***CANCELED***
Francisco López & Barbara Ellison
Internationally acclaimed for the intensity, richness and astonishing audio detail of his live immersive surround performances in the dark, sound artist and composer Francisco López has created yet another magnum sonic tour de force in his new VirtuAural Electro-Mechanics. A creation developed from a myriad of original sound recordings of mechanical machines, electromechanical systems and industrial environments gathered over the past 25 years all over the world; from food factories to “white rooms,” from 18th-century automata to computers, from wood and wires to magnetism, from the microscopic to the monumental. Resulting from a massive process of evolution, recombination and spatialization of these materials; merging the “real” with the rise of a new breed of unexistent, magnified, dramatically hyper-real machines; this gargantuan multi-layered creature is all about an extraordinary ontological sonic experience of VirtuAurality in the dark that will put you at the core of The archetypal machine.
Known for her explorations of ghostly presence and substance in a plethora of sonic realms, artist and composer Barbara Ellison’s work delves into the sonic intricacies of objects, manipulated instruments, voice avatars and sound environments from the Arctic to the Amazonian rainforest. In her work, the hidden and the phantasmatic reveal themselves as a reward for the engaged and attentive listener willing to take such a sonic voyage. Her new work for live performance, CyberSongs, explores the simultaneous use of both computer text-to-speech synthetic/sampled voices and computer-like patterns with human voices - through the intensive and extensive use of repetition- as tools and materials to give rise to surprising audible phenomena of a fascinating odd musicality. Words, morphemes, phonemes, phrases and speech particles acquire constantly shifting new aural meanings, turning into the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic patterns of the obsessively phantasmatic trans-human song cycle of the CyberSongs.
Barbara Ellison (Ireland/The Netherlands) is a sound and visual artist living and working in The Hague. Her work explores ghostly presence and substance in a plethora of sonic and visual realms. Her live performances often play with ritualistic forms giving rise to sonic structures emerging through a hypnotic repetitious exploration of simple sound-producing actions. Through her work and research with ‘Phantoms’, she explores states of auditory and visual ambiguity working with materials that are either naturally ambiguous or have been ‘composed’ or created to attain this quality, in order to exploit the potential for apophenia to manifest, bringing with it what she calls a ‘phantasmatic’ presence. For the creation of this work, she has developed a syncretic approach that encompasses and coalesces all kinds of sources, materials, techniques and creative tools: from exploring and performing with the sonic intricacies of amplified objects (‘Drawing Phantoms’), creating voice avatars with transhuman capabilities (‘Vocal Phantoms’), creating ‘Phantom Portraits’ or carrying out field expeditions from diverse environments such as the Arctic, the Himalayas, or the Amazonian rainforest (‘Natural Phantoms’). Ellison has performed and presented her work recently at festivals such as as Dag in De Branding (The Hague), MAZE festival 2017 (Amsterdam), Electronic Extravaganza Festival 2017 (Amsterdam), UBIK/WORM (Rotterdam), L’Audible festival (Paris), AZIMUTH (The Hague), Centro Puertas de Castilla (Murcia, Spain), Volumens festival (Valencia, Spain), STÖRUNG Festival 9 (Barcelona), Modern Body Festival (The Hague), Fringe festival (Amsterdam), ‘Test Extra’ Nutshuis (The Hague), TodaysArt festival (The Hague), Monotak festival OT3 (Amsterdam), Liquid Architecture (Melbourne/Sydney) and Venice architectural Biennale (Venice). She has a PhD from the University of Huddersfield, UK (‘Sonic Phantoms’) and currently teaches at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. barbaraellison.com
Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the main figures on the realms of sound art and experimental music. His experience in the field of sound creation and work with environmental recordings covers a period of forty years, during which he has developed an impressive sound universe that is completely personal and iconoclastic and based on profound listening to the world. He has performed hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings and sound installations in over seventy countries all over the world, including the main international museums, galleries and festivals, such as: PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), Museum of Modern Art (Paris), Sónar Festival (Barcelona), International Film Festival (Rotterdam), Festival des Arts (Brussels), Darwin Fringe (Darwin, Australia), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, Center of Contemporary Art (Kita-Kyushu, Japan), etc. His extensive catalogue of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with hundreds of international artists) has been published by 400 recording companies / publishers all over the world. He has been awarded five times with honorary mentions at the prestigious Ars Electronica Festival (Austria) and is the recipient of a Qwartz Award (France) for best sound anthology. franciscolopez.net