Performances Presented in 2022

I. Speak(er) to the Land by John Hill
: Speak(er) to the Land was produced by John Hill. Aliya Pabani provided editorial support on behalf of Constellations. Thanks to the University of Wisconsin Oneida Language Dictionary Project.

This piece is dedicated to Maria Hinton, the Oneida speaker heard at the end of the piece, and to Ima "Akoh" Johnson, Mohawk-Cayuga faithkeeper and language teacher. This piece is also dedicated to the land and its defenders everywhere.

“This piece is a prayer and poem which speaks directly to the ancestors and the future generations through language. A prayer and a promise.

It's goal is to send a message to generations passed and generations to come in the Oneida language, which is endangered by settler-colonial violence. The piece features two voices, the English voice which is static and unmoving, and the Oneida voice, which moves in a counter-clockwise motion, representative of traditional Haudenosaunee dance practices. When Sky Woman, our great-grandmother, danced on the great turtle's back, she did so in a counter-clockwise motion, and so the Haudenosaunee people do so to honour her.

Haudenosaunee people understand our responsibility to the land that gave birth to us, and so this piece is an address to not only the generations that have long since returned to the land, but those who are set to inherit this land. Across Turtle Island, Indigenous people are fighting to protect their ways and the land, and this poem is a message, a promise, to the next seven generations that we will not stop fighting on behalf of the land and the water and the non-human beings.” - John Hill

II. Pointing At Canopus by Arif Mirbaghi
"The tortoise, you know, carries his house on his back. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot leave home." - The Anv?r-i Suhayl? or Lights of Canopus

Pointing At Canopus is a meditation on the nature of home, not in the brick-and-mortar sense, but the broader idea: a place of rest. Children of immigrants often separately compartmentalize these ideas. Home is a place we live but heritage is a space we occupy. There is a daily pivot between the cadences of interaction with our family and those of our friends or co-workers. Inevitably the lines blur, and as individuals we find ourselves on different points along a gradient.

Coming to Iran reversed this pivot for me. The language of my home life suddenly spilled out in the streets, flooded my conversations, my day to day. For the first time I was utilizing Farsi beyond the comfort of my family home— I became a Farsi speaker.

At the same time, English became a place of thoughtful saudade. I would be lulled to sleep by audiobooks. The meter and ornamentation of the language felt familiar but distant like a kind of reverb— I became an English listener.

Pointing At Canopus explores the waxing and waning of home and heritage. I hope to evoke in listeners a sense of transit. A feeling neither here nor there. The idea that home is the pivot, not the point. Sounds of moving vehicles. Extra-lingual umms & ahhs while a speaker connects sentences. 'Here' is a space, but 'there' is a mythology, a fable. We orbit our fables like atoms around a nucleus. Wherever we go, there we are again.

Pointing At Canopus was composed by Arif Mirbaghi and edited by Michelle Macklem and Jess Shane. It was made with the voices of over a dozen friends. Special thanks to Michael Eckert for his pedal steel improvisation and Parva Karkhaneh for her patient guidance.

III. I don't think it's my place by Sophia Steinert-Evoy
: an interpersonal, theoretical, and material exploration of climate change and complicity

This piece was produced by Sophia Steinert-Evoy with original boops by William Smith and help and trust from her anonymous friend, and editorial support from Jess Shane and Michelle Macklem.

"Energy usage and sound are two omnipresent components of our daily life. We're constantly trying to weigh our own wants and complicities against individual sacrifices and the perceived "difference" our actions can make. In this piece I wanted to capture an interpersonal interaction about climate and personal responsibility, so I spoke with a friend who works in the oil and gas industry. I found he has many of the same moral quandaries as those of us who consider ourselves to be less directly implicated in the production of fossil fuels, which brought up questions of personal responsibility. I captured sounds of latent energy usage in my daily life: the stove, the laundry machine, a lawnmower, my car, the garage door, the shower to highlight how integrated energy usage and thus destruction is. - Sophia Steinert-Evoy

IV. The Mystery Box by Nicole Pingon
This is a new work with notes to be released at a later date.

I. Sound Diary 21 by Zoe Gordon
Sound Diary 21 is a compilation of pieces that are made from recordings done at the urban shore of Thunder Bay in 2020 and 2021. The pieces are process based work that is looking at my relationship to water, through industrial drones and the recorder. I was also looking at it through a lens that centres violence and extraction as part of my art practice and using my listening/sound body to process it which is why there are songs included among the pieces. The pieces accompany the book 'Sound Diary 21'. The pieces were made with support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. To order the book and the piece go to her bandcamp page - https://cricketcave.bandcamp.com/album/sound-diary-21

II. Closer, Closer by Deirdre Morrison
Closer, Closer is a sound art composition that explores the rocky shoreline of Toronto’s Tommy Thompson Park. Blending ecology and technology, the piece uses processed field recordings to observe the details and variations of natural micro-processes that are often difficult to perceive.

