September 14th there’s an opening concert for the 4th Rainforest installation workshop that Derek Holzer and I’ve done together. This time we have 6 local participants and it is the first time it is set up in public space. We’re collaborating with and are supported by Kulturforvaltningen, Århus Kommune and www.byiby.dk. In Århus we’re situated amidst a very interesting ongoing temporary urban space experiment right in the center of Århus. (see below for location)
The opening starts at 17 hrs with a concert and saturday and sunday between 12-17 the Rainforest will run as an ongoing performance installation. Free entry and everybody is invited to come and have a go with (amongst other stuff) our 3 meter long scrapmetal urinal.
Playful immediatism and physical simultaneity merged with radical methods of interventionism. This is a documentation from a workshop on tactile-acoustic interventionism, where the participants investigate and experiment with resonant properties of objects and structures in public space.
After a phase of experimenting, the participants go into setting up temporary sound installations, where selected objects are transformed into acoustic sources and sounding units. Thus the end results of the workshop is a ‘hidden’ soundinstallation where the existing objects and structures in public space are converted into “instruments” and “speakers”.
The underlying mission is to emphazise the positive aspects of using sound as prime medium of acquirement and perceptionally challenge a visually dominated and over-crowded public and communicative space.
My tech-setup is a special developed sound system, optimized to mobilty and quick independent interventions. Some challenge since sound installation art can be some of the most gear-heavy stuff
The workshop/installation project Rainforest has been approved by the FullPull festival to be part of their festival-event, september 2011 in Malmø.
Derek Holzer and I will hold a weeklong workshop with 8 participants, where we’ll build up an experimental feed-back chaos-generating installation sound-system out of old metal-trash.
See video and more stuff here, from the last Rainforest project we did in Berlin at the Club Transmediale festival.
This years Suset festival had invited CEO to do our workshop/concert package.
Nice setting in the midst of far out countryside and we had a nice workshopping day + a great concert involving guest star Derek Holzer on speaker box.
You can listen to the concert at our homepage here
This workshop I held as part of the festival Tuned City in Tallin, European Cultural Capital 2011.
By cooperating in a small group of workshop participants, a series excercises with sound installations were produced through investigating, experimenting, learning and performing with the acoustic possibilities of a city.
The method I’ve developed is basically to experiment with what I call the Tactile-Acoustic Interventionist approach. This meaning, to use the physical and tactile aspects of acoustics to adapt the everyday objects and structures in our urban surroundings. A bit like street art but with the absolute nerdish approach of sound art
From day to day, different sites of interest in Tallin were located and intervened with by testing the acoustic nature and adding acoustic energy in the objects and structures.
To perform this workshop I’ve developed a special Tactile Acoustic Interventionist System, that relies on principles of transduction, ie. the converting of energy from one form to another. The system uses transduction to set in vibration any objects or structures of choice in order to make sounding units. At the core of this system are certain speaker driver units called audio transducers. Their function can be described as a speaker magnet seperated from it’s cone and cabinet, and specially designed to flexible attachment and optimal transferring of vibrational energy to any given material attached upon. This technology is being used in as vast areas as crash-testing bridge-constructions, sonar, guitar pickups and of course home theaters and butt-kickers.
It might seem technically complicated (some of it is) but I made sure that to participate in the workshop only a low entry level on the tech-factor was demanded. Hence, none of the participants had worked with sound-installations before. And as a finishing result, the workshop developed to do a final, really nice, and well disguised interactive installation at a public playground in downtown Tallin.
The workshop results were presented to a general audience, who could also try the system by own hands. Also, we did a small performance where workshop participants together with the audience played on the installation using a laptop-soundcard interface and various found objects, i.e. trash from public space.
As part of the Your Space area, Obernkarbi and Anders Børup were invited to do a series of workshops in Circuit Bending.
Circuit Bending is somewhat like the art of hacking and breaking circuits in battery driven toy-instruments and other sound-giving toys in order to (un)obtain controlled bit-chaotic sound collages, variations of “Old McDonald” in §-minor etc.
The workshops were held as open sessions so everybody could come by and have a try in the world of circuit bending.
At the end of the day, each session ended up with a concert were all participants were invited to join in and give a blast with their newly bended noice-makers.
The workshops were held sunday june 26th and friday 1st of july from 12-20 hrs.
Anders Børup and Obernkarbi are part of a rare species among orchestras: The true and pure Circuit Bending band “CEO: Bend-o-Rama”, that does Circuit Bending concerts and workshops (among others at Roskilde Festival 2010).
As part of the Tuned City festival in Tallin, july 2011, Obernkarbi is invited to do a workshop and a series of installations in public space and leftover areas with the newly developed Tactile-Acoustic Interventionist System.
With this system it is possible to inject and extract sounds with public structures as benches, signs, trashcans etc., making everything a potential invisible tactile-acoustic unit.
Another CEO workshop and performance at the organic and social-economically driven restaurant Soup A Natural took place on march 20th as part of their continuous program Sofa Sessions introducing the underground music environment to a broad range of soup hungry copenhageners. Great concept, good karma and delicious food!
This project was done in collaboration with Derek Holzer, my friend and berlin-based sound-artist.
It was based on the ideas of the great performer and composer David Tudor, and his series of compositions entitled “Rainforest”. Together with a selected group of workshop participants – 7 musicians and sound-artists from around Europe – we build and performed with a system that could both send and recieve audio-signals through scrap-metal objects in an 8×8 matrix mixer setup.
Instantly composed and backfeeding soundscapes was injected into carefully prepared metalobjects found at the local scrapyard & well-hung at the lounge-space of West Germany. My dearest, vintage Rolen-Star transducers was of course a central part of the system and they felt as they’d returned to a previous life, since the original Tudor-Rainforest pieces was powered by the same Rolen-Star models.
After 4 days of building and getting to know this mysterious thing we’d created, the installation was open to the general public/guests of Club Transmediale for the rest of the festival.
See online magazine Vague Terrain #19 curated by Derek Holzer on Schematics as Score, exploring some of the underlying considerations behind Regenwald.
