Coastal Futures Festival
The Coastal Futures Festival is an environmental arts festival created by UVA’s Coastal Conservatory, a collaboration between artists, humanities scholars, and scientists with the Virginia Coastal Reserve, a long-term ecological research site supported by the National Science Foundation. Through various forms of listening, the Conservatory integrates arts and humanities into the scientific investigation of coastal change in order to deepen understanding and stimulate imaginations.
Coastal Futures Festival 2023
Produced by the University of Virginia’s Coastal Conservatory
December 6, 2-5pm, University of Virginia (UVA), Nau Hall 101
December 8, 2:00-5:00pm, Eastern Shore Community College (ESCC), Workforce Building Atrium
Schedule of Events:
December 6, 2023, 2-5pm
NAU Hall 101, University of Virginia (UVA)
2:00pm:
Matthew Burtner Welcome
Soundscapes of Restoration
Karen McGlathery, seagrass science
Dreams of Seagrass sonification by Matthew Burtner
Willis Jenkins reflection
Matt Reidenbach, oyster restoration science
Oyster Communion by Matthew Burtner
performed by Lisa Burrs along with oyster shell ensemble (Molly Joyce, Kristin Hauge, Ari Bell, Rah Hite, Gabrielle Cerberville)
Willis Jenkins reflection
Discussion
Flightways of Uncertainty
Karen McGlathery intro to Red Knot and Salt Marsh Sparrow science
Brian Lindgren “Red Knot Sonorama (2007-2022)”
Audience reflection
Kristin Hauge “On the Strangest Sea”
Audience reflection
3:15pm <Coffee break>
3:30
Hillary Kaell (McGill University)
“A Multibeing Manifesto: Using Tools from Religious Studies to Rethink Ecological Change on the Coast”
accompanying soundscape from Burtner:
Hurricane Ida Thunderstorm, Nov 10, 2009, recorded at Walnut Creek Lake, Virginia
What moral elements fuel ideas about development in the face of ecological risk? What is the impact if we rethink ecological relations more expansively as including non-humans, humans, and spiritual beings? As an anthropologist and historian of religion, Hillary Kaell explores these questions through her ongoing fieldwork in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In conversation with a diverse array of coastal residents, she asks what matters to people as they consider the past and imagine a possible future on the Banks.
Reception
__________________________________________________________________
December 8, 2023, 2-5pm
Atrium, Eastern Shore Community College (ESCC)
29316 Lankford Highway Melfa, VA 23410
2pm
Open House Listening Stations
2:30pm
Cora Baird, Welcome
Soundscapes of Restoration
Matthew Burtner Introduce Soundscapes of Restoration album
Karen McGlathery, seagrass science
Dreams of Seagrass sonification by Matthew Burtner
Willis Jenkins reflection
Matt Reidenbach, oyster restoration science
Oyster Communion by Matthew Burtner
performed by Lisa Burrs along with oyster shell ensemble (Molly Joyce, Kristin Hauge, Ari Bell, Rah Hite, Gabrielle Cerberville)
Willis Jenkins reflection
3:15pm
The Hidden World Around Us
Alex Foxworthy ESCC
3:30pm
Flightways of Uncertainty
Sarah Karpanty on shorebird science
Brian Lindgren composition: “Red Knot Sonorama (2007-2022)”
Audience reflection
Bridget Re on Salt Marsh Sparrow science
Kristin Hauge composition: “On the Strangest Sea”
Audience reflection
4:15pm
Community Conversation and Reception
Listening & Video Stations remain open until 5pm, Rm 130
HIGHLIGHTS FROM YEARS PAST
CONSERVATORY INAUGURAL FESTIVAL
The first Coastal Futures Festival was held in 2019, beginning with our conservatory launch meeting. The Maori traditional music ensemble WAI opened the Conservatory’s first research lab meeting by teaching researchers a traditional Maori percussion exercise. Invited to frame the lab meeting and participate as interlocutors, WAI oriented us to the mountains and rivers from which we each come, performed songs emerging from the waters of their homeland, and then taught us to come into rhythm with each other. Our research presentations, all focused on forms of listening to the Virginia coast, were thus framed by listening to Aotearoa’s coast. WAI ended the seminar by giving feedback to researchers, collectively charging us with the seriousness of our undertaking, and then closing the research space with a song honoring coastal waters. Here again, in a different way, experiences of listening are at once condition for ethics and itself an ethical relation. Listening with WAI connects our efforts to imagine coastal futures for the Eastern Shore of Virginia to the futures of other shores, to recognize how Virginia’s coastal future is linked with Aotearoa’s.
