For the year 2012-2013 matralab post-doc researcher, Otso Lähdeoja, has been awarded the Quebec Merit Scholarship for Foreign Students (MELS / PBEEE) postdoctoral grant by the Ministère d’Education, de Loisir et de Sports de Québec and the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la nature et la technology.
Congratulations Otso!
Weblink:
http://www.fqrnt.gouv.qc.ca/bourses/Fiches_programmes/index_V2_2B_2C_2I_2M.htm
Last week, Navid Navab, Jerome DelaPierre, and Michael Montanaro spent a week with Toney Chong (chef) in the matrabox working on a project called Practices Of Everyday Life; Day1: Panning
View documentation coming soon.
A performance choreographed around a chef and sonified objects: fruit, vegetables, meat, knives, pots and pans, cutting board and table.
Cooking*, the most ancient art of transmutation, has become over a quarter of a million years an unremarkable, domestic practice. But in this everyday practice, things perish, transform, nourish other things. Enchanting the fibers, meats, wood and metal with sound and painterly light, we stage a performance made from the moves(gestures) of cooking, scripted from the recipes of cuisine both high and humble…
For Montreal’s Nuit Blanche 2013 (March 3, 2013), matralab will be collaborating with the Goethe-Institut in presenting an evening of multimedia performances and installations.
Villes LuminoSoniques – LuminoSoniCities is a multifaceted media arts installation in the new spaces of the Goethe Institute Montreal. It showcases the work and collaborations of 10 artists working at or connected to the matralab, a research lab directed by German composer Sandeep Bhagwati at Concordia University. All artists explore the relationship of sound, light and cityscape in different ways: looking at a window that suddenly looks back at you; navigating the ambient sounds of Montreal on Google Map; showing a film of an encounter between you and someone you have never met, in a city that you perhaps have never visited; vintage domestic lamps going crazy in an uncanny conspiration of sound and light; exploring a cityscape, listening to music that is composed live by your movements; chilling to quiet gentle piano sounds in a quiet room that suddenly becomes very uncomfortable and exposed; and an architectural light-music-installation-performance that sways to the car traffic outside the building; a building that is now gentrified, but before was home to many artists – a fact explored and underlined by another performance/installation.
All installations will also feature performances that will happen throughout the evening. All performances will be repeated several times – whenever you come, you will not have to wait more than 10 minutes for a performance to start somewhere in the Institute. Detailed information will be posted on the project website.
with works by Sandeep Bhagwati, Jen Reimer, Adam Basanta, Devora Neumark, Michal Seta, Lenka Novakova, Unai Miquelajauregui, Navid Navab, Max Stein & Julian Stein
piano/forte (2012)
Sandeep Bhagwati + Adam Basanta + Julian Stein
A piano stands in a silent room. Occasionally, street noises filter in and make the piano sing quietly to their chaotic tune. But this singing always is only an after-image, an echo of a violent act of intrusion. In a nightly city landscape, lights are usually unobtrusive and beautiful, even when they flicker – but city sounds will assault us and never let us go. In this installation, the situation is reversed – the light assaults us, while the piano sound is gentle, inviting us to listen and contemplate.
Music for 12 Domestic Lamps
Adam Basanta + Julian Stein + Max Stein
Music for 12 Domestic Lamps is an installation and performance work for 12 sound and light emitting lamps. Each lamp is discreetly outfitted with a surface transducer speaker, turning the lamps into both light and sound emitters. The work investigates the potential of domestic objects, both to recall their quotidian functions and – through aesthetic transformation – transcend them.
The lamps will be performed upon by an electroacoustic improv-trio (A. Basanta, J. Stein, M. Stein), and will also run autonomously as a composed sound and light installation. The lamps will be arranged at the Goethe-Institut window-front, allowing both visitors and passers-by to experience the work.
inside/outside
Lenka Novakova + Jen Reimer + Max Stein
inside/outside is an interactive audiovisual performance and installation that blurs the perceptual boundaries of sound and moving image inside and outside of a given space. Live and recorded video will combine with an immersive multi-channel soundscape for processed horn and field recordings. This combination will echo the colors of street lights, and trace the movement of traffic outside the space, and mix it with the activity taking place inside.
