Artist talks, presentations and performances

Three days of talks, presentations and performances by festival artists in an auditorium situated in the arches of the old railway warehouse, including live performances by Graham Massey, Sven Konig/sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! and Zachary Lieberman. The artist presentation range from 15 minute demos to 45 minute performances and 60 minute discussions.

Auditorium, Museum of Science and Industry (next to 1830 Warehouse)
Fri 21 - Sun 23 July, 11am-5pm

Artist Talks and Performances Free

Download Artist Talks and Performances schedule

Friday 21 July

Open Music Archive (UK)

Leverage

--11am, Artist Talk--

Artists Eileen Simpson & Ben White run Open Music Archive, a collaborative initiative to source and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings: www.openmusicarchive.org. They will talk about making the archive and about Leverage, their new project to create a copyleft licensed vinyl scratch tool in collaboration with DJ Parkertron, featuring samples and beats made from out-of-copyright blues, jazz and folk from the archive. Open Music Archive is a Manchester-based collaborative initiative to source, digitise and distribute out of copyright sound recordings. The archive is open for anyone to use and contribute to. Various artistic projects are staged using material from the archive, from installations at Futuresonic and British Art Show to 'happenings' in second hand clothing stores.

mimoSa (Brazil) and UHC (UK)

Urban Intervention Machine

--12pm, Demo/Artist Talk--

mimoSa have been mapping Brazilian cities since 2005 through 'urban interventions'. Using these special machines built by local people from found objects and makeshift electronics, mimoSa re-appropriate technology to reveal places, people and their tales in a new light. Here they report on the development of the project in Manchester in collaboration with Manchester-based UHC (Ultimate Holding Company) is an inter-disciplinary Art Collective founded in 2002, who work collaboratively over multiple media and run a not-for-profit workers co-op, specialising in ethical visual communications.

Zachary Lieberman (USA)

Making the Invisible Visible

--1pm, Artist Talk/Live Performance--

The Manual Input Sessions (tmema.org/mis) is a series of audiovisual vignettes which probe the expressive possibilities of hand gestures and finger movements. Drawn (thesystemis.com/drawn) explores immediacy of drawing by turning simple brushstrokes of ink into complex and energetic life forms. The software used was developed to create a visual "instrument" that could be used in tight collaboration together with musicians. Zachary Lieberman (USA) is an artist, engineer and educator who produces installations, on-line works and concerts concerned with the themes of kinetic and gestural performance, interactive imaging and speech visualization. He was recently Artsist-in-Residence at the Futurelab, Ars Electronica.

Max Eastley (UK)

--2pm, Artist Talk--

Max Eastley is an artist who works with sound, vision, and kinetics to produce integrated art forms, for interior and exterior environments. He began to investigate the relationship of chance to music and visual art in the late 1960s and has worked extensively in the area of improvised and experimental music. Using kinetic sound devices and the environmental forces of wind, streams and sea, he has created automata with sculptural, ecological, architectural, theatrical and musical possibilities. His work has been included in many international exhibitions and he has made a number of large outdoor installations worldwide. He was a Visiting Fellow at Liverpool School of Art and Design, Liverpool John Moores University (2000-2001).

Vergil Sharkya' (UK) plus guest musicians

Tosterasta

--3pm, Live Performance--

Tosterasta contains hypercompositions for digital and acoustic instruments, specially arranging for CD-player, laptop, sound modulators, acoustic guitar and oboe. Vergil Sharkya's aesthetic, a 3-D-sonic space of warped frequencies and grooves, is defined by contrapuntal density, multi-dimensional polyrhythmic pulses, free harmonic structures and melodic series of seemingly endless micro-glissandi. Hypercomposition is the latest stage in Sharkya's quest for a means of composing music that reflects and extends the development of western art music, yet at the same time manages to communicate through its emotional immediacy, and, for want of a better word, beauty.

Folk Songs Project (Alastair Dant, Tom Davis & David Gunn, UK/USA)

Manchester : Peripheral

--4pm, Artist Talk--

The Folk Songs Project have been commissioned to develop an interactive, living SoundMap for Futuresonic 2006 where users remix field recordings and music contributed by Manchester's diverse communities and young people. Phase one is an online project presented in the Off The Map exhibition. Phase two is a collaborative process involving the Folk Songs group, a leading 'creative cartographer' and local community groups, exploring �alternative cartographies� for Manchester and culminating in the development of an innovative physical interface.

