Tag Archives: research

Research Seminar – Presents Jean Martin

Tonights Research Seminar we present Jean Martin.
Contemporary art music in the context of film and moving image.

Bridge Wardens College, Lecture Theatre
6-8pm
Tuesday, 25th March, 2014

Jean Martin will present some ideas from his recent book ‘Filmgeräusch  – Wahrnehmungsfelder eines Mediums (co-authored with Frieder Butzmann).

“Much of  music composed in history related to specific activities in the world: It  supported religious practice, dance, dramatic opera, funerals, military or  stately events. Only occasionally music was purely self-referential as in the  scholasticism of late Renaissance music, or the experimentations of New music  in the 20th Century. I want to look at the specific case of film music and  sound design and music for media. Composing music and sound design for films  poses specific challenges. The raison d’etre for any music and sound design, in  fact for the soundtrack as a whole is the narrative and the image track of the  film. This poses constraints for the timebased art of music. Film music can  never follow its own logic freely developing themes or sound textures as long  as it takes. It is limited by the duration of a scene which it supports or  comments. In my analyses of films I observed that film composers adopt two  fundamental musical approaches: on the one hand the thematic concept of music  using thematic Leitmotifs and harmonic tonality. On the other hand composers  practice a timbral or spectral aesthetic which expresses itself through complex  textures and drones.

It is closely linked to sound design, which emerged from the  electro-acoustic music tradition and the 20th Century aesthetic of  musicalising environmental, indeed any recorded sound or noise.”

This event is FREE to attend and open to Staff and Students.
Please bring your University ID to access the Dockyard.

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‘Balnakiel’ screening at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow – Sun 23rd March

CCA Symposium Uncertain Ground: Landscape, Memory and Theatres of Conflict, featuring film screening of Shona Illingworth’s film ‘Balnakiel’.

CCA Glasgow_Balnakiel Screening

Sunday, 23rd March, 2014
2-5pm
Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) Glasgow.

  • Entry: Free to attend but tickets required. Book here.

The CCA Symposium, programmed in association with Film and Video Umbrella, as part of 25 Frames, celebrating 25 years with their 25 selected films and with thanks to the Wellcome Trust, School of Music and Fine Art lecturer, Shona Illingworth will be attending the CCA Glasgow on Sunday 23rd March for the screening of her film Balnakiel.

“Shona Illingworth’s moving-image and sound work engages with the complexities of memory, and explores the intersections and instabilities between memory, history, subjectivity and place as they evolve over time.  Set in the far north of Sutherland, in a place marked by the tectonic forces of military/cultural history, her film Balnakiel provides the stimulus for a symposium on the Scottish landscape and its historical and contemporary aesthetic and political resonance.”

The event runs from 2-5pm, with Balnakiel screening at 2.10pm, followed ‘in conversation’ afterwards with Shona Illingworth and Head of Psychology at City University.

“Cognitive neuropsychologist Martin A. Conway, one of the foremost international experts in the field of Autobiographical Memory, and a close collaborator in Illingworth’s work; Hebridean psychologist Catriona Morrison, Head of Psychology at Heriot Watt University, who is known for her work on memory and language; Issie MacPhail, a cultural geographer, focused on culture and development in north west Sutherland, and a Research Fellow at the UHI Centre for Rural Health and Honorary Research Fellow at The School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, and Andrew Hoskins, Media Sociologist at the University of Glasgow whose work explores the intersections between media, war and memory. Chaired by Steven Bode, Director of Film and Video Umbrella.”

Film and Video Umbrella: 25 Frames
CCA Glasgow

 

 

 

Sound-Image-Space Research Centre (SISRC) welcomes new member and a new research focus

The School of Music and Fine Art would like to welcome a new member of staff to our Sound-Image-Space Research Centre SISRC. Dr Freya Vass-Rhee.

Freya

Dr Freya Vass-Rhee, also a new member of staff, lecturing in Drama and Theatre for The School of Arts in Canterbury, joins SISRC to bring a new area of research into the Centre.

Dr Vass-Rhee’s primary focus is Visuo-Sonic analysis of dance and theatre performance from cognitive interdisciplinary perspectives and is also a member of the Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics & Performance, based at Canterbury, where she is in the process of organising a visit in later this spring by Kate Stevens (MARCS Auditory Labs, U. Western Sydney), who is a specialist in music and cognition with an avid interest in dance and sound.

