Monday 20 January, Tobačna 001 and radioCona
7:20 p.m.: lectures
Jeff Kolar: ALERT! Transmission, Playback and Remix
Volkmar Klien: Sounds and their Consonances
8:30 p.m.: performances
Jeff Kolar: GSM Buzz
Volkmar Klien: Zeugnisse vergangener Lebensformen
Jeff Kolar: ALERT! Transmission, Playback and Remix (lecture)
ALERT! Transmission, Playback and Remix will examine several of Kolar’s projects that activate sound in unconventional, temporary, and ephemeral ways. The talk will focus on the use of appropriation and remix as a critical practice. Kolar will also discuss his curatorial work on Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform that supports work that engages the tonal and public spaces of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Jeff Kolar: GSM Buzz (performance)
GSM Buzz is an audible investigation of electromagnetic interference patterns between mobile phones and computer speakers. GSM Buzz captures bursts of electromagnetic radiation when mobile devices connect to cellular towers. The buzzy bursts are a result of overcrowded cellular networks transmitting data in rapid succession, one after the other, every 0.004615 seconds. GSM Buzz explores these synchronized interference patterns as source material. Each track uses a different generation of mobile wireless Internet to manipulate the repeated humming signals.
Volkmar Klien: Sounds and their Consonances (lecture)
All sounds become audible only in context, which – more aptly – might be referred to as consonance. Because whatever does become audible, does so in a shared sounding environment.
In this soundscape the sounding event or medium opens up the world contained within, itself linked in uncountable ways to shared experiences, cultural norms, physical laws and the individual listener’s very personal memories.
The possibilities of transposing audible worlds through media and the abundance of new consonances formed through these have for some time now been at the focal point of Volkmar Klien’s artistic practice. Concentrating on selected works he will recount some aspects in his interest in transposing sounds and sonic behaviour out of context in search for new forms of musical and sonic consonances.
Volkmar Klien: Zeugnisse vergangener Lebensformen (performance)
Sound recordings of everyday tasks and environments seem to be intrinsically bound to the sentimental. It is the fragmentary of these attempts to resurrect moments in time that poignantly point to transitory nature of all things. Listening to activities you do not see tends to infer connotations of eavesdropping, of listening in through walls on intimacies of others.
In Zeugnissen vergangener Lebensformen Volkmar Klien takes his archive of recordings accumulated over the past several years as his vantage point for a montage of sounds, found and produced, which he combines with music, situated well in the midst of these. To this he adds recordings of personal soundscapes, which were contributed by people from all over the world to the project ‘Personal Soundscapes’, organised by the ORF Musikprotokoll 2013 in co-operation with Ö1 Kunstradio.
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Growing up in Vienna Volkmar Klien spent his childhood engulfed in the city’s rich musical life with all its glorious traditions and engrained rituals. Working from this background he today strives to extend traditional practices of composing, producing and listening far beyond the established settings of concert music. He works in various areas of the audible and occasionally inaudible arts navigating the manifold links in-between the different modes of human perception, the spheres of presentation and the roles these play in the communal generation of meaning.
Jeff Kolar is a sound artist and curator working in Chicago, USA. His work, described as “speaker-shredding” (Half Letter Press) and “wonderfully strange” (John Corbett), includes cross-platform collaboration, low-powered radio, and live performance. Jeff is a free103point9 Transmission Artist, and also the director of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform. His work has been released on Panospria (CA), HAK Lo-Fi Record (FR), free103point9 (US), and has appeared in compilations by Furthernoise.org (AU) and Sonic Circuits (US). His video work was published in the DVD journal ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art. He presents work at festivals, radio programs, exhibitions, and performance venues which recently include the New Museum, MEGAPOLIS, KUNSTRADIO, and The Kitchen.http://jeffkolar.us/gsmbuzz