The Festival opened on September 19th with an arts exhibit that responded to Caribbean coasts in crisis. On September 21, it moved to the Eastern Shore for the opening of a sound art exhibition at the Barrier Islands Center in Machipongo, VA. The Festival returned to UVA for talks and performances on Monday, September 23, culminating in a concert featuring Grammy and MacArthur Award-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird, and a keynote address by ecoacoustic sound artist Leah Barclay on September 25th.
Featured residents include environmental philosopher Michael Nelson, eco-acoustician Leah Barclay, UVA alumnus and composer Erik DeLuca, Arctic scientist Christina Bonsell, and new music ensemble Eighth Blackbird. In addition to bringing these distinguished guests to UVA, the festival showcases work by UVA faculty, students and alumni whose interdisciplinary research focuses on sound and coastal environments. Through a series of performances, talks, installations, and collaborative work sessions, the Coastal Futures Festival brings together art, film, and multimedia music that represents global issues such as coastal erosion, sea level rise, and melting ice along with the attendant impacts on human and non-human habitats.
Full Schedule of Events:
Coasts in Crisis
Thursday 9/20, 4pm
Brooks Hall Commons, UVA
Arts opening after recent hurricanes
This kick-off event of the Coastal Futures Fall Festival will offer creative ways of addressing environmental disaster by bringing together live music, poetry, photography, painting, and installation art about recent hurricanes from the U.S. South and the Caribbean. The participating artists will perform, display and discuss their work forged out of the experiences common to climate refugees and hurricane survivors: homelessness, forced migration, family separation, food insecurity, and living without electricity or running water. Works by artists from the U.S. South and Greater Caribbean including David Berg (St. Croix, Virgin Islands), Sally Binard (Florida/ Haiti), Jo Cosme (Puerto Rico/ Seattle), Nicole Delgado (Puerto Rico), Alfonso Fuentes (Puerto Rico), and Sarabel Santos Negrón (Puerto Rico).
Liz Miller Shoreline Project
Friday 9/21, 10am
Clark Hall Mural Room, UVA
Exhibit Opening
The Shore Line, a collaborative interactive documentary project, is a collection of dynamic maps, visualizations, soundscape and over 40 videos featuring individuals who are confronting the threats of unsustainable development and extreme weather with persistence and ingenuity. Described as “a storybook for the future,” The Shore Line conveys ways that 43 people, living in the urban cities and remote islands of nine countries, have confronted the climate impacts of rising seas and violent storms. By navigating films, interactive maps, databases, and chapters, The Shore Line users learn about the innovative ways that people have managed the effects of climate change. They can navigate by tags, including strategy toolkits, country, threat, and language. Users can also navigate by occupation — activist, architect, artist, biologist, communication, and so forth — this feature allows The Shore Line to locate ways that they might contribute to their own communities based on their own particular skills and talents.
Sounding Science: Listening to Coastal Futures
Saturday 9/21, 4-6pm
Barrier Islands Center, Machipongo, VA
Sound-art Exhibit Opening
This event features sound-art from musicians working with scientists to understand coastal change. Through individual listening stations, the exhibit features field recordings, data sonifications, and eco-acoustic compositions. Listeners can hear the Eastern Shore anew, and also experience the sounds of coastal change in Australia and the Arctic. Exhibit remains open through December.
