workshops

UP IN THE VALLEY

Listening Interventions in Mountain Locations

The workshop takes place on the mountains of ValSabbia (Brescia) each year around end july/beginning of august. Registrations open in may/june.

Up In The Valley is a sound workshop that takes place in a mountain setting.

Presenting a series of exercices specifically designed for the location, the workshop explores the propagation of sound in space and the concept of listening-as-intervention.

Focussing on the position of the listener, the distance from the sound source and the threshold of audibilty, the workshop investigates the potential of the listener to produce and interact with sound in space.

During the 4 days of the workshop, basic acoustic principles and sound effects such as reflection, absorption and filtering are staged and performed live.

All the exercises are exploration-based and run under a performative frame that refers to the notions of presence, touch, and intersubjectivity.

The exercises are presented within a series of walking excursions. The average time of each excursion is 8 hours including breaks and exercises.

All the activities are site specific and take advantage of the affordances/constraints of the place.

The mountain setting serves as a unique setting that provides specific qualities such as high silence/noise ratio, long-distance acoustic horizon and irregular reflecting faces.

White noise and sound impulses are the main tools that are used in the exercises.

DOCUMENTATION
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE DOCUMENTATION FROM THE PAST EDITIONS OF THE WORKSHOP

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Listening/Intervention

Listening Workshop
listening workshop

The workshop is open to anyone concerned with the possibility of interaction between sound, space and listening.

Through specific exercises that stage phenomena of reflection, absorption, filtering and the threshold of audibility, the workshop encourages the active role of the listener and his/her own potentials to perceive sound.

The main aim of the workshop is to offer a wide range of listening experiences in order to lead participants to recognize sound as a concrete presence that puts the listener in relation with space, materials and other people’s bodies.

DOCUMENTATION
VIDEO from the workshop in Turin, 2012
IMAGES from the workshops in London, CSSD, 2011 + Turin, 2012 + Berlin, Errant Bodies, 2015

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Soundstorming

Sound Interventions in the Outdoor
photos Link Art Center Brescia (1), © laura-arlotti.com (3,4,5,6,)

Soundstorming is an exploration walk that invites participants to develop site specific interventions. Echoing the process of brainstorming, the workshop functions as an informal exchange of collective experiment with sound and listening.

Soundstorming begins with a semi-structured walk that interesects a certain area or territory. Participants stop the walk and start working whenever they find a potentially interesting location, whether it is an abandoned building, a construction site, or an area under transformation. The fundamental parameters for choosing where to stop relate to the spatial affordances of the place, its configuration and acoustic quality as well as to the freedom of movement it provides.

Participants bring to the walk their own technical equipment. Everything must be compact and easy to carry around. Bent electronics, small analog/digital sound instruments, sound generators, portable loudspeakers, megaphones, pre-recorded sounds, contact mics, sound playback/recording devices and found objects are some of the tools for developing interventions and situations.

Besides being a direct process for fast prototyping of outdoor interventions, Soundstorming provides a context in which participants acquire emotional and practical knowledge about some of the most debated issues concerning the notion of place, the role of the context, the definition of private/public, the abandoned, the act of trespassing, the production and reappropriation of space.

DOCUMENTATION
CONCEPTS from the workshop at STEIM, Amsterdam, 2012
IMAGES from the workshops at STEIM, Amsterdam, 2012 + IMM, Dusseldorf, 2011
VIDEO from the workshop at STEIM, Amsterdam, 2012
VIDEO from the workshop at IMM, Dusseldorf, 2011

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