Home Cart Listen Calendar Contact
4.jpg

Installations in 2011

Click Here for More Past Installations

Installations presented in 2011


Avaaz interactive installation
By Dipna Horra
April 30, 2011 to May 21, 2011
Fridays 12:00 pm to 3:00 pm - Saturdays 10:00 am to 2:00 pm
Opening Day Artist Talk on Saturday April 30 @ 1:30 pm
The NAISA Space, #252
Admission by donation
The main sculpture of the Avaaz installation is a Colonial Times table with four accompanying chairs for listeners to sit in. This sculpture plays an audio recording of the artist's father telling the story of his great-grandfather’s journey from the Punjab to Kenya and his subsequent founding of newspaper called The Colonial Times. In this work we also hear recordings of the artist as a child singing songs in English and French. In Avaaz, the artist transformed a teapot, sugar bowl, teacups, a table, a window and a vent into speakers. Sound and narrative are used in this work to transport the viewer between different historical moments and places – the Punjab, Kenya, Ottawa.
The Electrostatic Bell Choir installation
By Darsha Hewitt
May 20, 2011 to May 29, 2011
Fridays 12:00 pm to 3:00 pm - Saturdays 10:00 am to 2:00 pm
Artscape Wychwood Barns, 2nd floor
Admission by donation
The Electrostatic Bell Choir consists of small bells and pith balls suspended in front of cathode-ray tube televisions. The TVs are muted and tuned to various channels of white noise. A control circuit cycles them on and off in alternating sequences, building up static charges that attract the pith balls and cause them to waver and lightly strike the bells; resulting in quasi-melodic bell compositions. The movement of these apparatuses is subtle and the sound is delicate.
Darsha Hewitt is a Canadian/Berlin based artist known for her examinations of communication technology in the domestic sphere and her use of DIY aesthetics and practices as an artistic method. Her work is interdisciplinary and often uses electronic sound as a central medium. She makes electromechanical sound installations, drawings, audio-visual works, how-to videos, sculptural installations and experimental performances with handmade electronics. Darsha is a visiting faculty member in Sound Studies and Sonic Art at the Art University of Berlin.
Synthecycletron
By Barry Prophet
July 16, 2011
24 hours, 7 days a week
Toronto Island
FREE
Visitors that encounter the "Synthecycletron," a favourite amongst Toronto cyclists, generate power by pedalling on stationary bicycles which in turn activate synthesizers and generate sounds connected to their movements.
Barry Prophet is a composer, percussionist, and sculptor whose music has appeared in galleries and theatres in Canada, United States and Europe. Creating unique sounds since 1979, he has exhibited and performed on percussion sculptures at art galleries throughout Ontario and elsewhere. Barry's micro tonally tuned glass lithophones have been featured in performance venues throughout the country and his 1997 recording 'Crystal Bones' (CD) has been choreographed to by international dance artists. Barry has led traditional and experimental percussion programs for students and educators across Canada since 1983.
“Welcome to My Parlour”
By Chan Ka Nin
July 22, 2011 to September 3, 2011
Fridays 12:00 pm to 3:00 pm - Saturdays 10:00 am to 2:00 pm
except Aug 19 and 20 plus demonstration by Artist on August 10 from 6 to 8 pm
NAISA Space, Artscape Wychwood Barns, 601 Christie #252, Toronto
Admission by donation
Anyone encountering this six foot spider-shaped sound sculpture are encouraged to touch the strings. Loud and wonderful sounds will result. He/she is encouraged to move through the sculpture to the back end where the strings are tuned in microtonal intervals. This is symbolic of yielding to temptation and crossing the line to the “dark side”. More than one participant can jam on it at the same time, producing both tonal and atonal sounds.
Sonic Spaces: The Kinetics of Sound Interactive Installation
opens during Nuit Blanche
By Shawn Pinchbeck
October 7, 2011 to October 29, 2012
Fridays 12:12 am to 12:15 am - Saturdays 12:10 am to 12:14 am
opens during Nuit Blanche continues Oct 7 to 29 (Friday noon - 3 pm, Saturdays 10 am - 1 pm)
NAISA Space, Artscape Wychwood Barns, 601 Christie #252
Sonic Spaces is a computer interactive sound installation for a public space. The impetus behind this work is to allow passers-by the opportunity to sonically explore the movement of their bodies through the space by transforming this movement into a multi-channel acousmatic sound environment.
Shawn Pinchbeck is an award winning artist based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and Viljandi, Estonia. He is a multi-faceted artist: electroacoustic music composer, sound designer, audio engineer, performer, media artist, curator and educator. His artworks explore all things that sound, merging elements such as video, computer interaction, multi-speaker environments, sensors and electronics, interdisciplinary performance and installation art.
Sounds Scary Treasure Hunt
during the WBCA 'BOO' at the Barns event
By NAISA
October 29, 2011, 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Various locations at the Artscape Wychwood Barns, 601 Christie St., Toronto
Go on a Halloween sound treasure hunt at the Artscape Wychwood Barns and then learn about the secrets behind how sounds are made in the movies.
SOUNDplay Videomusic Installation
By Max Alexander, Bjørn Erik Haugen, Grady Gerbacht and Louise Harris
November 2, 2011 to November 26, 2011
Thursdays 12:10 am to 12:14 am - Fridays 12:10 am to 12:14 am - Saturdays 12:10 am to 12:14 am
NAISA Space, 601 Christie St #252, Toronto
Empire by Max Alexander
Baudrichord by Bjørn Erik Haugen
A pale shade of Grey by Bjørn Erik Haugen
62931-62943 by Grady Gerbracht
Filling by Laurie Radford
fuzee by Louise Harris

