Art – Page 2 – Project DIVFUSE

A Ghost Pond Emerges : Action Pyramid [PAST]

Exhibition:

27 & 28 November 2021 Saturday & Sunday 2-7pm.

Artist will be on site 4-7pm Saturday & 5:30-7pm Sunday.

Free Entry

We are delighted to announce that the work of Tom Fisher (aka Action Pyramid) has been selected to exhibit at Project DIVFUSE capsule art space through the first Open Call in collaboration with The Thames Submarine – an online sound art platform. Theme of this Open Call was Beginnings.

‘Over the past few years I have accompanied Carl Sayer, Helen Greaves and Jack Greenhalgh (UCL, The Norfolk Ponds Project, University of Bristol) on fieldwork trips to Norfolk, during which I made numerous recordings of the mysterious sounds of underwater life in the farmland ponds of the area. This piece is part of an ongoing project composing audio works with the underwater pond soundscapes.The fieldwork focuses on restoring and surveying these pond habitats and the hydrophone recordings featured in the piece are from various ponds in the area. The poetic term ‘ghost pond’ is used to describe the traces of a old farm pond which has since been filled in, but is still visible on the landscape as markings in the field. Amazingly if these ghost ponds are dug out the original aquatic plant life will often regrow from the seeds preserved in mud of the old pond bed.’

Tom Fisher is a sound artist and musician based in the marshy edge-lands of North East London. Working primarily under the name Action Pyramid his projects vary from site-specific sound installation and headphone based works for galleries and museums, to experimental radio works and compositions.

Transects – Jardin du Luxembourg & Copenhagen : John F. Barber [PAST]

Sound Exhibition:

4 February 2022 Friday 3-7pm

5 & 6 February 2022 Saturday & Sunday 2-6pm

Free Entry

We are delighted to announce that the work of John F. Barber has been selected as one of the two pieces to exhibit at Project DIVFUSE micro media art gallery through the Open Call DIVFUSE Sound Archive, which puts a focus on work based on field recordings.

Transects is a sound art project collecting field recordings while walking through acoustic environments. Combined, these samples provide sound-based collages representing their place of origin. The desired end result is to promote immersive narratives of the overlay and interplay between sounds heard in an acoustic environment.

Transect: Jardin du Luxembourg

August 2013, Paris, France, John Barber

Begun in 1612 by Marie dé Medici, Jardin du Luxembourg (Luxembourg Garden), Paris, France, features fountains, terraces, gardens, tree-lined pathways, tennis and basketball courts, a theatre, brasseries, bands, and boles. All can be heard in this transect.

Transect: Copenhagen

August 2014, Copenhagen, Denmark, John Barber

This transect experiences walking through Copenhagen. Playing with a set of automatic doors and a corrugated cardboard wall covering, with a broken alarm in the background. Wheeled suitcases on cobblestone streets. A street crossing alarm. Automobile and horse carriage traffic. Metro announcements. Pedestrian ambiance around the Vor Frue Plads fountain, street sounds, a marching band and squad of soldiers passing on their way to a guard changing ceremony at the Odd Fellows Palace, the tinkling of a bicycle bell.

From Other Spaces : [ _ _ _ ] [PAST]

Sound Exhibition:

25 February 2022 Friday 3-7pm

26 & 27 February 2022 Saturday & Sunday 2-6pm

Artist Li Song will be on site Friday 5-7pm & Saturday 4-6pm. He will be joined in by Shuoxin Tan and Jia Liu online for an artist talk on Saturday 4-5pm. Please email divfuse@gmail.com to reserve a place for the artists’ talk. 10 seats only.

Free Entry

We are delighted to announce that the work of the ensemble [ _ _ _ ] has been selected as one of the two pieces to exhibit at Project DIVFUSE micro media art gallery through the Open Call DIVFUSE Sound Archive, which puts a focus on work based on field recordings.

Three members of [ _ _ _ ] have recorded in the field of traffic and acoustic signals in their own cities (London, Cologne and Karlsruhe) using binaural microphones. The concrete traces of urban networks are intertwined with the abstract electronic sound through the network music ensemble’s collaborative algorithm, which they developed in the programming language SuperCollider from 2020 to 2021 during the lockdown.

By live coding within their interactive system, exchanging information and sharing the signal flow, they’ve created this 30-minute sonic trip, on a route that does not exist.

The project was supported by Musikfonds (Neustart Kultur, Germany).

