Exhibition
13 – 17 Jun 2013

Resonant Bodies

Sound Art Exhibition

Opening

Thursday, 13 June 2013, 20:30

Works by

Alessandro Bosetti
Alpine Flipbooks
Words travel and change while traveling. Relocating words causes a re-locutio that is a new utterance. So yes: let’s move stuff around! Cheese, people, cows, soldiers, holes, shoes, milk, snow, mountains, brothers and sisters, ghosts, mothers, fathers… These little alpine dictionaries – here presented in the form of a video – are the distilled result of a research trip across several linguistic enclaves in 2012.

Christof Migone
Rimmed Record 

 (2008)
Part of Disco Sec, a series of works using the principle of citation on a collection of recordings which is representative of the artist’s listening over the years. Vinyl records physically reduced to the outer rim, packaged in silk-screened recycled record covers.
Record Release (2012-)
The raw material to make records comes in pellets of petroleum product. The pellets were loaded on a scale until it reached 180 grams (the weight of audiophile vinyl). One by one the pellets will be sold, gifted, or placed in a public space. Each transaction will be documented and paired with a photograph of the pellets arranged in the form of a 12″ record. The record will have been released when the last pellet is sold, gifted, or placed.

Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri & Pe Lang
Untitled II (2010)
Sound sculpture powered by three motors, comprised of different sized plexi-glass cylinders closed at one end by a membrane with a nylon thread from each to a winch coated with resin. The rotations of the winch create changes in the tension of the thread, resulting in an orchestration of delicate sounds.

Georgia Rodger
Alternative conductors
Works using the voice as a material and exploring possible alternatives, substitutes and disruptions to the role of the conductor. Skype Choir: Interacting in real time via ‘Skype’, without talking to each other the group communicate through singing and voicing. In these sessions ‘chat’ messages were used to organize the group, and recordings were taken in each room to create a composition with multiple perspectives. Mechanical conducting hand: A dockside performance where a group of singers respond to the signals of a mechanical conducting hand controlled by the movement of waves in a busy harbour. Hand to voice: In two sound studio rooms separated by glass, one singer conducts whilst the other singer makes an interpretation; without them being able to hear each other.

Annette Stahmer
J’aime ma caméra parce que j’aime vivre (2006) video, 1min 56sec.
The camera is an extension of my body, moved by my heartbeat, looking through my closed eyes. Laying on the ground and putting the camera on my chest, the sky starts to move in the rhythm of my heartbeat and breath; MY DEAR (2007) video, 3min 26sec. This short video is made in a time of separation from my partner, in which we were writing us emails every day. I’m reading one of his emails and my answer as two layers, touching each other, like an acoustical palimpsest.

Marcelina Wellmer
Poetry Machine (2012)
The work mixes two poems by William Blake: Little Girl Lost and Little Boy Lost. Particular verses are randomly selected and read out loud by the machine. The artificial voices are synthesized by computer software. The human body influences and interacts with the machine – based on the distance of the listener to the object, the voices are changing, changing in volume, mixing the sentences, getting destroyed.

Elana Mann & Juliana Snapper
The People’s Microphony, SongBook (2012)
When the Occupy Wall Street protests began, Mann & Snapper became fascinated by the phenomena of The People’s Mic. They were interested in the idea of a “listening vocality,” that is, listening to another’s voice by embodying that voice with one’s own. They launched a series exploring the People’s Mic as an instrument of voice, vocal transfer and collectivity. This included a call for scores from musicians, artists, poets and activists. What are the implications of repeating someone else’s words? How does the act of repetition through many bodies change the meaning of a statement by an individual voice? What are the expressive possibilities of this collective vocality?

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Alessandro Bosetti
Christof Migone
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri
Georgia Rodger
Annette Stahmer
Marcelina Wellmer
Elana Mann
Juliana Snapper

Organized by

Zeynep Bulut
Brandon LaBelle
Claudia Peppel
ICI Berlin
Funded by Volkswagen Foundation

In English

First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/exhibition-resonant-bodies/
Rights: © ICI Berlin

Part of the Conference

Resonant Bodies: Landscapes of Acoustic Tension

When a solid body meets its natural resonant frequency, it violently vibrates and breaks into pieces. What happens when the human body meets its resonant frequencies? Mostly a combination of soft tissue and water, the human body is not one solid object. It includes a variety of molecules each of which has a different resonant frequency. Yet the soft tissue and water do not allow these molecules to be completely destroyed. Instead, the human body’s liquidity and elasticity perpetuate the fundamental principle of acoustic resonance: holding a multitude of similar frequencies neither as precisely same nor as perfectly different. For the very same reason perhaps, the human body is involved in a constant reciprocity with its sonic environment. Knowingly or unknowingly, it vibrates with multiple other bodies. Without any necessary physical contact, it matches its resonant frequencies from a distance. Acoustic resonance draws a particular proximity between one’s physical location and his/her phenomenal extension to another.

Consider this proximity acoustic tension, a case of mental distance despite the physical closeness, and equally, a case of mental closeness despite the physical distance. Then picture acoustic resonance as a landscape of acoustic tension, a horizontal spectrum of multiple modalities of sounds, which do coincide with one another but which do not necessarily become one. The very act of hearing holds the acoustic tension. When we hear a sound, we are simultaneously moved to and positioned in a place. What happens if acoustic tension is heightened, if we pay close attention to the intensity and volume of sound? What would be the material effects of such sonic embodiment in everyday life? What kind of subjectivity does it enact? What kind of an epistemology does acoustic tension evoke, mirror and transform? And how do our resonant bodies function in understanding the self’s relation to its external world? The symposium explored these questions by marking three landscapes of acoustic tension: sensory ecologies of hearing, materiality of voice, language and speech, and affective states of sound.

The conference Resonant Bodies – Landscapes of Acoustic Tension also included an exhibition of works investigating the territories of sound, music, environment and language, and their intersections.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Jason Sjanyek
Benjamin Piekut
Veit Erdmann
Doris Kolesch
Mara Mills
Helga de la Motte-Haber
Annette E. Stahmer
Allen S. Weiss
Dieter Schnebel
Maulwerker Ensemble

Organized by

Zeynep Bulut
Claudia Peppel
Brandon LaBelle
With support from the VolkswagenStiftung
Cite as: ‘Resonant Bodies: Sound Art Exhibition’, exhibition presented at the conference Resonant Bodies: Landscapes of Acoustic Tension, ICI Berlin, 13–17 June 2013 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e130613-1>