thoughtsandtalks

http://www.happynewfestival.be/Klinkende_Stad.html

MAHILA is a multi media project that engages with women empowerment in small communities, here especially focused on Indian countrywomen affected by climate change. The project is presented in a twofold installation. One room unveils a multiple speaker ante-chamber that guides to the second room where a film is shown. The first room gives a taste of the material and atmosphere that the artists captured during their research in India. By the use of polyphonic principles and theatrical setups Billy Bultheel creates a simple yet elegant sound installation approaching the contemplative Indian landscape.
The second room shows a film made by Annemie Maes, which is a reflective documentary on women empowerment, going from west to east and vice versa.
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Thursday, september 11th, I met this gypsy women in Skopje. She was sitting on the sidewalk of a big street, and she was shouting and screaming as if she gave a very personal performance. Nobody of the passers by gave her any attention. I was struck by her behaviour. Completely free, the street was clearly her natural habitat.
The moment she noticed my attention for her, she was happy to have some interested public, finally. She grew in her performing role, singing, telling a lot of things that I did not understand. She became more and more sad, concerned. Still none of the passers by gave her any attention. They seemed to be ashamed for what she was telling. Once again, language was acting on a second level for me. Names of children (I guess), mostly girls. Words like mobsters, passports, abortus, dinars and deportation.
I made up my own story about her. The next day I asked Jasna, one of the workshop participants, to translate what the gypsywoman told me. I decided to film Jasna while she was making a simultaneous translation. I will edit both voices on top of each other, as a testimonial and a comment.

cagehappening at concertgebouw Brugge.

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performance for carillon: imaginary landscape nr.3
(soundquality: open-air recording with mobile phone)

I have nothing to say /
and I am saying it /
and that is poetry /
as I needed it.
[ John Cage :: lecture on nothing / silence ]

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The bat mosque (Khirki Masjid) in Khirki Village, Delhi South.
The monumental mosque dates from 1380 and the domes in the ceiling are filled with bats. They make these funny noises, as they were humans quarreling with each other …

Sounds of the Djna El Fna square and the Marrakech souk.
Best listen with binaural headphones.

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“… as I see it, poetry is not prose simply because poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements [time, sound] to be introduced into the world of words.”
John Cage

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notovo phase#2
As a generative sound installation No2Pho plays with a connected set of elements. It is composed of dissonant synthetic voices, changing in real time from speech to sound.

more … on the NoToVo-project

You define yourself as a digital materialist. Can you explain what you mean by this, and what is your artistic background.

Digital materialism is the fundamental concept for my audio-visual work: installations and performances. I see the digital computer not as a tool, but as a raw material for generating artworks, similar to stone, wood, iron and so on.
In a digital computer you have huge clusters of numbers, such as files and data. These numbers have no forms, and in order to perceptualize them we need to transform the numbers into sound, images, text, and so on. The important point is how to perceptualize the numbers inside the computer, how we transform them into their perceptual form. That is the basic approach for creating art.
People often say it is very important how to digitize something, but i think the most important point is how to perceptualize the digital itself. The raw material is only numbers, without any form, and the way we transform this raw materials into a perceptual form is the basic approach of my digital work.

Do you mean by this that an artist should see from start beyond the numbers a certain form of audio and visuals?

What is the starting point? The starting point are the numbers, not the physical world. Starting from the digital domain is the most important approach for the digital materialist. These numbers are some kind of conceptual material and than they transform into a concrete form.
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digital dada from buda(pest)

The Re:activism conference addresses what role social activism can play in the broad process in which emerging new media technologies transform existing structures of cultural, economic and political power.
The Sonic Tags project is to build small FM-transmitters and place a bunch of them in the public city-space. Supplied with a street-map, a small radio-receiver and headphones, the public can discover a city-center tagged with sound-messages, sometimes poetic, sometimes activist, sometimes just informative.