Avantwhatever is organised from the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people and we acknowledge their sovereignty. We pay our respects to their elders, past, present and future, as well as to the elders of their neighbours in the Kulin Nation, and those of all communities. Especially indigenous peoples around the world whose land, sea, and air we inhabit, both in person and with the telecommunications and other infrastructure on which we rely. We ask you do the same. Our server runs from a data centre on Malay land, using 100% renewable energy.
I trust her to go on living (for James Wright) with Charmaine Lee
Image: Charmaine Lee and Luke Cheng
Closing our initial season of audiovisual commissions is Charmaine Lee's 'I trust her to go on living (for James Wright)', which refracts and reflects the voice as self.
Listen right here, and then subscribe using RSS or ActivityPub at Avantwhatever.xyz , or sign up to our newsletter here to catch coming commissions.
Artist Biography
Charmaine Lee (b. 1991) is a New York-based vocalist from Sydney, Australia. Her music is predominantly improvised, favoring a uniquely personal approach to vocal expression concerned with spontaneity, playfulness, and risk-taking. Beyond extended vocal technique, Charmaine uses amplification, feedback, and microphones to augment and distort the voice.
Charmaine has performed with leading improvisers id m theft able, Sam Pluta, Tyshawn Sorey, Nate Wooley, and C. Spencer Yeh, and maintains ongoing collaborations with Ikue Mori, Conrad Tao, Victoria Shen, and Eric Wubbels. Charmaine has performed at the Lincoln Center, ISSUE Project Room, the Kitchen, Roulette, The Poetry Project, and MoMA and participated in festivals including Resonant Bodies and Huddersfield Contemporary. She been featured in group exhibitions including The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging at the Museum of Chinese in America (2019). As a composer, Charmaine has been commissioned by HBO Max, International Contemporary Ensemble, the Wet Ink Ensemble, and Spektral Quartet. She has lectured at institutions including Princeton University, Columbia University, Stanford University, and The New School. Charmaine was an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room (2019) and Van Lier Fellow at Roulette (2021). She currently serves on the Board of ISSUE Project Room and on the Editorial Board of Sound American.
Next in our new series of commissions is Stephen Cornford's stunning and incisive Spectral Index.
It deftly shows us how we use rocks to look for rocks.
Watch right here, and then subscribe using RSS or ActivityPub at Avantwhatever.xyz , or sign up to our newsletter here to catch coming commissions.
Artist statement
Digitisation has shifted the materials on which our media technologies rely. The minerals and metals required for digital imaging are the same as those required for energy transition away from fossil fuels. There is currently a new resource race underway, with nation states and political blocks scrambling to ensure secure supplies of these critical raw materials. This race is both driven by and reliant upon visual cultures, a recursive circularity in which images are used to produce minerals which are used to produce images.
This single-screen video work considers the role of the ‘spectral index’ in framing our relationship with landscapes that are perpetually surveilled by orbital satellites and aerial drones. A spectral index is a mathematical image function in which different wavelengths of the visible and infrared spectrum are combined to produce false colour images that analyse different terrestrial conditions. To gaze at the earth through these instrumental lenses presumes both ownership and functionality of the planetary surface below.
Artist Biography
Stephen Cornford is a media artist who works with consumer electronics, critiquing the ideologies they embody and the constitutive role they have come to play in our lives. His current research is concerned with the toxicity of digital media, the complex metallurgy of ubiquitous technologies and relationships between planetary and photographic space.
Much of his recent work has been made in collaboration with scienctific researchers. He has worked alongside commercial geophysicists prospecting for technology metals in Europe and volcanologists studying magma crystallisation with X-rays. His practice often employs laboratory processes or scientific imaging, using geological furnaces to transform electronic waste or optoelectronics facilities to damage cameras.
In 2018 he completed a PhD affiliated to the Archaeologies of Media & Technology Research Group at Winchester School of Art. Stephen has had solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Berlin, Brighton, Bergen, Ljubljana & London and his work has been included in group exhibtions at the ZKM Center for Art & Media, Karlsruhe; ICC, Tokyo; Haus der Electronische Kunst, Basel; Sigma Foundation, Venice; Finnish Museum of Photography and Coventry Biennial.
Avantwhatever is launching a new program of online audiovisual commissions, the initial season of which will be published from June to August 2023.
We've set up a new server Avantwhatever.xyz to host the videos. It's located on Malay land and run on 100% renewable energy, and you can follow the instructions on the server's landing page to subscribe using the open web in a few different ways, or keep up to date via our newsletter which you can sign up to here.
We're very excited to share the first commission, Hand over Panel by Peter Blamey, which listens in to the overwhelming abundance of solar radiation.
Artist statement
Hand over Panel is a performance work that explores the possibility of using photovoltaic technologies for a physical, embodied interaction with sunlight, realised through sound. Despite its simplicity, performing with sunlight makes it difficult to present this work to a live audience, so video seems to make sense.
Technically speaking, the work is fairly straightforward: the output from a small photovoltaic (solar) panel is connected directly to an audio amplifier. In full sun, the electrical current the panel produces is heard as quiet hiss. However, when portions of its surface are shadowed by my hand, the amount of sunlight falling on the panel is reduced, along with its electrical output, causing the sound to increase in volume, shifting and deepening in tone. Ironically, in this case, less energy equals more sound.
My hand also interrupts the steady flow of photons onto the panel, no doubt contributing its own changes in texture and reaction, which is further complicated by me moving my hand around in response to the sounds I’m hearing, searching out new interactions. Sunlight, hand, panel and shadow combine to produce swelling, energetic, oceanic noise, here doubled through the separate performances seen on the left and right of the screen.