III. Cullykhan Water by Pete Stollery
Cullykhan Water uses a number of recordings taken at Cullykhan Beach in north east Scotland, captured in one recording session over a period of one hour. Sounds range from tiny drips of rainwater to the crashing sea of the Moray Firth.

I. KippenHeimWeiler by Raphaël Néron
Kippenheimweiler is part of the Waldeinsamkeit cycle of work that I began working on in 2019. Waldeinsamkeit is a German word that describes a feeling of loneliness that one can experience in the forest. This feeling is generally perceived as positive. Shot entirely in the forest with 360 cameras, this series of work is inspired by my childhood memories in Germany.

II. Space_03 by Hector Centeno
This piece is part of Centeno's ongoing Space_ series of media art works. The works in the series are derived directly from the attentive and phenomenological exploration of a specific geographical/physical location. The majority of the visual and acoustic elements present in these pieces come from processing photogrammetry, spatial audio (ambisonic) and still images captured during a period of attentive immersion and observation that Centeno conducts while physically present at the recording location. This observation and recording technique follows mindfulness processes among others.

This new piece in the cycle was commissioned by New Adventures in Sound Art in honour of its 20th anniversary and the recording process for the piece was facilitated by a residency at Warbler's Roost in South River, Ontario. The recordings made at Warbler's Roost are used to create a photorealistic virtual place composed of 3D geometry and reactive spatial audio. From this content Centeno performs a real-time virtual exploration that determines the final recorded audiovisual sequence presented in this piece.

III. breathwatersoundscannon by Iddo Aharony and Arom Choi
“Now / make room in the mouth / for grassesgrassesgrasses” reads the epigraph opening Layli Long Soldier’s poetry collection Whereas (2017). This collaborative piece emerged from a thirst for some of the liminal spaces that these words seem to invite us to open — between voice and place, breath and earth, perhaps “now” and memory. Whereas is in part a response to the Congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans, a document of carefully crafted legal language signed by President Obama in obscurity in 2009. Long Soldier’s specific poem which both inspired this piece and is woven into its fabric, “Resolution 2,” is adapted from the language of this Congressional resolution itself. However, its text — “I commend and honor Native Peoples for the thousands of years that they have stewarded and protected this land” — is put into question as it is disassembled on the page before the reader’s eyes: its words are listed top to bottom, one by one, at the very left of the page; meanwhile, the rest of the page is made of empty space. Within this space two words float, reappearing in different placements — “this” and “land.” Each iteration of these two words seems to carry its own timbre, density, and frequency, carry its own questioning of how this language has been used in the past and present, carry its own defiance.

breathwatersoundcannon was created as a dipping of a toe into a fraction of the many streams potentially flowing out of this poem’s empty spaces.

Credits:
bass-flute: Shanna Pranaitis
text and recorded voice: Layli Long Soldier
video: Arom Choi
performance in video: Mónica Sanchez
composition and electronics: Iddo Aharony

IV. In-Between by Mark Gustavson and Chris Myhr
“In-Between” is an experimental audio-visual collaboration. The electroacoustic composition presents two complementary musical characters. The visual component presents a mediating character that cycles somewhere in-between the two discrete-yet-interconnected musical elements.

The work explores themes of liminality and contradiction; simultaneous becoming/disappearing; transmission/reception; organization/entropy; and aims to make sensible that which operates between polarities—the forces that make things whole, yet paradoxically multifaceted and fragmented.

Imagery consists of macro HD video of particles vibrating on scientific Chladni plates, time-lapse sequences of evaporating water collected from sections of Lake Ontario contaminated with blue-green algae, as well as other footage captured above and below various bodies of water in Central and Eastern Canada.

The musical characterizations of the elements other than water, including fire, air, earth. The processing of sound sources in some cases reveals their essence.

