FREE and open to the public
Douglas Kahn’s book – Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitudes in the Arts
<fidget>’s programmatic focus on Luigi Russolo’s “Art of Noise” manifesto continues. Join <fidget> for a celebration of Douglas Kahn’s brilliant new book, in which he picks up Russolo’s thread and expands his seminal history of sound in the arts to natural radio, brainwaves, the signals of the earth and the music of the cosmos. Douglas Kahn is widely recognized as an authority on experimental music and a founder of the emerging field of sound studies.
On October 19th a reading, panel discussion, and live performances will be held at thefidget space to celebrate Kahn’s groundbreaking work that explores the frontiers between technology and nature in the experimental arts of the past 200 years.
Panel discussion with : Thomas Patteson, Douglas Kahn, John Tresch, and Peter Price
Performances by: Joo Won Park and Adam Vidiksis
Joo Won will be performing a piece for wireless router and a piece for no-input mixing board. The wireless router piece uses a phone pickup to convert electromagnetic sigma to sound. The no-input mixing piece, called Large Intestine, uses feedback loop of a mixer as the sound source. Adam will perform works for percussion and live digital audio processing, using found objects that highlight and explore the vast world of sounds that surround us everyday. One piece, entitled synapse_circuit uses both a score and improvisation on the part of both the human performer and the computer, creating a duet between them that results in vast creative possibilities in each performance
Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
For more information on the book: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520257559
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is a historian and theorist of the media arts and experimental music with concentrations in the study of sound, electromagnetism, and natural media. Kahn is the author of Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013) and Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999).
Thomas Patteson is a writer, curator, and educator whose work explores the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, with a focus on experimentalism and sound technology. He teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music and is an associate curator at Bowerbird, a Philadelphia-based organization that presents new and contemporary music, film, and dance. Among his online projects are the music blog Acousmata and the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments.
Peter Price, Ph.D., is a critical media theorist as well as a composer, electronic musician, and digital artist. Price is co-director of thefidget space, a platform for his collaborative work with choreographer and wife Megan Bridge. The project is based in Philadelphia as a research laboratory for new forms of art, performance and media. Peter Price completed his doctorate at The European Graduate School (EGS) in Switzerland.
John Tresch is a historian of science at The University of Pennsylvania. John Tresch’s research focuses on the cultural history of science, focusing on its interactions with politics, philosophy, technology, religion, and the arts. Particular interests include the impact of media technology on epistemology and aesthetics; an anthropological attention to ritual and experience in the technoscience of the past two centuries; the changing disciplinary arrangements, methods, and effects of the social sciences; relations of science and literature; the shifting limits of the rational and real.
ABOUT THE PERFORMERS
Joo Won Park (b.1980) wants to make everyday sound beautiful and strange so that everyday becomes beautiful and strange. He performs live with toys, kitchenware, vegetables, umbrellas, and other non-musical objects by digitally processing their sounds. He also produces pieces made with with field recordings, sine waves, and any other sources that he can record or synthesize. Joo Won draws inspirations from listening Florida swamps, Philadelphia skyscrapers, his 2-year-old son’s play, and other soundscapes surrounding him. He has studied in Berklee College of Music and the University of Florida, and currently serves as an assistant professor of music at the Community College of Philadelphia. Joo Won’s music and writings are available on ICMC DVD, Spectrum Press, MIT Press, and PARMA recording.
Adam Vidiksis is a composer, conductor, percussionist, and technologist based in Philadelphia whose interests span from historically informed performance to the cutting edge of digital audio processing. Equally comfortable with both electronic and acoustic composition, his music has been heard in concert halls and venues around the world. Vidiksis has become known for exploring new timbral soundscapes in his electronic and acoustic works, often using the computer not only as a means of enhancing and manipulating the sounds he produces, but as a digital performer on equal footing with its human counterparts. His music often explores sound, science, and the intersection of humankind with the machines we build. He serves on the faculty of Temple University as Assistant Professor of composition, where he teaches classes in music theory, orchestration, composition, and music technology. His works are available through HoneyRock Publishing.