Jury Statement The European Network for Contemporary Audiovisual Creation (ENCAC) 1st Open Call
ENCAC jury during deliberations in Linz, Austria
The European Network for Contemporary Audiovisual Creation (ENCAC) 1st Open Call aims to expand the potential of Audiovisual Creation which involves all kinds of innovative concepts and ideas in the fields of intermedia research on sound, visuals, music, performing arts and digital culture.
This first call for projects targeted artists and developers to win a residency at 5 different venues (DISK Berlin -DE-, hTh Montpellier -FR-, Le Lieu Unique Nantes -FR-, Avatar Quebec -CA- and LABoral/LEV Gijón -ES-) and it offers a chance for artists to research, conceive, produce and present new artistic works, new tools, methods, formats and perspectives for audiovisual creation. Presentation format depends on the nature of the residency, and may range from a final performance, an informal work-in-progress presentation, installation, a talk or workshop-style format, or other. Resident artists will receive technical and artistic guidance during the development of their research and production. The support will be provided by the hosting venue and its network of collaborators.
In this way, 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.
It is important to underline that the jury came from different professional backgrounds. The consortium consisted of eleven representatives of artistic research and production centres, performing arts centres, festivals and visual arts venues. The understanding of projects therefore, had different artistic and cultural capital as a background and different expectations for the final artwork, which will not only be exhibited at the hosted venues but also in the rest of the partners venues.
The jury was formed by the Curatorial Committee of ENCAC which is integrated by: Martin Honzik (Director of Ars Electronica Festival), Caroline Gagné (Artistic Director of Avatar), Remco Schuurbiers (Co-Director at DISK Berlin, CTM Festival), Nathalie Bachand (Head of Development at Elektra Festival), Daniel Romero (Director of the Digital Arts Department at hTh CDN Montpellier), Lucía García (Managing Director of LABoral), Anaïs Rolez (PhD in History of Contemporary Art, Professor of Media Art and Performance at Nantes University as representative of Le Lieu Unique), Ignacio de la Vega (Co-DIrector at LEV Festival), Justine Beaujouan (Festival programmer at Mapping Festival), Damian Romero (Founder and Director of MUTEK.MX) and Eduard Prats Molner (Co-Founder and Curator at Resonate Festival).
The jury received 361 submissions, representing 51 countries.
A wide range of approaches from performers, visual artists, film makers, choreographers and musicians, composers or sound artists who showed their particular vision of audiovisual creation and its potential in the crossdisciplinary fields of sound, visuals, music, performing arts and digital culture.
The final list of the 5 awarded artists is a good sample of outstanding approaches for working on developing artistically innovative models. http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/en/files/2015/encac/encac
The awarded artists will spend 2-week residencies at different venues: Avatar Quebec (february 2016), DISK Berlin (january/february 2016) , hTh CDN Montpellier (march/april 2016), LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial Gijón (April 2016) and Le Lieu Unique Nantes (january 2016).
Final results:
| Project | Artist | country | Residency AT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guerrilla Spatialization Unit | Ganzfeld | US | Avatar |
| Force Field | Evelina Domnitch y Dimitry Gelfand con Paul Prudence | BY, RU, FR | DISK |
| Liberating the Digital Crowd | Alan Warburton | GB | hTh |
| autopsy.glass | Myriam Bleau | CA | LABoral |
| F ( ) Stultus | Tokuyama Tomonaga (y Wladimir Schall para Stultus | JP | Le Lieu Unique |
- Guerrilla Spatialization Unit by Ganzfeld
The first reaction of the jury to Ganzfeld's work was both, enthusiastic and of admiration, driven by the inteligibility and consistency of their artistic proposal.
Their project, Guerrilla Spatialization Unit, proposes a performance device conceived specifically for our call for projects. Following the artistic background of both artists, the work explores the new forms of instrumentation and musical dialogue with the architectural space, matter itself, the surfaces and the objects that inhabit it.
The collective is formed by artists Sukandar Kartadinata and Liz Allbee. He is particularly interested in the new forms of musical instruments which are built based on technological interfaces; She is an electroaccoustic composer and performer also interested in the interactivity between instruments and objects as a connecting tool between the space and the performer.
Both from United States, they live and work in Berlin where they actively contribute to the contemporary practices, particularly towards improvisation and sound performance. They multiply the creations in the community, contributing to group variable geometry while pursuing an individual practice. Together they develop a very personal and singular sound dialogue through transducers, sensors and luminescent objets which are integrated in their presentation spaces. They make their own electronic interfaces in order to modify and integrate their instruments, particularly the electric guitar and the trumpet. Each piece reveals multiple resonances and alters the architectural spaces they intervene.
In this sense, Ganzfeld's artistic approach is based on the experience of the space itself and the technological research, crossed over with a curious spirit that reconfigures the musical instruments. Among the selected proposals, Spatialization Guerrilla Unit is also an opportunity to give recognition to improvisation and sound art performance as a fundamental contribution to interdisciplinary practices of audiovisual creation nowadays, something that the ENCAC network aims to support.
- Force Field by Evelina Domnitch, Dmitry Gelfand with Paul Prudence
Levitated by sonic pressure, a spinning droplet of water mirrors some of nature’s deepest secrets, from the anomalous force compressing atomic nuclei to that which squeezes the event horizon of black holes. Since the the 1970s and 80s, acoustic levitation techniques have primarily been applied by NASA and ESA to trap and navigate otherwise uncontrollable samples in microgravity. Over the last two decades, the same methods have come to be used as a powerful tool for containerless manipulation on Earth, in a vast range of research areas, including fluid dynamics, analytical chemistry, atmospheric sciences, molecular biology, and most recently particle physics and astrophysics.
