Ror-bu & LuFi
Luboš Fidler/Veronika Svobodová

Luboš Fidler is one of the most significant figures of the Czech alternative music scene, as well as in sound art and fine art. He has been active since the 1970s as a guitar player, and was a founding member of various art rock groups. In the early 1980s, he was a member of the minimalist-experimental trio Janota-Fidler-Richter, and in the 1990s he created interactive sound installations.

Veronika Svobodová reflects in her work space, time and situations. Her approach unmistakably reveals links to theater scenography, the art of installations and performance. What is important is not the sound itself but rather the way it is created in the scene. Often, this is a direct response to specific locations in the landscape or architectural spaces.

ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴀʀᴛɪᴄʟᴇ …
čᴇsᴋʏ …

Symbiont

SYMBIONT

In the twentieth century, the natural and social sciences alike imagined the world as composed of individuals – with distinct bodies, genomes, and competing vested interests. Twenty-first-century research has shown that symbiosis is a near-requirement for life – even for Homo sapiens. Life is symbiosis “all the way down”. However, when conditions suddenly shift, once life-sustaining relationships sometimes turn deadly.

Agosto Foundation is sponsoring the SYMBIONT film series as a storytelling response in times of vulnerability and radical ecosystemic changes. The SYMBIONT screening series Stories of transforming mutualism has been organized in collaboration with Anthropictures and the Cinema Ponrepo, and is curated by social anthropologist Pavel Borecký.

ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴀʀᴛɪᴄʟᴇ …
čᴇsᴋʏ …

Politically Engaged Films Against Colonialism

The Karrabing Film Collective (est. 2008) is an award-winning group of some thirty filmmakers and artists who use their aesthetic practices as a means of self-organization and social analysis. Most Karrabing are Indigenous and live in a rural community in northwestern Australia. In the Emiyengal Indigenous language Karrabing means ‘tide out.’ It refers to a time of coming together, as well as to the coastline that connects the Karrabing Film Collective as an extended family group across social lines.

Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ operates in the realm of docu-fiction and improvisational realism. Four young Aboriginal men are holed up in a chemically compromised mangrove swamp having been falsely accused of stealing two cartons of beer, while at the edge of the standoff miners ransack the country.

The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland is a powerful intervention in contemporary debates about the future present of climate change, extractive capitalism, and industrial toxicity from the point of view of Indigenous worlds. In the not-so distant future, Europeans will no longer be able to survive for long periods outdoors in a land and seascape poisoned by capitalism, but Indigenous people seem able to. …

ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴀʀᴛɪᴄʟᴇ …
čᴇsᴋʏ …

Roi Vaara: Grounding

A performer in black clothing walks at a ceremonially slow pace. He drags a guitar amp on a hand truck, followed by an iconic electric guitar, a Fender Stratocaster, dragging along on the ground a few meters behind him. Its strings are face down and are played by the surface of the ground. The loud amplified sound varies at every step. It calls people to join the procession. At the end of the performance, the guitar is worn out. The site and situation–specific performance Grounding is based on an interdisciplinary approach and on the integration of various formal matters in a simple way. It is an artistic ritual-like performance where a brand new musical instrument is sacrificed as it is being played.

ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴀʀᴛɪᴄʟᴇ …
čᴇsᴋʏ …

Towards the Unsecure Horizon
Acoustic Ecology: Landscape​/​Collapse​/​Art

The simple act of listening reveals the dissonance of the approaching age of climate change during the Anthropocene. As a preamble to the upcoming international conference MURMURANS MUNDUS: Sonic Ecology and Beyond, the CENSE Annual Conference organized by the Faculty of Art and Design, UJEP in Ústí nad Labem (3–5 October, 2019), a panel discussion will take place concerning issues that will be further discussed during the later conference. The discussions will focus on topics relating to environmental issues and acoustic ecology and will feature a number of guests from such fields as ecology, sociology, art and philosophy, who will reflect on this burning topic.

ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴀʀᴛɪᴄʟᴇ …
čᴇsᴋʏ …

Murmurans Mundus
The Second Annual CENSE Conference

Murmurans Mundus: Sonic Ecology and Beyond is an international interdisciplinary conference focused on the current matters of acoustic ecology perceived from the perspective of arts and both social and natural sciences. The aim of the conference is to contribute to the international discussion on topics such as noise pollution, options of interpretation and manipulation of the acoustic environment or possibilities to reflex “acoustic ecology” in the educational process. The conference picks up where the founding conference, CENSE, left off. The Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies conference was held in Budapest at the end of November and beginning of December 2018.

The project is based on collaboration of Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University, Ústí nad Labem (CZ), Faculty of Education at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem (CZ), The Soundscape Research Studio, Institute of Cultural Studies, University Wroclaw (PL), Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra (SK) and Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest (HU).

ᴡᴇʙ sɪᴛᴇ …

Acoustemology

Sound is a medium which connects all animate and inanimate objects in the world into a network of relationships. While in the past, sound’s fleeting nature discouraged many from diving deeper into its complexities, the sheer fascination with sound of many avant-garde artists and adventurous scholars, along with the development of sound recording technologies, have greatly contributed to the increased interest in sound over the last 50 years.

ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴀʀᴛɪᴄʟᴇ …
čᴇsᴋʏ …

Burkhard Beins

Born 1964 in Lower Saxony, Burkhard Beins has lived in Berlin since 1995. As a composer/performer of experimental music he is known for his definitive use of percussion in combination with selected sound objects. In addition, he works with live-electronics/analog synthesizers and has conceived several sound installations. Beins leads workshops based on his graphic score system Adapt/Oppose.

ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴀʀᴛɪᴄʟᴇ …
čᴇsᴋʏ …

Luciano Chessa

The Noise of Art and Concert for Intonarumori
Sounds / Codes / Images, 11 August 2019
Event photographs

Luciano Chessa is a composer, conductor, audiovisual and performance artist. His compositions include Cromlech, a large organ piece he premiered in Melbourne’s Town Hall in May 2018 as part of a solo organ recital; the opera Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago, a work merging experimental theater with reality TV which required from the cast over 55 hours of fasting, and A Heavenly Act, an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with original video by Kalup Linzy.

Opening Performance Orchestra is a seven-membered ensemble working within a large span of genres – from 20th-century electronic thrusts of the musical avant-garde as far as contemporary Japanese noise music. The ensemble’s own work is based on the so called fraction music, when the initial sound is digitally destroyed, fractured, and uncompromisingly rid of all its original attributes in the sense of the credo “no rhythms – no melodies – no harmonies.”

Phaerentz (a.k.a. Petr Ferenc) is a Prague-based electronic musician, promoter and music journalist. He has been working with sound and different kinds of media, making use of various music players, particularly record and tape players, but also minidiscs and portable CD players.

ᴠɪᴇᴡ ɢᴀʟʟᴇʀʏ …
čᴇsᴋʏ …

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