School of Music and Fine Art Audio Electronics Lecturer, Dr. Sean Williams, was featured on a programme called Radio Controlled on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday February 11th at 6:45pm with several other academics, talking about early experimental electronic music on West German radio in the 1950s.
Presented by Robert Worby, the programme tells the fascinating story of how post-war West German radio, and modern music, was conscripted to win the cultural cold war, often juggling political, economic and cultural forces outside of their control.
Dr. Sean Williams is a researcher with a strong background in music practice. He has released a number of records on various labels in the UK, Europe and the USA, and performs solo and with groups including Grey Area, and the Monosynth Orchestra. For more info go to https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/staff/staff-profiles/musicandaudio/Williams.html
SMFA music lecturer Anna Neale-Widdison has released a new single Evolution which is available on all the usual music platforms such as Spotify and iTunes. The video was filmed at the Historic Dockyard Chatham and Royal Dockyard Church, and featured University of Kent (Medway) students. It can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/GrWcMpNOMko
Evolution is taken from Anna’s forthcoming album Wide Sky, due for release on the 23rd March, featuring performances from Syrian musicians and the members of the English National Opera (ENO) chorus. Fusing together Middle Eastern music with Western pop, and continuing the world music theme featured in her previous album River Man.
Anna is a multi-talented singer/songwriter, composer, session vocalist, and voice over artist, and has performed at most of the major music conferences, released two albums and two EP’s to critical acclaim, written songs for other artists, radio and TV advertising, and provided vocals for many TV animations, songs and adverts. As well as her composing and performing credits, Anna has lectured at the University of Cambridge, The British Museum, BIMM (Brighton & London), Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of Hertfordshire. She is also a member of the Oxford Brookes’s music industry board. Her research interests include songwriting and the music of Ancient Greece. More info here: http://www.annaneale.net
SMFA’s Adam Chodzko, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, is adjudicating The ARTiculation Prize South East Regional Finals at Quarterhouse, Folkestone on 31 January.
The ARTiculation Prize is a nationally acclaimed annual event designed to promote the appreciation and discussion of art and encourages students aged between 16 -19 in full-time further education, to express their opinions and thoughts via a ten minute presentation to an interested audience about a work of art, artefact or architecture of their choice. Adjudicators are asked to assess each presentation as a whole, looking at content, structure, delivery and the speaker’s original approach and unique potential. In 2018 nine Regional Finals will be held across the country.
Adjudicators will select a first, second and third prize winner in each Regional Final, who will each receive book prizes sponsored by Laurence King Publishers. The first prize speaker from each Regional Final will go on to give their talk at the ARTiculation Grand Final on Friday 9 March 2018 at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Winning 2018 Finalists will be awarded 1st Prize £300, 2nd Prize £200, 3rd Prize £100. All ARTiculation Finalists will receive one year’s free membership to The Art Fund to include an Art Pass and a year’s membership to the Friends of The Roche Court Educational Trust.
Dr Ruth Herbert, Lecturer in Music Performance in the School of Music and Fine Art, has been invited to give a guest lecture at Humboldt University, Berlin http://hu.berlin/mbkhu as part of The KOSMOS Workshop Mind Wandering and Visual Mental Imagery in Music from 16-19th May. Ruth is one of several invited from international experts in the field of mind, music and consciousness.
Funding from Humboldt University will allow MA music student Andrea Hepworth, who has an interest in music psychology, to accompany Ruth and participate in the conference.
Ruth’s guest lecture, Everyday Musical Daydreams and Kinds of Consciousness, will feature both music we actually hear plus music that pops into our heads – including so-called ‘earworms’.
A music psychologist and performer, Ruth has diverse research interests in the fields of music in everyday life, music, health and wellbeing, music and consciousness (including ASC and Trance), sonic studies and music education. Further research interests include performance psychology, evolutionary psychology and ethology. She has published extensively on aspects of music teaching and education and is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Sonic Studies, Musicae Scientiae and the Global Listening Centre. http://www.globallisteningcentre.org/member/ruth-herbert/. She is also a member of the Music Education Expo and Musical Theatre and Drama Education Advisory Committee, the NYJC/IoE Jazz and Gender Forum, and (latterly) the Musical Progressions Roundtable.
SMFA Fine Art students are part of the new artists’ collective Muster Station, created in response to the University of Kent’s planned closure of the School of Music and Fine Art. As Muster Station, they have been invited by Whitstable Biennale, to take part in the 2018 Tate Modern Exchange projects, with a theme “Production”. It will involve current Fine Art BA and MA students (as well as recent Fine Art BA and MA alumni), is open to the public throughout, and free to attend. Through a programme of workshops, talks, interactions and interventions Muster Station will explore the means by which artists produce in response to constantly shifting conditions of space, time, audience and the ebb and flow of economic and political support.
The venue is Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG in the Blavatnik Building, Level 5.
Taking place intermittently throughout the weekend:
A data conservator will interpret the code of the Tate website through a translation
of digital coding into musical notation. The Gov.UK art-collection will also be dissected
and performed in sung and spoken live-burst performances.
Beyond Art Lectures, a ‘cultural telemarketing’ project with artists from Latin America that promotes the idea of outsourcing art lectures by taking advantage of unfair labour conditions.
Join in a Muster Drill, mixing yoga and semaphore signals for an invisible audience on the Thames, exploring care and communion.
A live action role play accompanied by musicians performing their interpretations of symbol-based graphic scores made in response to artworks in the permanent collection.