Dr Freya Vass-Rhee Profile:
Freya studied Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of California, Los Angeles before completing a PhD in Dance History and Theory in 2011 from the University of California, Riverside with the dissertation “Audio-Visual Stress: Cognitive Approaches to the Perceptual Performativity of William Forsythe and Ensemble.” From 2011 to 2013, Freya was an Associate Researcher with the Dance Engaging Science workgroup of the Motion Bank project (The Forsythe Company, Frankfurt). Her research has appeared in Dance Chronicle and in edited volumes on dance dramaturgy and the work of William Forsythe.

Prior to her academic career, Freya worked as a professional dancer, ballet mistress, teacher, and choreographer with companies in Europe and the U.S. Her training includes classical/neoclassical ballet, contemporary and modern dance, period styles of musical theater dance, jazz, and tap dance.

From 2006-13, Freya served as dramaturg and production assistant to choreographer William Forsythe. She has also freelanced as dramaturg for choreographers including David Dawson.

View Dr Freya Vass-Rhee profile

Research Seminar – Dr Jennifer Walshe

Tonights Research Seminar we present Dr Jennifer Walshe.
Bridge Wardens College, Lecture Theatre
6-8pm
Tuesday, 11th March, 2014

JenniferWalshe.2
Dr Jennifer Walshe will present her  recent work
.
She is a composer, performer and visual artist of whom the Irish  Times has said that “without a doubt, hers is the most original  compositional voice to emerge in Ireland in the last 20 years”.  Jennifer Walshe says of her work that “the  sounds I am interested in include those that we hear all the time but are normally  considered flawed or redundant: twigs snapping in a burning fire, paper  tearing, breathing, instrumental sounds that aren’t considered ‘beautiful’ in  standard terms.

I think these sounds have their own beauty in the way that  pebbles on a beach or graffiti can have.”

Download the Poster: Research Seminar-Jennifer Walshe

Upcoming Seminar:
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
The Rebirth of Music from the Spirit of Drama – Jean Martin

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Research Seminar – ‘The Sounding Image: Interactivity in Audio Visual Video’ by Dr Holly Rogers

– ‘The Sounding Image: Interactivity in Audio Visual Video’ by Dr Holly Rogers
– ‘The Sounding Image: Interactivity in Audio Visual Video’ by Dr Holly Rogers

Tuesday, March 4, 2014
6-8pm
Bridge Wardens College, BWC201
Dr Holly Rogers will be visiting the School of Music and Fine Art to present some of her ideas from her recent publication ‘Sound the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music’, which explores the first decade of creative video work, focussing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music.

Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960’s, video became integral to the experimentalism of New York City’s music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, allowing composers to visualise their music artists to sound their images in a quick and easy manner. Video also enable the creation of interactive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption.

The mediums audio visual synergy could be projected, manipulated and processed live and the closed circuit video feed drew audience members into the heart of the experience. Such activated spectatorship resulted in improvisatory and performative events, in which the space between artists, composers, performers and visitors collapsed into a single, yet expansive, intermedial environment. Many believed that audio visual video signalled a brand new art form that only begun in 1965.

Rogers book suggests that this is inaccurate. During the Twentieth Century, composers were experimenting with spatialising their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as creative element in their visual work. Pioneering video work allowed these two disciplines to come together. Shifting the focus from object to spatial process, Sounding The Gallery uses theories in intermedia, fim, architecture, drama and performance practice to create an interdisciplinary history of music and art that culminates in the rise of video art-music in the late 1960s.

Download the Poster: SMFA_Research Seminar_04.03.14

Upcoming Seminar:
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Dr Jennifer Walshe will present her recent work.

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Special Screening of Perestroika: Reconstructed by Director Sarah Turner at the ICA, March 2nd

Sarah Turner has been invited to the ICA London for a special screening to launch the LUX DVD/BluRay of both films ‘Perestroika’ and ‘Perestroika : Reconstructed’, followed by a questions and answers session.

The screening is open to all, to be held this coming Sunday, 2nd March
at the ICA, London, Cinema 1. Hosted by Helen de Witt, British Film Institute,
Head of Cinemas. The DVD will be on sale for a special discount price of £15.

Perestroika: Reconstructed is a ghost story that combines the genres of documentary, essay film and film poem.  Part psychogeography, part dream and part environmental allegory, the film explores the process of memory: both what we forget and how we remember. Sequence one constitutes the 2009 version of the film, whilst the second sequence constructs a new framing narrative that reinterprets and reconfigures both the imagery and the experience of the first.

Limited to views from the window of the Trans-Siberian train, both sequences of Perestroika: Reconstructed conclude at Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake, contrasting experiences of terror and apocalypse with those of beauty and tranquillity, the one contaminating the other. In this uncanny return, the instability of the environment is twinned with the instability of memory.

