for the past six months or so i’ve been thinking a lot about retooling my approach to making things. “production”has slowed considerably due to exhaustion and periodic bouts of anxiety (though one may not think so if all the things i’ve set in motion actually come to fruition). i have been working with domestic sounds and improvs, more because it’s an enjoyable activity that takes my mind off my circumstances than any sort of overarching plan for producing anything.
i’ve had a lifelong interest in sound and listening and after many false starts eventually found a niche to occupy.
I am working on a new series of scores based on vegetables, growing seasons, folklore, and myth. This is part of a wider project looking at the rural as an extension of the studio and a site of de-marginalised production.
Sarah Hughes’ multidisciplinary arts practice, comprising composition, performance, curating and installation, revolves around the relationship between social and environmental systems of cooperation. The work draws from various contexts including ecology, feminist politics, alternative economies, land use, and protest in order to explore speculative systems of organisation and collaboration as the ground for social change.
Hughes’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally, including at South London Gallery, Punt WG Amsterdam, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Supplement, and Modern Art Oxford. Her compositions have been performed by various ensembles and at various festivals including London Contemporary Music Festival, Music We’d Like To Hear, and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Realisations of her compositions have been published by Another Timbre, Suppedaneum, Melange Editions, and Consumer Waste.
(Residues. Found objects. Charcoal drawings. Concrete poetry, watercolors.) Working on the architecture for an artist book that can hold remnants of poems, compositions, drawings, photographs and instructions for performances, diagrams, possible installations.
Starting a new series of texts called The Telaraña Circuit; they’re little eclipses of thoughts on place, forgetting and memory.
Trying to edit a small film with footage from 2016 (if I write it here I will probably start someday with this as a witness.)
diSONARE – Hosting an online bilingual reading series called Ecos Virtuales (Virtual Echoes) Experimentation, sound and poetry. Launching a new website soon with a sound archive & additional content to the journal.
Lucía Hinojosa is an artist from Mexico City working with language, sound, improvisation and poetry. She’s the editor of diSONARE, a bilingual journal of art & literature.
Sound as touch (a comfort in these physically distanced times; voices envelop as a hug or arm stroke); interspecies communication, and the (dis)harmony of ecological soundscapes; reification (text made flesh; breath as metaphor for life); alternative time systems: experimenting away from chronological time whenever I possibly can.
Working on:
EnCOUnTErs – a multi-disciplinary project at the intersection between nonhuman encounter, art ecology and the sonic imagination.
Auraldiversities – an ongoing series of lectures, workshops and in-situ training sessions seeking to encourage creative and critical attention towards aural diversity, especially within the arts and humanities.
Helen Frosi’s practice resides at the nexus between ecological thought, poetics and experimental pedagogy, with tentacles entwined within the creative, social and political aspects of sound, hearing and listening. Notions of communion, conviviality and alternative economies are keystones within her practice-based and embodied research.
A book, called To Suckle a Field of Monsters, that is slowly picking scraps from the teeth of a residency I was lucky enough to have at Capel Y Graig, and from three Chase talks I wrote earlier this year.
Reading 17th Century archival documents connecting Ireland to the Barbary Coast and the New World.
Writing letters to myself from imaginary people.
Drinking an ungodly amount of tea.
Watching John Hyatts painting updates.
Researching the migration of whales.
Developing braille ceramics.
Creating interactive art for those with dementia.
This next year I will be living in The Burren. It is very isolated and I expect to pine for people. I have several projects to be getting on with. Finishing my own ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is one. To clarify, not stylistically, just in the sense that people won’t enjoy it. I know I certainly won’t.
I feel quite emotional today. Thinking of all the mischief I miss. Quite striking how our worlds can be contained within the drunken monologues of friends and the insights of precarious love interests… Feel free to send your songs of love and hate, or your ramblings to styxthalia@gmail.com – Oh and when you feel sad, to remember this most important thing, Bill Callahan wrote ’Riding For The Feeling’.
I am currently working on a residency with a group of volcanologists from Bristol University’s School of Earth Sciences, which now looks like it will be extended into 2021. Broadly speaking this work looks at the relationship between geological materials and the technical instruments that are refined from them and then used to study them. I am looking at parallels between volcanic processes and the manufacturing processes that go into the creation of contemporary media devices, particularly through the lens of silicon. The scientists on the project are studying the behaviour of two silicates (pyroxene and plagioclase) in their high temperature / high pressure experiments, imaging them with X-rays in a silicon image sensor and then modelling their behaviour computationally – again in silicon. My response so far is through video and some high temperature experiments on smartphones.
