Giga-Hertz Award 2020: Concert I
Siamak Anvari, Annie Rüfenacht & Sandra Schmid, Mark Pilkington and h0nh1m
Sat, November 28, 2020 8:30 pm CET
- Location
- Online
After the award ceremony, you will hear live performances by this year's Giga-Hertz Production Award winners h0nh1m and Mark Pilkington. The concert starts with a piece by Siamak Anvari, followed by a performance by Annie Rüfenacht & Sandra Schmid who received Honorary Mentions.
h0nh1m belongs to a new generation of artists who are working to abolish the separation of installation, audiovisual performance and technical realization. It was precisely this interaction between image and music that convinced the jury, as the animated images in combination with the music creates a fascinating pull that immerses recipients in an art world that, despite all its aestheticization, also creates anxiety. This is certainly also to be seen as a political statement, as the sky over his home Hong Kong is threatening to darken.
Being engineer, visual artist and electronic musician, Mark Pilkington combines the visual and the aural in a natural way. His work »Hidden Forest«, implemented as a live computer algorithm or a fixed media work, is centered around the idea of natural and artificial ecosystems, and the concept of movement as manifesting living presence and time. »Hidden Forest« calls attention to the burning environmental issues by combining the natural and the artificial.
The jury of the Giga-Hertz Award 2020 awards the Swiss artist duo Annie Rüfenacht & Sandra Schmid an Honorary Mention. The double character between scientificity and abstraction of their work »Kataklasit«, with which Rüfenacht & Schmid explore visual and acoustic aspects of stones, impressed the jury to a great extent.
Siamak Anvari composed the almost 17-minute composition »Hafthasht« in a 24-channel surround sound version, which allows the nebulous, abstract and yet expressive character of the composition to be experienced immersively. The jury was impressed by the immediacy and freshness of the sounds, as well as by the immediate effect the composition is able to unfold.
Program
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Siamak Anvari »Hafthasht« (2019)
Dauer: 16‘20‘‘
Format: Fixed Media for 24 channels»Hafthasht« is a fixed media electroacoustic piece composed for 24 channels. The piece was finished in October 2019 and premiered at the »Azimuth # 8« concert, which took place in »iii« workspace, The Hague. The core idea of the piece is based on the phenomenon of reverberation or echo. A sound bounces from various surfaces and with each reflection, it looses a part of its energy until it fades into silence. This idea is incorporated into the production of the sound materials as well as into the spatialization of the piece. Here, each loudspeaker functions as a surface in projecting the sound. In other words, the 24-channel setup establishes a network of reflection points in this space in a symmetrical manner. The time intervals between the iterations are also manipulated and stretched in various scales throughout the piece. The silence which terminates each reverberation process, plays a critical role in the composition as well. The sound materials are mainly derived form the recordings of some Persian instruments such as setar, santur, or tombak.
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Annie Rüfenacht & Sandra Schmid »Kataklasit« (2016)
Dauer: 10‘16‘‘
Format: audiovisual performanceAsphalt and stone dissolve, fuse with digital fragments, these fuse again with water, the water with stone, to reunite again and again into an astral-like landscape. The work »Kataklasit« deals with the ephemeral, the independent in nature and in the digital world. Hybrid image fragments create a bridge between representation and abstraction. Using program algorithms, photographs are transformed into transparent, floating and diffuse fragments. Sounds from the immediate environment are amplified and expanded in their sound potential. Recognizable and identifiable sounds are reduced to the essential on the image and sound level and focused on tectonic connections. Furthermore, this work deals with aspects of simultaneity and asynchrony of music and image. Using field recordings and sound recordings from the immediate surroundings, a scenery is created in which the image-sound relationship expands, changes, and separates again.
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Mark Pilkington »Hidden Forest« (2018)
Duration: 11’33’’
Format: Audio-visual Algorithm»Hidden Forest« is an algorithmic composition examining the use of technology to represent ecological concerns. The forest acts as a metaphor for an ecosystem inhabited by entities sensed through the movement of light and sound. Coded non-biological entities are intertwined through movement allowing us to comprehend embodiment in a spatial-temporal field. Revealing a vision of how natural and artificial ecosystems interact to provide an experience of nature as process. It is precisely this emphasis on the evolving relationship between parameters, or their interactive feedback that characterizes the piece in terms of real-time adaptation, emergence, and transformation. The parametric design allows the temporal dimension of space to become central through the formation of invariant topologies. Prediction is no longer based on finite probabilities, but rather on the inclusion of potential qualities.
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h0nh1m »RadianceScape Live!« (2020)
Duration: 10’00’’ – 20’00’’
Format: audiovisual performance»RadianceScape Live!« is an audiovisual performance that replaces the observatory. The core idea behind this project rests upon the visualization of live radiation data of major cities around the world in comparison to Chernobyl and Fukushima struggeling with the consequences from the massive nuclear disasters happening in 1986 and 2011 until today. The sound as well as the visuals are generated on the basis of the radiation data collected from Safecast.org, which is a global sensor network for collecting and sharing radioactivity measurement data. Since body-damaging radiation – γ-waves – is always invisible to the eye, a scanning laser technique is used to establish the dialogue between space and all radiation data. Different tonal drone ambiance and noises are generated on the basis of radioactivity. The sound samples are captured with an electromagnetic field detector device which also gives an alarm to the inaudible energy field. Will the piece reflect what the witnesses experienced in the wreckages and ruins?
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Contains a sample of ‘ZURE’ from »async«
by Ryuichi Sakamoto
© 2017 KAB America Inc. (ASCAP), Administered by Kobalt Songs Music Publishing / KAB Inc.
Courtesy of KAB America Inc.
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