New Adventures in Sound Art’s (NAISA) is proud to present the 23rd edition of its SOUNDplay Festival. SOUNDplay is an annual fall Festival that encourages new avenues of exploration between sound and new media. This year’s edition connects NAISA’s 2024 theme of Reimagine to the immense world of play available to artists wishing to abstract both images and sounds.
The festival this year includes a diverse collection of artists from across Canada that are working in a variety of disciplines. Festival artists include composers and media artists Colin Frank, Véro Marengère and Edgardo Moreno, the collaborative duos of media artists Mark Trimmings and Brady Marks and ceramic artist April Martin and musician and poet Ben McCarthy as well as the trio of computer artist Laura De Decker, media artist Stefan A. Rose and poet and painter Herménégilde Chiasson. Also included in the festival is a return from last year of the 48-Hour Sound Art Challenge and an adaptation of the Wetland Project for a special YouTube livestream organized by Christof Migone.
“The artists in SOUNDplay Reimagine places, actions, objects. On the surface they depart abstractly from their subjects but in doing so they afford us a deep immersion into a hidden and unexpected beauty.” — Darren Copeland, Artistic Director, New Adventures in Sound Art
A Soundmap of Sherbrooke’s Machine Songs
By Colin Frank
September 26, 2024 to January 6, 2025. Open 10 am to 4 pm Thursday to Monday.
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario
Pay by Donation
This interactive installation allows visitors to virtually explore machine sounds from the city of Sherbrooke, Québec. Machines pervade urban environments, yet their sonic performances are often overlooked. From air conditioners to electrical boxes, mechanical sounds resonate all around us, forming urban soundscapes that are frequently ignored. Visitors can navigate a virtual environment comprising of field recordings and 3D models the artist made of machines encountered in Sherbrooke. Through the compression and digitization of those everyday spaces, the industrial urban environment becomes unexpectedly aesthetic, providing a reimagination of the city whereby non-humans have their own voices, and beauty arises from the functionality of industrial objects.
By Colin Frank
September 26, 2024 to January 6, 2025. Open 10 am to 4 pm Thursday to Monday.
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario
Pay by Donation
This interactive installation allows visitors to virtually explore machine sounds from the city of Sherbrooke, Québec. Machines pervade urban environments, yet their sonic performances are often overlooked. From air conditioners to electrical boxes, mechanical sounds resonate all around us, forming urban soundscapes that are frequently ignored. Visitors can navigate a virtual environment comprising of field recordings and 3D models the artist made of machines encountered in Sherbrooke. Through the compression and digitization of those everyday spaces, the industrial urban environment becomes unexpectedly aesthetic, providing a reimagination of the city whereby non-humans have their own voices, and beauty arises from the functionality of industrial objects.
Colin Frank is a percussionist, field recordist, installation artist, improviser, and multimedia composer. He is a founding member of Brutalust and Drift Ensemble, and has worked notably with the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, and TAK Ensemble. His installations have appeared at Salem Art Works, Dai Hall, and Analix Forever. His PhD dissertation at the University of Huddersfield considered how unconventional instruments and objects influence his creative process. He teaches percussion, improvisation, and experimental music. Click Here for his website.
Borderline (Almaguin Highlands): Collective counter mapping through sonic geographies
By Jessica Thompson
Open after September 14, 2023. Open 10 am to 4 pm Thursday to Monday.
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario
Pay by Donation
By Jessica Thompson
Open after September 14, 2023. Open 10 am to 4 pm Thursday to Monday.
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario
Pay by Donation
Borderline is a critical mapmaking project that uses sound to illuminate social and economic differences in local geographies. Visitors to the NAISA North Media Arts Centre are invited to contribute to a large-scale soundmap of the Almaguin Highlands by borrowing a toolkit to map sounds in one of the villages of their choice, or by using the Borderline mobile app. The sounds collected will be added to the map on an ongoing basis.
The Borderline iOS app enables users to automatically map sounds in their environment, put them in dialogue with other forms of data, and generate interactive soundscapes by playing sounds back into the environment. Click here to download
The Borderline iOS app enables users to automatically map sounds in their environment, put them in dialogue with other forms of data, and generate interactive soundscapes by playing sounds back into the environment. Click here to download
Jessica Thompson is a media artist working in sound, performance and mobile technologies. Her interactive artworks have shown at venues such as the International Symposium of Electronic Art (San Jose, Dubai, Vancouver), the Conflux Festival (New York), Thinking Metropolis (Copenhagen), Beyond/In Western New York (Buffalo), NIME (Oslo), Artists’ Walks (New York), Locus Sonus (Aix-en-Provence), the AGW Triennial (Windsor), InterACTION (Kitchener), HASTAC (Vancouver), Re:Sound (Aalborg), and Entorno Encuentro Exploración (Pamplona), The Politics of Sound (Lethbridge) and CAFKA (Kitchener). She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Government of Ontario.
The Sensation of Distribution
By Mitchell Akiyama and Brady Peters
Open 24/7 year round.
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario
By Mitchell Akiyama and Brady Peters
Open 24/7 year round.
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario
The Sensation of Distribution is a reprise of Mitchell Akiyama and Brady Peters’s 2019 work, The Distribution of Sensation, which they created while artists in residence at The Bentway, a large, urban public space situated under an elevated highway in downtown Toronto. The Distribution of Sensation was a sound sculpture composed of PVC pipes installed around The Bentway that invited visitors to listen through the natural resonance of the cylinders, creating a series of musical experiences across the site. Mimic the plumbing infrastructure of the site, the installation was meant to create aesthetic slippages that might potentially lead to confusion as to what exactly functioned or counted as art.
The re-installation of this work at NAISA blends the pipe sculptures into a more domestic vernacular. Mounted on NAISA’s exterior walls to impersonate furnace vents and erupting from the ground to suggest rogue plumbing gone awry, The Sensation of Distribution re-invites visitors to explore the unnoticed or imminent sonic and aesthetic potential of our built environment.
The re-installation of this work at NAISA blends the pipe sculptures into a more domestic vernacular. Mounted on NAISA’s exterior walls to impersonate furnace vents and erupting from the ground to suggest rogue plumbing gone awry, The Sensation of Distribution re-invites visitors to explore the unnoticed or imminent sonic and aesthetic potential of our built environment.
Mitchell Akiyama is a Toronto-based scholar, composer, and artist. His eclectic body of work includes writings about plants, animals, cities, and sound art; scores for film and dance; and objects and installations that trouble received ideas about history, perception, and sensory experience. Akiyama’s output has appeared in commensurately miscellaneous sources such as Leonardo Music Journal, ISEA, Sonar Music Festival (Barcelona), Raster-Noton Records (Berlin), Gendai Gallery (Toronto), and in many other exhibitions, publications, and festivals. He holds a PhD in communications from McGill University, an MFA from Concordia University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto.
Brady Peters is a Canadian designer and researcher who successfully bridges technology and design. He has significant expertise in the use and development of design technology, in integrative construction, and in digital fabrication. With many years of experience in practice, Peters has successfully collaborated with experts in architecture, engineering, and computer science.
He specializes in architectural acoustics, environmental simulation, computational design, and digital fabrication. He uses computer programming, parametric modelling, and simulation to design performance-driven forms, and is skilled in the communication and fabrication of buildings with complex geometry. He received his PhD in Architecture from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark, a Professional Master of Architecture from Dalhousie University, a Bachelor of Environmental Design (Distinction) from Dalhousie University, and, Bachelor of Science in Geography (Distinction) from the University of Victoria.