Date: 24 October 2020 (Saturday)

An assortment of sound and moving image delights from the SoundTeam at SCM, featuring works by PerMagnus Lindborg, Ryo Ikeshiro, András Blazsek, Edwin Lo, Charles Chan, Manni Chen and others.

This performance is one of the programs for CityU Virtual Information Day 2020.

The performance is available online at https://youtu.be/xNtAwjS13nA

SoundTeam Presents …

01 Ryo - Composition: White Square, White Circle - extended version (2013)

Composition: White Square, White Circle is a fixed-media screening/installation work. It is an “audiovisualisation”, where the same data and process generate both the sound and the moving image. It is a homage to the Russian Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich.

The same process in the digital medium generates both the sound and the moving image, and movements and patterns that are seen can also be heard and vice versa. Simple abstract designs are used, based on folding into a square and stretching into a circle, much like kneading dough. These shapes are moved to and fro, and gently transformed into complex structures and then back again. 

02 Edwin - Procession (2016)
video game / installation - video documentation

Based on the field recordings made in 2007, Processions (2016) reveals the resonance of religious occasions of the Taoism procession of the Hunger Ghost Festival in a simulated environment. By using different signs and assets of game engine Unity3D, the work situates sound in the game environment and the work tries to reexamine the perspectives and gestures of listening and the relationship between auditory and visual experiences in a digital/simulated environment and with positioning sound as subject in game, it conveys the artist’s question and reflection of how sound art and game art emerging together.

With situating field recordings in a digital environment instead of pure transmissions through psychical records, do our listening experiences changed? Does it affect our usual perception of sound, and how? The work itself is not meant to an end as a game to be played and but also as a process of exploring with experiences, listening, observing details and signs with auditory materials.

03 Manni - Glitch Noise for Information Day (2020)

04 Vertical Acoustics - Battery Harris (2017)
Music for piano wire, drone and an aluminum pendulum plumb.

In recent years, increasing numbers of public and private spaces are affected by the sound of drones. Tracking the emergence of consumer drones, I could observe a change in the language used to talk about them - the “quadcopter” discusses in tech reviews, became the “drone” in everyday language - and as the connotation of the word “drone” recalls the military background of the instrument, the machine appeared affected by fear and the noise of vulnerability through surveillance. The sound instrument I built from a DJI Spark (a small consumer grade drone), a piano wire, and an aluminum pendulum plumb I turned on a metal lathe explores this issue of vulnerability. The drone was anchored to the ground and allowed to fly to the high vaulted ceiling, tethered and gently swinging its plumb.

Fort Tilden is a concrete structure at a former WWI military site on the beaches of Queens, in the Rockaways, New York. The area is now a popular site to visit for recreational purposes. The generally calm soundscape of the ocean site coexists with the visually brutalist concrete structure of the gun case mates, the only reminder of the noises and blasts of WWI war instruments once housed by the camouflaged casemates. The sound instrument with drone, piano wire and pendulum plumb was used on one occasion to capture and enhance the soundscape of the abandoned military site near the Atlantic Ocean to introduce the hum of the drone into the soundscape of the de-militarized area.

Residency Unlimited is a Brooklyn based artist-in-residence program that I participated in 2017. The refurbished space of the former South Congregational Church hosts the residency. The acoustically challenging space of the church's interior was the key element of the performance I made for the RU. The space became the acoustic body for my new instrument, which was able to resonate, refract, and scatter sound frequencies across the walls of the church, collaborating in the emergence of a ‘voice’ from the building.

05 Ryo - Call On Me Call On Me Call On Me Call On Me / CCCCaaaallll OOOOnnnn MMMMeeee (2015)

Pop music tracks are transformed so the pitch and speed continually rise higher and faster to happy hardcore heaven without ever becoming slower and lower. The process is known as the Risset rhythm based on the Shepard tone, an aural illusion equivalent to Escher’s Stairs. The accompanying music videos are also accelerated, satirising the hyper-sexualisation of promotional videos.

The work is from the series Eternal Accelerando, a light-hearted response to accelerationism which calls for an acceleration of technosocial processes to subvert its neoliberal origins or to further capitalist progress to hasten its self-demise.

06 Charles - Long March to Arcadia

07 Andras - Performance at LACE (2012)

08 Ryo - New Town (2017)
360-video

The 360-video is part of a work which explores various effects of the regeneration of Susaek-dong and Sangam-dong, Seoul, in sound. Through the use of the ambisonic format, it could be considered as 360-degree field recordings which can be navigated with a VR head-mounted display accompanied by 360 video.

The video begins on the roof of the Mediterranean Pine – a restaurant, cafe and community workshop running art and craft classes – situated between the futuristic Digital Media City to the south, and the antiquated Susaek to the north. Various locations in Susaek and Sangam can be viewed and heard including the following:

• a traditional market in decline;
• a red-light district;
• a former Japanese military house discovered during the redevelopment of Sangam-dong and relocated and preserved at great cost partly due to rising property prices amidst opposition from locals;
• the Japanese school which relocated across the road from the former Japanese military housing which provides a strange soundtrack including a Japanese school chime, teachers counting and giving instructions in Japanese over a megaphone and the sound of taiko (big drums);
• whole neighbourhoods almost deserted due to residents being relocated/evicted;
• entrances to empty apartment blocks sprayed with the word “vacant” in red;
• residents declaring their opposition to the development with a make-shift red flags;
• piles of rubbish due to the ceasing of waste collection;
• the hum from the oldest existing electrical substation in Korea, rumoured to be moved underground to make way for a park in the near future;
• a former public bath being used before its demolition for various activities such as an exhibition of paintings by a local artist and a concert by Kim Chang-wan formerly of Sanulrim, often described as the Korean Beatles.

09 PerMagnus - 

10 Edwin - The Fall (2018)

Outlast-Poe Trilogy (2018-2019) begins as a digital study of the groundbreaking first person horror survival game Outlast (2015) from Red Barrel. Inspired by the narrative of the game, this project juxtaposes the psychological horror classic “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” by Edgar Allan Poe with the game scenes as a hybrid form of machinima-literature. This project consists three episodes, The Fall (2018), The Heart (2018) and The Pit (2019) and they convey the artist’s attempt in thinking the reproduction of soundscape of the video game with the juxtaposition of the text excerpted from the short stories of Poe that echoes with the psychological horror and the threshold of body.

By appropriating the game scenes and remaking the soundscape and soundtrack of the game scenes, the works detaches the mentality of horror, extreme, insanity, gore and tension of the game and constitutes certain suspension of the game scenes. It is misery, static, abstract and yet dull and dark. With selecting several vocabularies and phases of the novels, they constitute a second layer of suspension of emotion and sensation that echoes with the central theme of the game and the novel on insanity and horror in the state of mind.