Installations in 2014

In March, 2012 New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) turns 13! Back by popular demand, the NAISA Sound Bash returns. On March 12, 2001, New Adventures in Sound Art became a not-for-profit organization, expanding its programming that year from one festival (Sound Travels) to 3 and committing to providing year-round sound art programming for all ages.

Since its inception in March 2001, New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) has provided a home for the sonic imagination in Toronto, a place where anyone can explore art through sound. As NAISA turns 13, we encourage you to join in the celebration as you discover the potential for music in everyday sounds. There is a musician and sound artist within us all. Let the NAISA Sound Bash open that creative door.- Darren Copeland, NAISA Artistic Director

For the month of March, NAISA's installation space will be filled with new selection of everyday objects especially selected for the interesting sounds they make when struck or played, offering you a chance to play with sound and manipulate it live. Open every Saturday in March, 10am - 3pm or by appointment with added times during the March Break Fun Fair. The 2014 edition of the NAISA Sound Bash installation will be designed by McMaster interns Ben Barrett-Forest and Mackenzie Ewing.

The aluCIne Festival presents the installation Forest by Balam Soto at the NAISA Space. It will open on Saturday April 5th with a performance by Hector Centeno of a soundscape work in response to the installation. Forest is an interactive installation based on a custom-made touch sensor providing a seamless interaction between humans and technology. A prolific artist, Balam Soto has exhibited his new media artwork in fine art venues worldwide and is based in Hartford, Connecticut.

Fear Eats the Soul is a sound and light composition displaying the full dialogue of Angst Essen Seele Auf, (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, converted to Morse code in the form of two Obstacle lights similar to those seen on top of buildings and bridges. One light represents the Moroccan immigrant, Ali; the other light represents the older working class German, Elsi. The lights are set at two visible points and can communicate via x-bee across a room, space, or landscape through a Raspberry Pi microcomputer. An FM station broadcasts the Morse code audio. The composition is an ongoing loop with a duration of up to ten hours. The result, a slow abstracted dialogue of Ali and Elsi, is a representation of their relationship translated from German, to English, to Morse code. It is a digital haunting of old technology hidden amongst a digital space.

“Xerocks” is an installation designed to turn two copying machines into musical instruments. Two photocopiers, massive and imposing, are in the middle of a dark room. Several spotlights are trained on these iconic objects like sculptures on display, accentuating their gleaming surfaces. Microphones, placed at strategic points inside the machine, capture the clatter of their internal workings. The body of the machines, moreover, holds a computer running a sound-processing program. The sounds given off by the running of the machines are broadcast via a system of loudspeakers around the room. Press a button on the machine and that will trigger a copying cycle, simultaneously generating a sequence of sounds. By (mis)appropriating and thereby alienating this familiar piece of office equipment, “Xerocks” ironically morphs an imaging apparatus into a sound production device. The installation pays homage to familiar machines and technologies that are soon to become obsolete: it’s a last stand of sorts, one final recycling before consignment to the scrapheap of technological history.

Real-time sound synthesis system CataRT by Diemo Schwarz. The first version of the installation has been produced in 2009 by Espace Multimédia Gantner in Bourogne France, with suport of la SCAM. Xerocks is sponsored by Direct Office Solutions.

Biography:

From industrial music in the 1980s (with the band Nox) to an exploration of electronic and digital arts in our day, Cécile Babiole’s artistic trajectory has evolved laterally, cutting across the realms of music and the visual arts. Far from de rigueur interdisciplinarianism, her works move back and forth between one language and another, bleeding each code into the other in an ongoing reinterpretation of the relationship between technique and visual or sound arts. Whether staged in the public realm (streets, busses) or in private venues (galleries, concert halls), her latest installations and performances question our prevailing systems of representation and communication – from an original and ironic angle. Her work is shown internationally : Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, Transmediale Berlin, Elektra Montreal, Arsenal Riga, NAMOC Beijing ...

http://www.babiole.net/spip.php?page=sommaire-en

See a video of Xerocks at http://vimeo.com/6571461

ongoing annual interactive installation

Atacama is a sound installation that maps the locations of the soundscape recordings while providing an opportunity for the listener to experience the soundscapes through personal listening stations. In 2012, the artist travelled to the Atacama Desert in order to explore and record the sound of ruins left by humankind. He was interested in natural phenomena, like wind, sand or electromagnetic radiation, and how these phenomena activate the ruins and set a new landscape.

Visit the NAISA table from 2 to 8 pm at Yonge-Dundas Square and enjoy interactive fun with sound using NAISAtrons and laptop performance tools.

Hive, by Hopkins Duffield, is a sound sculpture that explores convergences between technology and nature using wasp architectures created from found and fabricated parts.

NAISA is once again delighted to be part of the Boo! at 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).