Artist Biography
Peter Blamey is an artist based in Sydney, on Gadigal land. His practice is often sound-focussed and accomplished via an economy of means, and includes performances, videos, recordings and installations. Broadly speaking, his work explores (amongst other things) the interconnected themes of energies and residues, often through reimagining our everyday encounters with mundane materials and technologies and the physical world, and our experiences of energy generation, use and wastage.
Avantwhatever.org with community minded creative people
Avantwhatever.org is a meeting, discussion and sharing space for those working critically and creatively with experimental digital sound, art and design, especially listening, technology, ecologies, capitalism and living through and beyond all of these. Hosted in Singapore, on Malay land, in a data center powered with 100% renewable energy.
The server runs Hometown, a decentralised Twitter like social media software.
Along with features you would recognise from other social media, it includes the ability to post only to the local server, or so that your posts federate to other servers running similar software as part of the Fediverse.
It is free and ad-free, and your data is your own, you can delete it at any time, or export it to take to another server.
Please request an invite link here if you'd like to be involved, and one of our administrators or moderators will be in touch to show you around.
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Ryoko Akama
Ryoko Akama is a sound artist/composer/performer who approaches listening situations that magnify silence, time and space. Her work aims to offer quiet temporal/spatial experiences, and is connected to literature, fine art and mixed media (technology). She employs small and fragile objects such as paper balloons and glass bottles in order to create tiny aural and visual occurrences that embody ‘almost nothing’ aesthetics. She composes text scores and performs a diversity of alternative scores in collaboration with international artists.
Since 2003 I have been exploring the creative possibilities of electronically transforming acoustic, mainly instrumental material, into new uncanny timbres. I am interested in creating preternatural and unsettling sounds — sounds that bear a strange or wholly mysterious relation to their original acoustic DNA. I am concerned with how these complex textures — often in combination with their instrumental source — can articulate aesthetic, social and political conditions in art-making and beyond. This search for an idiosyncratic material musical language has been grounded in research into psychoacoustics & auditory perception. I have been commissioned by the Sacrum Profanum festival, the SSO, the Bionic Ear Institute, ICE (New York), Adapter (Berlin), Ensemble Phoenix (Basel), Inland, Ensemble Offspring, the STC and the ABC.
Natasha Anderson's work is supported by the Regional Arts Fund.
The Australian Government’s Regional Arts Fund is provided through Regional Arts Australia, administered in Victoria by Regional Arts Victoria.
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Clare Cooper
Photo credit: Ali Crosby
Clare M. Cooper plays the harp and guzheng, sometimes she tap-dances. She’s passionate about the sociability of sound and its capacity to encourage compassion and radical acts of trust. She gets things started; the NOW now festival of experimental music and film, The Splinter Orchestra and Berlin Splitter Orchester, Smack/Bang Film Soundtrack Festival, and most recently co-founded the Design Activism Workshop, and Frontyard: a non-institutional space experimenting with community futuring and skill-sharing on Gadigal land. Cooper is a proud climate activist, and rank and file union member with the NTEU.
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Byron Dean & Polly Stanton
Byron Dean is a sound artist and field recordist based in Narrm Melbourne. Working across acousmatic composition, performance and site-specific sound practice, his works reimagine and negotiate sensory experience of place through field recording, often exploring themes of transformation and polyphony of listening. Drawing relationships between sounds, environments and temporalities, his compositions are concerned with the portrayal and expansion of sonic experience.
Polly Stanton is an artist filmmaker. Her work primarily investigates the relations between environment, human actions, and land use. Sound and listening also play a critical role in Stanton's work, in both the creation and reception of projects; with listening practices and field recordings engaged with as a means to expand vision and consider the unseen elements of place.
Together their separate practices intercept to create multidisciplinary work that spans varying forms of sound and installation practice, experimental film, writing and publication.
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doktorb
doktorb is Adrian Lucas Healey, a music producer who has existed on the fringes internet music for the best part of 20 years creating noisy lo-fi found media cut-ups. Stylistically his music straddles the boundaries between noise, vaporwave, (very broken) breakcore and cybergrind (as well as a whole host of other completely made-up genres that may, or may not, have existed online for the blink of an eye). The seeds for this project were planted in the late 90s with Adrian’s discovery of the weird and wonderful world of Usenet. From these formative experiences a lifelong fascination with participatory internet culture grew and Adrian found himself looking for strategies to keep hold of the cultural fragments which captured his imagination. In this sense doktorb exists as a way of processing the mediascape, an experiment in guerrilla archival that diverts the flow of viral content using recontextualization as a strategy for remembering that helps him make sense of the hypermediated world in which he finds himself.
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Bec Fary
Photo credit: Clara Slewa
Bec Fary is a creative audio producer and researcher living and working on stolen Marin Balluk/Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country in so-called Footscray, Australia. They have worked on numerous podcasts, broadcasts and installations, and continue to explore local ecological listenings and experimental web design.
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Amias Hanley
Amias Hanley is a sound artist and researcher based in Birrarung-ga (Melbourne). Their practice-based research considers relations of space, bodies, technology and contemporary ecologies. Engaging forms of performance, installation, and collaboration, their work often explores gender, sexuality and queer expression/s. Hanley's practice is interested in listening as an affective practice and the possibilities of sound as a communicator for matter-cultural gestures between human and non-human bodies. They currently work as a sessional tutor at RMIT University's School of Media and Communication.
Hanley was an artist in residence at Bogong Centre for Sound Culture (2020) and was the recipient of the Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival, Best Sound Art Award 2019 (IRE). They have featured work at Screen & Sound Cultures Eco_Media Symposium (2019), Falls Festival (2019), A Night at the Nicholas (2019), Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival (2019), Mapping Melbourne (2018), The Black Box Theatre (2018), The Design Hub (2017), Crack Theatre Festival (2016), Melbourne Meat Markets (2016), 107 Projects (2016).
