From My Non-Place - Piece for Morse Code & Keylogger (D. A. Calf)

‘These shifts of gaze and plays of imagery, this emptying of the consciousness, can be caused - this time in systematic, generalised and prosaic fashion - by the characteristic features of what I have proposed to call ‘supermodernity’. These subject the individual consciousness to entirely new experiences and ordeals of solitude, directly linked with the appearance and proliferation of non-places.’ -Marc Augé (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity) When Marc Augé first began identifying the alienating and transitory spaces that marked his notion of the supermodern life they were big, architectural and public. Computers had yet to so thoroughly inveigle the personal space, let alone become miniaturised, super-powered and portable. The revolution that has occurred since has shifted the site of the non-place from the public to the personal, and from the large to the small. The new non-place par excellence is the QWERTY key[board/pad]. It exists as a our prime zone of interaction with, and mediation of, the world yet they are inherently empty. We spend more and more time with them, for digital transition and transmission, for the genesis of our identities. From My Non-Place is an attempt to interrogate the habitation of this space, to further depersonalise the experience of engagement with the keyboard and to consider the ultimate significance of the content that we produce daily and that constitutes so much of our personal archive. Additionally the work attempts to free past streams of activity by allowing them to live on as things of beauty through sonarising and encoding. The source data set for this work is one week of activity on a personal laptop, as tracked by a covert keylogger. This data is broken into four subsets which is each parsed by a discrete morse engine using Max/MSP. The text generates a stream of morse code. Each engine is tuned so that the four voices, when occurring simultaneously, comprise a D minor chord. The tempo of each voice is also controlled independent of the others. The voices are then routed into Ableton Live where they undergo additional processing and spatialisation. They are then presented in a quad speaker array, with each discrete voice granted into its own speaker. Echoes of each voice can heard in its cardinally opposite speaker. The choice of morse code as a carrier codec for the data set reflects its suitability for sonically creating the impression of a celestial scape. Using spatialisation techniques, the attempt has been made to immerse the listener in a stream of personal data that may as well be distant points of energy. While all information has been preserved, and is available for decoding, it has been depersonalised. It is not long before the listener ceases to hear textual communication and in its place hears musical tonality and perhaps randomness. Any traces of significance have been erased. NB: The work is adaptable to site by harnessing the data streams that are suggested by each new context eg. traffic flow data, nearby tweet emanations, etc.

Two Door No Roof (Johnathon Win)

Two Door No Roof is a work in three sections for soloist. Composed in October 2018, Two Door No Roof takes as its premise the three categories for defining sculpture as presented by art theorist Rosalind Krauss in her 1979 essay: Sculpture in the Expanded Field. These three categories: site construction; marked sites; and axiomatic structures were presented as a means of contending with the shift from modernist notions of sculpture towards an aesthetic and categorical malleability within the medium. My work takes the materiality of Krauss’ categories and appropriates them within the context of a work for soloist. Here the performer performs highly specific musical gestures in regards to architectural structures (and the gradient of control regarding ingressive sound); ambient sound as a positive space (and musical listening under states of physical negation); and ambient sound under a fixed state of negation (whereby what would otherwise be a negative space becomes grounds for positive sound and musical activity).

A special version of the second movement (tyres) will be presented at the Tilde New Music Festival. Here Johnathon will perform the movement for individual audience members at a mutually agreed upon time and place within the Testing Grounds.

Continu/um (Sonant Bodies)

Sonant Bodies is a sound-art collective featuring James Hazel & Victoria Pham. As composers and artists, our work explores the idea of resonance as the starting point for creating installations that engage with the idea of ritual in various ways through the use of sound-producing objects & transformative processes. The collective have presented works for VIVID Festival, Sydney Fringe Festival and TINA Festival and actively seeks to collaborate with emerging artists and musicians. James Hazel is a composer, sound-artist & writer based in Sydney who holds a Bachelor of Music (Honours). His work explores the intersection between sound-art and composition; the notion of the ‘sacred’; precarity; and various spatial sound practices. James has been commissioned by the Bundanon Trust, Videodance Festival, Catapult Dance Studio, and the Lockup Gallery. His work has been exhibited/performed at the Lockup Gallery (Newcastle), Pinnacles Gallery Queensland, Spectrum Now Festival, Sydney Fringe Festival, & TINA festival. Victoria Pham is a Sydney-based composer, illustrator and archaeologist having studied composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and archaeology/art history at the University of Sydney. She has been commissioned by AGNSW: Brett Whiteley Studio, Spineless Wonders and The Out of the Shadows Festival, and worked with the Australian Museum and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

Pizza. Needs no description. Delicious!