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. He recently completed a PhD affiliated to the Archaeologies of Media & Technology Research Group at Winchester School of Art.
His current research is concerned with the toxicity of media technologies, and the scarcity of some of the raw materials now ubiquitous in digital imaging devices. These works seek to problematise the technological solutionism often proposed to resolve the environmental impacts of rampant media consumption.
The whole of Seinfeld from beginning to end (if it’s your first time start at Season 3)
Working on:
I’m spending my time (which I have a lot more of now I’ve been furloughed from my producing job) developing a project called ‘Town Hall Meeting of the Air’, which grew out of the residency I did with SARU in 2018-19, and is a collaboration with artist Kate Liston. The focus of this work is the poetics of civic gathering, and how democracy manifests in the language of public discourse and design of civic architecture. Imagining a space for civic gathering – which is what we hope the project will become – has become quite a different prospect in recent weeks. ‘Town Hall Meeting of the Air’ will be presented as an exhibition, performance and public programme at Baltic 39 in Newcastle and Ovada in Oxford in 2021. I’ve also been enjoying doing more open-ended writing, just writing for writing’s sake, which I find really helpful for keeping my head straight. I’m really wary of the notion that lockdown is an opportunity to be creative or productive though – its probably the most stressful and shocking thing any of us will ever live through, so just eating, sleeping and staying calm seem like enough to be getting on with.
I am an artist living in Gateshead in the North East of England. My work spans performance, writing, workshops and installation. I am also the producer of the Artists’ Moving Image programme at Tyneside Cinema.
Just before lockdown I presented at Transmediale in Berlin and was lucky enough to be part of the Adverserial Hacking workshop run by Matteo Pasquinelli, whose work I have been reading over this period. He presented a new project in progress with Vlad Joler, which was published last week, here: It is a cultural critique or re-perspective of emergent artificial intelligence and machine learning practices. Well worth a read. The bulk of the work in this area focuses on the optic, the visual. At the workshop, I presented my research in the sonic space as part of one panel that looked at sound and music.
Like many artists, musicians and researchers, the pandemic means much of upcoming events, gigs and odd jobs are either cancelled, postponed or suspended in uncertain limbo. I was due to perform with Valentina Vuksic at BOM (Birmingham Open Media) as part of BEASTFEaST 2020. While the festival could not happen, they did manage to present a virtual programme of which our improvisation was a part.
That’s really it from my side. Has also been a full time job trying to not let myself get furious at the news, our ‘dear leaders’ and the way in which the pandemic has been handled from the corridors of power. To make matters worse I got accused of looking like Matt Hancock! But, we can’t end on that, so…
I also built a robot, and took apart a laptop with my daughter. This was, in her words, ‘like, the coolest thing ever’
The influence of soundscape in psychological distancing, a theme that runs through my recent explorations of ‘positive silence’
Working On:
Sound Art and Mental Health – producing a range of sound art and slow media for in-patients at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading. The pieces will be realised through participatory arts work with NHS and community mental health services and continues previous work developing a range of focus-oriented sound art practices.
Distal Bodies – a Sound Diaries project that documents the changing soundscape of a South Oxfordshire village during the Covid-19 lockdown and beyond.
Sandokai – production of a short film exploring the text of this Sōtō Zen poem, with its presentation of the interbeing nature of independent, seemingly disparate phenomena. A collaboration with artist and resident monastic Rev. Gareth Milliken of Reading Buddhist Priory.
Belong – a series of multi-disciplinary ‘blind collaborations’ with other associate artists at the Jelly arts organisation, creating a stratified work that coalesces around the theme of ‘breathing’.
Richard Bentley is a sound artist and researcher whose work explores focus-oriented sound arts practice and the experience of positive silence. This interest is manifested through listenings, writings, field recordings, composition, soundwalks and the development of participatory sound art exercises.
In his practice, Richard explores the interplay of mind and soundscape in experiences of positive silence. Phenomenological enquiry and documentation, through field recording and stream-of-consciousness transcription, typically provide the starting point for work, unearthing themes that are shared and developed through reflective writings, sound works and a host of interdisciplinary and participatory arts work.
Informed by this artistic practice and drawing from the fields of sound studies, art therapy and positive psychology, Richard’s research investigates focused-oriented sound art practices for wellbeing. His current work explores the experience of positive silence as freedom from distraction and the influence of the soundscape on present-centred awareness and psychological distancing. In addition to contributing to academic and public discourse on the topic, research outcomes include the development of participatory sound art practices that support wellbeing in both clinical and non-clinical settings.
