Marla Hlady in collaboration with Christof Migone

Count and Strike and Spin
Marla Hlady in collaboration with Christof Migone

Opening reception: Monday June 29, 19:00h

Opening hours:
Saturday-Sunday: 14-18:00h
Monday-Friday: 16-20:00h

Errant Bodies
Kollwitzstrasse 97
10435 Berlin

From June 27th to July 5th, Hlady and Migone will inhabit the Errant Bodies Sound Art Space with a project that is somewhere between an installation, a performance and a residency. Together Hlady and Migone will compose, experiment, improvise, listen, alter, converse…over seven days as they explore what their band is in this particular space.

This residency project is based on an on-going premise for sound collaborations developed by Hlady in which she takes some element of a collaborator’s practice and mechanizes it. Hlady’s own mechanical instruments are also part of the mix. The project asks questions such as: What would it be like to be surrounded by an instrument (an instrument that fully embraces being an apparatus, an assemblage of parts)? What if some of these instruments were kinetic, moved on their own? And what would happen if this instrument, with all of its parts, could be mobile, moved to different resonant spaces as a way to explore a variety of acoustic sites? Migone’s Hit Parade performance was the starting premise for the present collaboration. In Migone’s Hit Parade microphones are used by live performers as crude, hammer-like instruments for percussion. Mechanizing an action raises questions about skills, labour, economy, duration and obsolescence. This mechanical band performs with both the limitations and the expanded control a machine and its computer program allows—in other words, methodically yet also haphazardly. As a band, in the collective rhythm produced by this ensemble of machines, the social side to sound making is foregrounded. Hlady complements the hitting microphones with mechanically spinning microphones. They will twirl, turn, shift and displace discussions about the project occurring throughout its run; they will wah-wah ideas around.


The work has 3 parts:

PART 1
A microphone stand is placed in front of the window; microphones are attached to both ends of the boom arm. The stand has been modified to motorize the boom arm: the two microphones now move back and forth tapping the window. As one microphone hits, a read-out counts up to one million; as the other microphone hits, another read-out counts down. The microphones are amplified some of the time, unamplified at other times and provide a base rhythm for the overall project.

It takes approximately 57.87 days (1,388.8889 hours), 24 hours a day for this machine to become a millionaire.

PART 2
Three identical microphone-hit-machines use microphones as percussion instruments. These machines are designed to run independently, controlled by a microprocessor; and they are designed to be manually adjusted through control dials and through various alterable appendages. Each day the percussion possibilities are altered and experimented with.

PART 3
Three identical machines spin shotgun microphones at various speeds. These machines are designed to run independently, controlled by a microprocessor, or they can be controlled manually with a foot pedal.

Starting June 28 and ending July 4, a guest will participate in a conversation. Each conversation is recorded using untreated and treated microphones (i.e. the spinning microphone). This sound is processed and used in the space the following day as a sound element, again using the spinning microphones as a way to further process the sound.

Conversation schedule: Saturday/Sunday 16hr, weekdays 18hr
Sunday, June 28 – Gwen MacGregor + Lewis Nicolson
Monday, June 29 – Caleb Kelly + Kusum Normoyle
Tuesday, June 30 – Linnea Semmerling
Thursday, July 2 – Kristan Horton
Friday, July 3 – Emma Waltraud Howes
Saturday, July 4 – Heidi Sill + Michael Schultze

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Marla Hlady draws, makes sculpture, works with sites and sounds and sometimes makes video. Hlady's kinetic sculptures and sound pieces often consist of common objects (such as teapots, cocktail mixers, jars) that are expanded and animated to reveal unexpected sonic and poetic properties often using a system-based approach to composition. She’s shown widely in solo and group shows in Canada, US, Italy, Britain, Norway and Iceland. She has mounted site works in such places as the fjords of Norway, a grain silo as part of the sound festival Electric Eclectic, an apartment window in Berlin, a tour bus in Ottawa, the Hudson’s Bay department store display window and an empty shell of a building. She also, at times, collaborates. Hlady completed her BFA at the University of Victoria, and her MFA at York University. She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and is represented by the Jessica Bradley Gallery.

