Wednesday 9 September 2015, 8pm
To coincide with the start of the CONTROL installation in the Project Space here's a fantastic line-up of artists pushing at the edges of current electronic music practice. As well as performing, all the artists will be in conversation with Christopher Haworth, and the CONTROL installation will be open to view.
CONTROL is an interactive installation exploring the relationships between artists, music, and musical artefacts. It attempts to call attention to the role that the musical artefacts play in developing musical ideas. A single dial is connected to a single speaker, but the relationship between the two is not fixed; it flits between a range of possibilities composed by a diverse range of artists. Visitors are invited to use the dial to make sounds, and to thus explore the links between their actions, the limits of the dial, and the musical ideas embedded in the software by the artists.
Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield (UK). After studying experimental film and video art at Sheffield City Polytechnic he reverted to earlier interests in computational technology, music and synthetic sound. In 1998 he began a series of critically acclaimed record releases on labels including Mille Plateaux, Line, Editions Mego and Raster Noton. Fell is widely known for exploring the relationships between popular music styles, such as electronica and club musics, and typically academic approaches to computer-based composition with a particular emphasis on algorithmic and mathematical systems. Since his early electronic music pieces Fell’s practice has expanded to include moving image works, sound and light installation, choregoraphy, critical texts, curatorial projects and educational activites. He has worked with a number of artists including Yasunao Tone, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Okkyung Lee, Luke Fowler, Peter Gidal, John Chowning, Ernest Edmonds, Peter Rehberg, Oren Ambarchi and Carl Michael Von Hausswolff.
The diversity and importance of Fell's practice is reflected in the range and scale of international institutions that have presented his work which include - Hong Kong National Film archive, The Baltic (Gateshead), Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Laboral (XIxon), The Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Royal Festival Hall (London), The Serpentine (London), The Australian Centre For Moving Image, Artists Space (NYC), Issue Project Room (NYC), Corcoran (DC), Curtis R.Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (NY), Lampo/Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Chicago), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), Hanger Biccoca (Milan) and others. Fell's work is in the collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna) and has as been recognised by ARS Electronica (Linz).
Ewa Justka is a Polish electronic noise artist, self taught instruments builder and electronics teacher based in London. She currently studies MA Computational Arts at Goldsmiths College.
Justka’s main field of research is based on exploration of materiality of objects, vibrant, ontological systems (human bodies, plants’ bodies, electronic circuits: varied range of micro and macro environments and relations between them) and an investigation of modes of quasi-direct perception through noise performance actions, interactive installation, DIY electronics, hardware hacking, plant-molesting, breaking, deconstructing and collaborating. In her artistic work Ewa attempts to explore the concept of materiality of the hidden.
Alberto de Campo is a musician and composer who creates experimental art with electronic and computational means. He plays solo, in ensembles like Trio Brachiale, powerbooks_unplugged, Republic111, and plays and works with artists like Mario de Vega, Marcus Schmickler, Hannes Hoelzl, Julian Rohrhuber and others. His performance setups combine code and networks as interfaces, self-written software, various interfaces and choice analog devices. Recently he has been developing the concept of metacontrol, with the aim of losing control to gain influence.
As professor for generative art / computational art at the University of the Arts Berlin, he also creates complex installations and performance concepts inspired by second-order cybernetics and radical constructivism, often with groups of collaborators such as the Society for Nontrivial Pursuits.
Christopher Haworth is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Music and Digitisation Research Group based at University of Oxford. His work concerns genre and genealogy in digital music and sound art, with current work investigating the use of online ethnography methods to analyse genre communities such as microsound that are in part 'digitally native'. Other interests include technology, aesthetics and authorship in digital music. In a recent article for Computer Music Journal he examined the ways in which particular tools and techniques are made to carry a nuanced politics of what electronic music 'is' in 'Extreme' Computer Music and Noise genres. Christopher completed his Ph.D. at Queen’s University Belfast in the Sonic Arts Research Centre in 2012.