Land, Coasts, Oceans
Monday 9/23, 9am-12
Pavilion VII, UVA Lawn
Talks and Presentations on the Arctic
in collaboration with the Arctic Bridging conference
music by Eighth Blackbird
Keynote by Craig Corey
Coastal Futures Conference
Monday 9/23, 2-4pm
Pan-University Institute,
1400 University Avenue, UVA Corner
Keynote by Michael Nelson
music by Eighth Blackbird
presentations by Conservatory Fellows
guest presentation by Erik DeLuca
The Coastal Futures Conservatory integrates arts and humanities into the investigation of coastal change. Conservatory researchers work with scientists at the Virginia Coast Reserve and with scientists working in other parts of the world. The Conservatory brings the arts and humanities into conversation with the sciences in order to open new ways to listen to and experience the dynamics reshaping coasts. In doing so, we hope to stimulate imagination and deepen public understanding. This lab session features lightning talks by UVA Conservatory Fellows, Keynote presentations by Michael Nelson and Erik DeLuca, and a performance of Jacob Druckman’s On the Nature of Water by Eighth Blackbird percussionist, Matthew Duvall.
Eighth Blackbird
Coastal Futures Concert
Monday 9/23, 8pm
Old Cabell Hall, UVA Lawn
Joint concert with Arctic Bridging Workshop featuring Eighth Blackbird and the Rivanna String Quartet, Music by Swendsen, Barclay, Evans, Guo, Burtner, Holland, Luna-Mega, and Cage.
Eighth Blackbird’s mission is to move music forward through innovative performance, advocate for new music by living composers, and create a legacy of guiding an emerging generation of musicians.
Eighth Blackbird, hailed as “one of the smartest, most dynamic contemporary classical ensembles on the planet” (Chicago Tribune), began in 1996 as a group of six entrepreneurial Oberlin Conservatory students and quickly became “a brand-name defined by adventure, vibrancy and quality” (Detroit Free Press).Over the course of more than two decades, Eighth Blackbird has continually pushed at the edges of what it means to be a contemporary chamber ensemble, presenting distinct programs in Chicago, nationally, and internationally, reaching audiences totaling tens of thousands.
The sextet has commissioned and premiered hundreds of works by composers both established and emerging, and have perpetuated the creation of music with profound impact, such as Steve Reich’sDouble Sextet, which went on to win the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. The ensemble’s extensive recording history, primarily with Chicago’s Cedille Records, has produced more than a dozen acclaimed albums and four Grammy Awards for Best Small Ensemble/Chamber Music Performance, most recently in 2016 for Filament.Receiving the prestigious MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, Chamber Music America’s inaugural Visionary Award, and being named Musical America’s 2017 Ensemble of the Year have supported Eighth Blackbird’s position as a catalyst for innovation in the new music ecosystem of Chicago and beyond.
Underwater Ecoacoustics Keynote by Leah Barclay
Wednesday 9/25, 2pm, VCCM B11
Old Cabell Hall, UVA Lawn
Dr. Leah Barclay is an Australian sound artist, composer and researcher working at the intersection of art, science and technology. She specialises in electroacoustic music, acoustic ecology and emerging fields of biology exploring environmental patterns and changes through sound. Her sonic environments draw attention to changing climates and fragile ecosystems; the works are realised through live performances, interactive installations and site-specific interventions, and often draw on environmental field recordings, data sonification, live streams and immersive sound diffusion. Her work has been commissioned, performed and exhibited to wide acclaim across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA, Peru, Colombia, Europe, India, South Africa, China and Korea by organisations including UNESCO, Ear to the Earth, Streaming Museum, Al Gore’s Climate Reality and the IUCN. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and has directed and curated interdisciplinary projects across the Asia-Pacific and USA.
