From: On the Wings of an Unusual Exhibition by Alice Pfeiffer, Part of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s exhibition at Barbican’s Curve, (Barbican Gallery, Silk Street, London): …. For his first solo show in Britain, the French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has built an aviary orchestra at the Curve — and the exhibition is designed specially for the unusual space, which wraps around the concert hall at the Barbican Center.

At the show, which runs through May 23 at the Curve …, a basic rock set-up — guitars, bass, cymbals — are set up alongside amplifiers, and seeds and water are sprinkled all over the instruments; instead of musicians, there are 40 zebra finches. As they fly around and pick grain off the instruments, they generate a chance composition. Continue reading

IHME 2010: Susan Philipsz’s, When Day Closes — a sound installation at the Helsinki Central Railway Station :: March 12 - April 11, 2010.

IHME is an annual Contemporary Art Festival in three parts: the IHME Project, a new, commissioned work in a public space; the IHME Days discussion forum; and the IHME Editions.

The IHME Project 2010 is a sound installation in Helsinki designed by Scottish sculptor Susan Philipsz. She creates sculptures using sound, and is interested in the values associated with space and in how sound can define architecture. Among the key elements of Philipsz’s approach are the psychological effects of songs and the way that songs can evoke immediate emotions and memories. Continue reading

In his first solo exhibition in New England, sound artist and electronic musician Stephen Vitiello creates Something Like Fireworks, a new installation at the Davis Museum in Wellesley. The installation, done in collaboration with lighting designer Jeremy Choate, features Vitiello’s field recordings from the Australian outback, the Canadian wilderness, a Virginia marsh, and New York City’s streets. Vitiello’s soundtrack moves between the abstract and the recognizable, attuning us to the subtleties of ambient sound. In this piece, sound is connected with light and color, creating an immersive synaesthetic experience. The lighting has been designed in sympathy with the audio, and the resulting combination surrounds the visitor, altering our spatial perception. The installation is on view through June 6 at the Davis Museum on the campus of Wellesley College. Continue reading

Bent Festival :: at The Tank, 45th Street Theatre in Hell’s Kitchen, 354 W. 45th Street between 8th and 9th., New York, NY :: April 22-24, 2010 ::

The Bent Festival is an annual art and music festival celebrating DIY electronics, hardware hacking, and circuit bending. Each year they invite artists from across the country and around the globe to perform music with their home-made or circuit bent instruments, teach workshops to adults and children alike, create beautiful art installations and to generally come together, face to face, and showcase the state of the art in DIY electronics and circuit bending culture. Continue reading

“With the installation Sonicity, the English artist Stanza adds another significant chapter to his quest for new metaphors to translate the countless interactions produced by data passing through an environment into a sensory plane. Stanza’s aim is to create a data space that is perceived as alive. To achieve this goal he has installed a great number of sensors that are able to detect the smallest changes in variables (such as light, temperature, noise, humidity and the location of certain objects) in the building that houses the gallery. Each of these sensors provides information on the parameters being monitored. These data are then transformed by Sonicity into a sound environment through the use of a wireless network consisting of hundreds of small speakers positioned on the floor and walls of the exhibition space. Continue reading

Tristan Perich: Interval Studies :: February 5 - 14, 2010 ::Mikrogalleriet, Gormsgade 9, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Mikrogalleriet’s solo exhibition for New York-based composer and artist Tristan Perich ends this Sunday in Copenhagen. His new body of work, Interval Studies, is a formal look at musical intervals as a dense continuum of microtonal pitch, expressed en masse as discrete 1-bit frequencies distributed across hundreds of individual speakers. Each speaker, emitting a single, primitive 1-bit tone, becomes a microscopic voice in the total cluster, substituting individual pitch for larger sonic masses. Photographs and Video from the exhibition.

Florian Hecker :: February 12 – March 28, 2010 :: Lecture: March 18, 7:00 pm :: Chisenhale Gallery, 64 Chisenhale Road, London E3 5QZ.

Chisenhale Gallery is pleased to announce a major solo exhibition by Florian Hecker, his first in a UK public institution, comprising a new installation of sound pieces co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London and IKON Gallery, Birmingham. Hecker’s new commission continues his investigation of sound in relation to the body and space, employing idiosyncratic psychoacoustic propositions in order to examine and disrupt spatial perception.

At Chisenhale Gallery Hecker will present a series of four independent, electro-acoustic works that lead the visitor around the gallery space, where each work exposes a fault line in the traditional categorizations of auditory events, auditory objects or streams. Continue reading

Archival Records @ Asia Art Archive, a sound installation by Cédric Maridet, Hong Kong :: exhibition from February 2, 2010 to May 5, 2010 :: Opening: February 11, 2010; 6.30 - 8:00 p.m :: Hollywood Centre 11th Floor, 233 Hollywood Road, Hong Kong.

Archival Records intends to articulate the Archive’s physical and material space through the medium of sound, and establish a new connection between the Archive’s ‘voices’. It focuses on the realm bridging textual readings (of printed material) and their vocal counterparts, through multilingual audio recordings of excerpts from the collection, supplemented by ambient sounds at the Archive. This sound installation not only aims at exploring the idea of the Archive, but also rediscovering the mechanics of sensory experiences and aural cognition through a composed technological mediation of experience. Continue reading

Pascal Broccolichi @ YIRIY :: January 29 - March 6, 2010 :: Galerie Catherine Issert , 2 routes des Serres, 06570 Saint Paul, France.

image: © Pascal Broccolichi, Sans titre, 2010, Serie Aliasing, Courtesy Galerie Catherine Issert

The starting point of a Pascal Broccolichi exhibition is usually the close relationship created between the innumerable listening experiences afforded by the exhibition, and what one commonly calls the ‘background noise’. Therefore one cannot fully access the artist’s installations without remaining long enough inside the soundscapes he has composed. Continue reading

Experiments on the Notation of Shapes by Joao Vasco Paiva :: February 12 - April 4, 2010 :: Opening Reception: February 12; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: Artist Talk: March 24; 7:00 pm :: Unmeasured Music: March 31; 7.30 pm :: I/O (Input/ Output), 31 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong.

Experiments on the Notation of Shapes by Portuguese artist and Hong Kong resident, Joao Vasco Paiva, is a generative multi-channel video installation where Hong Kong cityscapes are used as coordinates for sound synthesis. Computational translation, footage of urban planning and architectural elements are used as a musical score. In this work, a post-apocalyptic aura consumes the concrete form of the metropolis. Two wall-based projections present Hong Kong cityscapes. The city, its emptiness and its structure are kept in “time images” that solicit contemplation. Continue reading