To close the day on Saturday, a one-off performance of Shears For Tears:’unrestrained screamers’, mixed into an audioscape, orchestrated by a video-chromatic score.
From 3rd February until 18th March, SMFA’s Fine Art Lecturer and artist Tim Meacham’s work Eye of the Needle is on show at the Hantverk & Found Gallery in Margate. This is part of the offsite programme for Turner Contemporary’s major exhibition Journeyswith ‘The Waste Land’, which explores the significance of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land through the visual arts.
Eye of the Needle, made with support from the University of Kent, explores TS Eliot’s relationship with the mechanical sound recording of the gramophone, making particular reference to its role in The Waste Land in providing the machine mediated sound track of modernity. The viewer accompanies the needle on its journey across the landscape of a gramophone record. The role of the needle is considered in first embedding sound, through creating the grooves of the record, and then as a “rider” travelling across the surface of the disc as it plays. 78-rpm records, made of shellac and slate dust, give something of themselves (dust) in order to release their sound, thus changing the landscape with each play.
Tim Meacham is an artist who works across media to explore space within the triangulated world of experience between seeing, hearing and touching. SMFA’s Partner and College Liaison Officer, he is currently undertaking a practice based PhD. More info: www.timmeacham.space
Hantverk & Found is a celebrated seafood café and commissioning art gallery in the heart of Margate Old Town committed to supporting artists to make art, with a small gallery space to exhibit works by local and emerging artists. As well as providing support to artists, they frequently commission new work.
The Preview is Saturday 3rd February, 6-8pm at Hantverk & Found, 18 King Street, Margate, CT9 1DA. The exhibition runs until 18th March. Opening hours: Thursday-Sunday, 12pm-4pm, with viewing at other times by appointment. Contact: gallery@hantverk-found.co.uk and http://www.hantverk-found.co.uk/
SMFA Fine Art Senior Lecturer and acclaimed artist Adam Chodzko has a video work, About Knots, screened on February 8th at the Whitechapel Gallery in Refuge – an evening of films, sound-works and readings that mark Britain’s historic status as a place of sanctuary for threatened European artists.
About Knots focuses on the relationship between artist Kurt Schwittersin the final years of his life in the late 1940’s, living in poverty, (and exile) in the Lake District, and J. Edgar Kaufmann, wealthy owner of the Kaufman Department Store in Pittsburgh, USA. The work combines text and moving image and creates a narrative about longing, creation and fragmentation, endings and beginnings.
Exhibiting internationally since 1991, Adam Chodzko works across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm. http://www.adamchodzko.com
SMFA Fine Art Lecturer and acclaimed artist, Adam Chodzko, is featured in new exhibition, The Ash Archive, a collaboration between the University of Kent and The Ash Project which examines the human relationship with the ash tree and woodlands. Reflecting on the uncertain future of the ash tree, the exhibition brings together works by artists, designers and local makers which explore our dynamic and complex relationship with the life and death of the natural world. Artists featured include Ackroyd & Harvey, Colin Booth, ,Sebastian Cox, French & Mottershead, Magz Hall, Max Lamb, David Nash (in collaboration with Common Ground), Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton and Sheaf + Barley, and there is a collection of objects made from ash wood from Rob Penn’s book The man who made things out of trees.
The Private View is on Thursday 18 January, 6-9pm, at Studio 3 Gallery, Jarman Building, School of Arts, Canterbury. The exhibition runs until 14 April.
The exhibition is curated by Madeleine Hodge and Rose Thompson for The Ash Project in partnership with the University of Kent, and will tour galleries across Kent in 2018, including Limbo Gallery in Margate, Nucleus Arts in Chatham, UCA Brewery Tap in Folkestone as part of the Salt Festival and at Kaleidoscope Gallery in Sevenoaks.
The Ash Archive will grow over the course of the exhibition and the public are invited to make contributions of ash objects to the archive. The Ash Project is an urgent cultural response to the devastating loss of one of our most important species of tree. For more information go to: www.facebook.com/events/202163857010683
SMFA Lecturer in Fine Art, Andy Conio, has received an Above and Beyond Award from Kent Union. Students commended him on his passion for the subject, inspirational teaching, support and motivation. His carefully structured, engaging classes create a non-judgemental atmosphere, and he also organised critical writing workshops, listened to student concerns and ensured these were reflected in a reorganised timetable, helping students to better manage workloads and planning.
The awards recognise tutors who have exceeded expectations and gone “above and beyond” to enhance the student experience.
The historic Eastgate House in Rochester recently hosted Authenticate, an intervention with live multimedia installations and performances by Year 3 Event and Experience Design students which was so successful that Eastgate House want to keep part of one of the works by student Emma Greenwood – an installation of a jigsaw/drawing of a decorative plaster ceiling, on a viewing mirror. They also want to work with student Elle Mayne on a future video mapping commission.
Emma Greenwood, 2017.
Lisa Caleno, Visitor Development Officer, at Eastgate House commented: “We were so impressed with the students work at Eastgate House this week, not just in the creativity and understanding of the house shown in the installations but also their courtesy and professionalism. We were particularly impressed with Emma’s work in the mirror room and Elle’s projection in the Rochester Room. I would like to consider working with Elle when she has graduated on a potential installation at the house using projection. We would also be very interested in acquiring the jigsaw puzzle which Emma created to have as a feature of the mirror room.”
Peter Hatton, Programmes Director for Event and Experience Design, Event and Experience Management and Fine Art, and Deputy Head of School, added: “Both outcomes are very good for the students in terms of their confidence, portfolio
