Category: Installation

What if the stars made music

Outdoor Culture presents Sounds of the Night Sky featuring Robert Jarvis‘ sound installation: aroundNorth, opening Thursday 20 February 2014 6.30-9.30 pm at the National Trust Stowe New Inn Farm Buckingham MK18 5EQ

This outdoor event will showcase the premier of Robert Jarvis’ new sound art installation, aroundNorth, a piece that was shortlisted for the 2010 PRS New Music Award.  A multi-speaker sound map of the stars driven by the turning of the Earth, aroundNorth uses Kyma to transform the night sky into a celestial music box rotating around Polaris, the North Star. As each star passes a virtual line in the sky, it triggers a musical note whose qualities are determined by the star’s spectrum, mass, brightness and distance from earth, creating a mesmerising sound map of the universe as viewed from our rotating planet.

Visitors will be accompanied down Bell Gate Drive on foot and into the gardens of Stowe after dark, before entering the semi-wilderness of the newly-opened Lamport Garden where the sounds of moving stars will be created like a giant celestial music box! Dress for the outdoors and bring a flashlight!  Click here for more information and tickets.

Dance of the particles

Choreographer Gilles Jobin‘s newest piece “QUANTUM” was inspired by his 2012 residency at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, where Jobin worked with physicists under the auspices of the Arts@CERN program.  For Jobin’s QUANTUM, six dancers will be illuminated by a kinetic light sculpture designed by another Arts@CERN alumnus Julius von Bismarck and sheathed in skin-tight costumes designed by Belgian fashion designer Jean-Paul Lespagnard.  Music for the production, composed by Carla Scaletti using Kyma, incorporates data from the Large Hadron Collider, including the 2012 data with evidence of the Higgs particle (thanks to physicists & inspiration partners Lily Asquith and Michael Krämer of the LHCSound  project).

Jobin-QUANTUMGilles Jobin’s QUANTUM, in rehearsal during July 2013. Photo: Gregory Batardon

The first performances will take place at the CERN CMS Experiment, directly above the detector where the Higgs Boson was discovered last year. Each evening, from 23 to 26 September 2013, audiences will be transported from Theatre Forum Meyrin to the CMS Experiment for the performance followed by a tour into the entrails of the large Hadron Collider and encounters with the artistic team and CERN physicists. For tickets, visit the Theatre Forum Meyrin site.

On the following weekend, there will be two performances a day as part of the CERN Open Days (28-29 September 2013) at the CMS experiment; CERN Open Days is one of the rare occasions when the entire CERN laboratory is open to the public.

The piece will then go on tour with electronic musician POL running the live Kyma score, beginning with 4 nights at the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale in Paris from 4-8 November 2013.

—

Dancers: Catarina Barbosa, Ruth Childs, Susana Panadés Díaz, Stanislas Charré, Martin Roehrich, Denis Terrasse

Science advisers: Michael Doser, Nicolas Chanon (CERN physicists)  

Engineer: Martin Schied

Costumes assistant: Léa Capisano

Production: Cie Gilles Jobin РGen̬ve

In collaboration with: Collide@CERN, Théâtre Forum Meyrin, CERN Expérience CMS

With the support of:  Fondation d’entreprise Hermès dans le cadre de son programme New Settings, Loterie Romande, Fondation Meyrinoise du Casino, Fondation Leenaards, Fondation Ernst Göhner

La Cie Gilles Jobin is supported by the Ville de Genève, la République et Canton de Genève et Pro Helvetia Fondation suisse  pour la culture.  Gilles Jobin est artiste associé à Bonlieu Scène nationale Annecy. 
Gilles Jobin et Julius von Bismarck ont tous les deux reçu le Prix Collide@CERN 2012.  
 QUANTUM est développée à partir de la résidence d’artistes Collide@CERN Genève.  
Versuch Unter Kreisen a été développée à partir de la résidence d’artiste Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN et exposée pour la première fois au Festival Ars Electronica à Linz, Autriche, en septembre 2012. 

IN SICH(T) emerging

On composer Bruno Liberda’s blog, you can actually witness the evolution of a new composition. “IN SICH(T)”, Liberda’s new site-specific piece, in the process of being written for Max Hegele’s memorial chapel in Vienna, includes performers who, in addition to playing their instruments, will be “playing the space”, exploring and transforming the many-seconds long natural reverberation and other acoustic characteristics of the highly reflective dome.

Follow along as Liberda adapts and expands the piece and develops his own notation specific to the space, and be sure to save the date of the premiere performance: April 20 2013.

LA area performances by Phil Curtis

Composer Phil Curtis will be performing in two up-coming Los Angeles-area events, bringing his own brand of live sonic palimpsests to the work of two LA-area artists. On November 6, he’ll be providing live Kyma electronics for a performance of Anne LeBaron’s Floodsongs (2012), a choral setting of three poems by Douglas Kearney performed by the Santa Clarita Master Chorale as part of the last ever SCREAM electronic music festival at REDCAT on Saturday November 10 at 8:30 PM.

The following weekend – Friday through Sunday with two shows on Saturday – Curtis is performing as part of a Furnace, a piece conceived by Carole Kim at Automata in Chinatown. Shows are at 7:00 pm November 16-18 (extra show at 9:30 pm on the 17th). Automata is at 504 Chung King Court. This will be a big multimedia interactive extravaganza with Butoh dance, Experimental Music, and Live Video Projection! Seats are VERY limited, so advance tickets are highly recommended!

For more information and tickets, visit the ticketing site or the Furnace facebook page.

The White Crane

Composer Silvia Matheus will be participating in the 2012 Garden of Memory at the Chapel of the Chimes with White Cranes, a performance piece in collaboration with Laura Glen Louis, poet, and William Thibault, video artist, and Maria Matheus, visual artist and designer, who made many of the paper cranes. The concept for this concert is inspired by the story of Sadako Sasaki (instigated by Maria Matheus and Silvia Matheus in conversation on Skype). Sadako Sasaki was a Hiroshima survivor at age 2, who later developed leukemia. The Japanese story is that anyone who folds a thousand cranes will be granted a wish; sadly, she fell short before she died at age twelve.

Silvia will be folding cranes prior to the performance and invites you to fold a crane and make a wish. During the performance, Laura will be reading poems from her chapbook, “Some, like elephants”, accompanied by visuals created by William Thibault and an electronic music score with live Kyma signal processing that Silvia composed, inspired by Laura’s poems (one of which talks briefly about Sadako). There will be white origami paper printed by Maria Matheus marking the paths to our performance space.

Please visit the Garden of Memory website for a list of all performers, and for ticket information. Events run simultaneously and you are encouraged to walk around to sample anything that strikes you. You will find White Cranes in the Chapel of the Chimes by entering through the main door and follow the white cranes upstairs. Please, check the time schedule when you arrive; the plan is for the performances to be at 6-7 pm and 8-9pm. Seating in the chapel is limited, so, please be prepared to stand:

21 June 2012
6-7 pm and 8-9 pm
Chapel Of The Chimes
4499 Piedmont Ave
Oakland, CA 94611
(510) 654-0123