Listening Seminar 4 - Sound Works by Women Artists

The MA in Aural and Visual Cultures Presents:

Listening Seminar 4 - Sound Works by Women Artists 

Curated by Diana Policarpo

This seminar will present new audio pieces by a selection of women artists. It features the work of Adrianna Palazzolo, Cara Tolmie, Diana Policarpo, Hannah Catherine Jones, Jenna Bliss, Jenna Collins, Marina Elderton and Nicola Woodham. 

Each of these artists investigate different aspects of sound, in relation to space, atmosphere and the presence or absence of the image. Through a variety of approaches, these works explore notions of multi-vocality, using rhythm, time, formal and informal speech, narrative and noise, both as material and inspiration.

The works have been compiled back-to-back on a playlist, to prioritise collective listening, over discussion. I hope this event, which is married to space and corporeality, will allow us to question the various ways we experience the sonic world. 

Diana Policarpo, 

March, 2014

Adrianna Palazzolo (b. Toronto, Canada) lives and works in London. She graduated with an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths in 2012. Recent group exhibitions include: Emergency6, Aspex, Portsmouth, UK; Adrianna Palazzolo and Ella McCartney, Peter Von Kant, London; .gif, online exhibition, MMOCA (Main Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art); Perspectivism, Slakthusateljéernas, Stockholm, Sweden and Pavilion, Open File, Grand Union Gallery, Birmingham, UK.

Adrianna's practice is largely based on experimentation, focusing in video and installation works. The soundtrack of each of her works are sculptural, where the sound takes precedence over the image in the editing process. This mode of working can be seen as a way to question the patriarchal relationship of sound and image in film making ideologies in direct comparison to feminist politics.

Cara Tolmie is an artist, born in Glasgow currently based in London, who works with moving image, performance, sound and installation. She made two new projects in 2013; Pley, commissioned and produced by Picture This and exhibited at Spike Island, Bristol and Artissima, Turin; and Otiumfold commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London and Tower Hamlets. Both used the format of the ‘exercise’ to scrutinise interpersonal relations between groups of performers each navigating their own investigations into play, improvisation and language. She is currently working on new collaborative performances with Patrick Staff for Open File at Outpost, Norwich and Paul Abbott for the Counterflows festival in Glasgow this April. 

Diana Policarpo (b. Lisbon, Portugal), is an artist based in London and recently completed an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College. Her work can mainly be described as a spatial practice: various media such as drawing, performance, sound, writing and spoken word open up different ways for her to delineate and activate objects and space.

She composes and improvises time-based components for polyrhythmic sound sculptures and performative installations, which deal with the performative role that language and power play, both reflecting on reality and on the trandisciplinary field of cultural production. She is currently working on projects with the female collective Cabiria and her first solo show in Germany will be at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in July 2014.

Jenna Bliss recently completed an MA at Slade School of Fine Art in London and is now based in New York, NY.  Her current project revolves around the radical political action and drug-free detox at Lincoln Hospital Detoxification Clinic in the South Bronx during the 1970s. 

The audio piece for this listening seminar explores the historical moment and location whilst attempting to utilize the detoxifying capabilities of deep breathing and body heat. The culmination of this project will be a video and series of performances. 

Jenna Collins works across sound, video and text to make visible the ways and means by which the body is continuous with the environment, seeking to reveal the pressures, feedback and aspirations that clutter moments of enunciation. www.jennacollins.com

Hannah Catherine Jones (b. Doncaster 1987) investigates the documentation modes of performance art. Using her (live) operatic voice, she often gives (recorded) vocal presence to documenting devices in the moment of performance. Jones’ investigations into language, specifically her punning titles, have recently enriched her practice. Jones has a BFA and MA from Oxford University, an MFA from Goldsmiths and begins a practice-based PhD at Goldsmiths in September 2014.

Marina Elderton is a self-taught musician based in London. She plays guitar and sings in the two-piece KULL (www.kullmusic.com), and improvises live experimental soundscapes alongside Diana Policarpo and Hannah Jones as part of the female collective Cabiria. 

Drawn to the immersive nature of sound as a mind altering tool, she experiments with raw musical elements, embracing atmospheric minimalism and ritualised cycles to access purer conscious states. She will be playing a song from a new independent piano project C'est Celestial. She is currently studying an MA in Composing for Film at the National Film and Television School. 

Nicola Woodham is a sound, performance and video artist. She creates fictions with the voice as a means to explore forms of surveillance and the notion of the female voice as ‘monstrous’. She recently took part in the Totemic Festival, Freud Museum and FLOWS, Vibe Gallery, London. She is part of a collaborative project Zeros + Ones with artists from Stockholm and London. She also contributes regularly to Electric Sheep film magazine.  www.nicolawoodham.com

The Listening Seminar will take place from 8-10pm on March 25^th  at Goldsmiths College in NAB LG01 and it is located in the New Academic building  which is to be found at the rear of the College, behind the quad. 