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an n/a
the machine is nowhere to be found, but everywhere to be felt
– Todd Hoffman
Rather than just record what I would have done live, I decided to make something for the internet. I've been harbouring a fascination with the likes of @lilmiquela and @shudu.gram, instagram influencers with millions of followers who, despite their professed hangovers and emotional posts, are unreal, computer-generated avatars. Unstable, porous borders between identity and reality, subject and object, have always intrigued. Where this eerie materiality — uncertainly both technological and corporeal — meets the capitalist machine of social media is where this work begins. Using Instagram as the frame, I'm wondering if a Flickr film technique of alternating image and black, together with shifting loops of acoustic & electronically-processed sound, will work to fill the after-image effect of the black frames with weird materiality. After all, on a laptop or phone, more likely than not it's the viewer's own gaze that stares back at them, mingling with the screen's smears. Foregrounding a materiality that disappears as representation becomes rendered elsewhere, the pulsing repetition of the loops and the Flickr film merge into clicks between posts. In those black moments, do we witness our own absence?...
Natasha Anderson's work is supported by the Regional Arts Fund.
The Australian Government’s Regional Arts Fund is provided through Regional Arts Australia, administered in Victoria by Regional Arts Victoria.
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Propositions for Listening
Propositions for Listening is a browser-based sound work that explores the contingent moments of fieldwork as a generative space of listenings. Drawing from field research undertaken during an artist residency at the Hepburn Wind farm in Victoria Australia, the work presents the field as an assemblage of networks between bodies and events, revealing the multilayered transformation of local phenomena. Juxtaposing sound, text and imagery as a shifting and iterative articulation, Propositions for Listening situates fieldwork as a productive space of knowledge making - where interplays and relationships coincide to make something new.
This work was created on the unceded territory of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. The artists acknowledge the Traditional Owners of country and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
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Patrick Hase & Asher Elazary
Patrick Hase is a media artist/researcher living and working on unceded Wurundjeri land, who specializes in VR, animation and live A/V. His work explores the emotional impact of embodiment in virtual spaces by creating visceral non-mimetic experiences across varying digital platforms.
Asher Elazary is an artist, musician, and composer. He has worked in a variety of live, installation, and record contexts and has a strong interest in interaction, proceduralism, and collaboration to create new multidisciplinary works.
Having previously worked together conducting audiovisual works in physical spaces, Patrick and Asher have instead developed this work entirely through the process of online collaboration.
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Sarah Hennies
Photo credit: Walter Wlodarczyk
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. She is primarily a composer of small chamber works, but is also active in improvisation, film, performance art, and dance. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Festival Cable (Nantes), send + receive (Winnipeg), O’ Art Space (Milan), The OBEY Convention (Halifax), Cafe Oto (London), ALICE (Copenhagen), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Cristian Alvear, Claire Chase, R. Andrew Lee (Denver), LIMINAR, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Two-Way Street, and Yarn/Wire.
Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.
She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received additional support from New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.
Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.
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Kiernan Ironfield
Photo credit: Natalie Ironfield
Kiernan Ironfield is a Dharug man and self taught Yidaki player. Through his music Kiernan creates spaces for to explore thoughts and be lead by the vibrations of the Yidaki. Kiernan acknowledges the Yolngu people as custodians of the Yidaki and the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation whose land he lives upon.
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Lucy Liyou
Philadelphia-based artist Lucy Liyou synthesizes field recordings, text-to-speech readings, poetry, and elements from Korean folk opera into sonic narratives that explore the quotidian implications of Orientalism and Westernization. Though their music reflects the work of genres such as post-industrial and musique-concrète, Lucy Liyou is greatly influenced by audiobooks as well as music from the Impressionist period and Neoclassical period. Lucy Liyou’s debut project A Hope I Had, which caught the attention of South London based artist Klein, was a sonic examination of hereditary depression in Asian families. Their following and most recent project Welfare, which was released in March through Klein’s label ijn inc., is an ambitious analysis of the colonialist concept of self-care.
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Mara Schwerdtfeger
Photo credit: Zoe Baumgartner
Mara Schwerdtfeger is a sound artist and composer creating performed pieces and commissioned soundtracks for dance, film, and installations. Her practice explores the crossover between physical and digital environments through the use of field recording and digital manipulation.
She holds a Bachelor of Design (Digital Media) from RMIT and attended LungA School where she collaborated with peers on weekly exhibitions creating and curating an array of works. Having studied violin from the age of four Mara completed her Viola AmusA in 2016 and performs in multiple bands and duos as well as solo.
Mara has been commissioned by SIGNAL, where she took the opportunity to expand her work exploring sound ecologies and multichannel sound installation, culminating in the piece Unrecognised Interference. Other projects have included collaborations with filmmaker Veronica Charmont (Specular, 2019; Bunset Soulevard, 2019), dancer Angela Valdez (Breathe, 2018; Of Space and Time, 2019) and ceramicists Lotte Schwerdtfeger (Autonomous Objects, 2018; Map (Onishi), 2017) and Sassy Park (Sailor Pete, 2020). She currently works with Liquid Architecture producing their podcast series.
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Tom Smith
Tom Smith is a Melbourne-based artist, musician and researcher. His practice combines performance, video, electronic music, curatorial projects and critical writing. Tom’s work is concerned with the politics of creative economies, generic digital aesthetics, ambivalent affect and music as mode of critical inquiry. Tom’s work explores the tyranny and poetics of computational systems and other technology through eerie video assemblages and live performances of digital work routines and aesthetic production. Tom is also one half of production duo Utility, and runs an independent record label called Sumactrac with Jarred Beeler (DJ Plead) and Jon Watts.