Saturday 22 July

Simon Blackmore (Owl Project, UK)

iLog

--11am, Artist Talk--

Owl Project are Manchester-based Simon Blackmore and Antony Hall. At Futuresonic they are presenting iLog. A potent mix of wood, low-tech computer and personal stereo iLog is the latest 'must-have' consumer gadget from Manchester-based artist group Owl Project, combining computation, sonic artistry and ... woodwork. Featuring computer circuits lovingly encased in a wooden log, originally devised as an eco-alternative to using laptops during live audio performances The iLogs have been so successful that they now include several software packages and new improved Log Operating Systems: Squirrel and Badger 2005, with limited editions out for Christmas.

Dr X: A Version of Events

Ken Hollings, Graham Massey and Howard Walmsley (BTAL, UK)

--12pm, Live Performance--

Dr X is a spoken word / video / electronic music performance evoking the

feel of an illustrated surreal science lecture. The piece takes as its starting point, a fragment of the lost 1930s horror film, Dr X, and expands it into an essay on the dawn of the age of electricity in 1930's New York. Ken Hollings, Graham Massey and Howard Walmsley, the three members of BTAL (Biting Tongues Arts Lab) have collaborated together since 1979. Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster, Howard Walmsley is a film director/producer/musician, Graham Massey is an international recording artist remixer and producer credits include his own bands 808state, Toolshed and Homelife along side collaborations as diverse as Bjork to Robbie Williams, Brian Eno to Quincy Jones.

sCrAmBlEd HaCkZ (DE)

Sven Konig

--1pm, Live Performance--

Cut up segments of music videos are reordered and reassembled so fast that, no sooner have the words left your mouth, you hear them spoken back to you. sCrAmBlEd ?HaCkZ! analyses the audio portion of a video file to determine the tempo of the incoming audio, and then slices it up into discrete chunks of a quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note and so on. Using a large number of vectors, those slices are classified into a database according to their sonic characteristics. When the user sends new audio information to the program using e.g. voice and microphone, it follows approximately the same process, becoming classified in the database. The software outputs the pre-analysed sample that is most similar to the newly cached sample. The result, which can be seen in the video, is the ability to reconfigure a number of music videos on the fly, so that they produce a sound similar to whatever is input. On screen the software plays the frames of video that accompany the selected audio.

Getting To The Point

with Simon Pope, Michelle Teran, Jen Southern and Pete Gomes (UK/CA)

--2pm, Artist Presentations/Workshop--

Talks by artists who have led a city walk over the festival weekend. Each one works in some way with location and geographical positioning technologies. During the short walks the artists discuss and demonstrate the relationships between walking and positioning technologies such as GPS in their work. This workshop will gather together the participating artists and those who have journeyed through the city with them to explore the themes of the project.

Victor Gama (PT)

Pangeia Instrumentos

--3pm, Artist talk followed by performance/demo--

Victor Gama combines high tech instrument design with ancient, African musical forms. Pangeia Instrumentos are acoustic musical instruments, sound devices and installations designed and built as a process of experimentation with form, design, sound and music. He initiated the Pangeia Instrumentos project in the early 1990s in which he uses form as a variable in the composition process. He has since developed The Golian Modes Theory in which the score has a three dimensional component. The Golian Modes are four musical modes derived from the ancient Kongo/Angolan graphic writing system known as Bidimbu. The basis of the Golian modes are the fundamental cosmogram known as Dikenga, and the concept of N'kizy, a religious object that is used to establish communication with the ancestors world.

Pete Hindle (UK)

Duelling Etch-A-Sketches

--4pm, Live Performance/Demo--

Duelling Etch-A-Sketches attempts to reclaim the act of making music as public behaviour, using the famous children's toy. �By selling music as an object to be listened to, rather than a manuscript that anybody could alter, record companies became rich and our notion of music changed. It is impossible for most people to think of gathering around the piano doe a sing-song, as our grandparents might have done, and so we are left with the static, unchanging thing that music has become � packaged for demographics, sold as a compilation. Duelling Etch-A-Sketch attempts to redress that imbalance, by offering the easiest interface possible to create music.�

Sunday 23 July

SoundNetwork (UK)

--11am-12pm & 2pm-5pm, Live Performance--

SoundNetwork, a new network for artists using sound in the NorthWest of England, will be presenting an innovative programme of work from their membership for Futuresonic 2006. Performances, installations, interventions and collaborations will show off the fascinating work of sound artists and musicians in the region and beyond.

Share (USA)

--12pm (midday)-5pm, Collaborative Jam--

Share hold free, open jams and workshops in cities including New York, Montreal, San Diego and Weisbaden. You are invited to bring your portable equipment, plug in, improvise on each others' signal and perform live audio and video. Share provide a forum for fluid, improvised creative processes. Teaming up with the locally based SoundNetwork outfit, this is Share's first visit to the UK. Come to watch and listen; come to play. http://share.dj