17 Jun 2015
Sonic Pattern Performances
Sonic Pattern and the Textility of Code is a series of events (symposia, performances, exhibitions) curated by Karen Gaskill (who until 2016 lead the Innovation strand of the Crafts Council) and Alex McLean. Through these events we bring people working variously with threads, sound and code together, for discussion and practice focussing on the cultural-technological role of pattern in their work.
As part of the Inhabiting the Hack series, we joined with the AHRC Weaving Codes, Coding Weaves project and Crafts Council to fund a symposium, evening of performances and group residency.
Performances
The evening of performances featured a range of performance exploring the role of code in mediating between live sound and image.
Full Bleed, Paul Wolinski - Paul’s time is mostly taken up with being one quarter of the noisy instrumental band 65daysofstatic. He is here with a rare solo show, actually a debut of a performance built around his recent solo album Full Bleed. Wolinski is taking this album as a jumping-off point for a PhD research project, exploring new forms for composition to aim at, beyond the traditional disciplines of live performance and albums.
Phantasmata, xname - xname is Eleonora Oreggia, a multimedia artist born in Milan and currently based in London. Her live performances are developed through the use of artificial lights and home-made micro-oscillators which generate sound waves. The light, transformed in electric current, passes through the circuit and exits in the shape of a sonic frequency, while the sound, modulated by manipulating the light sources, becomes tactile and synesthetic. The result is an hypnotic spectacle dominated by stroboscopy and industrial and noise-techno frequencies.
Tiling session, Theo Burt - Tiling sessions attempts to tessellate sets of tiles over an area. These spatial algorithms are presented as series of vivid, brutal and euphoric progressions of sound and colour. Humans are attuned to recognize patterns within a narrow time frame – too fast, and individual events appear to merge into one whole or disappear altogether, too slow and we have forgotten them by the time they repeat. The tiling system is designed to shift in speed from slowly placing individual tiles to laying hundreds per second, causing individual events to blur into continua. As one temporal structure becomes imperceptible, we become conscious of new ones, previously too slow for us to recognise. This performance was not filmed.
Tim Shaw and John Bowers - Drawing on Soviet experiments in image/sound translation and esoteric theories of correspondence, Shaw and Bowers have created a number of devices with which they will physically investigate local geological materials from the surrounding Sheffield area. The varying textures, colours and structures of the rocks will be directly translated to sound through the audification of variably illuminated microscopic images and spectral reflections. Live feeds from microscopes and various sound generation techniques will allow this cross-sensory performance to provide an expanded sense of the carboniferous.
Alex Keegan and Alex McLean - Keegan is one third of Sheffield agrobeat band Blood Sport, and McLean is one third of London/Falmouth/Sheffield live coding band Slub, with recent solo release Peak Cut EP on Computer Club. They’re combining their respective research interests in music psychology and algorithmic music to explore the limits of entrainment in audio/visual beat perception.