Jury Statement The European Network for Contemporary Audiovisual Creation (ENCAC) 2st Open Call
ENCAC jury during deliberations in Nantes
ENCAC seeks to facilitate, promote, inspire, support and create new opportunities and challenges as well as innovative and sustainable solutions for the creative community, a wide range of audiences and the audiovisual industry. This second call?/competition for projects was aimed at artists and developers who would be awarded a residency at one of the following venues (DISK Berlin, Germany; hTh Montpellier, France; Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, France;
Avatar Quebec, Canada or LABoral/LEV, Gijón, Spain) and it offered a chance for artists to research, conceive, produce and present new artistic works and new tools, methods, formats
and perspectives for audiovisual creation.
The jury, which convened in Nantes on 19th and 20th September, 2016, was formed by the Curatorial Committee of ENCAC and its members were: Caroline Gagné (Artistic Director of Avatar), Remco Schuurbiers (Co-Director at DISK Berlin, CTM Festival), Daniel Romero (Director of the Digital Arts Department at hTh CDN Montpellier), Karin Ohlenschläger (Artistic Director of LABoral), Lucía García (Managing Director of LABoral), Patrick Gyger (Artistic Director of Le Lieu Unique), Anaïs Rolez (PhD in History of Contemporary Art, Professor of
Media Art and Performance at Nantes University and also a representative of Le Lieu Unique), Ignacio de la Vega and Cristina de Silva (Co-Directors of the LEV Festival) and Anna Ascencio and Justine Beaujouan (Festival programmers of the Mapping Festival).
The jury was judging 186 projects, representing 34 countries (Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, UK, USA and Uruguay).
A wide range of approaches from developers, performers, visual artists, film makers, choreographers and musicians, composers and sound artists showed their particular visions of the potential for audiovisual creativity in the crossdisciplinary fields of sound, visuals, music, the performing arts and digital culture. The jury would like to take this opportunity to encourage the participation of women artists in future calls?/competitions and activities of the network.
The final list of the 6 winning projects is a good sample of outstanding approaches to working
on developing artistically innovative models. Each of the 6 winning artists will be awarded one of four 2-week residencies or two 1-month residencies at the following institutions: Avatar, Quebec, CTM Festival DISK, Berlin, hTh Montpellier, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón and Le Lieu Unique, Nantes. The final results are as follows:
ÆTEROFONER by Christian Skjødt
As part of this second competton, ENCAC's Curatorial Commitee wishes to acknowledge the rigour, consistency and coherence of the work of the Danish artst and composer, Christian Skjødt.
Among current trends within sound art, there is a growing interest in artistic strategies that reveal generally imperceptible phenomena for the purpose of expressing a material reality that is infinitely more complex than it appears. Along these lines, Skjødt's installations were already causing fascination for the ways in which they make audible variations in the intensity of light or the vibration of matter.
In his new creation, ÆTEROFONER, which Skjødt will produce during his residency in Avatar, the artist is inspired by the life and inventions of Leon Theremin, including his eponymous electronic musical instrument. The aim of his residency is to carry out in-depth research into the detection and monitoring of electromagnetic waves.
EMBODIED GESTURES by Enrique Tomás
CTM Festival is excited to host Enrique Tomás’s “Embodied Gestures” project as their second ENCAC residency. Enrique´s biography shows a long history of focused research and deep familiarity with diverse technologies and interfaces, from commercial MPCs to self-made digital instruments. Throughout his work, the artist has grappled with the difficulty of encoding his musical intentions into hardware and software, often feeling/experiencing a disembodiment between the instrument and his musical ideas. With “Embodied Gestures”, Tomás asks: “how can we encode our musical intentions within digital instruments?” By considering musical sensibility, empathy and emotional intensity as triggers of creative processes and musical experience, Enrique Tomás touches the core of CTM 2017’s FEAR ANGER LOVE theme.
MANUFACTORY by Transforma
Transforma’s "ManuFactory" is a performative installation with a maximum duration of three days. On an open stage, 6 performers or ‘workers’ perform repetitive, choreographed tasks in a setting resembling a production line. Installed cameras and microphones capture the
workers' actions. With this project, Transforma proposes a transdisciplinary collaboration between performers, choreographers and musicians that fully complies with the objectives that were set specifically for the residency at hTh, National Dramatic Centre of Montpellier: namely, to broaden the limits of the scenic fact in relation to digital art, new technologies and contemporary art? creation. By a re-contextualising labour, Transforma aims to produce an unfamiliar and imagined working environment. "ManuFactory" is the culmination of almost 10 years of practice in this direction: exploring ideas of process, handwork, ritual and material structure. Throughout these years, Transforma has been developing unique and highly sensitive work that has gained recognition and respect all over the world. Taking on this new format and extending their praxis towards choreography and theatre seems to be a natural
progression for their output in 2017.
PERMAFROST by Adam Basanta and Gil Delindro
Permafrost is the ttle of the frst joint project of these two musicians and composers, whose individual lines of work coincide in the exploraton of unique acoustc qualites coupled with a conceptual and aesthetc contemplaton of sound. Their instrument is an assembly of frozen organic materials. The disintegraton and impact of these organic materials on a membrane of digital sensors and transducers generate a visual and sound landscape. Their proposal has been considered outstanding because it achieves
the producton of new sounds in the transboundary areas between natural processes, organic materials and digital devices, exploring different parameters of tme, processes and cycles.
AERYON by Maotik
Aeryon fits in perfectly with the network and the aims of ENCAC. It is a work based on the visualisation of a landscape and its representation by means of surveillance cameras and the processing of real-time data. It brings together a series of parameters that seem to us to be ideal for this approach, such as the use of drones and surveillance cameras (a geopolitical
component), the visualisation of real-time data, a poetic interpretation of landscape (urban and non-urban), generative graphics and augmented reality, real images and field recordings, all of which are imbued with a critical discourse both geopolitical and social. It consists of an installation and audiovisual performance closely linked to its exhibition space because it functions with real data and visualisations of that area, so it can be considered as a sitespecific installation and therefore unique in each presentation of the work in different settings. We would add that the FABlab of LABoral has always been prominent in research into the development of drones, so it makes very good sense for the development of this project to be at this venue.
SOFT PROBE by Matthew Biederman and Marko Peljhan
The ENCAC jury has decided to award the month-long residency at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes to Matthew Biederman and Marko Peljhan for their project, Soft Probe - the Edges of SDR (software-defined radio). The two artists are proposing to research and create a tactical environment using software-defined radios for insight into contemporary telecommunication
paradigms.
The jury is convinced that their political stance and the experience of the artists will bring the project to fruition and hopes that their residency in Nantes will nurture and have an impact on research which underlines the fragility of contemporary telecommunication infrastructures.
Their use of open source equipment and software, their focus on our current loss of privacy and their keen understanding of the shifts brought about by SDR technology will ensure that Soft Probe achieves its goals: to create a live and autonomous electromagnetic spectrum charting machine and to raise awareness of what we emit without knowing it, through a series of demonstrations and performances.
