The workshop is an opportunity to research on themes such as: sound propagation in outdoor space, long distance listening, and context-specific sound intervention.
The location for the workshop is the TAV construction site in Valsusa. The acronym TAV in Italian stands for Treno ad Alta Velocità, which means high-speed train in English. Heavily contested by the No TAV movement, the construction site has been declared by the italian governement “sito d’importanza strategica” which basically means strategic military zone. The construction site appears fenced and patrolled by police and military forces.
The choice of the TAV construction site as context for the workshop is because of the following reasons:
- the presence of a red zone, prohibiting people’s circulation and action, which makes sound a means for reaching and crossing the construction site from a distance;
- the military forces and the technological surveillance protecting the construction site, which put the performers in a condition of alertness and attentive listening;
- the certainty of having an “audience” listening from inside the construction site, perceiving our sounds as a sinister presence.
During the workshop, each of the participant is invited to develop an intervention and to perform it during a night excursion in the surroundings of the construction site.
MORE INFO HERE
workshops
TENSE EARS
UP IN THE VALLEY
What
Up In The Valley is an exploratory workshop taking place in mountain settings. From 2013 to 2019 the worskhop has been organised on the mountains of val-sabbia (brescia, northern italy).
Presenting a series of listening pieces and exercises specifically designed for the locations, the workshop explores the propagation of sound and the interaction between sound, space, and point(s) of listening. Acoustic principles and sound effects such as reflection, absorption, filtering, and threshold of audibilty are staged, performed, and experienced live.
All the proposed activities take advantage of the affordances/constraints of the chosen locations. Mountain serves as unique setting providing specific qualities such as high silence/noise ratio, long-distance acoustic horizon and multiple reflecting surfaces.
The pieces/exercises are presented as part of a series of walking excursions. The average time of each excursion is 6/8 hours including breaks.
Documentation Images
https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidetidoni/sets/72157651874593186
Logistics (previous editions organised in val-sabbia)
read here
Listening / Intervention
The workshop is open to anyone concerned with the possibility of interaction between sound, space, and the body.
Through a series of pieces and exercises based on spatial listening, body filtering, and sound-guided movements, the workshop reflects on the active role of the listener in actualising and interfering with the production of sound and its propagation.
Standing on the conviction that there is no listening without intervention (the observer is always participating to the observed event) the workshop frames listening as an act of transformation, a capacity to interact and co-produce sound events.
A list of possible activities includes: your footsteps in the room; closed-eyes walk to the wall; touch the others with a microphone; someone is listening from inside a cardboard box; “anolog” filters and white noise; ears at the wall; hit the microphone with a slingshot; try to avoid any feedback to occur while walking to the amp; find the spot where two different sounds are perceived at the same loudness; walk away from the sound source up to the point where you cannot hear it anymore; participants’ bodies functioning as absorption panels,…
Documentation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52_f4094wD4
https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidetidoni/albums/72157650976176766
Soundstorming
What
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. 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 practical experience about some of the most debated issues concerning 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
VIDEO from the workshop at STEIM, Amsterdam, 2012
VIDEO from the workshop at IMM, Düsseldorf/Köln, 2011