Coastal Futures International Competition of Ecoacoustic Music
The Coastal Futures Conservatory at the University of Virginia in partnership with EcoSono announced the winners of the International Competition for Ecoacoustic Music after receiving submissions from around the world between 2020 and 2021. The call for works aimed to discover and recognize new music and sound art focused on the theme of coastal futures. Nine awards were given in the areas of: 1) Live performance pieces with or without electronics, 2) sonifications or audifications of data, and 3) field recording-based pieces. In addition, two commissions were awarded for the creation of a new piece for EcoSono Ensemble.
Winners of the Coastal Futures International Ecoacoustic Music Competition:
Natasha Barrett (Norway) for Sansing i Strandsona (Remote Sensing on the Beach) EcoSono Ensemble commission www.natashabarrett.org Natasha Barrett (1972, NO/UK) composes acousmatic and live electroacoustic concert works, sound-art, installations and interactive music. Her inspiration comes from the natural and social world around us: the way it sounds and behaves, systems, processes and resulting phenomena. These interests have led her into worlds of cutting-edge audio technologies, geoscience, sonification, motion tracking and some exciting collaborations with soloists, chamber ensembles, visual artists, architects and scientists. Binding together these inspirations is an overarching search for new music and the way it can touch the listener. Originally from the UK, Barrett moved to Norway in 1999. Active in performance, education and research, she founded and co-directs EAU (Electric Audio Unit – the Norwegian spatial- music performance ensemble), 3DA (the Norwegian society for 3-D sound-art), and is professor of composition at the Norwegian Academy for Music, Oslo. The hidden treasures of everyday soundscapes are often side-lined by the bustle of modern life, and we travel the world in search of interesting experiences which may already lie on our own doorstep. “Sansing i Strandsona” is one in a series of works aimed to evoke a new awareness of everyday sound environments as a catalyst for us to appreciate common surroundings in a new and more curious way.The work combines high precision 3D field recordings made during summer and winter in the Inner Oslo Fjord (EigenMike 4th order Ambisonics), with the sonification of spatial data extracted these recordings. This data was used to re-process the spatial and frequency content of the original sounds, revealing and enhancing fleeting details that are easily missed. To obtain meaningful data for the sonification, EigenMike recordings were decomposed into spatial-frequency components by applying interactive beamforming and data extraction techniques developed in the composers’ research work. The opening is framed by a sonification of the local topography surrounding the recording site. High resolution elevation data traced along 20 sightlines converging on the recording location was sonified, mapped to both sound modulation (pitch, amplitude and spatial location) and to sine tones. The data was obtained from the Norwegian Mapping Authority and describes a projection of the surroundings. Sound travels towards the listening position, tumbling over the peaks and valleys. The work then unfolds from spring to summer. It ends with the cracking of the winter ice layer pushed by the wake of distant boats, the sound resonating over the landscape.
Daniel Blinkhorn (Australia) for frostbYte - chalk outline EcoSono Ensemble commission www.danielblinkhorn.com Daniel Blinkhorn is an Australian composer and new media artist who works extensively with environmental sound. He has worked in a variety of creative, academic and research contexts, and is lecturer in composition and music technology at the Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. He is an ardent location field recordist, where he has embarked upon a growing number of recording expeditions throughout Africa, Alaska, Amazon, Australia, Cuba, West Indies, Mexico, Madagascar, Middle East, Northern Europe, and the high Arctic/ North Pole region of Svalbard. His creative works have received a number of awards at important international composition competitions, and whilst entirely self-taught in environmental sound, electroacoustic music and sound art, Daniel has formally studied composition and the creative arts at a number of Australian universities. In frostbYte – chalk outline I wanted to capture some of the delicate complexity, and unified, sonorous symmetries produced through the charismatic, audible ecosystems that are indelibly linked to each of the glacial calving’s increasingly populating artic shorelines and coastal regions. In order to transcribe/ translate, then sculpt these natural calving’s into musical gestures and phrases within the pieces, I chose to de-construct a number of hydrophone recordings into discrete elements, often organised into families of sound shapes. These typomorphologies were then re-constructed into a variety of gestures, phrases and forms, each of which contained its own attendant ecosystem of sound, much like the original field recordings. From a broader perspective, the resultant phrases in each work are intended to mimic the idea of something that is calved, or ‘sculptured’ using an array of tools and techniques produced when physically ‘carving’ ice sculptures. To my mind the final geometries and patterns sculptured became like those of the short-lived glacial fragments, each populating its own unique ecosystem and all subject to the natural forces at play around them.
