Archive for the Project 'ARCHITONE'

composed city

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

composedcity

Composed City is an experimental workshop dealing with city sounds; using the public space as an instrument and initiating permanent changes to the existing soundscape. The „instrument“ to be played is the Wriezener Freiraum labor, part of the former train station Wriezener Bahnhof in Berlin Friedrichshain.

A lecture series on June 4th on sound art in public space will introduce the subject; the lecturing artists are Mark Bain, Achim Wollscheid, and Per Hedfors. Afterwards, the workshop takes place between June 5th-8th 2008. The results will be presented in a performance at the Berlin Festival „Tuned City - Between sound and space speculation“ on July 4th-5th.

Organisation: Staalplaat Soundsystem (Amsterdam, NL), Lola landscape architects (Rotterdam, NL), UDK Berlin (departement of soundstudies) TU Berlin (FG Feduchi, Fachgebiet Architektur) and TX-Architekten (Berlin).
More info: www.composedcity.org & www.tunedcity.de

avantilator at Octopus Festival, Paris

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

octopus_staalplaat

For the Octopus festival in Paris (may 2nd 2008) we developed a new version of our avantilator performance using parts of the architone concept and other machine instruments.

Composed City

Monday, February 4th, 2008

Staalplaat soundsystem and Lola have met during a 5 moth art in public space resicentie at the Zuidas in Amsterdam, a brand new banking quarter.
It was in this period that we have spend long discussions on sound in public space, from simple practical solutions like wind driven percussion instruments that visitors can use to compose, to fundamental working principals.
It was there where we were impressed by the working similarities and contrast between our disciplines.
Besides the obvious differences there are many similarities between sound art and architecture in arranging and composing public space
Working with function, material and volume but from a different perspective to the same problem.

In Composed City we want to show the direct relationship between public space and sound and place it in a broad perspective -historical, present-day, theory and praxis- by means of lectures, presentations and workshops dealing with public space in the city, approached from the view of sound art as well as landscape architecture resulting in a sound art work in public space. Composed city will take place in the preparation of the Berlin festival Tuned City - Between sound and space speculation in May and June.

Program
During the lectures a broad overall view is given on the position of sound and public space, historical and practical, then we’ll slowly focus on the points where sound art and landscape architecture interact. In practice: the first lectures begin with a historical overview of the entire field, the lectures on the present will be more focused on sound art in public space, and the presented artist will be specialized on a field were the architectural and public conditions of the space is a elementary part of their work. We have invited Mark Bain - Edwin van de Heide, Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Carsten Nicolai.

The workshops will focus on the praxis and deal with artistic concepts and practical obstacles on the road to realization of a composition with urban facts. The workshops will result in a sound art composition - spatial as well as sonic - that reveals, emphasizes and uses the sounds of the urban landscape were in contact with local architects to select lacerations that will be the turned in to a urban instrument.

Steirischer Herbst and musikprotokoll 2007, Graz

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

[…] Built with the aid of cutting-edge architectural and technological means as the ideal concert hall, free of inherent noise: The Helmut-List-Halle is an almost perfect white cube for music. For the opening of steirischer herbst, Staalplaat Soundsystem will for the first time use the hall not as a flawless shell for music but rather play the hall itself as an instrument – in a duet with the noises that surround it and that are usually locked out. […]

Commissioned by Steirischer Herbst and musikprotokoll 2007 (Curators: Susanna Niedermayr/Christian Scheib) we have produced a new version of our Architone project for the official festival opening on the 20th September 2007. Plus a 2nd show on the 21st September.

Geert-Jan Hobijn (NL), Carsten Stabenow (D), Carlo Crovato (GB), Olaf Matthes (D) and Jens Alexander Ewald (D)
special guests:
BMB.con Justin Bennett (GB), Roelf Toxopeus (NL) and Mark Bain (US)

A short video of the second performance:
camicon http://www.staalplaat.org/video/closed_enough.mov
some more impressions from the opening of steirischer herbst can be found here:
camicon official festival doku by Timm Ringewald (min 6:30-9:30)

the soundartist Wolfgang Dorninger made some binaural recordings and wrote a small review: part 1 and part 2.

Some reviews can be found here:
news icon http://oe1.orf.at/highlights/109119.html

news icon http://www.diepresse.com/home/kultur/news/331516/index.do

————————————————————-
From 26th - 28th we did a workshop on the topic “how to play a building” and presented the results together with the students as a lead-in to the musikprotokoll week with a concert on the 2nd October. This show was also featuring special guest FM3.

Later on the 2nd October we played together with our friends FM3 a Buddha Boxing set at the Generalmusikdirektion.
For some video of this very funny evening please have a look at camicon nine lives of buddha

On the 3rd October we have done the last Architone performance - for this we invited Goodiepal, Owl Project and our workshop students to play the building together with us.

