IEIE, Reflected, Reflected

University of California, San Diego, 2008

Ultra Sounds. The Sonic Art of Polish Radio Experimental Studio, ed. by David Crowley, Kehrer Verlag, 2019

2016

This paper describes a long term, collaborative project Sound Spaces. Within this project we creatively investigated various environments and built a collection of artworks in response to material gathered through a number of practical field visits. Our responses were presented in numerous, idiosyncratic ways and took shape through a number of concerted making activities. The work was conducted both in and with the public, allowing participants to inform the creative decisions made throughout the project as well as experiencing the building of the artworks. Within this essay we report on our process, presentation and offer alternative methods for collecting material and presenting representations of space. We describe the many responses made during our time and related these to research concerns relevant to the NIME community. We conclude with our findings and, through the production of an annotated portfolio, offer our main emerging themes as points of discussion.

Mika Vainio: 50 Hz, 2020

is known in his homeland primarily for his minimalistic electronic music and he achieved international acclaim as a pioneering avant-garde composer. What is less well known to many Finns is that, in addition to carving out a notable musical career, Vainio also distinguished himself as an accomplished sound artist within the domain of contemporary art. In the late 1990s, he began exhibiting spatial sound installations in many group exhibitions, mainly in continental Europe and North America. Sound art rose to prominence in contemporary art in the late 1990s through exhibition projects foregrounding sound in its various forms and meanings. 1 During this period, Vainio created a number of sound installations for exhibitions, both as solo projects and in collaboration with other musicians and artists, such as his fellow member of the band Pan Sonic, Ilpo Väisänen; the German artist and composer Carsten Nicolai; and the Italian-born artist Micol Assaëli. In addition to creating his own sound installations, Vainio collaborated actively with many artists and choreographers, composing soundscapes and music for their various works. 2 1 The sound art boom took off in earnest around the turn of the millennium. Among the exhibitions then featuring sound and aurality in contemporary art were 'Sonic Boom: The Art of Sound' at London's Hayward Gallery (2000) and 'Volume: Bed of Sound' (2000) at New York's MoMA PS1. Vainio took part in both exhibitions together with Ilpo Väisänen. A few years later Vainio was invited to take part in 'Frequencies [Hz]: Audiovisual space'

Continuum, 1994

Sound installations afford the perceiver time to consider the position of sounds in space over a longer time span than other forms of musical or performance art. As such they are totally dependent on some form of continuous sound reproduction or automated technological devices. How artists choose to use technological systems of all kinds effects the possible poetic result. They are means to an artistic end, defined, codified and implemented by artists who choose to work in one way or another for artistic and expedient reasons. The purpose of technology-and acquiring the knowledge for its implementation once the appropriate choice has been made-remains one of the critical issues for many contemporary artists. The following article considers three examples of the ways in which specific choices have been made for specific artistic ends. My installation "Time Warps" (1991) was a solo exhibition based on an artist-designed audience interactive multitrack playback system. Hellen Sky and John McCormick's collaborative installation "Tactile Memoirs" (1992) used sounds to activate an animation of images from a photographic exhibition onto a TV screen via computer. "The White Room" (1992) was a collaboration by Vineta Lagzdina, Warren Burt, Alan Lamb, Ernie Althoff and myself entailing acoustic, mechanical and computer generated sounds, an integrated sound water light contingency, and several sound performances by two composers. Each piece resolves the artist technology interface in a specific way to a unique end.

The article deals with the artistic and curatorial process of "Weather Station", a sound-based exhibition and the Finnish contribution to the Prague Quadrennial for Performance Design and Space 2015 (PQ 2015). We wanted to highlight the role of sound as a scenographic material – sensual, spatial, performative, unexpected. One of the reasons for bringing sound into the frontline in our PQ 2015 contribution is that scenic sound art is going through an interesting and energetic phase in Finland. The spectrum of electronic music, experimental sound, transdisciplinary approaches and sound research are increasingly well-recognized areas within the contemporary performing arts. The exposition was inspired by the Quadrennial's central theme of ‘Music, Weather, Politics’ – and we chose Weather, with emphasis on sound art and sound design. In our call for proposals we invited our colleagues and fellow artists to consider weather and sound – as parallel actors – in terms of space, condition and environment. The curator of the PQ 2015 Weather section, Simon Banham, articulated the theme in a way that inspired us in its ambiguity and open-ended formulation that seemed to leave wild space for unexpected and super-imaginary processes. For us this worked best as an activator towards imagining potential spaces that were not necessarily limited by the imperatives of meaning-economies that the tradition of modernist theatre and scenography has been burdened with for decades. Our aim was rather to take off from what might be called a post-dramatic premise, and create an event that would highlight artistic processes and working methods that tackle the given themes with a peculiar curiosity and a whimsical and experimental attitude. We invited artists and designers to ponder on what kinds of (re)articulations and (re)formulations may come to the fore by bringing together sound-based performative situations with an interactive, unexpected, untamed factor such as weather. Contributors were encouraged to ‘think outside the box’, and to consider the spatial form, the visual features and embodied qualities of their proposal. They were asked to submit performative works or situations that foregrounded the spatiality, embodied experientiality and multisensory qualities in the mixing of sound and weather in refined and contextualized, yet open-ended and multidimensional ways. Published in Theatre and Performance Design, Vol. 2 , Iss. 1-2,2016. Authors: Maiju Loukola with Heidi Soidinsalo, Antti Mäkelä, Kristian Ekholm, Elina Lifländer, Nanni Vapaavuori and Antti Nykyri

Leonardo Music Journal, 2016