[IR]rationnel
Michal Seta
[IR]rationnel is a performative installation where invisible light intersects with sound. Moving bodies in the real world interact with objects in the virtual, physically modelled world. Disturbances in the virtual world make some things move, bounce, collide. Movements of virtual bodies within the [ir]rationnel world produce sound audible in the real world. The sounds inspire movement, movement causes sound. Users interact with virtual satellite-like objects that provide their reinterpretation of electric city lights.
“Les persiennes et les sortilèges”
Navid Navab + Jerome Delapierre + Michael Montanaro
An interactive work dealing with the veiling and unveiling of perception… seductive and mysterious because of what is left unseen, eyes appear from a darkened room, seeking a connection with those on the other side. But who is the seen and who or what the seen?
Someone’s behind those Venetian blinds. A finger slips over an edge and pulls it down. Two fingers, four. A pair of eyes. Then a pair of lips mouthing your name. Who is it? And how does he or she know you, standing at the window, if she’s only a ghost of a ghost? Come to the Goethe Institute / La Nuit blanche, when Alkemie animates the windows with video-performers haunting video-persiennes.
Montréal Sound Map
Max Stein + Julian Stein
The Montréal Sound Map is an interactive soundscape project that allows users to upload field recordings to a Google Map of Montréal. Since 2008, almost 300 sound recordings from all over the island have been collected and archived.
In this installation, the Montréal Sound Map is projected on a window of the Goethe-Institut. The map runs on autoplay with field recordings selected at random one after another, and the map pans to new locations following each newly selected sound. The audio will be heard both outside and inside, providing viewers with two very different listening environments: one static and one dynamic.
Anyone is welcome to contribute to the project. For more information, please visit http://montrealsoundmap.com.
PHANTOMATON (2012)
Unai Miquelajauregui
Phantomaton is a user-dependent, responsive, 3-channel-video installation that generates composite video shots of its spectators placing them in urban landscapes. Embodying the intimate space of a photo-booth, this participatory cinema piece addresses the tension between authorship and spectatorship in regards to aesthetic creation around the moving image. It works as a cinematic device that requires the audience’s participation in order to function.
On Dec 6, 2012 in Mumbai / India, at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Sandeep will give the inaugural annual public “Ashok Ranade Memorial Lecture”, in memory of the eminent Indian musicologist and composer Ashok Ranade, who unexpectedly died last year, and who he had closely worked with over the past 11 years.
Listen to Sandeep’s “Stele VI Alaap for Ashok” on the music page.
For more information:
http://www.ncpamumbai.com/event/dr-ashok-da-ranade-memorial-lecture
Sandeep Bhagwati is the director of matralab.
Inspired by the tunnel’s reverberant acoustics and unique sonic environment Jen Reimer, Max Stein and Adam Basanta collaborate in creating an immersive multichannel sound and visual experience in the space itself. The work incorporates processed horn, field recordings and a light installation by Adam Basanta responding to the ambient soundscape and inherent sonic environment.
The location of the performance will be announced closer to the performance date.
Weblink:
http://www.htmlles.net/2012/
Adam Basanta participated in a collaborative concert-installation called “The Burning Skies of Bogota: New Music for Piano and Electronics from Colombia” on November 9 and November 10, 8pm.
A very interesting collaborative project with pianist Daniel Anez, in which Adam composed an hour long light composition for 16 light bulbs to accompany an evening length performance of contemporary Colombian music for Piano and electroacoustics.
Weblink:
http://m-a-i.qc.ca/en/current/daniel-anez-garcia
Adam Basanta is a masters student at matralab.
