Installations in 2013

Call 647-694-4607 to add your voice/sounds to the mix! As part of New Music 101 and the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio and Transmission Art, New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) presents the interactive installation Cellphonia: Toronto SONicGeo by Steve Bull and Scot Gresham-Lancaster. Call 647-694-4607 between April 8 and May 31 in order to contribute to Cellphonia's constantly transforming sound collage, which will be accessible at https://www.naisa.ca/ and http://www.cellphonia.org/Toronto.

The purpose of this sound installation is to narrate Indigenous stories of place in the City of Toronto. I wanted to create an artwork that encompassed Indigenous living histories that are linked to the land, water and people. The area of land selected for this project was the Humber River Valley, which includes Baby Point and Etienne Brule Park. Searching the land for an Indigenous history in a city that perpetually transforms is a daunting and difficult task. To further compound the growing cityscape, the Indigenous history of the land is situated in many conflicting stories from historians, archeologists, Indigenous nations and competing ethnic groups. All of these associations want to lay a claim to the area and link their knowledge to the territory. As well, there are numerous groups of people who seek to create an exciting, exotic and romantic history in order to satisfy tourism and promote interest in the City of Toronto. This project is a creative intervention, which challenges a linear \'factual\' settler accounts of the history of the area. The sound piece is a collection of voices and the knowledge of historians, archeologists, elders, various texts, the land, maps and archival documents and testimonies.

Working directly with live sounds from the vicinity of NAISA's Christie St location, Eleanor King will create a new site-specific audio installation which will shift and change over the duration of the exhibition. With many radio receivers tuned to one low powered FM radio signal, multiple mono speakers make for a nuanced sonic experience.

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.

(E)scapes: exploring the sonic relationship between body and space is an exhibition featuring two interactive sound sculptures that explore the relationship of the human body to the soundscape. New Adventures in Sound Art is grateful for the support of the Japan Foundation in making this exhibition possible.

This Place is No Place by Lawton Hall
http://www.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca/project.html?project_id=1265

This Place is No Place is a night-long intermedia installation that creates an ever-shifting aural-visual topography of found images and mechanical sounds, using digitally-controlled vintage 35mm slide projectors to create an immersive multi-sensory experience. Three times throughout the night, Lawton Hall transforms this imaginary landscape into a dynamic musical instrument, performing alongside some of Toronto's finest improvising musicians. Based upon the idea that "The nostalgic desires... to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition." (Stevlana Boym), This Place is No Place delves into the past through captured images and the noisy, mechanical processes that reinforce (or create) our collective memory. This Place is No Place will run as an installation from 7pm Oct 5 to 7am Oct 6 with the following exceptions: Performances using the installation as a musical instrument are scheduled to happen at: 9pm, 11pm and 1am. Lawton Hall creates music and intermedia art that explores perception, memory, and communication.

NAISA is once again delighted to be part of the Boo in the Barns event for another year. This year's SoundScary events include a chance for adults and children alike to turn their voice into something devilishly scary (look for the NAISA SoundScary table in the Covered Street) as well as to try their hand at moving sounds around a NAISA Space haunted with spine-chilling sounds (upstairs in the NAISA Space Studio #252).

Whispering Rain is an audio installation that displays a sonic, geographic dream. Three different terrains are represented by three separate field recordings, each played through a directional speaker. These are carefully placed in close enough proximity to each other (on the ceiling) for spectators to experience each terrain only a footstep or two from each other. This installation is presented in a darkened room with only a small and brightly lit, hand drawn map to represent this otherworldly topography.

"Tracings" by Nataliya Petkova consists of two works - "Geophonies" and "[x]Tensions" - being presented at the Art Gallery of Mississauga`s XIT gallery and co-presented with New Adventures in Sound Art. Petkova describes "Geophonies" and "[x]Tensions" as being part of an ensemble of instruments for territorial readings and sound performances that strive to shift our everyday environmental perceptions and assign sound characteristics to visual geography. Using steel needles, as in phonographs, they translate immediate territorial texture into aleatory and unrepeatable sound compositions.