I. -I HOUR 1 (12 EST) Amal (act)-III : Khayaal (care) by Tazeen Qayyum (Tkarón:to/Toronto)
Presented by SAVAC (Tkarón:to/Toronto)

Drawing from empathy, I see my performative work as poetic forms of memories, shared vulnerabilities and quiet reflection. Repeatedly drawing a single word in my native language Urdu, often hours at a time, I create a detailed concentric abstract form resembling the organic attributes of a spiral, an eye, or a black hole in which words and thoughts are contracted and stretched. The meditative act of continual repetition allows me to focus inward on ideas of care, patience and belief, as a way of thoughtfully considering how we approach the world as social beings. It is a reminder that although everything is in a constant state of flux and transformation, we are infinitely connected through thoughts, words and actions. A single channel, performance-based video originally commissioned by TD Corporate Art Collection. Videography by Khurram Durrani. Sound created by Aniyah Faisal using the qawwali Kanhiya written by Nawab Sadik Junj Bahadur "Hilm" performed by Farid Ayaz and Abu Mohammad.

+ for the last 10 minutes of the hour, audiovisual roomtone of the studio of Annette Krebs as part of the Different From The One series.

II. -I HOUR 2 (13 EST) hidrolato by Gabriela Areal (Buenos-Aires)
Presented by SQUINT PRESS (Tkarón:to/Toronto and Québec City)

In between the sinuous vapory becoming of bodies of sound distilling into reshaped beings. hidrolato is an audiovisual work engaging gradients of porosity, through the intertwining of veiled sounds and images. Music and concept by Gabriela Areal, video in collaboration with visual artist Leah Beo.

+ for the last 10 minutes of the hour, audiovisual roomtone of the studio of Gordon Monahan as part of the Different From The One series.

III. -I HOUR 3 (14 EST) A Sound That Never Was by Various Artists (international)
Presented by THE DIM COAST (Saskatoon)

A Sound That Never Was is a generative sound work in response to Vivian Darroch-Lozowski’s book, Voice of Hearing. A new digital instrument operates a score writ from custom software that is modulated by weather data and seismic activity. The score parses the library’s sound files authored by this chorus of artists, played out in arrangements determined by the vibrancy of the world in a particular place at the moment of selection. The precise arrangements, understood as relationality between the world, the machines of production, transmission, reception, and the artists original gestures - perform a sound that never was before and never will assemble exactly thus again.

A Sound That Never Was features the work of Félicia Atkinson (France), Matthew Cardinal (Canada), Raven Chacon (USA), crys cole (Canada), Isabella Forciniti (Austria/Italy), David Grubbs (USA), Timothy Herzog (Canada/USA), Sasha J. Langford (Canada), Mani Mazinani (Canada/Iran), Christof Migone (Canada), Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt (Canada), respectfulchild (Canada), Anju Singh (Canada), Aho Ssan (France), Mark Templeton (Canada).

+ for the last 10 minutes of the hour, audiovisual roomtone of the studio of Kate Carr, as part of the Different From The One series.

IV. -I HOUR 4 (15 EST) Soliloquy, Soliloquy (2022) by Midi Onodera (Tkarón:to/Toronto) and Claire Savoie (Tiohti:áke/Montré
Presented by TRINITY SQUARE VIDEO (Tkarón:to/Toronto).

A series of 12 videos, that are site-specific interpretations of the 2018 online series, Soliloquy. This recent incarnation locates a progressive dialogue between the artist and her AI friend, “FauxMidi” in the familiar spaces of home and studio. The videos document the growing relationship, the awkwardness of getting acquainted and the frustrations of miscommunication. This project uses the consumer app, Replika which according to its website, is “an AI companion who is eager to learn and would love to see the world through your eyes. Replika is always ready to chat when you need an empathetic friend.

Aujourd’hui (dates-vidéos)/ Today (date-videos) by Claire Savoie

Referencing the method of On Kawara's 'Date Paintings', this on-going project consists of producing (attempting to produce) a video clip every day. This project arose out of a private epistolary practice I had been engaged in for a long time and whose forms evolved according to circumstances. It primarily consists of a desire to account for a particular moment often riveted to the very act of writing. The core of this process of interiorization coincides, without a doubt, with the desire to communicate a thought turned toward the present, at the precise moment that this present occurs. Often alone—whether in the country or in the city—for more or less prolonged periods of time, I maintained a kind of correspondence with family and friends which, in recent years, took the form of very short, intimate clips, like postcards, relating small daily events. The videos (8 sec. to 4 min.) are composed of textual, visual and sound data recorded on a daily basis at the indicated date of each video. Various layers of information are overlaid in a condensed form through an editing process where different formal strategies are at use. The moods vary from poetical, humoristic, witty, deep, shallow,… exciting to plain boring. Since the 5th of February 2006, some 1600 videos have been done.