Tom has completed a PhD through UNSW Art & Design, and teaches in the School of Design at the RMIT Melbourne. Tom’s works have been exhibited and/or performed at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), Nasjonalmuseet (Oslo), Floating Projects (Hong Kong), Goldsmiths College (London), Firstdraft Gallery (Sydney), Queensland University Art Museum (Brisbane), Alaska Projects (Sydney) and Blindside Gallery (Melbourne).
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Splinter Orchestra
Splinter is a radically inclusive large-scale improvising orchestra that has been a forum for listening and sounding together for well over 100 exploratory musicians and sound artists living in or passing through Sydney for 2 decades. Currently we have a diverse membership of roughly 25. Our process of co-creation and the resulting music is probably best left undefined — amorphous and ephemeral qualities being inherent to the project — but we can say that playing is the group’s fundamental activity. We meet weekly, with ever-fluctuating line-ups, to do just that. Much of our public work in the last few years has been an exploration of ‘choreographed’ play in vast spaces, particularly outdoors, including Mungo National Park, Bundanon and The Pilliga, where we listen, move, sound and record, (and then listen back to the inscribed phenomena on our apparatus). In recent years we’ve developed an interest in sound installations, consisting of self-playing instruments, interactive sound-sculptures, visual and text provocations, sound devices and more. The elements of these ‘Splintstallations’, just like the many voices of Splinter, work together, sometimes in parallel, sometimes intersecting.
"Every Splinter Orchestra performance unfolds a unique improvisational sonic ecology combining highly developed music skills with thoroughly experimental sound-making and an intuitive compositional repertoire built from years of collective engagement. The entire space becomes a stage for performers and audience alike to wander, carrying their generative or listening attentions amongst, between and through an evolving sonic unknown.”
– Gary Warner, 2017
Splinters (past and present)
April Fonti - cello, Adam Sussman - acoustic guitar, Michael Sheridan - electric guitar, Clayton Thomas - double bass, Mike Majkowski - double bass, Rory Brown - double bass, Clare Cooper - guzheng/harp, Ben Gerard - piano, Jeff Henderson – saxes, Chris Abrahams - keyboard, Amanda Stewart - voice and text, Matt Earle - electronics, Martin Ng - turntables, Dave Goodman - drums, Nylstoch - electric guitar, Robbie Avenaim - percussion, Chris Burke - tenor sax, Jim Denley - flutes, Reuben Derrick - tenor sax, Matt Ottignon - clarinet and tenor sax, Darren Moore - percussion, Cor Fuhler - piano, Jo Derrick - trumpet, Dale Gorfinkel - vibes, Milica Stefanovic - electric bass, Luke Callaghan - laptop, Inge Olmheim - electronics, Peter Farrar - alto sax, Karen Booth - alto sax, Abel Cross - electric bass, Alex Masso - drums, Paul Taylor - percussion, Tom Fielding - tenor sax, Ian Pieterse - baritone sax, Simon Ferenci - trumpet, Monica Brooks - accordion, Emily Morandini - computer, Daniel Whiting - laptop, Shannon O'Neil - synthesiser, Kahtsee - percussion, Ben Byrne - electronics, Lloyd Honeybrook - alto sax, Gerard Crewdson - trombone, Finn Ryan - drums, Cass McGlynn - horn, Alex Davies - electronics, Jamie Fennelly - harmonium, Mirabai Peart - violin, Sam Dobson - double bass, Grant Arthur - trombone and banjo, Aemon Webb - guitar, David Green - shakuhachi + laptop, Rivka Schembri - cello, Laura Altman - clarinet, Melanie Herbert - violin, Tony Osborne - vocals and electronics, Dan Whiting - laptop, Andrew Fedorovitch - alto sax and little instruments, Josh Isaac - percussion, Dominik Krupinski - guitar, Sam Pettigrew - double bass, John Wilton - percussion, Drew Bourgeois - percussion, Heather Shannon - violin, Tim Wall - clarinet, Emily McDaniel - laptop, Tom Wade - double bass, Romy Caen - harmonium and electronics, Gail Priest - laptop, Alison Cachia - violin, Rishin Singh - trombone, Jordan Dorjee - turntable, Jack Dibben - guitar, Jon Watts - electronics, Shota Matsumura - trumpet +, Sonya Holowell - voice, Alon Ilsar - percussion, Martin Kirkwood - electronics, Marcus Whale - voice and electronics, Alexandra Spence - clarinet and electronics, Brianne Curran - violin, Andrew Brooks - alto sax and laptop, Alicia Kahn - clarinet, Joe Cummins - trumpet, Jeremy Tartar - flute, Helen Nehil - recorders, Tim Cunningham - guitar, Nadine Pita - violin, Cecile Roux - Cello, Danielle Zorbas - clarinet, Julia Reidy - guitar, Marco Cheng - guitar, Bonnie Stewart - percussion, Weizen Ho - little instruments/ movement, Yvonne Lam - percussion, Easter Toru - drums, Jack Stoneman - alto sax and computer, Sam Gill - alto sax, Luiz Gubeissi - electric and double bass, Maximillian Alduca - double bass, Prue Fuller - recorder, voice, objects, Axel Powrie - flutes, alto clarinet, objects, Adam Gottlieb - guitar / objects, Mel Eden - voice, text and electronics, Ruby Everett - alto sax, Mimi Kind - installations, Rhys Mottley - guitar and clarinets, Clara Pitt - flutes, Hannah Kim - percussion, Bárbara Guzmán-Galeb - voice and laptop, Nick Ashwood - guitar, Charlie Sundborn - alto sax, Solly Frank - clarinet and mouthshocks, Johannes MacDonald - flutes, Joshua Winestock - guitar, Phoebe Bognar - flute
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Jon Tjhia
Photo credit: Tom Ross
Jon Tjhia is a radio maker, musician, artist and writer. He is the co-founder of the podcast Paper Radio, the co-editor of the Australian Audio Guide and the Wheeler Centre’s senior digital editor.