Francisca Rocha Goncalves (Portugal) for SINØ III franciscagoncalves.com Francisca Rocha Gonçalves is a researcher from Porto, where she currently lives and works. She has a background in biological sciences with a degree in veterinary medicine from ICBAS (University of Porto) and a multimedia master’s in interactive music and sound design from FEUP (University of Porto). Combining her interests in sound, technology, art and science, she aims to raise environmental awareness in society, promoting environmental awareness through artistic practices and sound art. Her great passion for biology and music led her to find synergies between nature and sound. Bridging these two worlds, she attempts to find new musical approaches, not only for musical compositions but also for live performances. In 2017, she enrolled in a digital media PhD at FEUP (University of Porto) under the program UT Austin | Portugal CoLab. She focuses on acoustic ecology as a tool for environmental awareness concerning the ocean soundscape. Developing artistic artefacts that reveal the problem of noise pollution in underwater environments is possible to understand changes in vibration and particle motion, both vital components in aquatic life. She is Co-founder of the artistic collective Openfield Creative Lab, Co-founder of Ocean Soundscape Awareness project – ØSAW, and performs under the name SINØ. SINØ III is a live audiovisual performance developed for Criatech Festival and supported by Camara Municipal de Aveiro. The concept for the performance investigates water as a medium for artistic exploration. Three main acts compose the performance: water as sound, water as visible, and water as a medium for sound vibrations to propagate and travel. The first act explores live sounds made from water. The live sound input is from a hydrophone inside the aquarium, capturing sounds. There is also a sound composition of previously recorded soundscapes with anthropogenic interference. An exploration of underwater sounds, noises, and vibrations that merge with the synthesized sound turns into a soundscape of chaos and randomness. By creating artwork that fosters nature- connectedness, the aim is to impact audiences to think, be curious, question, and feel closer and connected to ocean soundscapes. Only when one feels part of these places might they care, commit and act towards preserving and protecting them.
Chris Chafe and Greg Niemeyer (California) for The Metered Tide Chris Chafe is a composer, improvisor, and cellist, developing much of his music alongside computer-based research. He is Director of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). In 2019, he was International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at The University of British Columbia, Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Torino, and Edgard-Varèse Guest Professor at the Technical University of Berlin. At IRCAM (Paris) and The Banff Centre (Alberta), he has pursued methods for digital synthesis, music performance and real-time internet collaboration. CCRMA’s jacktrip project involves live concertizing with musicians the world over. Online collaboration software and research into latency factors continue to evolve. An active performer either on the net or physically present, his music reaches audiences in sometimes novel venues. An early network project was a simultaneous five-country concert was hosted at the United Nations in 2009. Chafe’s works include gallery and museum music installations which are now into their second decade with “musifications” resulting from collaborations with artists, scientists and MD’s. Recent work includes the Earth Symphony, the Brain Stethoscope project (Gnosisong), PolarTide for the 2013 Venice Biennale, Tomato Quintet for the transLife:media Festival at the National Art Museum of China and Sun Shot played by the horns of large ships in the port of St. Johns, Newfoundland. Born in Switzerland in 1967, Greg Niemeyer studied Classics and Photography. He started working with new media when he arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1992. He received his MFA from Stanford University in New Media in 1997. At the same time, he