P123_stiched_Perestroika

 

‘A ruined hotel. A lake as big as a sea. And a death, never explained but by now as momentous to us, and as engulfing, as a black hole. What begins as a travelogue with philosophical trimmings turns into a puzzle picture worthy of Resnais or Antonioni.’
Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

‘Elegantly photographed, sound- designed to precise and goose- bumping effect, this is a rare and haunting work of memory-gleaning.’
Sukdev Sandhu, The Telegraph

‘Conceived with intelligence and arresting intensity’
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

LUX Special Screening:
Sunday, 2nd March
13.30
Cinema 1, ICA London
£8-£10
LUX Publication Page
LUX Facebook Page

Book to attend the screening:
ICA, London

LUX DVD/BluRay Release:
2 Disc Dual Format DVD/Blu Ray
DVD 9 PAL Region 0/ BD 50 Region 0
Perestroika, 2009, 118 mins
Perestroika: Reconstructed 2013, 178 mins
Plus new essays by Elizabeth Cowie, Sophie Mayer, and Paul Newland
Published by LUX
Price £22 individuals / £60 institutions

Purchase the DVD/BluRay:
LUX, Artist’s Moving Image
turner-PK-Front

 

MAAST plays tribute to electroacoustic composer Bernard Parmegiani

The School of Music and Fine Art’s ‘Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre’ (MAAST) system is set to diffuse a sequence of electroacoustic works by the legendary French composer Bernard Parmegiani as an tribute to his music, during a 3-day Festival in March 2014.

Bernard Parmegiani_MAAST Tribute Event

The School’s research-focused sound diffusion system, designed to explore spatial sound, is set to relive some of the works of the late great pioneer of electroacoustic music, Bernard Parmegiani, who passed away last November. Hosted by LCMF, the event will take over a former carpet factory, a magnificent 20,000 sq ft space in Brick Lane, London.

Parmegiani’s rich body of work, spanning nearly 50 years, stands among the most important in electroacoustic music, influencing generations of artists within the academy and beyond it.

Following the success of the School’s recent Symposium on Acoustic Ecology, the School’s MAAST innovative diffusion system, comprising more than 30 loudspeakers, will once again be showcased from Friday 21st to Sunday 23rd of March.

Curriculum Lead for Music and Audio Arts and Director of MAAST, Dr Aki Pasoulas, along with Ambrose Seddon and Diana Salazar will be diffusing Parmegiani’s music from the 1970s on Saturday 22 March.. The influential electroacoustic composers and scholars Denis Smalley and Jonty Harrison, along with Peiman Khosravi will be diffusing Parmegiani’s works on the first day of the festival, Friday 21 March; while on Sunday, the director of the renowned Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), Daniel Teruggi, will conclude the 3-day tribute festival.

We look forward to this event and encourage anyone interested in attending to book tickets online (http://lcmf.co.uk) as soon as possible, because they are selling fast We hope this gives our MAAST system another enthusiastic performance and platforms the developments we are making in spatial sound out to a wider audience.

Any SMFA students interested in volunteering for the event, please contact Dr Aki Pasoulas as soon as possible. This will be a work experience not to be missed, as you will be working alongside the most distinguished and influential composers and scholars of music and audio art today.

Bernard Parmegiani (1927-2013)
 Parmegiani initially trained as a mime, a practice he often drew on when describing his music. It was Pierre Schaeffer who, in 1961, convinced him to start composing. In Schaeffer’s musique concrète, the building blocks of composition were not notes and rests, but recordings. Pieces were created through collage and the transformation of acoustic sounds on tape. It was this technique that Parmegiani developed so expansively from the 1960s onwards.

While Parmegiani found himself at the centre of Schaeffer’s GRM, he also led a parallel career, composing for film, television, and even for Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.

 

 

Research Seminar – Andrea Luka Zimmerman Presents

Fine Art Research Events Spring Term 2013

Tuesday 5 February
5-7pm, BWC 102

Andrea  Luka Zimmerman presents Estate: a reverie, an  artist’s film, song cycle and installation to be created and performed by the  disappearing community of the Haggerston Estate, East London.  It is the final and most ambitious project in  a trilogy of collaborative works on the estate led by artist resident Andrea  Luka Zimmerman, working closely with architectural researcher and writer David  Roberts, following the public art/photo-installation i am here (with Lasse  Johansson and Tristan Fenell) and the artists’ book Estate (Myrdle Court Press,  with Lasse Johansson, Paul Hallam, Cristina Cerully, Victor Buchli), both of  which have gained international acclaim.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman has been making films  since 1998, originally as part of a film collective called Vision Machine,  which worked predominately in Indonesia exploring the impact of Globalisation  and working directly with plantation workers. Her non fiction feature essay Prisoner of War, investigates US  militarism and foreign policy through a character study of one of its most  enduring rogue agents. She has just completed Taskafa: stories from the streets, a film about resistance and  co-existence told through the lives of street dogs in Istanbul. Estate, a reverie, is an essay film made  in collaboration with the residents of the about to be demolished housing  estate in Haggerston, Hackney, where she also lives.