+ for the last 10 minutes of the hour, audiovisual roomtone of the studio of Sebastiane Hegarty as part of the Different From The One series.

V. -I HOUR 5 (16 EST) Cognitive Distortions (RESET) by Michel Poblete Montoya (Santiago)
Presented by TSONAMI (Valparaíso)

Our own automatic conceptions about the environment, the others, what we are and all its possible combinations allow us quickly to mask reality. There is a high probability that we are misprocessing the information we receive, making non-objective interpretations through distorting mechanisms of perception creating twisted feelings. This experience proposes a RESET, restarting and calibrating our ideas, correcting our distorted thoughts, those that confirm our own beliefs and that somehow help us to feel unable to fail.

+ for the last 10 minutes of the hour, audiovisual roomtone of the studio of Nick Kuepfer as part of the Different From The One series.

VI. -I HOUR 6 (17 EST) With nothing but words or nearly so by David Grubbs (Brooklyn)
Presented by WAVE FARM (Acra, NY)

With nothing but words or nearly so
nothing but words to rely on
words only to buttress
words alone or nearly so
words alone but also
words and

(With nothing but words or nearly so David Grubbs tricks himself into a session of writing.
Don’t say hypnotize.)

+ for the last 10 minutes of the hour, audiovisual roomtone of the studio of Maia Urstad as part of the Different From The One series

VII. -I HOUR 7 (18 EST) An Autobiography of Air (2019) by Chloe Lum & Yannick Desranleau (Tiohti:áke/Montréal)
Presented by OBORO (Tiohti:áke/Montréal)

I read that article about
physicists finding evidence
of sounds carrying mass, on
their waves.
Since then, I’ve been deliberate,
making more noise in my day-to-day.
Noise that is more interesting,
noise that is more complex.
I vary the force and rhythm
of my steps, syncopated,
a one woman rhythm section
a one woman metronome
on my way to the metro
finding fits of productivity
where I can.
Secure in the knowledge that I’m
carrying mass so passively,
heavy limbs flopping like fish
as I sit down, lay down, lean back. (Thud sound)
Just making matter.
Making sure I matter.
Flesh or water or air.
The discovery has
massive implications.

Performers: Sarah Albu, Lara Oundjian

Meditations, Volume 3: Words as Sculpture, Their Shapes as Sound (2020)

In Words as Sculpture, Their Shapes as Sound, the protagonist compares the styles of Sylvia Plath, whose use of onomatopoeia seemingly creates its own soundtrack on the page, to that of Clarice Lispector, whose rich descriptions of object, place, and material, seem to burst off the page as actual physical structures. Citing both of these methodologies as key to her own artistic production, she laments the lack of language to describe text that seems to have material dimension.

+ for the last 10 minutes of the hour, audiovisual roomtone of the studio of Matmos as part of the Different From The One series.

VIII. -I HOUR 8 (19 EST) Rituals, Rhythms & Reveries by Ryo Ikeshiro (Hong Kong)
Presented by METAOBJECTS (Hong Kong)

The sometimes solitary activities of attentive listening and observation offer access to collective memory in Rituals, Rhythms & Reveries [single-channel version] (2022). The past, the present and the future are evoked and blurred as individual figures – passers-by, vehicles and abstract shapes – appear and remain alone or converge momentarily with others, only to diverge and disappear. The work takes the viewer/listener on seemingly unrelated scenes involving: waiting for an infrequent freight train which passes several times a day at a now disused railway station in Västernorrland County, Sweden; shopping arcades in the post-industrial city of Kitakyushu, Japan, that are now mostly shuttered streets and appear as remnants of the Showa era; the cyclical movement of geometric patterns recalling Constructivism generated from iterative processes that sway to and fro; a farmer winding up a collection of 700 clocks which belonged to his late father-in-law, every year on New Year’s Eve. Alternating between physical space through 360-video and spatial audio recorded on location and 3D virtual space through data visualisation and sonification, the passage of time becomes visible and audible in various ways as dreams of technological progress are remembered and forgotten. Assistant: Longman Luk.

+ for the last 10 minutes of the hour, audiovisual roomtone of the studio of Joaquín Gutiérrez Hadid as part of the Different From The One series.