His audibles have been broadcast on radio stations around the anglosphere, at Manchester Literature Festival and the Barbican (UK), on stage at Sydney Opera House and Arts Centre Melbourne, on the podcasts Short Cuts and The Truth; and written about in The New Yorker, The Wire and The Age. He is a former member of bands including Speed Painters, ii, Aleks and the Ramps and others.
With the Wheeler Centre, Jon was part of the team that produced the series Better Off Dead (2016) and the multi-award winning series The Messenger, a collaboration with Behind the Wire. The latter documents the life of Abdul Aziz Muhamat, a Sudanese refugee living in immigration detention in Papua New Guinea.
‘how are you today’, a collaborative sound work involving men detained on Manus Island, recently appeared as part of Eavesdropping at City Gallery (Wellington) and The Shouting Valley at Gus Fisher Gallery (Auckland), after first appearing in Eavesdropping at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne. ‘Thing-Like', an installation, recently appeared in Resonant Bodies at Toronto Media Arts Centre.
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Ben Byrne
Listener, organiser, and teacher experimenting with digital media, music and design while living through big tech and climate crisis
Director of Avantwhatever
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Patrick Hase
Patrick Hase is a media artist/researcher living and working on unceded Wurundjeri land, who specializes in VR, animation and live A/V. His work explores the emotional impact of embodiment in virtual spaces by creating visceral non-mimetic experiences across varying digital platforms.
Core Principles is a taxonomy of movements essential to everyday life and functioning in digital environments; a typology of actions synonymous with platformed existence. Core Principles draws on the scientific management techniques of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, contemporaries of Frederick Winslow Taylor. In the 1910s Gilbreth compiled a series of 'motion studies’ designed to optimise the movements of workers and maximise their productivity. Core Principles transposes the Gilbreth’s motions into the always already optimised field of digital labour. Core Principles takes inspiration from a long history of documentary filmmaking depicting everyday labour, including the Lumiére Brothers' Workers Leaving the Factory, Louis Malle’s Humain, trop Humain, Jean Luc Godard’s British Sounds, and Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann’s Labour in a Single Shot.
I Can Still Hear the Strong Winds Outside emerged from a place of frustration. While making field recordings in the East Fjords of Iceland, the continuous wind infiltrated and obstructed sounds that were, at the same time, being generated by the wind. Drawing inspiration from Norse Mythology, I Can Still Hear the Strong Winds Outside embraces the wind as an anthropomorphised element; a performer of the earth’s surface. Similar to the god of the North Wind, Kári, the wind becomes a singer and an activator of sound. Using field recordings and electronic music techniques, the sounds have been translated from physical movement into chance composition via code. I Can Still Hear the Strong Winds Outside shifts into the inner sound space of the winds forthright presence, pulling them apart both digitally and musically. By placing this new environment within a webpage and having the physical experience of wearing headphones, what is inside or outside becomes confused. Allowing the wind to be understood as a performer gives a greater spectrum to how it is felt and heard. It is awakening the sounds around us.
Local Time is a durational listening experience exploring the presence and absence inherent in place-based sound. It was developed from Bec Fary's deep listening and field recording in their local area, on Woi Wurrung and Boonwurrung land in and around so-called Footscray and Melbourne’s inner West. These listenings explore sonorous urban environments — public space, wildlife, regenerated vegetation and echoes of everyday industrial and domestic noise. Longform field recordings — interspersed with perceived sonic microdisturbances and interruptive temporalities — are programmed algorithmically to play overnight approximate to sunset—sunrise in July 2020 in the UTC+10 timezone. Through these acoustic entanglements, Local Time unfolds the complex interrelations between a recordist and a place, and their human and non-human neighbours.
Object Animacy is a tactile audiovisual web app developed to interact with digital slime mould. The site prompts the user through calibration of a personal interface agent, providing a custom feel for communicating with non-human intelligences.
Propositions for Listening is a browser-based sound work that explores the contingent moments of fieldwork as a generative space of listenings. Drawing from field research undertaken during an artist residency at the Hepburn Wind farm in Victoria Australia, the work presents the field as an assemblage of networks between bodies and events, revealing the multilayered transformation of local phenomena. Juxtaposing sound, text and imagery as a shifting and iterative articulation, Propositions for Listening situates fieldwork as a productive space of knowledge making - where interplays and relationships coincide to make something new.
This work was created on the unceded territory of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. The artists acknowledge the Traditional Owners of country and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging
Audition #4 will feature Amias Hanley and Patrick Hase presenting a body of work that enfolds listening bodies and ecologies. Hanley will present their audio works Sonic Entanglements: Bodies of the Valley (2018) and SUNKLAND (2021), using the Black Box’s 24.2 spatial audio system. Alongside this, Patrick Hase will lead a live Let’s Play of the pair’s collaborative interactive audio work SUNKLAND.XYZ (2021).
Amias Hanley is an artist currently living on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne, Australia. Their practice uses sound and media to explore relations among queer ecologies, attunement, situatedness and speculative practices. Engaging forms of performance, installation and collaboration, Amias’ work is interested in audition as an affective practice and the possibilities of sound and technology to support and alter the sonic expressions of humans and more-than-humans.
Patrick Hase is an artist and researcher focused on digital interaction design in audio-visual browser based projects. His practice often leads to the construction of playful and collaborative digital interfaces grounded through previous experiences working in music production & performance, 3D animation and VR.