(http://www.gold.ac.uk/newacademicbuilding/)

TRANSMÈTIC — Call for Submissions

Call out for submissions.

Transmètic

Submissions and proposals in any media or mode sought for a night of schizo-disciplinary interchange.

Submissions (under one or several names) could include but are not limited to:
- music/DJ sets/bands
- video
- performance
- happenings
- installations
- 2-D or 3-D
- &c./misc/other

Transmètic will take form over an evening and night in early summer modulating between the abstract/(in)aesthetic through the rhythmic/4-to-the-floor and back again.


Please send a short bio and proposal, approximate dimensions/running time with images and/or links to sound/video. Works should function in a pub/venue environment.

Send to: hello.transmetic@gmail.com
by Sunday 23rd March

The Shining and The Eerie

The MA in Aural and Visual Cultures Presents:

The Shining and The Eerie

Professor Roger Luckhurst, author of the recent BFI Film Classics book on The Shining, in conversation with Justin Barton and Mark Fisher

February 11th

New Academic Building LG02 7-9 pm

Free and open to all. No booking required

Cyberlove - Black Mirror S2 EP01

Big thanks to Lisa for flagging this up.

I won't reveal the contents but the episode has big themes about our relationships with technology, cyber simulacra and avatars. Of course, the voice is key...

Watch links here
http://watchseries.lt/episode/black_mirror_s2_e1.html

ASMR - Now used in Veblen Goods Advertisements

I was always fascinated at the luxury/tertiary service bias of ASMR whisperer role plays. It seemed that a majority of ASMR role plays revolved around consumerism. Now Lanvin have made an advert that is basically an ASMR video sans performer webcam.

How Siri found its voice

Listening Seminar 3

Details

Nicola Woodham - Data Chant (2013) stereo sound, 5 mins.

There is an endless chatter, a voice just behind your shoulder, it moves round with you, the imagined monitor. An insurer advises you about home security, she is caught in a glitch, moving around inside your brain. But what is insured? Fragments echo and loop, folding back onto themselves. In between the layers, a sonic figment looms. This piece is a development of ideas explored in a live audio play ‘The Gift Experience’ which ran in 2013 at Weekend OtherWorld at Goldsmiths College and Block Party, Enclave Gallery, London.

Nicola Woodham is a sound, performance and video artist. She creates fictions with the voice: disembodied, distorted or as echo, as a means to critique forms of surveillance. She recently took part in the Totemic Festival, Freud Museum and FLOWS, Vibe Gallery, London. She is part of a collaborative project ‘Zeros and Ones’ with artists from Stockholm and London and also writes for Electric Sheep Magazine.

Robin Bale

The piece begins with the sound of a poured libation splashing on pavement and an invocation to Hermes, perhaps other chthonic gods and psychopomps. It then traces an echo-haunted path through a variety of aural spaces, the dimensions of which morph in response to the mumbling, singing and chanting voices that inhabit them, accompanied by the unending rumble of traffic. The city is reconfigured as a reverberant abode of ghosts – although not those ghosts fondly evoked by companionable antiquarians and their associates in the heritage industry.

http://www.robinbale.blogspot.com

Robin Bale is a London-based poet/performer and sound artist. He makes improvised performances utilising verbal and non-verbal vocalisation and basic musical equipment. He also makes recordings that experiment with aural space and mixing aesthetics. Robin is currently a Fine Art practice-as-research PhD candidate at Middlesex University. The working title of his project is “Making (a) Public: the performer and the polity”.

Catherine Linton - She's a bird/ She's a bitch/ She's a Fox

I / Not she has a story to tell. I / Not she makes, She / Not I tells it. It is a female tale, with many I’s and she’s, reflecting on the self, mixing muses from the past and present, forming visual and voiced palimpsests, as light as wings, with dark hirsute tails.

I / Not she lives, thinks, breaths, dies by the gaze and framing, makes up rules, her own set of controls and constraints to play with, manipulate, the stuck single states it tries to impose. She might appear to submit, be dominated, then moves, is multiple, transforms to outwit. Her soft yet firm voice subdues it, has done since I / Not she, and many she before her, took up the pen to fend room of their own.

Catherine Linton is a MAMA of English Literature and Fine Art.

Justin Hopper: Extracts from Public Record: Estuary

Public Record: Estuary is an album-length cycle of audio poems designed to be heard on a walk around the ancient Essex fishing village of Leigh-on-Sea. The poems are inspired by reports of minor sea disasters in the late-19th century Thames estuary, off the coast of Leigh. With texts sampled from period newspaper reports, travel- and nature-writing, folk songs and other primary sources, Public Record: Estuary haunts the coastal landscape with trace memories of its own in-between nature – neither river nor sea, ancient nor modern, city nor countryside.

Justin Hopper is a writer and artist from Pittsburgh, USA, living and working in London. His work explores the relationships between landscape, memory and myth in both nonfiction writing and audio artworks, which combine ideas from documentary poetry, folk song, journalism and ambient poetics.