Bob George

Sound Arguments 2023

December 8, 2022

Sound Arguments is an innovative laboratory-atelier for creative artists dealing with sound. Presented by the Orpheus Institute, Ghent (BE), and ACPA, University of Leiden (NL), Sound Arguments transcends the boundaries of art school or conservatory, art space or university to propose a new kind of creating-researching-learning community. It reaches into the broad and complex space of current art-sound practices. At Sound Arguments, artists will share, invent, learn and discuss.

Presentation Registration

Our creative, imaginative relationship with sound has entered a fantastically rich period, facilitated and necessitated by cultural, social and technological evolution. Sound acts as a new parameter in a world evolved from the practices and theory of the visual arts or as a highly sophisticated art form in music composition and improvisation. It acts as a dimension of the plastic, installation and interactive arts. It provides a perspective on place, is a vital component of environmental art and a conveyor of information through sonification. It emerges as algorithmic surface, as the trace of virtuoso improvised performance or of informal social behaviour. And it provides an interface with technology.

Each of these perspectives has its own discourse, practices, techniques, cultural infrastructure and institutions. Sound Arguments is a locus for this rich tapestry, a space that aims to bring together sound artists with diverse, and complementary, backgrounds. Through sustained cross-fertilisation, they will participate in the evolution of new common discourse and individual critical practice.

At each of five monthly, two-day encounters you will meet and discuss with invited artists and experts, addressing issues from the abstract to the technical, from the social to the practical. Guest artists will act as catalysts for sharing and reflection between participants; you will acquire new techniques in workshops led by international experts, to stimulate and inform practice. All participants will be able to share their own projects in a wide-ranging, critical and supportive environment. As a community, we will expand horizons, vision and practice – and together hopefully evolve new discourse on contemporary sound-based practices.

Topics include:

  • Hardware hacking & DIY electronics
  • Live coding & creative coding
  • Digital fabrication & 3D printing
  • The body in performance
  • Field recording
  • Alternative spaces and venues
  • Sound art theory and practice
  • The audio paper
  • Sound installation
  • Notation

Guests for the series will include:

Cecilia Arditto

Cecilia Arditto

Photo by Daniel Nicolas

Cecilia Arditto studied at the Conservatorio Julián Aguirre, in CEAMC Buenos Aires and at the Conservatory of Amsterdam (cum laude). Arditto’s music is performed all over the world: Borealis Festival (Norway), Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Germany), Innovations en Concert (Canada), and Festival Rümlingen (Switzerland), among others. She won the first prize in the prestigious Rychenberg Orchestra Competition 2020. Musique Concréte, represented Holland at the ISCM World Music Days Festival 2022, New Zealand. She won the first prize National Opera in Mannheim, 2021 to write an opera based on L’ètranger by Albert Camus. She has been living in Amsterdam since 2002.

http://www.ceciliaarditto.com

Alexandra Cárdenas

Alexandra Cardenas 2

Alexandra’s work focuses on the algorithmic behaviour of music and the exploration of musicality within code. She is a core member of the international live coding and algorave community and performs worldwide using the live coding platforms SuperCollider and TidalCycles. In 2017, she was the Chair of the International Live Coding Conference in Morelia, Mexico.

Alexandra studied composition at the Los Andes University in Bogota, Colombia, and later completed a Sound Studies and Sonic Arts Master’s Degree at Universität der Künste, Berlin. Besides her live-coded music works, she has composed contemporary pieces for orchestra, ensembles and soloists, and worked with theatre companies in Mexico, Belgium and Germany.

https://alexandracardenas.com
https://media-loca.com/alexandra-cardenas/

Nicolas Collins

Nicolas Collins

New York born and raised, Nicolas Collins spent most of the 1990s in Europe, where he was Artistic Director of STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin.  He is a Professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  From 1997 - 2017 he was Editor-in-Chief of the Leonardo Music Journal. An early adopter of microcomputers for live performance, Collins also makes use of homemade electronic circuitry and conventional acoustic instruments.  His book, Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking (Routledge), now in its third edition, has influenced emerging electronic music worldwide.

www.nicolascollins.com

Julia Eckhardt

Julia Eckhardt

Photo by Vera Marmel

Julia Eckhardt is a musician and organiser in the field of the sonic arts. She is a founding member and artistic co-director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels, for which she conceptualised various thematic research projects. As a performer of composed and improvised music she has collaborated with numerous artists, and extensively with Éliane Radigue. She has performed internationally, and released a number of recordings. She has been lecturing about topics such as sound, gender and sonic space, and is (co-)author of The Second Sound, conversation on gender and music, Grounds for Possible Music, The Middle Matter – sound as interstice, and Éliane Radigue – Intermediary Spaces/Espaces intermédiaires.

https://www.juliaeckhardt.net/

Sanne Krogh Groth

Sanne Krogh

Sanne Krogh Groth is Associate Professor of Musicology at Lund University, Sweden, Office Director of the Sound Environment Centre, Lund University, and Editor-in-Chief of the online journal Seismograf/Peer. She is author of the book Politics and Aesthetics in Electronic Music (2014), co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art (2020) and Negotiating Noise (2021) and is currently conducting field-based research on experimental music and decolonial aesthetics in Indonesia.

https://www.kultur.lu.se/en/person/SanneKroghGroth

Cathy Lane

Cathy Lane

Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist and academic. Her work uses spoken word, field recordings and archive material to explore aspects of our listening relationship with each other and the multiverse. She is currently focused on how sound relates to the past, our histories, environment and our collective and individual memories from a feminist perspective.