IX. -I HOUR 9 (20 EST) Ego Trip by Machine Listening: Sean Dockray, James Parker, Joel Stern (Naarm/Melbourne)
Presented by LIQUID ARCHITECTURE (Naarm/Melbourne)

In 2021, Facebook AI announced a long-term project called Ego4D, which was different from most other computer vision and machine listening projects because it was focused explicitly on first-person perspective. This egocentric perspective of AR Ray-Ban sunglasses and a Metaverse VR headset needs to be constructed. The digital self has to be programmed. Ego4D is a dataset, an international research network coordinated by Meta, and a set of machine learning challenges to competitively answer the questions: “what did I do?”, “what am I doing now?”, and “what will I do next?” through the eyes and ears of an augmented human body. This video extracts moments from an Ego4D promotional video and relentlessly recomposes them into new variations of their slogan-question, What if AI could understand your world through your eyes?, connecting across to the Metaverse launch and Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony. This video was made using a CLI version of the WORD PROCESSOR, a (de)compositional tool for transcribed audio/video. It is an instrument in the sense of both a thing you play with to make sounds and also a forensic device for machine listening.

+ for the last 10 minutes of the hour, audiovisual roomtone of the studio of Andrea-Jane Cornell as part of the Different From The One series.

X. -I HOUR 10 (21 EST) CIRCULATE by Mani Mazinani (Tkarón:to/Toronto)
Presented by ARRAYMUSIC (Tkarón:to/Toronto)

A live-for-broadcast sound performance built around a circular table stationed at the centre of the performance space. The table-top rotates freely (like a turntable). A microphone is mounted to the edge of the table and amplifies sound from multiple sources, some live, some pre-recorded and played back through various amplification systems. Imagine a clock with 12 sound sources located around the dial, one at each hour, then picture a minute hand that spins freely, with a microphone attached to it. The natural aural mix that the microphone hears, will be what the audience hears in the broadcast.

+ for the last 10 minutes of the hour, audiovisual roomtone of the studio of Emily DiCarlo as part of the Different From The One series.

XI. -I HOUR 11 (22 EST) Lonely Woman by Sam Shalabi (Tiohti:áke/Montréal)
Presented by CONSTELLATION (Tiohti:áke/Montréal)

This performance will be a solo oud interpretation of Ornette Coleman's “Lonely Woman” with visual accompaniment. This piece has always struck me as one of the most enigmatic and beautiful melodies. Since I first heard it, nearly 40 years ago, it has resonated with me in ever shifting ways - it's like a place or person I check in with every once in a while to see how we are both doing - what's changed and what's stayed the same. Sometime after I started playing oud, I started to hear Arabic Music in the melody - almost to the point where the song sounded like a long lost 'classic' of Egyptian Classical Music. And I could hear Maqam (the 1/4 tones in Arabic music) in it and Ornette Coleman's music in general - all this only deepened the song for me - made it even more 'universal ' than it already was and I started to hear it on oud and in a way the melody - with its screams and sobbing qualities, sounds like it was written for oud. My performance - both visually and sound-wise will be a kind of solo 'recital' - using the traditional template of a classical oud recital to open up this 'concept' while putting the practice of free improvisation in this tradition by blurring it with Taksim (the tradition of modal improvisation in Arabic music). The visual element - a film collage - will be a poetic expression of all of these ideas.

+ for the last 10 minutes of the hour, audiovisual roomtone of the studio of Debashis Sinha as part of the Different From The One series

XII. -I HOUR 12 (23 EST) Things I’ve Forgotten by Cindy Baker (Amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton)
Presented by FADO (Tkarón:to/Toronto)

A work that incorporates audio, object-making, sculptural installation, and performance to explore the relationship between trauma, memory and the body. The project is based on a very specific, mostly-forgotten childhood memory. I’m fascinated by the ability of our brains to block out traumatic events from our conscious memory, but their inability to prevent those events from making their mark in ways that impact us into adulthood. I often wonder how much this childhood trauma had a role in the formation of my personality, my physicality, or my disabilities. During the live performance of the work, I am required to keep cycling as long as I want the audience to be able to hear the work; this endurance piece requires me to continue seeking resolution for an event that cannot be resolved. It is endless, exhausting, manic. Through this work, I am attempting to set in motion a process by which I can trigger the emergence of memories long-buried by past trauma. This experiment in personal betterment and catharsis through the creative process has a long art historical tradition. In my own practice, this type of experiment walks a tightrope between earnestness and cynicism; setting up (usually hilariously futile) challenges to my personal limitations, and attempts to make myself into something that I am not serve to highlight the futility of the search for perfection and the altogether human desire for knowledge.

+ for the last 10 minutes of the hour, audiovisual roomtone of the studio of Laura Kikauka as part of the Different From The One series.