Research residents Q-O2, GMEA, TRAFO 2024 announced
GMEA, Q-O2 and TRAFO are pleased to announce the first research residents for 2024, who will be in residence for 2 to 6 weeks:
GMEA
Abigail Toll’s (UK/DE) psychoacoustic soundworlds combine ambient, drone, and noise which unfold as meditation and upheaval. She focuses on data aesthetics and harmonic chaos as a mode for critical thinking, which is often in collaboration with musicians, artists and writers. Toll’s emerging research 'Where Words Fail: World building With Data, Sound and Co-creation', brings somatic and non-linguistic forms of communication into focus along with an expansion of what constitutes data, or so-called truth values. During her residency, she will expand her method of data aesthetics and see how it can help us to better understand intergenerational situated knowledge and relationality to the places, people, beings and environment around us.
Rodolphe Bourotte (CI/FR) bases his music on the assumption that we should, us humans, make the effort to create things that cannot be modelled by the computer. Comma is a real-time notation technology based on probabilistic partitions. During this residency, he intends to test the emancipatory potential of this system, by questioning it in opposition to a much less technical version based on paper notation. The aim will be to provide at least a partial answer to the following question: To what extent does advanced technology constitute a truly liberating contribution, when compared with a hand written version, which on the other hand has the advantage of the immediacy of a more concrete cognitive experience?
Q-O2
Elijah Maja (NG/UK) is interested in the origins of technology across the diaspora, and the overlap between memory, encounter and the formation of new audio and visual technique. He will explore call and response as an experimental technological system that threads culture together, a technology that puts out a signal picked up by bodies globally. By approaching technology as a body of knowledge used to create, extract and process, as well as a means of accessing information, call and response provides space for interpretation, new channels for the exploratory nature of music and ways of hearing and communicating. The research would aim to ground how this technology came about, how it stretches beyond music and uncover where genres like gospel, reggae, jazz, funk, techno and drill are all in conversation with folklore in the same framework: calls and responses from bodies globally that inform how new and old sounds work together.
https://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/elijahmaja
[Paul Gründorfer (AT) develops process-related systems and explores variable or unstable conditions within the occurrence of sound when exposed to amplification, feedback and plural signal streams. His research project “whisper,” deals with sound phenomena and subliminal sound and voice experiences and investigates how phonetic voice or speech fragments resonate and are reflected in different environments, inhabiting imaginary abstract spaces using elements of digital feedback synthesis and generative voice models. Starting from the idea of subliminal experiences such as those found in Japanese ghost stories or the electronic voice phenomenon where people report hearing hidden messages in radio frequency recordings, Paul will develop an experimental space that deals with these phenomena.
Sholto Dobie (UK/LT) creates his own instruments with analogue technologies, drawing on the functions and designs of folk and traditional wind instruments, such as bagpipes and organs. For him, their appearance several thousand years ago represents a technological shift in music, as humans extended the reach of their lungs by creating bellows, bags and reservoirs that could sustain flutes and reeds for longer than human lungs, a drive that is echoed in more recent technological socio-musical shifts, such as electronic dance music. More recently Sholto has began to incorporate analogue electronics alongside handmade reed pipes, using basic prefabricated timer modules and industrial electric valves to control air flow, the role of technology then becoming that of a co-creator who assists in the creation of trickery.
https://soundcloud.com/sholtodobie
Ikbal Lubys and Aii Wijayanti Anik (ID) are artists and educators from Yogyakarta in Indonesia. In coming to Brussels, the duo plans to investigate the state of European DIY music culture, in order to compare it to the rich DIY scene in Yogyakarta where they live. How has technology changed people's way of life, their way of thinking, their traditions and culture? By investigating DIY music production, the project wants to look toward more autonomous and more environmentally sustainable means of music production. The residency’s outcome will be a series of DIY workshops and open studios to share the research and DIY practices from Indonesia.
Violeta López López (ES) is a multimedia artist based in Spain. Her work combines analogue and digital elements with experimental sound with a deep interest in language, literature and science. Her Tekhne project is titled ‘to execute the word,’ an investigation into separating words from their semantic content in order to conceive fo them as actions. By focussing on the sonic content of words, Lopez Lopez seeks to go beyond the practice of translation into words as part of a “language environment.” Words are executed both in the sense of carried out and killed.
Laura Conant (FR/BE) is a Brussels based DJ and producer, as well as a designer and developer working at the crossroads between gender theory, technology and sound. Coming from a background in Free Licence and Open Source programming, Conant is interested in the notion of accessible interface design and how it overlaps with ideas of gender. Over the course of her residency, in dialogue with other artists, Contant will seek to develop Open Source sound softwares that specifically seek to address the needs of female artists and others gender minorities.
TRAFO
Passepartout Duo propose to develop a room scale installation of synthesiser modules connected by a network of flexible tubes containing 'ferrofluids'. Developed for industry in the 1960s, ferrofluids are made by suspending magnetic materials in liquid, giving it both magnetic and conductive properties.
https://passepartoutduo.com/projects
Kinda Hassan is a sound artist and instrument builder exploring ways in which sound lies outside direct human activity or control. For her Tekhne project, she proposes an ambitious composition for two rooms ("an autonomous diptych sound installation") in which sound via microphones and remotes sensors in one space produces the listening situation in the other.
Ruben Rübe is an instrument builder, improvising musician, DJ and sound artist, who frequently collaborates with theatre and dance projects. For his Tekhne project, Rübe proposes a workshop for students to build simple synthesisers and control them via physical process (light, fruits and bodies); as well as an interactive installation where sounds change in relation to the movements of visitors.