founded the Stanford University Digital Art Center. In 2001 he was appointed at UC Berkeley as a Professor for New Media in Art Practice. He co-founded and directed the Center for New Media, focusing on the critical analysis of the impact of new media on human experiences. Greg Niemeyer’s work focuses on mediations between individuals, communities and environments. These mediations rely on data manifestations. Data manifestations are materializations of abstract data in the way people can feel. Sea water levels can become compositions for Carillons. Climate data stored in the Vostok Ice Core can become an audio tour. The myriad ways in which nodes in networks can connect to define emergent ways of life can become a gallery exhibit or a multimedia concert. Niemeyer’s work includes collaborations across disciplines and media from gravure to VR, always with an eye for the poetic foundations and social implications of technical protocols. Summer, 2019 Chris Chafe, composer Greg Niemeyer, videographer Greg Niemeyer suggests a location test for a sonification music video. The site is Crissy Field, Golden Gate National Recreation Area at the upper tip of San Francisco next door to the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge. The data set is 100 years of tidal records acquired by the gauge on the shore adjacent to where we record. Greg brings video / audio crew, I bring celletto, mobile phone and earbuds. We make 7 takes and depart. I then flew to British Columbia laptop in lap and worried “how will I ever do the post-production” of this completely fun but quick session while going onward with other projects. A ”light bulb” idea happened on the plane (as sometimes does at altitude). I wrote a script while seat belted in place in which the audio mix is made automatically and follows the original tidal data. I sent the edit decision list to Greg and his video edits followed suit. The sonification signal I was improvising with was created algorithmically from the tidal data and played back in one ear while the electronic cello (celletto) sounded in my other ear. El Nino’s and other extreme events in the record are audible against a background of ever-rising sea level.
Joyce To and Louis Pino (Australia) for Home Joyce To is an Australian percussionist, curator and improviser whose creative practices explore sounds of found objects alongside traditional instruments in contemporary and experimental settings. Her music career spans across the globe, having performed throughout Australia and in Japan, America and Canada. She is passionate about performing new works and supporting emerging creatives. Joyce’s musical endeavours primarily focus and reflect on contemporary environmental and social discourse. Recently, she has immersed herself in the research and exploration of realising new performative frameworks pursuing liveness amid COVID19 digital culture through the curation of a digital concert series ‘Nothing Else Left to Read’. Louis Pino is a percussionist and electronicist whose work spans a breadth of musical genres and other media, including improvisation, composed theater, pop, and electroacoustic music. His improvisational and compositional practices are influenced by cyclical time, neural entrainment, and the sound of his cat’s purr. As a soloist, Pino prefers to work on music incorporating theatrical elements and the use of technology, and has performed solo recitals of entirely theatrical music and entirely electroacoustic music. Pino spends most of his time composing for his friends, tinkering with homemade electronic instruments, and live streaming online. Home was composed in late 2019/early 2020 and reflects on global warming as a result of urbanisation and wasteful consumerism. The work is a reflection on the lifeline we personally place on items and aims to challenge and encourage the audience to recycle and use objects to their full potential before discarding. The visual is of a NASA released illustration of the Earth’s average global surface temperature from 1880 to 2019. The text used is from a speech delivered at the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development by 12 year old, Severn Suzuki.
