Awarded the five production residencies launched by the European Network for Contemporary Audiovisual Creation
Ganzfeld (US), Evelina Domnitch y Dmitry Gelfand con Paul Prudence (BY, RU, UK), Alan Warburton (GB), Myriam Bleau (CA), Tokuyama Tomonaga and Wladimir Schall (JP, FR) will develop their projects at Avatar Quebec, DISK/CTM Festival, hTh Montpellier, LABoral/LEV Festival Gijón and Le Lieu Unique Nantes, respectively
autopsy.glass, by Myriam Bleau, will be developed during a production residency at LABoral. Photo: Severin Smith
LABoral and the nine artistic and cultural institutions that take part at the European Network for Contemporary Audiovisual Creation (ENCAC) have awarded its first open call addressed to artists/developers worldwide, which are working on all kinds of innovative concepts and ideas in the fields of intermedia research on sound, visuals, music, performing arts and digital culture.
The artists Ganzfeld (US), Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand with Paul Prudence (BY, RU, UK), Alan Warburton (GB), Myriam Bleau (CA), Tokuyama Tomonaga with Wladimir Schall for STULTUS (JP, FR) will develop their projects during a 2-week artistic residency at Avatar, DISK/CTM Festival, hTh, LABoral/LEV Festival and Le Lieu Unique, respectively. All the five projects have been selected between 361 proposals, representing 51 countries.
The jury was formed by the Curatorial Committee of ENCAC which is integrated by: Martin Honzik (Director of Ars Electronica Festival Linz; Austria), Caroline Gagné (Artistic Director of Avatar Quebec, Canada), Remco Schuurbiers (Co-Director at DISK / CTM Festival Berlin, Germany), Nathalie Bachand (Head of Development at Elektra Festival Montreal, Canada), Daniel Romero (Director of the Digital Arts Department at hTh CDN Montpellier, France), Lucía García (Managing Director of LABoral Gijón, Spain), Anaïs Rolez (PhD in History of Contemporary Art, Professor of Media Art and Performance at Nantes University as representative of Le Lieu Unique Nantes, France), Ignacio de la Vega (Co-Director at LEV Festival Gijón, Spain), Justine Beaujouan (Festival programmer at Mapping Festival Geneva, Switzerland), Damian Romero (Founder and Director of Mutek.MX Festival, Mexico) and Eduard Prats Molner (Co-Founder and Curator at Resonate Festival Belgrade, Serbia).
In its decision, the jury remarked that the final list of the five awarded artists is a good sample of outstanding approaches for working on developing artistically innovative models.
The jury went through a the 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 cross disciplinary fields of sound, visuals, music, performing arts and digital culture.
Leaded by LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Spain) and with LEV festival as strategic partner, ENCAC is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. The European Network for Contemporary Audiovisual Creation (ENCAC) aims to facilitate, promote, inspire, support and create new opportunities and challenges in the audiovisual arts as well as to foster innovative and sustainable solutions for the creative community, a wide range of audiences and the audiovisual field.
THE SELECTED PROJECTSuerrilla Spatialization Unit, by Ganzfeld, US.
To be developed during a production residency at Avatar Québec, in February 2016.
Guerrilla Spatialization Unit proposes a performance device conceived specifically for this call. 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, an artist particularly interested in the new forms of musical instruments which are built based on technological interfaces; and Liz Allbee, an electroacoustic 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.
Their project 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 and Dmitry Gelfand with Paul Prudence, BY, RU, UK.
To be developed during a production residency at DISK/CTM Festival, in January/February 2016.
Working at the interface of art and science for over a decade, Amsterdam-based Evelina Domnitch (Belarus) and Dmitry Gelfand (Russia) will develop this 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-channel 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, by Alan Warburton, GB.
To be developed during a production residency at hTh CDN Montpellier, in March/Abril 2016.
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.
autopsy.glass, de Myriam Bleau, CA.
To be developed during a production residency at LABoral in April 2016 and will be on show at the L.E.V Festival 2016.
According to the jury, Myriam Bleau's work gathers talent, innovation and experimentation, in search for new strategies which integrate image, light and sound in a performance through the manipulation of quotidian objects.
Myriam's proposal is 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.
autopsy.glass 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, de Tokuyama Tomonaga (with Wladimir Schall in Stultus), JP, FR.
To be developed during a production residency at Le Lieu Unique in January 2016.
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 demonstrated background. 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.
The collaboration between Tomonaga Tokuyama and electroacoustician composer Wladimir Schall (in the second piece, STULTUS) seems, according to the jury, very promising in mixing programming and concrete music in a physical space (as a field of calculation).