Sonic Entanglements: Bodies of the Valley (2018)
Sonic Entanglements: Bodies of the Valley is a practice-based creative research project that uses the theoretical framework of queer ecologies and an iterative audio recording/playback methodology to problematise the inside-outside distinction between listening-hearing and self-environment.
The research practice is inspired by Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room (1981), though my research is conducted in the Brunswick Valley, known as Moonee Moonee or Moonee Ponds Creek, Victoria, Australia. This work aims to enact an embodied listening experience that stimulates an awareness of the interdependence and multiple temporalities of bodies and environments.
The intention of the project is to compel a listener to critically consider how an awareness of the permeability of boundaries between bodies can challenge us to rethink the anthropocentric concept of “Nature”— to consider humans and technology, not merely in relation to the environment, but rather as part of the environment.
SUNKLAND (2021)
SUNKLAND imagines a speculative swampland wherein multiple species, forms and forces are transforming through a series of open-ended vocal exchanges. This work is a sonic fabulation that is informed by a pre-colonised Carrum Carrum Swamp, settler governance of watercourses and the drainage of wetlands in the area where McClelland Sculpture Park exists, Bunurong Country. The swampland is a slice of tangled time—it carries both remnants of the past and feelings of futurity, which coalesce in a kind of nonlinear discontinuous present.
This work draws on queer perspectives of non-biological kin and the sonic body as a site of becoming and ambiguity. Exploring the poetics of care and exchange through themes of hybridity and heritage, the work invites listeners to imagine the ways that kinship might be felt through embodying the expressions of another species or form—questioning, how might these events allow for listening to the worlds of others in ways that matter?
This work was originally composed for 24.2 channels by Amias Hanley and first exhibited at Liquid Architecture’s Unheard Relations, as part of McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery’s Site & Sound: Sonic art as ecological practice 2021.
SUNKLAND.XYZ (2021)
SUNKLAND.XYZ is an experimental web app for being with a multichannel audio composition, first published by Disclaimer journal. The work invites users to move through, explore and respond to the composition of sounds, textures and spatial arrangements, providing navigational agency to engage in nonlinear, repetitious, permeable and static ways.
Patrick will be presenting a live Let’s Play of SUNKLAND.XYZ and discussing the adjunctive digital spaces that facilitated its collaborative creation.
AUDITION is a new event series for sonic research and practice. It is a collaboration between researchers and artists at three RMIT University labs: Sound Art & Auditory Culture (School of Art), Screen and Sound Cultures (School of Media and Communication), and Design & Sonic Practice (School of Design). Programs will take place at RMIT and external venues, each event convened by a different group member.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present.
/OPT employs a laptop, shell scripts, Pure Data, VLC, and found files to navigate information architectures as compositional structures, listening in to the sounds of data, software, and circuitry.
Developed, programmed, and produced 2016-2022
Thanks to Miyuki Jokiranta, Alex White, Daniel Green, Sam Bruce, Peter Newman, Peter Blamey, Darrin Verhagen, Patrick McMahon, Adrian Lucas-Healey, Jon Tjhia, Dale Gorfinkel, and Ivan Lisyak for listening along the way.
Avantwhatever Festival 2020 was hosted online at avantwhatever.com. Comprised of a program of live streams, audiovisual premieres, Q&As, workshops and browser-based works, the festival focused on creating online situations for listening. Hosted on a specially designed site, produced in collaboration with Paul Mylecharane from Public Office, it utilised dedicated independent streaming and video conferencing servers based in Australia. The festival was funded by the Australia Council for the Arts and presented entirely free and open to all.
Tom Smith
Sarah Hennies
Lucy Liyou
Jon Tjhia
doktorb
Clare Cooper
Ryoko Akama
Amias Hanley
Kiernan Ironfield
Splinter Orchestra
Natasha Anderson
Bec Fary
Patrick Hase & Asher Elazary
Mara Schwerdtfeger
Byron Dean & Polly Stanton
Mara Schwerdtfeger | Frustration Practice🔗Jul. 2020Release
Constructed of field recordings taken in Seydisfjordur, Iceland, Mara Schwerdtfeger’s record Frustration Practice was a challenge to embrace the frustrating presence of wind that constantly infiltrated recordings.
This is a companion composition to I Can Still Hear the Strong Winds Outside, a web installation for Avantwhatever Festival 2020 now available as a subdomain here.
01 Frustration Practice
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Arek Gulbenkoglu | The Musician's Aid🔗Mar. 2019Release
These two pieces are intended as tools to assist musicians in the production of their own works. They are meant to be listened to prior to commencing work to concentrate the ears and mind. The pieces can be listened to from any point for as long or short a duration as required. They should be listened to on studio monitor speakers at a moderate to loud volume.
Recorded on 16 March 2016 direct to hard disk with oscillators and Red Panda Particle pedal.
credits
01 Warm up piece 2
02 Warm up piece 3
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Avantwhatever Festival 2018Jul. 2018FestivalStephen Cornford at Avantwhatever Festival 2018 | Photo: Tim Grey
Avantwhatever Festival 2018 oscillated around creative, and destructive, approaches to consumer electronics. It was held across the Triple R Performance space, the Alderman, Merri Creek, Fleming Park, and a lounge room in Brunswick, Melbourne. Co-presented by Triple R FM, it was funded by the Australia Council for the Arts.