D.A. Calf

D.A.Calf is a sound and installation artist, musician, composer and producer. He is currently in the Sound Art & Spatial Sculpture program at RMIT where his particular interests lie in explorations of trauma, memory, serialisation, place and cartography. He has previously presented interactive installation works at Dark Mofo (Last Words in a Hearse - piece for three hearses and website, 2016) and for The Boon Companions (Human Reactable at All That We Cannot Say, 2016); gallery-based durational video and sound works (Remnant, Kings Artist-Run, 2017); live scores (Nature Morte at COP21, Federation Square, 2015); sound and light-based performances (Hurtz, Melbourne Music Week 2014, Electrofringe 2015, Tilde Festival 2016) and studio/field recordings (Terra series, 2014- ; One Hundred Sixty-Eight Hrs, 2017; Flushes of…, 2016- ; Seven Mornings, 2017). D.A.Calf is also co-founder and sound designer/composer of acclaimed immersive theatre company The Guerrilla Museum (Funeral - Melbourne Festival 2016, Brisbane Festival 2015, Dark Mofo 2015; All of My Friends Were There - Melbourne Festival 2017) and The Institute Studio, where he has helped craft the sonic visions of numerous artists and sound-based projects. In addition he tours regularly as a multi-instrumentalist and sound designer for numerous acts and has toured Australia, Europe and the US multiple times. Website

Johnathon Win

Johnathon Win is a Melbourne-based musician with interests in formal composition and uncertainty. Johnathon is currently working towards a Bachelor of Music (Composition) at Monash University studying with Mary Finsterer and David Chisholm; he has also undertaken further studies with composers Liza Lim and Chris Dench, among others. Recent premieres of Johnathonâ€TMs music have included To Speak; You Must Wear The Veil for duo by Paris-based ensemble Scapegoat; and also a currently untitled work for quartet as part of the 2017 Future Creatives Festival. Johnathon recently participated in various presentations and panels at the International and Australasian Conference(s) for Undergraduate Research, respectively, as well as at the Melbourne Music Analysis Summer School. Forthcoming projects include works for soloist, percussion, and trio, as well as the launch of an online content series.

Sonant Bodies

The first incarnation of Contin/uum was initially developed by James Hazel as the result of a commission by the Create2308 Arts Festival in Newcastle. This work has since been developed and is now the result of a collaboration between Hazel and Victoria Pham (Sonant Bodies). This work will be exhibited at an upcoming Sonant Bodies exhibition at Maitland Regional Art Gallery in February 2018. Contin/uum is an interactive sound installation which explores the idea of cross-generational or intergenerational song/sound creation - inspired by the idea of the oral sound traditions of various traditional cultures from around the world. Visually speaking, Contin/uum consists of a set of instructions (listen, kneel, speak a sentence) and a single condenser microphone which is hung-low, in a dimly lit booth or contained space - akin to the visual presentation of a confessional booth - alluding to the idea of a private spoken confession to an invisible, or concealed figure. Ultimately, the participant is invited to make a spoken contribution, and thus engage in the creation of a composition, which engages with participants from the past and future, in a constantly evolving continuum. In terms of sound production, the single microphone is processed through a pre-prepared Max MSP patch on a mac-mini, which is sent through a small amplifier, mixing desk, and stereo speakers. Only the speakers and microphone are visible to the public. The resulting sound world of Contin/uum is generated by an immersive mixture of participants voices, which are processed, and semi-concealed electronically - through the use of delay, reverb and other effects - in real-time, within the algorithmically defined, parameters of a Max MSP patch.