Sol Path + Synergetica Screening

AxS Festival 2014 | Curiosity

September 19-October 5, 2014

Click here for official event page

Sol Path is an immersive music and media work by composer/cognitive scientist Bruno Louchouarn, commissioned for the AxS 2014 | SPHAERAE temporary pavilion.

Inspired by the exploratory path that the Mars Rover takes over the course of a sol - a Martian day- Sol Path explores the intricate interactions between an Earth-bound team of explorers and a robotic space lab as it searches for signs of life millions of miles away.

Sol Path was developed through a residency at NASA/JPL during which Louchouarn met with Mars Mission team members including rover drivers, robotics engineers and members of the “planetary protection team” and collected interviews, images and data that are incorporated into the score and media installation. Sol Path features renowned violist Brett Deubner and projection design by award-winning Adam Larsen.

Composer Bruno Louchouarn’s practice bridges new music, sound design and art installation; and is informed by his academic research in the cognitive aspects of music.
Louchouarn’s immersive works have been presented at the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Festival and Liverpool Biennale, Santa Monica’s GLOW Festival and Transatlantyk Music and Film Festival in Poland, as well as previous AxS Festivals.

Premieres of his new music have been performed at The Colburn School, Royce Hall, REDCAT, Getty Center and Villa as well as Juilliard, University of Southern California, University of Akron, Chapman School of Music, Occidental College.

In 2014-15 Louchouarn will compose new works for contemporary choreographers, Jacques Heim of Diavolo Dance, Deborah Slater of Deborah Slater Dance Theatre and Susan Jaffe, Dean of Dance at University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Louchouarn is an Associate Professor of interdisciplinary arts at University of North Carolina School of the Arts and a researcher at its Center for Design Innovation.

Visit Bruno Louchouarn’s website: www.brunolouchouarn.com

Brett Deubner, one of this generation’s most accomplished violists, has inspired worldwide critical acclaim for his powerful intensity and sumptuous tone. Deubner’s commitment to extending the viola repertoire has resulted in collaborations with some of today’s greatest composers, including Samuel Adler, Lalo Schifrin, Andrew Rudin, David Del Tredici and several of this generation’s leading young composers. To date, over eighty works for viola — including over thirty viola concerti and numerous solo and chamber works for viola — have been dedicated to and premiered by Mr. Deubner.

Visit Brett Deubner’s website: brettdeubner.com

Composition and Soundscape by Bruno Louchouarn.
Guest violist Brett Deubner.
Immersive Media Design by Adam Larsen.
A L’Atelier Production, directed by Corey Madden.

Presented by AxS Festival in association with L’Atelier Arts.

Special thanks to Michelle Viotti and Sarah Marcotte at NASA/JPL.

Curated by Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, the ArtScience Interfaculty and Synergetica Lab present a series of multi-sensory performances and installations in the context of synthetic biology. Founded in 2006 in The Netherlands, Synergetica is an art-science laboratory, investigating photonics, fluid dynamics, acoustics, quantum chemistry and psychophysics.
Visit the Synergetica website: synergeticalab.com

Paul Prudence | Francisco López
Hydro-Acoustic Study

Hydro-Acoustic Study is a cinematic exploration of sonically activated hydrological events, specifically evolving waveforms, protocellular bubbles, and meniscusʼs that grow and exhibit behavior in direct response to sound.

Paul Prudence is an audio-visual performer working with algorithmic and generative environments. His work, which had been shown and performed internationally, focuses on the ways in which sound, space and form can be cross-wired to create live-cinematic visual-music experiences. Paul maintains the weblog Dataisnature exploring the interrelationships between natural processes, computational systems and procedural-based art practices.

Visit Paul Prudence’s website: paulprudence.com

Francisco López (ES) is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. For more than thirty years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion.

He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in over seventy countries of the five continents. His extensive catalog of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with over 150 international artists) has been released by more than 300 record labels worldwide. He has been awarded four times with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival and is the recipient of the Qwartz Award 2010 for best sound anthology.