Contributors:
Stephen Cornford
Sam Bruce
Emily Morandini
Pia van Gelder
Radu Malfatti
Alexander Garsden
Dale Gorfinkel
Jason Kahn
Polly Stanton
Bonny Cassidy
Mel Deerson
Jacqui Shelton
Richard Kamerman
Judith Hamann
Papaphilia
Keith Fullerton Whitman
Gabrielle Losoncy | Salvia🔗Mar. 2018ReleaseCover | Photo: Tim Grey
Ignaz Schick & Eliad Wagner’s record Yemen Breakfast brings a visceral physicality full of bizarre humour and roguishness.
01 honky tonk magic
02 Green landing
03 That is your belief
04 The messenger
05 Nomadic disasters
06 He belongs to the pygmy race
07 The land of Nubia
08 music without words
09 Dragons, lilies, buckshots, beards
10 Asphalt High
In 2012 Franciso Meirino and Yan Jun met in Lausanne during Luff Festival. They started to brew a collaboration based on materials from live concerts: live recordings, soundcheck recordings, field recordings and so on. In January of 2014, Francisco sent his one hour track to Yan. After about six months Yan made his own, when he had almost forgotten what Franciscos track sounded like. They kept this pace of working/forgetting/working until 2016, producing two more tracks and a few adjustments. Finally, they turned back to a simple mix of the first two tracks, this record The Blind Match. It keeps a slow pace, as if we have all the time we need.
01 The Blind Match
Francisco Meirino: field recordings, electronics
Yan Jun: field recordings, feedback
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Avantwhatever Presents Simon CharlesAug. 2017PerformanceMartin Kay’s setup in Chamber | Photo: Ben Byrne
Launch for Simon Charles’s record Erasing Architecture at Chamber in Brunswick.
Simon Charles | Erasing Architecture🔗Aug. 2017ReleaseCover | Photo: Tim Grey
Simon Charles’ record Erasing Architecture dissolves the distinction between figure and ground. Inspired by architect Kengo Kumas desire to erase architecture, it eschews foreground and background in favour of depth and entanglement. Elements in the compositions dont distinguish themselves so much as extend and reflect each other, creating an intimate sonic environment.
01 Erasing Architecture
02 Is He the Children 1 & 2
03 Houses
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Ben Byrne | MalfeasanceMay. 2017Release
Ben Byrne’s record Malfeasance is the sound of everything but nothing in particular.
Limited edition lathe cut 7 inch record, only available as a gift.
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Avantwhatever Presents Jérôme Noetinger & Liz RaczFeb. 2017PerformanceLiz Ravz performing at the Alderman | Photo: Ben ByrneJérôme Noetinger in performance | Photo: Ben Byrne
Jérôme Noetinger & Liz Racz performed their durational piece Revox Paper Scissors upstairs at the Alderman, Racz marking time as lines on paper with Noetinger manipulating the sounds of her movements using Revox B77 and electronics.
Richard Kamerman | Now it seems that even the scar has faded away🔗Dec. 2016Release
Richard Kamerman’s Now it seems that even the scar has faded away was recorded live during Sux By Suxwest 5: The Final Suck at Club 1808 Annex, Austin, TX on Sunday March 22nd, 2015 at approximately 6:15pm.
01 Now It Seems That Even the Scar Has Faded Away
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Avantwhatever Monthly - September 2016Sep. 2016PerformanceAvantwhatever Monthly - August 2016
Avantwhatever Monthly - August 2016Aug. 2016PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - August 2016
Avantwhatever & Repressed Records Present Jason LescalleetAug. 2016PerformanceJason Lescalleet | Photo: Tim Bugbee
Jason Lescalleet in Sydney with local artists as part of his tour for Avantwhatever Festival 2016.
Avantwhatever Presents Jason LescalleetJul. 2016PerformanceJason Lescalleet | Photo: Dyane Lacerda
Jason Lescalleet in Brisbane with local artists as part of his tour around Avantwhatever Festival 2016.
Avantwhatever Festival 2016Jul. 2016FestivalGabrielle Loscony at Avantwhatever Festival 2016 | Photo: Tim Grey
Avantwhatever Festival 2016 experimented particularly with recording technologies and their place in music and performance. It was held in the Triple R Performance space and at Merri Creek in Brunswick, Melbourne. Co-presented by Triple R FM, it was funded by the Australia Council for the Arts.
Contributors:
Rosalind Hall
Joel Stern
Robin Fox
Martin Kay
Half High
Thembi Soddell
Gabrielle Losoncy
Carolyn Connors
Smash Tennis
Peter Blamey
Jason Lescalleet
Arek Gulbenkoglu
Shani Mohini-Holmes
Simon Charles
Manfred Werder
Jim Denley
Martin Kay’s record ‘Stadium’ records the crowds of voices that fill the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), a body public.
01 Ponsford Stand, ground level seating bank, MCG
02 Metal barrier separating the MCG’s southern thoroughfare from rail yards
03 MCG elevator
04 Ventilation system in the middle of the Ponsford Stand’s seating bank, MCG
05 Highest point of the Olympic Stand’s seating bank, MCG
06 Metal fencing separating a nearby tennis court and the MCG
07 Bridge crossing the Flinders rail yards, East Melbourne
08 Drainage system beneath Rowena Parade & Rotherwood St, Richmond
09 Residential living room, Richmond Terrace, Richmond
10 Iron fence separating Batman Avenue from the banks of the Yarra River
11 Saint Ignatius Church, Richmond
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Avantwhatever Monthly - June 2016Jun. 2016PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - June 2016
Avantwhatever Monthly - May 2016May. 2016PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - May 2016
Avantwhatever Monthly - April 2016Apr. 2016PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - April 2016
Avantwhatever Monthly - March 2016Mar. 2016PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - March 2016
Avantwhatever Monthly - September 2015Sep. 2015PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - September 2015
DUNLOP/SLAZENGER, 9-15 BOWDEN ST, ALEXANDRIA, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA, 2015 (ACCESS THROUGH CARPARK AT 17-21 BOWDEN ST, ALEXANDRIA, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA, 2015).
