Oceanic Refractions, >>CTM Festival 2024
Oceanic Refractions is an immersive installation featuring testimonies of Fijian, i-Kiribati and Papua New Guinean elders on kinship, self-determination and care in the face of global ecocide. Along with reflections from these teachers, artists, fisherpeople, grandparents and chiefs, we hear field recordings of the reefs of Fiji, the oceans and mangroves of Kiribati, and the shorelines of Papua New Guinea’s Duke of York Islands.
runs: 27/1/- 4/2/2024
silent green Betonhalle
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The result of several years of research and talanoa (dialogue) with Indigenous leaders, scholars, artists and advocates from Fiji, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, the Marshall Islands and Nauru, the work is led and produced by artists AM Kanngieser (Australia/Germany) and Mere Nailatikau (Fiji) and who combine their expertise in climate research, education and arts (Kanngieser) and Pacific communication and international relations (Nailatikau), as they work with sound artist KMRU (Kenya/Germany), filmmakers Laisiasa Dave Lavaki (Fiji) and Tumeli Tuqota (Fiji), olfactory designer Smell Art (Australia), design and fabrication studio Space Forms (Ireland) and projection specialist Frame Works (Ireland).
The themes addressed by the installation will be further explored through talks and lectures at both CTM Festival and transmediale, as well as through specially commissioned texts featured via the festival magazines.
AM 9.0 - The Old Sharjah Slaughterhouse (Sharjah Architecture Triennial)
w/ Cave Bureau
Anthropocene Museum by occupying a partly disused slaughterhouse, philosophically and materially reflecting on the very concept of impermanence and the role of the human species amidst planetary crisis.
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The ninth instalment of Cave Bureau’s “Anthropocene Museum” research series constitutes the adaptation and tour of Sharjah’s old slaughterhouse, whose primary protagonists are the animals — cows, goats, sheep, and camels — consumed in the city; often without thought of their origins or how they are processed. The audience is corralled through an ever-present, but seldom reflected upon, municipal event space, in a building that is now only intermittently used.
Visitors will experience a variety of ambient sounds, drawings, projections, and installations that tell of a world steeped in a deranged consumerist culture deeply embedded in an enslaved human consciousness. On a global scale, man-induced livestock proliferation has constituted the greatest biomass of mammalian life on earth, with animals being a commodity sold to the highest-paying suitor. In equal and potent measure, human beings have been commodified through capitalism, auctioned to the highest bidder. A reference to a recent, near-forgotten past also emerges; enslaved Africans were led from the Indian Ocean shores to the Gulf by Arab merchants — like livestock.
At the core of the exhibit lies the philosophical underpinning of meaningful impermanence. In life, only death is certain, everything else is in flux. Visitors are encouraged to view the ever-shifting built landscape of life as an opportunity for reversed notions of growth through introspection and spiritual reconnection. It asks one to accept the need to adapt through a new planetary consciousness that embraces meaningful impermanence without us building almost anything at all.
Temporary Stored
Ars Electronica, 2023
Temporary Stored is a repatriation project which questions the significance of sound archives in museums. Using selected sounds from an archive from the Sound Archive of Royal Museum of Central Africa, a fixed media piece is developed, re-contextualizing what the archived sounds reveal about the cultural heritage of countries in East and Central Africa. The piece focuses on narratives through different sounds from the archive, field recordings, and synthesizers, reconfiguring ways of thinking sonically through recorded pasts and (futures).
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The Art of Dreams : Porsche 2022
Ruby Barber
Immersive art installation by floral artist Ruby Barber of Studio Mary Lennox.
Sound: KMRU
Palazzo Clerici, Via Clerici 5, Milano
The Art of Dreams is an initiative that welcomes philosophical discourse and benefits from conceptual depth. Together with Ruby the initiative aims to explore the relationships, tensions, and synergies between nature and technology. The dream-like piece incorporates a dozen piloted drones into a new-to-the-world viewing experience. It is part of Porsche’s series of special art & design commissions “The Art of Dreams” to be shown from the 6th till 12th June at Brera Design Week 2022.
press:
PORSCHE CONJURES A FLORAL DREAMSCAPE FOR MILAN DESIGN WEEK
Demystifying ‘The Art of Dreams’, Porsche’s debut at Brera for Milan Design Week 2022
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Robert Johnson Theorie 77 // Museum Of Sound
2day Listening Rooms + Lecture
The Museum of Sound is nomadic and in flux, it exists in no specific place and is rooted in the essence of sound and listening. In the series of the listening rooms, the aim is to get back to listening as a focused and prioritised activity, an empty room full of sound.