Cathy is Professor of Sound Arts and University of the Arts London and co-director of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice), University of the Arts London.

www.cathylane.co.uk

Marcela Lucatelli

Marcela Lucatelli 2

Photo by Ana Alexandrino

Marcela Lucatelli can already be hailed as one of the most innovative vocalists and composers of her generation. Born in Brazil and based in Denmark, Lucatelli has earned international recognition for her extremely original, sensuous and politically charged performance works. In March 2021, Marcela Lucatelli held a seminar at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts on the topic of “Decolonizing the Voice of Sublimity”. In layman’s terms: stripping away the pretence. And, in her work as a vocalist, performer, composer and crossover artist, Lucatelli does exactly that. A critic once referred to her works as “scores for the limits of body and voice”. Another described her inimitable performances as “inhuman human noise”. For Lucatelli, a stage is not merely a place for musical performance, but rather an arena in which the struggle for art, humour, and even life itself takes place. You have to see it – and hear it – to believe it.

https://www.marcelalucatelli.co/

Matteo Marangoni

Matteo Marangoni

Photo by Nicolo Rampazzo

Matteo Marangoni is an artist and community organiser interested in sonic rituals, DIY media and applied utopianism. His artistic practice focuses on creating spatial experiences probing the relationship between subject and object. As organiser he coordinates the program of iii (instrument inventors initiative) and curates the performance series No Patent Pending.

https://matteomarangoni.com/

Caeso

Caeso

Caeso [Carlos Eduardo Soares]: musician and sound-multimedia-etc artist, his creative output is diverse, exploring mediums such as acousmatic music, live electronics, free improvisation and also traditional written composition, besides building sound sculptures, videos and other multimedia artworks. Holds both a bachelor's and a master's degree in Music Composition, and is a docARTES PhD candidate on artistic research in music at Orpheus Institute (BE) and Leiden University (NL). His current interests are the poetics of negativity and creative uses of DIY practices in sound based artistic practices. His collaborations with other artists range from soundtracks, sound design and soundscapes to more technical development in digital and analog media. He has been granted a CAPES MUSIC ALIVE! scholarship (2010), a CNPq scholarship for research in Glitch Art (2012/13), a CAPES Master’s scholarship for research about failure as creative feedstock in art (2015/2017), and the prizes Funarte for Classical Composition 2016 and Best Music by the 72H Rio 2014 Film Festival.

https://www.caeso.info/

Guy van Belle

Guy Van Belle

As an artist also known as Gívan Belá, Guy van Belle e divides his time between the urban research institute IPEM with the Art and Science Interaction Lab (ASIL) UGent (BE), and the Kravín Rural Art place KRA (CZ). Driven by an interest in media and performance, the former satisfies an interest in embodiement, VR and art-science, the second provides a creative participation in experiments with media and bio arts. Since 2005 he refuses to work solo and indoors, but performs with his international band Rural Development only outdoors, both internet connected and battery-operated off-grid. In 2017 he was selected for the Documenta 14 sound art initiative 'Every Time A Ear di Soun' creating during 2 months 7 times a day a 5 minutes live broadcast called 'Weather Reports'. For the Next Festival Bratislava during lockdown in 2021 he made an interactive avatar marching band, connecting from Brno, Berlin, Gdansk and Hranice. For the European Capital of Culture, he netcast a 22-h long live radio piece for Esch-sur-Alzette's Radio Art Zone on 24-25 August 2022, with an audio score consisting of 4 simultaneous open mikes in natural environments in Berlin, Tokyo, Kerminy and Hranice. For the recent opening of the art-science exhibition "Sense Perception / Sensoria" in Gdansk, he made a 40-singer choir and a large participative audience together imitate a range of computer regenerated and reorganized birdsongs. He will retire in 2024 and then only write fake memoirs, probably.

https://ipem.ugent.be

https://kra.land

Registration

Sound Arguments will meet monthly from February – June 2023. Meetings will be held alternately in Ghent and The Hague. Sessions will run on Mondays 14:00-18:00 and Tuesdays 09:00-15:00.

  • February 27-28 2023 (The Hague)
  • March 27-28 2023 (The Hague)
  • April 17-18 2023 (Orpheus Institute, Ghent)
  • May 15-16 2023 (Orpheus Institute, Ghent)
  • June 5-6 2023 (Orpheus Institute, Ghent)

The nature of this series is such that numbers must be limited. Prospective participants are invited to apply by responding to this call at:

https://airtable.com/shrxaL1PH2FP7cwjn

The form requests a brief description of the role of sound in your practice, which will allow us to balance the series appropriately. Application is open until 16 January. Applicants will be notified by January 25.


Sound Arguments is made available at no cost to participants, regardless of institutional affiliation. At Sound Arguments we aim to create a safe and inclusive environment for all those involved; we particularly encourage applications from historically under-represented groups in the field. As organisors, we commit to taking that into account during evaluation of the applications received.

General inquiries can be sent to soundarguments@orpheusinstituut.be .

We look forward to meeting you!

Magno Caliman (Orpheus Instituut)
Marcel Cobussen (Academy of Creative and Performance Arts - Leiden University)
Jonathan Impett (Orpheus Instituut)