Andrea is Associate Lecturer at Central St. Martins  College of Art and Design, and Wimbeldon College of Art [University of the Arts  London]. She teaches cinematography on the MA Documentary Practice at Brunel  University.

Fugitive Images: Fugitive  Images are Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lasse Johansson and David  Roberts. Fugitive  Images platform grew out of a desire to capture the peculiar  moment of the place where they live and work immediately prior to it being  demolished. Haggerston Estate is suspended somewhere between it first being  occupied in the 1930’s and imminent demolition in 2009 (second phase of  demoloition is in 2013), a place in transformation, in wait.

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Research Seminar – Memory, Identity, Performance and Neuroscience: Part 1

Jointly hosted event between CKP and The Centre for Research into Sound, Image and Space (SISRC)

Friday March 1st, 5-6:30pm,

Medway Campus, Chatham Historic Dockyard

Bridge Warden’s College Lecture Theatre

Shona Illingworth (Fine Art lecturer and artist, School of Arts, Medway) discusses her collaboration with neuropsychologist, Catherine Loveday.

Their current project, in collaboration with cognitive neuropsychologist Martin A. Conway, is supported by the Wellcome Trust. Claire is a woman who has dense retrograde and anterograde amnesia. The project explores new biomedical insight into Claire’s condition, gained through research into her use of new sensory operated camera technology to unlock previously inaccessible memories. In parallel, the historical lesions in the physical and cultural landscape of St Kilda, an extraordinary archipelago located off the west coast of Scotland, provide a physical and metaphorical context within which to explore the self-experience of broken memory and dense cultural retrograde amnesia. Illingworth and Loveday will discuss how, by creating a multi-layered interplay between Claire and St Kilda, this project sets out to explore powerful synergies between the complex space of the mind, and that of the outside world, and in turn, examine the profound implications amnesia and cultural erasure have on the individual, social and cultural topologies that inform contemporary constructions of identity, place and location.

The second part of Memory, Identity, Performance and Neuroscience will take place in Autumn 2013. It will feature Anna Furse (Head of Theatre & Performance at Goldsmiths and Director of Athletes of the Heart),and Cambridge neuroscientist Nicky Clayton, in dialogue with Sian Stevenson and Jayne Thompson (StevensonThompson, Gulbenkian Theatre and School of Arts) on their ‘Moving Memory’ dance based projects.

Shona Illingworth

Shona Illingworth is an artist and Fine Art Lecturer in The School Arts, Medway, University of Kent. She works across sound, film, video, photography, drawing and painting. Major works using moving image and/or sound, take the form of gallery based and site specific installation. She has worked closely with scientists to explore individual and collective memory and the mapping of mental space onto external terrain, themes which are explored in the Film and Video Umbrella monograph on her work: The Watch Man – Balnakiel, Shona Illingworth (2011).
Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, the Wellcome Collection, London, the National Museum, Tirana and Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, Toronto and she has received high profile commissions from Film and Video Umbrella, the Hayward Gallery, London and Channel 4 Television.

Dr Catherine Loveday

Dr Catherine Loveday is a Principal Lecturer in Cognitive Science at the University of Westminster, London. She completed her PhD in 1996, investigating the neuropsychological basis of normal age-related memory loss.  Since this, she has continued to research the cognitive and biological changes that occur in ageing, particularly in relation to memory, but she has also extended her expertise to various clinical populations, for example traumatic brain injury, dementia, amnesia and hydrocephalus. This has included a significant amount of clinical work at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London and Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge.
Her current research projects include the cognitive neuroscience of amnesia (with Prof Martin A. Conway); the psychobiology of adolescence (with the PSRG); the neurobiology of anorexia nervosa; neuropsychological implications in congenital hydrocephalus (with Joanna Iddon, Prof John Pickard and Richard Morgan); the cognitive psychology of music (with Ludovico Minati).
She plays an active role in the British Psychological Society contributing significantly to the organisation of annual conference as well as being a member of the Research Board and Psychologist Policy committee. She has also appeared as an expert psychologist in a number of television and radio programmes.

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