On the evening of Thursday 29 November 2018, Oxford University’s EMPRES Collective and Modern Art Oxford will present the Art of Noises series, taking over our café and basement to present an evening of innovative sound installations and performances that explore the boundaries between music, sound and technology.
For this special event, we welcome internationally renowned sound artist Signe Lidén, who will be producing a live site-specific installation. Liden’s work is interested in how places and their histories resonate; in memory, through narratives and materials, as ideological manifestations and political territories.
In this post Lidén talks about her innovative workshop, The Field Modulation Sessions, which took place during her residency at Oxford University this summer.
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As a part of my sound art residency at St John’s College this term, I offered a workshop, the Field Modulation Sessions, which will have its final form at EMPRES presents: The Art of Noises II at Modern Art Oxford on 29 November. It really has been a pleasure to work with the amazing group of students who joined the workshop and I am curious to hear and see the installation coming out of this process.
The first workshop session explored the performative aspects of field recording.
The students built their own contact microphones and recorded sounds with a wide range of microphones, like pick up coil, omnidirectional microphones and hydrophones. The location for our field trip, or case study so to speak, was the St John’s College Garden – at the moment half garden, half construction site!
During the second workshop session we created speaker objects to play the recorded sound through. As preparation, the students were asked to listen through their recordings and cut out some interesting parts and think of what materiality or object could fit the sound. We got access to the SJC maintenance department storage and brought a bunch of stuff to my studio, and the students started to listen to their sounds and compositions through the different things that we had found (pipes, a sign, cans, bags and other objects of obscure functionality.)
The inspiration for the second session is David Tudor ‘Rainforest’ performances, the first piece (that I know of) that used cone-less speaker elements, transducers, to turn objects into speakers.
One of beauties of a forest, or a garden, is that singular elements with specific qualities melt together to an organic whole.
The instalment of Field Modulations Sessions will be an environment of sounding objects to listen in to, filling the space.
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Words by Signe Lidén, sound artist.
Read more about the event EMPRES Presents: The Art of Noises II here.
Learn more about EMPRES here.