Mark Timmings and Stephen Morris (Canada) for Navarez Bay Tidal Predictions Stephen Morris is a scholar specializing in Renaissance and Baroque music for lute and viola da gamba. He holds a Bachelor in Music and Masters in Music Education from McGill University, and a Bachelor in Education from the University of Toronto. In 2004, Morris received a PhD in Music History from the University of Washington. He has taught music at McGill University, the University of Washington and Agnes Scott College. Morris was a board member of the Viola da Gamba Society of America from 1996 to 2002. He lives and works in the unceded territory of the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations on Saturna Island, British Columbia. Mark Timmings is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory on Saturna Island, British Columbia. He explores perceptions of place by gathering data from around his home and enfolding them into the domain of art. His works intimate an infinite and vital web of interconnecting natural cycles and human patterns by arranging field observations and aspects of science into aesthetic considerations and contemplative experiences. These challenging and magical transformations resonate far beyond the source material. Timmings’ work has been exhibited and performed internationally. Composers Stephen Morris and Mark Timmings explore natural systems affecting their Saturna Island, British Columbia, community by appropriating scientific data and enfolding them into the domain of music. The score for Narvaez Bay: Tidal Predictions for 2012 forms a calendar in which the daily tide levels predicted to occur over the course of a year are transcribed onto a musical staff. Lunar cycles and the advent of solar equinoxes and solstices are also transfigured in this way. Invoking the renaissance tradition of Augenmusik (Eye Music), traditional musical notation is replaced with iconographical elements representing moon, tide and sun. The ensuing three-part score offers a representation of the tension at the heart of tidal dynamics. In performance, the rhythmic rise and fall of ocean levels as influenced by the sun and the moon are embodied in the inhaling and exhaling breath of human voices, creating a seamlessly flowing interface with natural cycles, which conjures a universe in constant flux.
Elsa Jaeyoung Park (South Korea) for Encroaching www.elsapjy.com Elsa Jaeyoung Park is a composer based in South Korea. She studied electroacoustic music at the University of Birmingham and Jazz Piano at Seoul Institute of the Arts. Her main interests focus on exploring uncomfortable or ignored emotions primarily in the composition of electroacoustic music and data sonification. Park’s music has been heard in various locations including the UK, Germany, Australia, Korea, and USA. Her music has also been featured in international events such as International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), Seoul International Computer Music Festival (SICMF) and film festivals. Park won the best piece of ICMA 2018 regional award Asia-Oceanic at ICMC. “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so”-Mark Twain. ‘Encroaching’ is a piece that deals with an experience of unpleasant truth – human’s attitude to nature, consisting of sonic environment and marine data of four seasons of Haeundae Beach, Busan in 2019. Inspired by the beauty of the sea, the piece is firstly created from the recording of Haeundae beach last year. Such as sounds of waves, people amused and the motorbikes on the road were captured. After then, a film about climate change encouraged me to look back on the moment I simply enjoyed the sea while not knowing the actual condition of the environment. Thus, I used oceanographic observation data of the beach from April to December in 2019 in the piece, then such numerical data were translated into musical data through Supercollider. During the process, I was in the position of experiencer and interpreter as to the collage of what computer-generated marine data and raw sound of the sea deliver. Also, the varying gradations of swaying gestures in the piece manifest composer’s changing experiences towards nature from a feeling of awe to the awareness of problems and become distant from the issues at some point. Therefore, ‘Encroaching’ is to invite listeners to explore and share demeanours to nature, acknowledging people’s connections and gaps to the environment.
