UNFORESEEN

King’s Stables Road, Hidden Door Festival 2015

Sunday 24 May – Wednesday 27 May @ 1 – 2pm daily

An adventurous, multidiscipline collaboration between musicians, artists, academics and audience. Running concurrently for 4 days during Hidden Door Festival 2015, Edinburgh.

The content and structure of each day will be informed and shaped by the outcomes of the preceding day. Barriers between performer, medium and audience will be challenged, as will the nature and context of collaboration, inspiration, creative methods and time constraints.

The outcome, a complete unknown, will be documented and discussed further to the series of events creating an ongoing process, exploring key themes in the evolution of art and culture at the intersection of sound and sight.

Check out the Facebook event for ongoing updates and info!

 

FACILITATOR

MARTIN PARKER

martin parker - chair SMALL

Martin is a senior lecturer and program director of the MSc Sound Design program at the University of Edinburgh, artistic director of the Dialogues Experimental Music Festival, and director of outreach at Edinburgh College of Art. He has a PhD in composition and recently used his four month curatorial residency at Talbot Rice Gallery to exhibit ‘gap in the air’ which aimed to bring technicians and curators together with artists and audiences in order to examine the challenge of sound in gallery spaces.

 

RESIDENT ARTISTS

Sunday 24th – Wednesday 27th May

HANS K CLAUSEN

74_i-am-the-artist--limited-po

‘I am interested in the ‘thingness’ of things; in the visual vocabularies, narrative qualities and emotive associations of ubiquitous objects.

The interaction between people and material culture has become a recurring area of enquiry in my artistic practice; how we look, how we read visual language, how we make sense of our material world and how the stuff that surrounds us becomes us. I am intrigued by the provenance, meaning and power of objects and by the forces of materialism, marketing, consumerism and obsolescence. Through the language of ‘stuff’ my work attempts to examine the relationship between artist, object and viewer and to challenge the conventional notions of authorship and consumption, thinking, making and creating.’

 

CHARLIE KNOX

tumblr_inline_n8i3x2bGpA1r0eppr

Charlie is a sonic artist based in Glasgow working on the fringes of house, techno and more abstract sounds. He creates emergent interactive systems that drive DIY modular synths and DSP processing to create immersive audio-visual installations and performances.

He is interested in creating new contexts for experimental sound practices. Through the creation of immersive and interactive audio-visual environments he explores synaesthetic experience, interactive systems and creative multichannel audio diffusion.

 

MARTIN SWEENY

10502070_670004349749313_7357976243661527385_n

By day Martin create user experiences for print and screen. By night he creates interactive audio visual environments/installations that are reactive to sound, incorporating projection mapping.

Martin is currently completing the Design & Digital Arts degree at Napier University. Focusing on the ever developing relationship of design and digital technologies, Design & Digital Arts provides an opportunity to develop skills specifically for the creative industries – building environments both physical and digital, producing design visualisations, challenging preconceptions in developing interfaces and digital environments, creating digitally enhanced propositions for a variety of designed scenarios.

 

G U E S T A R T I S T S

Monday 25th May

JLWILLIAMS

JL WILLIAMS

JL Williams’ first collection, Condition of Fire (Shearsman, 2011), was inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a journey to the Aeolian Islands. Her second collection, Locust and Marlin (Shearsman, 2014), explores the idea of home and where we come from, and was nominated for the 2014 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award.

She has been published in journals including Magma, Stand, Poetry Wales, Edinburgh Review and Fulcrum. Her poetry has been translated into Dutch, Spanish, Polish, French and Greek. She plays in the band Opul and is Programme Manager at the Scottish Poetry Library.

 

CATHERINE STREET

catherine street

Catherine Street’s work consists of layers of experience: she often incorporates her own body into an installation setting that has video, audio, drawn, sculptural, and written elements. The atmosphere is usually unnerving, tense, sensual, comical. Intense breathing sounds give the viewer the feeling of moving inside the lungs, the body’s cavities – whilst her writings often describe a desire to break apart the flesh and return it to its constituent elements.

Street focuses on her body because of its multitudinous natures; on the one hand simply matter subject to physical laws, and on the other a potentially limitless field of meanings: social, political, sexual, spiritual. She pays particular attention to themes of transformation and to the relationship between matter, thought, emotion and sensation.

Catherine Street is an artist based in Edinburgh. She has made work for performance festivals and exhibitions around the world including in Prague, Bergen, Berlin, Wellington and New York. She collaborates widely, maintaining long-standing collaborations with poet JL Williams and with composer and performance-maker Greg Sinclair. Her most recent project is a solo show at the Reid Gallery Glasgow School of Art – on until 30th April. She has contributed to a number of publications, most recently the Modern Edinburgh Film School anthology Queer Information.

 

Tuesday 26th May

JESSICA RAMM

jess ramm

Jessica Ramm gained her BA Hons from Duncan of Jordanstone in 2009 and her MFA Contemporary Practice from Edinburgh College of Art in 2014. Her research consists of a series of ongoing, sometimes haphazard experiments that examine contemporary civilisations ordering of nature through technology and science. Using her body to test the mobility and resistance of matter, she constructs performance videos and sculptural installations that manipulate the environment. Recent exhibitions include: Earth Rise, Tramway, Glasgow (2015); Remote Possibilities, Timespan, Helmsdale (2014); Convocation, Glasgow School of Art (2013); Leave the Capitol, The Fleming Collection, London (2013).

