Featuring a newly commissioned site-specific installation by John Wynne (13 February – 13 March) as well as installations by Antonio Della Marina (16 – 20 March) and Angelo Petronella (23 – 27 March).
The Contingencies Series presents a sound art exhibition reflecting upon contingency:
A future event or circumstance which is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty
The condition of being dependent on chance; uncertainty
Something incidental to something else.
John Wynne (13 February – 13 March)
John writes “I arrived in the gallery not knowing what I was going to do, but I did know what I was going to use to do it. I’ve been experimenting with the use of only high and low frequency sounds in a site-specific installation context for some time now. In order to push my investigations into new territory during this residency, and to heighten the level of uncertainty and chance, I have decided to limit myself to using relatively old technology for the reproduction and arrangement of sounds. Technological development now moves so rapidly that the potential of ‘old’ software and hardware is often left unexplored in the race to upgrade and update. In fact, I’m using the first computer I ever owned, an Atari ST which has no hard disk and only around 1 megabyte of RAM. Both visually and sonically, the final form of the installation will be determined by the limits and possibilities of the technology the physical and acoustic characteristics of the gallery itself as an architectural space.”
“I’d like to thank the curators and the Emerge Research Group for giving me this time in the Atrium Art Gallery to carry out my practice-based research. I’d also like to thank the University of the Arts London and Audio Feed Ltd for their support.”
John Wynne: work in progress, Atrium Gallery
About the artist/researcher:
John Wynne is an award-winning artist whose diverse, research-led practice includes large-scale sound installations, delicate sculptural works, flying radios and award-winning ‘composed documentaries’ that hover on the borders between documentation and abstraction. His Installation for 300 speakers, Pianola and vacuum cleaner was the first sound art in the Saatchi collection. He collaborated with filmmaker Atom Egoyan on a camera obscura sound installation for Aldeburgh Music. His work with endangered languages includes a project with click languages in Botswana and another with one of Canada’s indigenous languages. A year-long residency in a heart and lung transplant centre in collaboration with photographer Tim Wainwright led to a book, a 24-channel installation and a half-hour commission for BBC Radio 3. His most recent exhibition was I Am Not the Cancer, an installation based on women with metastatic breast cancer, has shown in 9 countries, most recently inside the European Parliament in Brussels.
John is a Reader in Sound Arts at the University of the Arts London and has a PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
You can find out more at www.sensitivebrigade.com/wynne.htm.
Antonio Della Marina (16 – 20 March)
About
Della Marina’s music puts sound in pole position, even going as far as to claim that it is more important than the artist himself. With an extremely reduced set of initial parameters, he realizes intense sets, quietly spectacular landscapes of sweet hummings, changing in frequency, sequence, pitch and colour, forming little melodies as well as emotive harmonic clusters. (Tobias Fischer – Tokafi).
Biography
Antonio Della Marina is an Italian electronic composer and musician who’s been focusing on working with sinusoids for more than a decade. Clearly influenced by the minimalist avant-garde of the American east coast in the sixties and seventies his work exploits the physical properties of sound, its relationship with human perception and the use of microtonal tuning sistems derived from natural harmonic series. He uses mathematical abstractions and custom built generators to shape his compositions which are offered in the form of sonorous sound sculptures.
You can find more at www.antoniodellamarina.com.