On November 4, 2012, the World Premiere of Sandeep’s new work for Sheng and String Quartet “Traces&Shadows II” will take place in Berlin at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Dahlem. The piece is performed by Wu Wei (Sheng) and the Asian Art Ensemble, who just won the prestigious “German Record Critics Award 2012” for their last CD.
Web Links:
http://www.asianart-ensemble.com/english/projects.html
Sandeep Bhagwati is the director of matralab.
Adam Basanta’s “Room Dynamics” will be on display at NAISA Space in Toronto from Oct 27th – Dec 1st.
Adam will do a performance with Julian Stein and Max Stein on October 27th at 8pm to open the exhibition.
Details:
Oct 27 to Dec 1, 2012
Fri (12-3) & Sat (10-2) – Admission by Donation
Special Opening Night Performance, October 27, 8 pm
NAISA Space, Artscape Wychwood Barns, 601 Christie Street #252, Toronto
Description:
Room Dynamics is an audiovisual installation consisting of 12 incandescent light bulbs and 14 channels of sound. The 12 bulbs – each coupled to a small audio speaker hanging above the bulb – are arranged into a permeable site-responsive media architecture which both occupies the gallery space and is in dialog with its surrounding architectural character. The media architecture is animated by a generative, algorithmic, multi-modal composition, exploring the perceptual and affective states arising from the interactions of dynamic media architectures and the material architectures within which they are embedded. The 12 “points” of light and sound – perceived as “sounding bulbs” – manifest various dynamic behavioural states, ranging from individual activities to collective operation. Each subsequent behavioural state exerts itself on its surrounding environment: reshaping its appearance and volume, creating movement and changes in perspective. Through these activities, the gallery space is activated: making available architectural features, articulating navigable pathways, “colouring” and “shading” the experiential space through which the spectator navigates.
Weblinks:
http://www.naisa.ca/soundplay/installations.html
Adam Basanta – Room Dynamics (Vimeo)
music for 12 domestic lamps (Vimeo)
Adam Basanta is a masters student at matralab.
Max Stein and Julian Stein are research assistants at matralab.
On Monday, Oct 22, from 1 pm – 5 pm, at matralab, graduate students, as well as two post-doctoral fellows at matralab, will present their artistic work and their research in an informal internal study day.
The presentations will be followed with a small, informal 5 à 7 reception.
We would like to know each other’s work better and discover possible synergies and inspirations, but also perhaps gain some new insights into our own work.
You will be able to encounter the work-in-progress and the thinking of:
Adam Basanta (Masters INDI) “Compositional Strategies in Light and Sound Installations” (Electroacoustic Composition and Light/Sound Installations)
Devora Neumark (PhD HUMA) “Radical Beauty for Troubled Times: Involuntary Displacement and the Making of Home Anew” (Performance Art)
Chantale Laplante (PhD UQAM) “Hyper-Écoute: Aspects du lieu, du son et de la durée dans le contexte de l’art performance” ([Electroacoustic] Composition and Space)
Tzu En Ngiao (PhD HUMA) “Mapping Musical Logic into Narrational Objectives” (Composition/ Music Theory)
Lenka Novak (PhD HUMA) “In-between the Light and Darkness: From Baroque Music to Contemporary Sound” (Sculpture/Light/Space/Music)
Otso Lahdeoja (Postdoc PBEEE) “Structure-borne sound in music and intermedia composition and performance” (Music Technology/Creation)
Marie Hélène Bréault (future PostDoc FQRSC) “De l’interprétation à la création musicale : une démarche inspirée des modes créatifs du théâtre” (Music Interpretation/Creation)
On October 4, 2012 Sandeep Bhagwati will give a lecture on Research-Creation@matralab in Ghent, Belgium at the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (ORCIM) Research Festival. He will also be member of the artistic-research expert feedback group.
Sandeep Bhagwati is the director of matralab.