A document of Dunlop/Slazenger, 9-15 Bowden St, Alexandria, New South Wales, Australia, 2015.
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Avantwhatever Monthly - August 2015Aug. 2015PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - August 2015
Avantwhatever Monthly - July 2015Jul. 2015PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - July 2015
Avantwhatever Monthly - May 2015May. 2015PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - May 2015
TJ#4Apr. 2015PerformanceFlyer for TJ#4
Avantwhatever guest programs at Tempe Jets in Sydney
Avantwhatever Monthly - April 2015Apr. 2015PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - April 2015
Avantwhatever Monthly - March 2015Mar. 2015PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - March 2015
Ilia Belorukov & Peter Vrba | Library Meeting🔗Mar. 2015Release
Rosalind Hall’s ‘Carriage of the Voice’, which explores how a space can form an extension of her body, her limbs and saxophone evaporating from consciousness as the music she plays transforms the surrounding environment.
01 Carriage of the Voice
02 A Chain of Suspensions
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Avantwhatever Monthly - April 2014Apr. 2014PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - April 2014
Rishin Singh’s Three Weevils, which presents an artist exploring how he is part of his sonic environment, treating himself as soluble rather than individual. Instead of playing with the sounds around him Singh plays inside them, his voice gradually lost in the flood.
01 Ablute
02 Vinyl
03 Kambah
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Avantwhatever Monthly - September 2013Sep. 2013PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - September 2013
Avantwhatever Monthly - August 2013Aug. 2013PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - August 2013
Avantwhatever Monthly - July 2013Jul. 2013PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - July 2013
Avantwhatever Monthly - June 2013Jun. 2013PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - June 2013
Avantwhatever Monthly - May 2013May. 2013PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - May 2013
Avantwhatever Monthly - April 2013Apr. 2013PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - April 2013
Avantwhatever Monthly - March 2013Mar. 2013PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Monthly - March 2013
Avantwhatever Monthly ran at the Alderman in Brunswick, Melbourne from 2013 to 2016, taking a different curatorial approach each year, from curated evenings with three sets, to invited artists being asked to invite others and co-create a program, to pairings of two performances per event, and back.
Avantwhatever Presents Mike MajkowskiFeb. 2013PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Presents Mike Majkowski
Launch show for Mike Majkowksi’s record ‘Tremolo’.
Ernie Althoff’s record Tide shelf, which gathers recordings from across twenty-five years. Including some of his most recent work alongside other previously unreleased pieces, it draws together tributaries running through his installation, instrument building and performance practice. Demonstrating his ongoing interest in playful kinetic explorations of the interplay of materiality, rhythm and texture, it is an album of vital contemporary music.
01 Northbrook House Installation
02 Twenty-three windchimes
03 Do the Fandango
04 Tide shelf
05 Declivities II
06 IndiaTwo
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The Birds & The BeesNov. 2012SoundwalkFlyer for The Birds and The Bees
Launch for Anthony Magen and Christina Tester’s record The Birds & The Bees.
Anthony Magen & Christina Tester | The Birds & The Bees🔗Nov. 2012Release
Anthony Magen & Christina Tester’s record The Birds & The Bees, a special edition lathe cut and mp3 release that draws together a piece from each artist, playfully destabilising the boundaries between artificial and natural, mediated and live and male and female.
01 The Birds
02 The Bees
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Avantwhatever Presents Peter BlameyOct. 2012PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Presents… Peter Blamey
Melbourne launch show for Peter Blamey’s record ‘Forage’.
Peter Blamey’s record Forage, which documents a forage for signals from a small electrical environment created by using eight salvaged computer motherboards, tangled bunches of exposed copper wire and some small amplifiers to form a feedback network.
01
02
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Avantwhatever Presents Peter Blamey, Jim Denley & Sam PettigrewSep. 2012PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Presents… Peter Blamey, Jim Denley & Sam Pettigrew
Sydney launch show for Peter Blamey’s ‘Forage’, Sam Pettigrew’s ‘Domestic Smear’ and Jim Denley’s ‘Your Breath On My Lips’.
Mike Majkowski’s record Tremolo based on a number of sonic possibilities, both harmonic and textural, that may be extracted from the use of this technique.
01 Tremolo
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Avantwhatever Presents Jim Denley & Sam PettigrewMar. 2012PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Presents Jim Denley & Sam Pettigrew
Launch show for Jim Denley’s record ‘Your Breath On My Lips’ and Sam Pettigrew’s record ‘Domestic Smear’.
Sam Pettigrew’s record ‘Domestic Smear’ uses the bass as a theatre to question stereotypical roles, including the artist as performer, the listener as audience and identity as independent, gendered and individual.
01 Truly
02 Madly
03 Deeply
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Jim Denley | Your Breath On My Lips🔗Dec. 2011Release
Matt Earle, Jason Kahn & Adam Sussmann’s record ‘Concerts Melbourne+Sydney’, dense with frequencies and activity but possessing a remarkable stillness.
01 Melbourne
02 Sydney
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Avantwhatever Presents A Night of CompositionsAug. 2011PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Presents A Night of Compositions
A night of compositions at Tape Projects.
Avantwhatever Presents Ivan LisyakJul. 2011PerformanceFlyer for Avantwhatever Presents Ivan Lisyak
Launch show for Ivan Lisyak’s record ‘South West Line’.
Ben Byrne’s record ‘Disposition’ asks listeners to chart their own path as the music constantly emerges from and disappears into a mess of signals, actions and noise.
01 Part I
02 Part II
03 Part III
04 Part IV
05 Part V