[ _ _ _ ]

“Three placeholders sitting in a room between empty spaces.” This is how the ensemble [ _ _ _ ] describes itself. It was founded in 2020 by the artists Li Song, Shuoxin Tan and Jia Liu, (to compose music for the network. Li Song is a musician and software developer based in London. He composes music for computers and acoustic instruments. Shuoxin Tan was born in Beijing and works as a composer and sound artist in Cologne. She researches algorithmic acoustics, sound ontology and Lacanian topology. Jia Liu is a composer and computer music performer. She lives in Karlsruhe and is currently working on algorithmic music and composition for autonomous systems.

London 26 and 28 March 2020: imitation: inversion : Caroline Kraabel [PAST]

Exhibition:

11 March 2022 Friday 3-7pm. Artist will be at the gallery 4:30-6:30pm on 11 March.

12 & 13 March 2022 Saturday & Sunday 2-6pm

Free Entry

A sound-film by Caroline Kraabel

‘This 40-minute Ivor Award-winning film (Sound Art category), my first, started with shots of London during the first UK Covid 19 Lockdown (the strict phase of which began on 23 March 2020), taken on my phone during “permitted exercise” (cycling), so my children would have a record of the unfamiliar stillness of their city at a time we now have ingrained in our memories for its sudden difference, and for the surfacing of fear, grief, and love it brought about.

I kept coming back to these shots of quiet streets: who was missing, who was still there, what was revealed when the tide of sound and activity went out?

I undertook to make sense of these images by playing their sounds, and their absence of sounds:

The shots from 26 March are “imitated”. On the alto saxophone I have recreated as many as possible of the original sounds from the audio on my phone-shots, and thus replaced the original audio.

For the shots from 28 March I replaced the original audio, too, “inverting” it.

I aimed to make music that was in a definable way the OPPOSITE of the actual sounds recorded on my phone.

First I divided the original audio into six “strips”, covering six separate frequency ranges, from low to high. Then I recorded six “strips” of sax and bass chords, again from low to high, and matched the highest sax/bass strip with the lowest original strip, the second highest with the second lowest, the third highest with the third lowest.

I used the dynamics of the original “strips” to control the sound on the corresponding sax and bass strips, ducking out the chords where there was a sound on the original, and leaving the chords present when there was no sound on the original. Then I muted the original audio tracks for all but a few dramatic seconds of the “inversion” section.

33Hz Sonic Orgasm : Mark Wagner [PAST]

Exhibition:

1 April 2022 Friday 4-8pm

2 & 3 April Saturday & Sunday 3-7pm

Free Entry

33Hz Sonic Orgasm is an interactive installation based on the modern folklore of 33Hz being the most arousing frequency. Using transducers and subwoofers mounted to a seat, Wagner ‘plays’ the saddle with frequencies, waves and sweeps using octaves, harmonics and overtones of 33Hz.

Though it can effectively trigger an orgasm, the project is first and foremost a playful and sensual sound experience with mystical implications.

Indeed, the number 33 is of great esoteric significance, pertaining to the nodal points of the central vortex or Kundalini. The sound travels from the root through the body and chakras resulting in an energetic ‘massage’ that can be just as much spiritual as sensual.

The experience is tailor made live adapting to each participant regardless of gender to create a unique experience…. Participants will be invited in turn into the intimate gallery space for the experience which lasts 10 – 15 minutes. The interactive installation has been presented in Geneva and Barcelona and this will be its UK public premiere.

Kingdom Loops 2002–2020 : Toby Kaufmann-Buhler [PAST]

Exhibition:

22 April 2022 Friday 4-8pm (Artist will be at the gallery 6-8pm)

23 & 24 April Saturday & Sunday 2-6pm (Artist will be at the gallery 3-5pm both days)

Running time : 29 minutes. Free Entry

Keys to the Kingdom 2002

The windows of our third floor flat overlooked the constant bustle of Hammersmith Broadway, and this view became the object of fascination for the two years we lived there. Constant traffic, masses of people, mass transportation and mass surveillance overlaid our life there. All of this (particularly the latter aspect) inspired me to set up a camera at the window, and frame as much of the activity as it could gather. One result was this video, made quickly in early 2002.

Sawing the Kingdom 2020

In the summer of 2020 and amidst the ongoing pandemic, I revisited video footage shot at Hammersmith Broadway from September 2003 (this time two shots recorded over two hours). I took a bifurcated approach to the imagery, similar to the 2002 video (altering the speed), and also manipulating the video through software effects to highlight and play with the density of activity in the frame. For the sound in this video I used an approach with singing saw (manipulated by software); the saw has been an important part of my practice for many years, and this sound has an affinity with the traffic and environmental sound of the original video.

– Toby Kaufmann-Buhler