An international collection of videomusic works selected from the 2011 NAISA call for submissions on the theme of “About Time” will be on display in the NAISA Space window.

Program:
I. Empire by Max Alexander
Empire is an audiovisual piece that is a result of a five-hour live audio performance in a four-story chute in Chicago in summer 2009. The audio was improvised based on existing recordings, and then recreated for the video version of the piece. The piece attempts to render the natural as something strictly formal, as images of sunset become read more and more as pure colour throughout the stages of the piece. Consequently, time becomes less and less significant throughout.
II. Baudrichord by Bjørn Erik Haugen
Baudrichord is based on an interview of the french post-modernist theoretician Jean Baudrillard. I wanted to make use of Baudrillard`s theories of the simulacra on himself as a source. The use is ambivalent since I both am inspired and critical of his theories. His spoken words are analyzed by a program that interprets his voice into tones, or midi-notes. These notes are then fed into a piano that plays these notes mechanically. With that I mean that you can see the tones played, the keys are playing without anybody but the computer moving them. The piece is a simulacra, that makes use of Baudrillard speaking, both as a source and a symbol of his theories creating a soundpiece made out of notes. This is a regression since his voice is reduced to notes. The audience looses the content of what is being said in the interview. Instead they hear a piece for piano made out of him talking on the video.
III. A Pale Shade of Grey by Bjørn Erik Haugen
A Pale Shade of Grey is an electroacoustic composition made out of speeches by Hitler. The speeches have been heavily cleansed for noise, in such a way that the content of what is actually being said, is impossible to get comprehend. The non-?gurative video is a drawing made out of the sounds of the composition. It continually redraws itself in grey tones and is a research in duration and perception of light in video. The video has a link to the material used for the composition: That nazism slowly entered the world as something we did not see the consequences of before it was too late, that of course, is not true. My intention and starting point with this work is to see if it is possible to use or reuse a material that is demonized in a composition.
IV. 62931-62943 by Grady Gerbracht
62931-62943 maps the trajectory of power through the rural landscape. The video, through a very abstract narrative, tells the story of my discovery of and fascination with a unique sonic phenomenon. It chronicles my encounters with imaginary architectures of pure vibration in what I call "agricultural time" - a slower kind of time within which the local agrarian community functions. Its measure is based on natural and seasonal rhythms like the growth of crops, the fattening of animals, and the change of seasons.
V. fuzee by Louise Harris
A fuzee (fusee) is a cone-shaped pulley with a spiral groove used in chord or chain-winding clocks. fuzee is an 8 minute audio/video piece in which sonic momentum is translated into visual movement in a pre-defined and very specific way. The sonic component of 'fuzee' is made up entirely of recordings of clocks chiming or ticking. The visual component makes abstract reference to the inner workings and mechanical motion of clocks and other time pieces.
VI. Filling by Laurie Radford
The videomusic work Filling explores the concept of "filling": the filling of the visual and aural fields, the filling of visual and aural space, the filling of the 'frame' of the screen, and the filling of time with audiovisual materials that present diverse contrasts and plays of texture, density, momentum, geometry and aural-visual interactions.