of documentary, the politics of space and participatory media. Robbie is an audio-visual artist and musician performing under the name of Left Hand Cuts off the Right. His work aims to create an immersive environment utilising DIY ethics and sources.

“Reflections on loudness” is a text by Yiorgis Sakellariou, published on The Field Reporter

http://thefieldreporter.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/239/ 

…”A concert or a recording doesn’t necessarily have to be a mere documentation, representation or statement but an experience which will be unable to be lived through in no way other than engaging with sound-as-such, frequently including its extreme physical side and diverse volume range.”…

Sound art conjures up a strange place. Nestled between disciplines, disagreed about, incarnating itself in a bewildering variety of forms, it feels like a voice crying in the wilderness.

Quoted from the gospels this is how John the Baptist chooses to identify himself. “The voice of one, crying in the wilderness.” The status of being a prophet, from a lineage of priests is all subsumed into the identity of being a sonic entity where probably none shall hear and the wind will carry this entity where it wills.

This for me is the fear and excitement of sound art. Maybe the call is to be in the desert or maybe it is to come in from the desert to be praised, ignored or rejected. Or maybe even more strangely it might be a voice to lead a chorus that transforms the wilderness.

Sunil Chandy

http://sacredbluesounds.wordpress.com/

Small documentation excerpts from my audiovisual installation piece as shown at “…on the boundary of sound…” at LCC in Nov 2012.

——————————-

Is there such a thing as Sound Art? And if so, what is it?

There seems to be no absolute consensus as to what might constitute Sound Art, the only generally recognised criteria being, perhaps, the presence of some sonic element (whether audible or inaudible, material or conceptual) and artistic intention. But deciding the point at which the sonic and the intention begin or end seems to be up to each individual person – ultimately there are as many definitions of the category as there are people questioned.

Sound Art? Is an investigation of the blurriness of artistic categories, an attempt to obliquely arrive at a definition and perhaps show the usefulness, or otherwise, of such a definition.

The work’s aim is to throw up questions and provide start-points for debate, more than provide answers.

Many thanks go to the wonderful individuals who kindly took part in the interviews which made up the material of these piece. There would be no piece without them:

Alan Licht
Alexander Williams
Anna Raimondo
Clive Graham
David Toop
Giorgio Sadotti
Iris Garrelfs
Mark Jackson
Matthew Lee Knowles
Mike Harding
Pauline Oliveros

Greta Pistaceci

www.gretapistaceci.com

The Sound Archive of Experimental Music and Sound Art, SONM, has been created as a public access resource -both physical and virtual online- with Francisco Lopez’s entire collection of experimental music and sound art, gathered over the past thirty years of direct exchange with thousands of sound artists worldwide.

http://sonmarchive.es/

Noise that’s been kissed by Jazz……

callow

An interesting opinion about this thorny issue at Abstract Critical.

callow