For the cooperation with Robert Johnson Theorie, Museum of Sound has invited Mieko Suzuki and KMRU to curate the listening rooms. Both artists have approaches to producing sound, which resonates with Museum of Sound, through use of intensity and textures.
1hr Listening Room at 14.00/15.00/16.00/17.00/18.00
curated by KMRU (Editions Mego)
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Slowed Cities
as part of : ‘Parting with a return (You’re So Busy),
Vapaan Taiteen Tila , Finland 2022
Engaging with soundscape through field recording, city sounds have been a significant study in my practice. Different perspectives emerge while considering listening to cityscapes as active research. A slowed inward listening approach to the city is a proposition to explore how the human and nonhuman is mediated by sound. A slowed interwoven piece is realized using sound fragments from personal archives of field recordings from Nairobi, Jinja, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, Montreal. A narrative of a past, present, and future soundscape of cities is re-imagined, reflecting on the ongoing industrial revolutions of cities and sonic lives of the inhabitants - using sound as a distinctive medium of knowledge.
photos by : jenniholma
Previous Showcases: UnderGround Institute Festival Berlin -
Slowed Cities” (sound installation, entrance to gr_und gallery, 10.12.22)
Upcoming:
Bärenzwinger
Promising Premises
Slowed Cities
Andrea Acosta, Jelena Fužinato & Patricia Sandonis, KMRU, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Ioana Vreme MoserBärenzwingerMarch 10, 2023 — May 14, 2023
photos by: Juan Saez
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Slowed Cities 2.0
Quadraphonic
STRP Festival 2023
Photo Courtesy of BoudewijnBollmann
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Aliens are temporary - a mutating tale
09.04.-06.06.2022
Curated by Sonia Fernández Pan , Sylvia Sadzinski , Anaïs Senli
At Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien
In this exhibition room you can hear:
KMRU & Aho Ssan
Ruined Abstractions, 2022
Sound, 21:20 min.
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Nile Koetting 'Downtime Salon'
Nüremberg 2022
Nile Koetting presents Downtime Salon, a site-specific waiting room for SB Space Between.
Located in the middle of the Steinbühl S-Bahn station on a barren staircase and busy forecourt, Koetting has developed a listening-focused waiting room environment where festival goers are invited to rest, listen, and kill time as they transition from one festival event to the next.
Inspired by his experience working in the service industry in Japan where BGM (background music) is flooded into every social environment, Koetting worked with artist Reece Cox to curate a selection of 14 composers to produce long-form compositions serving as background music. Throughout each day of the festival, visitors can listen to these works for any duration of their choosing. Populating the walls of the space are LED screens displaying detailed analysis of each composition produced using a music analysis engine called Cyanite, similar to technology used by streaming services to read ‘mood’ or ‘vibe’ of songs to then produce algorithmic playlists. Alongside the Cyanite graphs, visitors will find virtual festival schedules, train timetables, and bespoke animations produced collaboratively with artist Rina Cho.
By day, Downtime Salon is a public space for visitor information and restful listening. Each evening it will transform into a sleep session room, where a limited number of visitors may stay overnight and experience a special composition for sleep produced by composer Hideki Umezawa.
Le Son 7
Longbows (2021/ 2022)
Paris, 21’ Buenos Aires 22
Permission 'to just be' requires space. Harking back to scores such as Sonic Meditations, 1971 by the great Pauline Oliveros, Longbows explores how long a sound can be played out as one take. A string-like instrument is disintegrated to its extremes. As it withers, new elements and tones come to life and add a layer before it fades. An awareness of slowing down, a slowed down moment draws on elements of the self care movement in contemporary fine arts. Time slows down sound until it is apparently silent. Yet there is no such thing as silence, we cannot stop time. We can, however, stop long enough to be nearly still, while listening (especially active listening) is still a form of 'doing'.
New Ear Festival 2024
Friday, January 5 – Sunday, January 7
CURATED BY ((LE SON 7)) SOUND ART GALLERY
Le Son 7, a sound art gallery based in France, on the eve of its first exhibition in New York (from 9 – 14 January, 570 Broome Street, 10013 NY) presents a one-hour guided listening session of multi-channel and stereo pieces. The gallery only works with audio, there is nothing to see.