Zuidas Free Spaces / AIR initiative

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

‘If buildings and roads are the city’s hardware, then culture is the software that brings the city to life.’ - Geert-Jan was working five months in Amsterdam on a new project for the Zuidas Free Spaces / AIR initiative wich brings together urban planners, developers,
architects and politicians, artists and scholars to consider the appropriation of public space. In his project ‘Geluidas’ he wanted to play the city of Amsterdam as an instrument, but it was canseled by the organiser.

gluidas_plan

TSCHUMIFOON in Groningen

Saturday, April 28th, 2007

We finished a new installation called “Tschumifoon” for the beautiful tschumipaviljoen in Groningen.

Out of the glass Tschumipavilione we build an instrument wich is made playable by the audience via mobile phone. The glass windows are transformed in to speakers, and 8 independent sound channels can be selected and controlled by phone.
Inside the pavilion 8 groups of mechanical instruments are installed that are triggered by the single sound channels.

The TSCHUMIFOON was running from 28 April till 2 July 2007.
The opening was Saturday 28 April at 4 PM.

tschumiefoon01
more images below

sincronie chew-z in Milano and Reggio Emilia

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

CHEW-Z was a festival organised by Massimiliano Viel and the people arround the plattform sincronie.

CHEW-Z Colliding HEterophonic Waves was inspired by the book “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” by Philip K. Dick and was dealing with his ideas of perception of reality. Staalplaat Soundsystem was invited to play togethet with the Icarus Ensemble as well as solo parts for this two concert evenings. A YOKOMONO solo part was done but only with records cut especially for this event based on the material of Fausto Romitelli’s “La sabbia del tempo”. We did a analog live remix of this material. We played a MACHINE orchestra solo part and a piece called “Can-D” by Riccardo Nova together with the Icarus Ensemble, Riccardo Nova’s electronic manipulations and our MACHINES.
Compositions by:
Riccardo Nova, Otolab, Fausto Romitelli, Staalplaat Soundsystem, Giovanni Verrando and Massimiliano Viel

Conductor: Giorgio Bernasconi

Icarus Ensemble:
Giovanni Mareggini (flute), Nicola Zuccala’ (clarinet), Andrea Menafra (guit), Marco Pedrazzini (keyboards), Kumi Uchimoto (keyboards), Paolo Ghidoni (violin), Luciano Cavalli (viola), Matteo Malagoli, (violoncello)

ARCHITONE at Kunsthalle in Kiel

Monday, August 28th, 2006

Developed for Siemens Arts Programme series ‘Der Blick des Komponisten’ (’The View of the Composer’) in collaboration with Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival , “Architone” was an attempt to create a holophonic sound image of the Kunsthalle in Kiel.
A composition was produced for the building that reproduced the full physical magnitude of the latter’s structure, and simultaneously probed the very material, shape, and function of the institution as a soundsource, as an instrument and as a physical filter as well. For this we created sound sources that have been distributed around and in the entire Museum. These sources, including klaxons and specially constructed resonators, produced such a powerful sound that the enormous dimensions of the building became acoustically “tangible” for the audience - they could hear through layers of walls and ceilings, they could feel the sound. The audience was bisically inside the sound. The idea was to direct the audience to hear sounds they would normally not pay attention to or at least not always recognize as music. Additionally, we used architectural features as instruments, such as by transforming windows and glass walls into loudspeaker walls, and in this way directly played the substance of the building while other small sound sources simultaneously moved within the space as dynamic mobile soundsystem. The public was fixed in a location and could experience a dynamic live produced and presented holophonic image of the building. a building that is normally just perceived as a functional ‘white cube’ for presenting art suddenly became a living sound organism.

Geert-Jan Hobijn (NL), Carsten Stabenow (D)
in collaboration with
BMB.con Justin Bennett (GB), Wikke ‘t Hooft (NL), Roelf Toxopeus (NL)

programming and technical support: Jens Alexander Ewald (D)

initiated and produced by:
Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival and Siemens Arts Programme in cooperation with Kunsthalle, Kiel
concert within the project series ‘anbruch 06′ (NDR das neue werk)

news icon Kieler Nachrichten 20.08.2006

architone

for more images display gallery ….

NOSE DIVE at A Glamorous Night in Linschoten

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

“Nose Dive on Linschoten ” was a new mechanical sound orchestra, containing 7 motor driven sirens, 20 big sound boxes and 24 metal grinders, at A Glamorous Night in Linschoten presented in the garden of the of the Linschoten castle (10 till 20 august) more information you may find here: http://www.huistelinschoten.nl/home.html

linschoten 2006

Balkenwald at Polderlicht festival in Amsterdam

Friday, October 28th, 2005

The new installation Balkenwald was produced for the Polderlicht festival at Montessori College Oost Amsterdam
and shown 28 - 30 October 2005. We produced a big class room full of resonating and sounding class room tables.

polderlicht 2005