Christopher Jette (California) for Push Onward cj.lovelyweather.com Christopher Jette is a curator of lovely sounds, creating work as a composer and new media artist. His creative work explores the artistic possibilities at the intersection of human performers/creators and technological tools. Christopher’s research details his technical and aesthetic investigations and explores technology as a physical manifestation of formalized human constructs. A highly collaborative artist, Jette has created works that involve dance, theater, websites, electronics, food, toys, typewriters, cell phones, instrument design and good ol’ fashioned wood and steel instruments. In addition to creating concert music, Christopher served as a core member of the Anchorage based Light Brigade, exploring Creative Placemaking through site-specific and interactive works. He was the 2015-16 he was the Interdisciplinary Grant Wood Fellow at University of Iowa and ran the Max Lab at CCRMA, Stanford between 2017-2018. The arctic through the lens of Fredtjof Nansen in 1893, is a pristine expanse which overwhelms the human sensorial apparatus with immensity. This vastness inspires detailed musings which catalog the experiences and provoke personal reflection and contemplation of his internal landscape. The precarious position of the last solitude of ice, indeed, a coastline in continual evolution, is nearing a point of no return here in 2020. Stories of decimation and the projections of irreparable damage are not difficult to find, this in fact dominates the conversation around this melting coastline. In order to remind us about the hope these wonderful places can inspire, an account which both celebrates and optimistically quantifies the arctic is used. It is hoped that this inspires a future where this appreciation becomes possible again. Push Onward combines voice and a single string monoboard in order to explore the polar sensorial-scape which Nansen’s text captures. Nansen’s “Farthest North” is an interesting blend of scientific reporting, polar expedition reporting and poetic musings. The selected text are portions of his journal entries which he published. The five song set uses both prerecorded material, and live processing in addition to the live performance elements. The work is scored using a MaxMSP patch with an embedded graphic scores, file playback and written instructions. The score and fixed elements provide relative pitch and temporal information, enabling the performers to react to each other and the specific performance situation. Text of the songs (pages of “Farthest North” noted) 01 SilentOh ” Silent, oh, so silent !” – p 578 02 SnowShoe “How marvelous are these snow-shoe runs through this silent nature ! The ice-fields stretch all around, bathed in the silver moon- light ; here and there dark cold shadows project from the hummocks, whose sides faintly reflect the twilight. ” – p 37 03 HearVirbations “You can hear the vibrations of your own nerves. I seem as if I were gliding over and over these plains into infinite space. Is this not an image of what is to come? Eternity and peace are here. Nirvana must be cold and bright as such an eternal star- night.” -p 578 04 Sun “The sun no longer The sun no longer sinks beneath the icy horizon ; it is continual day. I gaze into far distance. over the barren plain of snow, a boundless, silent, and lifeless mass of ice in imperceptible motion. No sound can be heard save the faint murmur of the air through the rigging, or perhaps far away the low rumble of packing ice.” – p. 439 05 OhSilent ” Silent, oh, so silent !” – p 578
Jon Bellona (Oregon) for Sunken Shoreline jpbellona.com Jon Bellona is a sound artist who specializes in digital technologies. His music and media explore environmental sustainability, data-body interactivity, digital musical instruments, site-specific sound, and choreographic composition. Jon is a co-director of Harmonic Laboratory (http://harmoniclab.org), an interdisciplinary arts collective focused on art and technology collaborations. Jon’s work has been shown in concerts, festivals, and galleries across North America and Europe, including the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.; SPRING/BREAK Art Show in NYC; Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS); New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME); Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS); International Computer Music Conference (ICMC); with special performances at the Casa da Musica (Porto, Portugal) and CCRMA (Palo Alto, CA). Jon has received awards through the Mozilla Community Gigabit Fund, the Oregon Community Foundation Creative Heights Grant, the Jefferson Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, the University of Oregon Center for Environmental Futures, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Jon has served as a University of Virginia Presidential Fellow in Data Science, an Environmental Resilience and Sustainability Fellow, and an Art & Environmental Action Scholar. Jon studied composition with Samuel F. Pellman, Matthew Burtner, Ted Coffey, Jeffrey Stolet, and Judith Shatin, earning degrees at University of Virginia (Ph.D., M.A.), University of Oregon (M.Mus.), Hamilton College (B.A.) and Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences (Dip.). Jon is an instructor of Audio Production at the University of Oregon. Sunken Shoreline (2016) captures a 2014 performance of climate-related tweets from around the world in realtime (#climatechange, #tarsands, #environment, fracking, #sustainable, among others), the year before the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) formed a “Charter for Sound” to emphasize sound as a critical signifier in environmental health. Mapping characteristics of these tweets to sonic parameters, users from the around the world sound out a call for our climate. Here, an array of audio processing submerges these sonic voices under a technological deluge that suggests an Atlantian future should we choose to ignore the calls to action.