On the program are two stereo pieces, a compelling study of climate change in California by Bernie Krause and a sonification of the oscillations of stars by Caroline Devine, a four-channel deep-listening contemplation of different cities by KMRU and two eight channel works: a supernatural evocation of the ancient symbols by Beatriz Ferreyra and a tribute to a departed friend from Stephen Vitiello.
AMALGAMATED HABITATION : NAIROBI/BERLIN
collaborative work by Joseph Kamaru Ross Alexander, and Lupus Sieger.
2021
The work comprises a live performance presenting recordings and sounds collected and made by the two in their respective home cities of Nairobi and Berlin and an online virtual exhibit of mixed-media works.
Within AMALGAMATED HABITATION : NAIROBI/BERLIN the two artists utilise their respective collections of sound-walk field recordings made in Berlin and Nairobi to create interpretive and abstract sound maps of the two cities, these recordings are combined with extracted 3D mapping data and p-o-v video recordings of areas within the two metropolitan centres to create an immersive multi-media work which presents an impressionistic representation of similarity and contrast between the two places and aims to create a type of 'amalgamated' imagined city-scape using sonic and visual elements gathered from the recordings and videos.
In creating this hybrid representation the two aim to question and reflect the markers and boundaries which are used to define the typical aspects of habitational urban environments on different continents such as in Nairobi or Berlin and to abstract the the patterns of psycho-geography which play a role in the relation we have to these habitats. Within this, as is a theme within the work of both artists, a re-contextualisation of the represented spaces allows for escape into a third, imagined place which exists somewhere outside of any real-world restrictions, a place where typical markers and boundaries are deconstructed and reformed to offer an alternate view of what a metropolitan space can sound like, look like and be.
Opening format presentation Jan_23 16:00-17:00 on @cashmere_radio
Online Virtual exhibit Jan_23-31 : kuula.co/amhab
project funded by Initiative Neue Musik Berlin @field.notes.berlin_inm
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Meditation for an Open Mind, 2021.
Felisha Ledesma, Joseph Kamaru, Mitchell Keaney
29:04’
Meditation for an Open Mind was originally conceived as a guided meditation performance to explore the sensorial relationships between scent and sound. Due to health regulations in Germany mitigating the spread of COVID-19, the performance became a pre-recorded guided meditation for listeners to experience from their homes. Still working with the nature of a live performance, the sound for the meditation was recorded live in one take following four loosely defined stages: opening, sensory movement, intensity / catharsis, reconnecting to center.
Selected field recordings paired with modular synthesizer create the sonic environment to trigger memories of places and scents, while the “scent” aspect of the performance has been substituted by a spoken word piece. Using techniques found in ASMR for relaxation and reducing stress, we describe the scents that would have been used in the live performance with the intention of helping listeners pull from their existing sensory memories involving scent and sound.
Pre-listening Instructions*
Before starting the mediation,
please wear comfortable clothing and make a relaxing space in your room/home to lie on the floor.
Take a few sips of water, turn out the lights in your room,
lie down,
close your eyes (or wear a sleeping mask)
and
listen to the mediation with your favorite pair of headphones.
If something in the meditation strikes you as strange or incomprehensible,
don’t panic.
Welcome the confusion
and
enjoy the sounds
without
preconceived ideas or predetermined
goals.
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Variations
(Nairobi, Berlin, St Petersburg)
2019/2020.
Three-channel field recording/experimental sound, loudspeaker system.
Listening is often driven by a desire for understanding. It's an attempt to make associations, to recognize the sound as familiar to what we hear into known categories. Its also described and experienced as solidarity and individual practice, deeply personal and private. Field recording is one tool that enhances critical listening, using environmental sources as compositional tools. In 'Variations', the three channels of the work protract and complicate the listening experience. The soundscapes of the three locations will be installed as 3-channel audio, protracted at equidistant angles (Speakers) forcing the listener to stand centrally between either of the speakers to perceive the piece of two different locations or start in the center and listen to the entire scape collage. Movement and memory is key in this installation as it affects how the listener will hear the sounds, depending on the position of the ears, and understanding the piece as a whole.
Abuja Art Week, Nov 2019, NIgeria
Variations [Radiophonic]
Sonic Agency Festival -TBC
(in between Spaces)
AISIMULA, 2020 (wip)
4 Channel Audio-Visual
12:36’
‘AISIMULA’ explores the relationship between noise and artificial intelligence, investigating the contrast and connection between human processed sounds and output generated by Machine learning , investigating the emphasis of expression of the machine’s emotions from limited data set.
AISIMULA (excerpt01)