 

Wednesday 27th May

ANN MARIE SHILITO

anne marie

Ann Marie is a contemporary designer jeweller & maker, teacher, lecturer, research fellow, founder & CEO of Anarkik3D Ltd, software developers of award winning haptic 3D modelling software, Anarkik 3D Design. (‘Best Consumer Software’ at the 3DPrintShow Global Awards in 2013 and finalists again in 2014).

Author of ‘Digital Crafts: Industrial Technologies for Applied Artists & Designer Makers’ and a Fellow of the RSA, Ann Marie is passionate about enabling non-CAD using designer markers, 3D artists, applied artists, creative amateurs, hobbyists, & young-uns to engage with 3D digital making using technologies such as 3D printing.

Ann Marie’s company, Anarkik3D, develops haptic (virtual 3D touch) enabled software. Haptics is an emerging technology that enables people to feel digital information.

As part of UK Innovate grant-funded collaborative research project, Ann Marie is currently working on defining the requirements for vivid learning experiences that link directly to the national curriculum, with a particular focus on ‘hard to teach’ topics.

Seeing Sounds – with Deaf Joe

An ethereal soundscape fills the space, framing the meditative installation of colour and light, created by Emma Macleod, for our first venture with the Mash House. It was, we admit, accidental (and maybe slightly panicked!) happenstance that led us to discover Joe Harney, aka Deaf Joe, and his experimental dreamlike work. Yet the work of Deaf Joe and Emma Macleod could not have complemented each other more – almost as if planned….

With the release of his second album earlier this year accompanied by a publication in collaboration with artist Paul Hallahan, Deaf Joe is no stranger to exploring new mediums of art, expression and space. We chat about his work and the unexpected collaboration at The Mash House as part of Vault 23 – now PARADIGM, August 30 2014.

_MG_2283__Vault 23, image by Chris Scott

Your music has a reflective quality about it, the layers of sounds seemingly create narratives and uncover memories. Would you agree? How do present space (/environment) and past events influence your work?

Yes I’d agree. I’m interested in incorporating found sounds, field recordings into studio recordings of songs in such a way that they sit right up at the front of the mix and feature alongside acoustic intruments. The last batch of songs I finished was me playing with that idea of past and present happening at the same time.. the way you can be on a train staring out the window and be completely reliving something from your past in your head. And they’re both happening at the same time. or you open an old book and the feel of the pages can trigger an odd, random childhood memory. You’re never really in control of your memory, of what it might throw up at you. Environmental triggers are everywhere.

It is fair to say then your music has a prominent visual element to it. How do you feel a different environment- such as a nightclub – affects or changes the tone of your work?

A nightclub would be an odd place for some of my music! I think of a lot of the stuff I do being, as you said, reflective. which means it’s a bit drifty and spaced out and probably works best for people listening on their own, in their own head space. I’ve always thought of it like that anyway. I find it doubly weird cos a lot of the music I’d listen to would be fairly full-on (I’m a huge lightning bolt fan for instance). I’ve just never been able to make music for a fucking dance floor. Have plenty of ambient odds and ends knocking about that would serve an old school chill out room well though..

True! I’m thinking a slightly run down, smokey, wine bar possibly in France!? So how did you feel when Project Space asked to pair your piece ‘Angles of Light’ with a visual installation in a club night setting? What were your impressions of the space on the night?

I was delighted.. as you said about ‘prominent visual element’, I’ve always got fairly strong narrative or visual elements in my head when I’m putting music together. Some people play off groove, I need an image or a place to be making it for. I’m always thinking stories or pictures. So to put the music with Emma Macleod’s really strong installation was great, it’s as if I’d tailored it for the room! That particular piece of music was an ambient homage to a piece of music by Finnish composer Rautavaara, his 7th symphony third movement. It’s dubbed The Angel of Light so I flipped the title to ‘Angles’. Check Rautavaara out by the way, that’s not me being a pretentious obscure-o muso-twat, its harmony twists and turns in very beautiful unpredictable ways, there’s something of the natural world about it. Sounds like it has inspired the composers of many a soundtrack for BBC and David Attenborough documentaries.

for each and every
film still, For Each and Every One of Them, Deaf Joe

Wow that’s incredible! – thank you for the recommendation. After this experience, would you be tempted to make more work in collaboration with visual artists or for unexpected spaces?

Yes, indeed I would. As it is I’ve collaborated with some wonderful contemporary artists in Ireland in recent years. I like it when there’s a concept in place for a piece of music, where you’re contributing to the realisation of an idea. In that forum you really get to step into a place where the line between music and sound blurs. The nature of what’s required of the music/sound depends on what the artist’s intentions are for their work, so you’re most often bounced into having to approach composition or sound design from a new angle. I’ve recently finished a half-hour work with an Irish actor, I’ve scored music for his narration of a gruesome short story. We’re currently looking forward to realising it as an installation in a suitable found space in the future!

That sounds great! We will watch out for that project in the near future – keep us updated! You also released your second album – From the Heights of a Dream – this year, Congratulations! What does the future hold for you?

I’m currently finishing two album for different musical projects. I’m nearly done on both, but then again it could be another six months… Also I’ve just finished the mastering of an album by a friend of mine, Irish musician Katie Kim. It’s sounding beautiful, keep an eye out for her music on your internet radar. I also hope to find more contemporary artists to collaborate with in the near future, as it’s an amazing forum in which to work.

Check out Deaf Joe’s website – http://www.deafjoe.net/ and Facebook page to keep up to date with future projects – https://www.facebook.com/deafjoemusic?fref=ts