Working at the intersection of art and science for over a decade, Amsterdam-based Evelina Domnitch (Belarus) and Dmitry Gelfand (Russia) will develop a new project, “Force Field”, together with computational artist Paul Prudence, acoustic physicist Alexander Miltsen, and the Hydrodynamics Laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.
“Force Field” uses sonolevitation to acoustically levitate a water droplet that resonates and transforms from a spheroid into different oscillating shapes as the sonic pressure increases. Capturing the 3-dimensionality of sound and the elusive physicality of water, the droplet’s vibrations are rendered into sound and computational images that are presented as a live hemispherical projection and multi-chalnnel sound environment. Exploring normally inaccessible depths of both inner and outer space, “Force Field” extends the tradition of avant-garde research on phenomenological art through tightly-interwoven artistic and scientific practices.
- Liberating the Digital Crowd. Alan Warburton
Alan Warburton's project involves exploring within an artistic context the intersection of entertainment and science using a cutting-edge CGI "crowd simulation" software. This software is driven by a basic form of artificial intelligence alongside motion capture (MoCap) data to create complex movement and behaviour in large virtual crowds. This technology is normally used in Hollywood blockbuster films to fill out cities, stadiums and battlefields and also by researchers, architects, scientists and engineers working in crisis mapping, city planning and events management. His proposal consists of exploring this simulation software to (in his own words) 'liberate the digital crowd' in order to allow them to live and explore more experimental parameters. From here he intends to create behavioural sculptures that recall the abstraction of contemporary dance on a huge scale, making the crowd interact with a predesigned digital environment.
'Liberating the Digital Crowd' meets entirely the objectives that were set specifically for the residency at hTh. The purpose was to widen the limits of the scenic fact in relation to digital art and new technologies: multimedia contemporary dance, audiovisual electronic operas, performances with light, video and sound, performances directed by artificial intelligence, robotic theatre, performances based on data manipulation. hth was also open to any scenic act that could reflect, explicitly or poetically, about new technologies nowadays or even pervert, mock, abuse or misuse the technological fact. Alan presents a very interesting proposal where he intends to expand the limits of the technology through an artistic interpretation and use. He is also proposing a close transdisciplinary collaboration with a local performer/dancer and both aspects have been highly valued by the jury. And though the residency has yet a challenging outcome ahead, the experience and background of the artist gives the jury the guarantee of a very interesting and powerful result.
http://www.alanwarburton.co.uk
- autopsy.glass by Myriam Bleau
Myriam Bleau's work fits entirely the objectives of ENCAC network and particularly those that were set up for the residency launched for LABoral Centro de Arte and LEV festival such as favouring access to new tools for creators, encourage research on sound and visuals and look for new perspectives which oblige us to rethink the space we inhabit. 'autopsy.glass' gathers talent, innovation and experimentation, in search for new strategies which integrate image, light and sound in a performance through the manipulation of quotidian objets.
The jury highly appreciated Myriam's proposal which was based on a 'kind-of' handcrafted approach, the use of quotidian elements, particularly the fragility of glasses of wine, the sonorisation and visualization of it, the tension that precedes destruction and breaking and also her poetic interpretation of its symbolic potential and the strong energy created behind it.
Her project suggests a new concept in performance, an audiovisual live performance with a high performatic component which also includes chance, chaos, risk and tension, and which tears down the barriers between installation, interface and instrument to then generate an audiovisual landscape in realtime.
In summary, this piece makes digital language closer and warmer, it remains in the edge between the new and the old, the contemporary and the archaic, the mechanical and the digital.
- f( ) STULTUS by Tomonaga Tokuyama (and Vladimir Schall for STULTUS)
The ENCAC jury was very impressed by the clarity and professionalism of Tomonaga Tokuyama’s proposals. The f () installation ambitions to transform the exhibition space in an interactive sound and light artwork, allowing to feel space through sound. Tomonaga Tokuyama is an accomplished programmer with a solid technical background, which his work with Ryoji Ikeda, for instance, has demonstrated. His interest in spatial expression of synchronized audio and visual feeds, as well as in programming as an artistic mode of expression (more than a tool itself), has comforted the jury that this residency at le lieu unique would be relevant for his own research as well as le lieu unique’s programme.
f () is for function and field: in this project the artist proposes to work on making visible the consequences of the spectator interacting with computer programming and create their own landscape. These call for changes in the viewers’ behavior. The level of detail involved in the pieces was also a factor in the jury’s decision - for instance the reflective floor intends to trouble the spectators, making them lose their marks, while allowing a fluid circulation of sound and light. Therefore, formally, the installation is minimalistic, while being immersive and poetic. The work proposed underlines the complexity and imbrication of phenomena and their perception and uses digital technology in a way where it questions itself.
The main objectives of the residency at le lieu unique are to create an experimental audio environment through new instruments or by interrogating the frontiers of the musical field. The goal is also to question the links between music and other forms of artistic expression. The collaboration between Tomonaga Tokuyama with electroacoustician composer Wladimir Schall (in the second piece, Stultus) seems very promising in mixing programming and concrete music in a physical space (as a field of calculation). For these reasons these proposals fit perfectly in the call for residency at le lieu unique.
