Saturday, October 30, 2010

8th meeting report



For our 8th meeting we explored the Eesti Rahva Muuseum itself, experimenting with the building's sonic spaces, structures and architecture. After some initial group exercises in our usual meeting room (using the room's most prolific item: it's chairs) we broke into smaller groups for individual exploration of the building, culminating in two performances:




Our first space was the museum's coatroom; usually covered in coats, it's structure was already altered at this time of the evening by being completely bare, revealing the hollow metallic skeleton of the racks themselves. We found each hook to have it's own resonance when struck or bowed, and the hooks' numbering system (meant to help you find your coat among many) proved to be a convenient way to locate specific points and repeat resonant forms.




The second space was the small staircase area next to the bar - a varied palette of sounds came from the rotating bar stools, the staircase railing, and the museum's Finno-Ugric language display, representing each language within the Finno-Ugric group by a disc sized proportionally to the language's number of native speakers. Each disc, of course, proved to have its own distinct sound.

We finished our meeting by watching some video material of site-specific actions in Estonia and Latvia. For more information on the revenant:sound project that inspired this workshop, see http://www.revenantsound.net.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

8th meeting, Wednesday, October 27th

MoKS presents:
helikoosolek:tartu 
revenant:tartu, with Patrick McGinley
Wednesday, October 27th
6-8pm
Eesti Rahva Muuseum, Tartu


















revenant:tartu - site specific soundscape explorations

The 8th edition of helikoosolek:tartu will be led by its regular moderator Patrick McGinley as an exploration of group actions within specific spaces. The group will explore concepts of active participation within a space's soundscape through a series of games, exercises and improvisations in various spaces within the Eesti Rahva Muuseum itself, experimenting with materials, shapes, resonances, surfaces, distances, and micro and macro sound events, towards a series a private group 'performances' to happen around the building. All sounds will originate from materials found in-situ, and from interactions with the space itself, and no artificial amplification will be used.

McGinley will also present a series of short audio and video recordings dealing with the same topic, from the collected activities of revenant:sound, an ongoing project with open membership that focuses on site-specific acoustic actions.

http://www.revenantsound.net
http://www.murmerings.com

helikoosolek:tartu is organised my MoKS and supported by Eesti Rahva Muuseum, Tartu Linnavalitsus, and Eesti Kultuurkapital.
http://helikoosolek.blogspot.com
http://www.moks.ee
http://www.erm.ee

Thursday, October 14, 2010

7th meeting report

Thanks to Natalia for preparing yet another workshop. This one being very condensed also made people focused. In just 2 short hours we created a whole ensemble of low power circuits. Most of us even managed to get a fairly diverse range of sounds by connecting the free leads to different materials and the circuits of our neighbors. After a short while its hard to know why the circuit is doing what its doing and how to control it. All good fun.