Christof Migone is an artist, curator, teacher and writer. His research delves into language & voice, bodies & performance, intimacy & complicity, sound & silence, rhythmics & kinetics, translation & referentiality, stillness & imperceptibility, structure & improvisation, play & pathos, pedagogy & unlearning, failure & endurance. He is currently working with telephones as diaristic and synoptic vehicles, the raw material to make records as indexical performative objects of potentiality, and microphones as gestural and sculptural instruments that foment dissent. He co-edited the book Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2001) and his writings have been published in Aural Cultures, S:ON, Experimental Sound & Radio, Musicworks, Radio Rethink, Semiotext(e), Esse, Inter, Performance Research, etc. His writings on sound art are compiled in Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body (Errant Bodies Press, 2012). He obtained an MFA from NSCAD and a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University. He lives in Toronto and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario.

Morten Søndergaard & Marie Højlund

Vocal Rhythms - from Recitation to Repetition & Resolution
Artist talk and performance by Morten Søndergaard & Marie Højlund

Sunday, June 14th, 2015 - 19:30h

Errant Bodies
Kollwitzstrasse 97
10435 Berlin
www.errantbodies.org


The Danish composer and sound artist Marie Højlund and the Danish poet Morten Søndergaard have collaborated in many ways, but first and foremost through exploring the relationship between words, sound and music together. Morten has written the lyrics for two of Marie Højlund’s albums with Marybell Katastrophy and they both take part in all sorts of music and art projects in the active scene around the members of the band (that also include Jakob Schweppenhäuser, Emil Thomsen and Klaus Q Hedegaard Nielsen). In the talk and performance at Errant Bodies they will talk and perform both solo and together.

Marie Højlund explores the voice as a disruptive agent dissolving the divisions between inside and the outside and the way it is rendered and translated through other objects. The voice as a temporary rhythmic and fragile environment. Our most faithful and intimate companion but consistently a strange stranger. She will use her own voice through looping, distorting, layering and processing in her performance, as well as present projects where she engages citizens’ voices in art projects, as in the project Lys, Landskab og Stemmer (www.lysogstemmer.dk) where she and Elle-Mie Ejdrup Hansen collected 758 different voices in East Jutland reading Inger Christensens poem Lys (Light) aloud. The recordings were transformed into a 24-speaker outdoor composition presented in six different sites, each six hours long, one for each site, unfolded over six evenings in 2011.

// Video clip from one of the six evenings at Trehøje: https://vimeo.com/32379599
// Performance with a high school choir at a shopping mall in Aarhus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVLSKhqnbvI

Morten Søndergaard is a poet, but he works in many others fields but always on the base of words. He often works with repetition and looping as medium and he will reflect on this in his piece at Errant Bodies, as well on difference between or coincidence with sound and sense. He will literally play his books and he will give his own personal reading of Brandon LaBelle’s book "Lexicon of the Mouth”.

// http://mortensondergaard.net/english/
// http://www.wordpharmacy.com

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Marie Højlund (born 1979) is a sound artist and composer and has exhibited sound art installations around Denmark including Love Alley, Kunsthal Aarhus, Kunsten Aalborg, Roskilde Museum for Samtidskunst and Spor Festival. As a composer under the alias Marybell Katastrophy she has won critical acclaim, awards, received numerous grants and commissions, released several albums and played concerts and festivals in Denmark, Germany, Austria, England, Ireland, France and Italy including Roskilde Festival (DK) and Nordklang (AU). She is currently undertaking a PhD in Audio Design at The Department of Aesthetics and Communication at Aarhus University, Denmark. In her practice-based and artistic research she is particularly interested in exploring different strategies to create dynamic atmospheres with sound and voices integrated into the physical environment in shared spaces in the Danish hospital.

Morten Søndergaard (born 1964) is one of the foremost of the generation of Danish poets to emerge onto the scene in the early nineties. Søndergaard’s first collection of poetry, Sahara i mine hænder (Sahara In My Hands) was published in 1992. This debut collection has been followed by a succession of works which have won him both critical acclaim and a number of literary awards. Language is Morten Søndergaard’s medium and his métier, one which he practises not only as a poet, but also as a translator, sound artist and literary editor. And while his craft is solidly rooted in the classic poetic tradition he is constantly intent on exploring the possibilities of language and new ways in which these can be presented. Over the years, alongside his written publications, this has resulted in musical and dramatic works and in recordings, exhibitions and installations centring on language and sound. Morten Søndergard’s most recent publication is The Process and Half the Kingdom (2010) and Pros and cons of developing wings (2013). - Barbara Haveland