Visit Francisco López’s website: franciscolopez.net

Bas van Koolwijk
Fdbck AV

Media artist Bas van Koolwijk uses both sound and image, be it analogue or in numerical code, as interchangeable data. He produces visual and acoustic compositions in which both manifestations powerfully interact. His works can often be seen as an attack on the illusion of the medium itself. Van Koolwijk develops his own hardware and software applications.

For the Fdbck AV live sets and releases, Van Koolwijk has created a feedback control circuit between audio and video data, making these into two facets of a self-sustaining data stream. Through manipulation of the ensuing processes, the system becomes an audio-visual instrument. This particular composition was especially created for projection within the Sphæræ dome.

Visit Bas van Koolwijk’s website: basvankoolwijk.com

Jet Smits
LC Environment

New media artist Jet Smits explores the transitional border between the physical and the virtual world, investigating the transition point where data becomes sensorial, trying to capture that exact moment of change. She finds herself in the area of science and technology related to our perception. Her phenomenological approach results in the use of different media and technologies to create immersive, contemplative installations, based on empirical research as well as thorough artistic and scientific experimentation.

In LC Environment, liquid crystals are a physical substance able to translate digital data to visual images. The fascinating transitional qualities of the material captured her interest. While many households use liquid crystals in their most conventional form; the LCD screen, her aim is to use the unique qualities of this material in different aesthetic ways. The Technical University in Delft allowed her to do a residency, which enabled her to do more extensive research into the behaviors and aesthetic qualities of this material. This research lead her to create a live-video installation and an abstract video piece utilizing liquid crystals, which enables the visitor to experience this material directly.

Visit Jet Smits’ website: jetsmits.nl

Martijn van Boven
On Growth and Data

The work of Martijn van Boven lies in the field of experimental film and computer art. In his work, he uses the techniques and possibilities of state of the art image processing within the context of the experimental film and early computer generated films. The abstract films of Stan Brakhage and computer art also have an influence on his work and thinking about abstract imagery in relation to film.

Martijn van Boven studied at the Royal Art Academy in The Hague, at the Image and Sound department. His work includes video-installations, films, and collaborations with composers and Live Cinema performances. His work has been shown at numerous festivals world-wide such as: IFF Rotterdam, State X New Forms, Sonic Acts, Holland Festival, Five Days Off, FICCO (Mexico City/MX), RIKZ (Riga/LV), SKIF-9 (St. Petersburg/RU) and Transmediale (Berlin/DE), STRP Festival (Eindhoven/NL) and Woodstreet Galleries (Pittsburgh/US).

Since 2000, Martijn van Boven works as a freelance film and video curator, focusing on avant-garde film and abstract cinema. In 2003, he co-founded the new media art center The Hague. Since 2006, he is part of the curatorial team of Sonic Acts (NL). In the same year, he also started teaching audio-visual design at the Art Academy of Arnhem, and as of 2012 he is head of the department of Interaction Design at the ArteZ Institute of the Arts.
He lives and works in Amsterdam (NL).

Visit Martijn van Boven’s website: 474746.org

Paul Prudence
Lumophre

Paul Prudence is an audio-visual performer working with algorithmic and generative environments. His work, which had been shown and performed internationally, focuses on the ways in which sound, space and form can be cross-wired to create live-cinematic visual-music experiences. Paul maintains the weblog Dataisnature exploring the interrelationships between natural processes, computational systems and procedural-based art practices.

Originally commissioned for the Kaluga Festival at the Kaluga Planetarium and Space Museum in Russia, Lumophore explores the potential for inter-modal colour-shape-sound synergies to create an abstract narrative of architectonic forms in relation to sound. A lumophore (also luminophore) is an atom or atomic grouping in a chemical compound that manifests luminescence.

Visit Paul Prudence’s website: paulprudence.com