MusicMakers Hacklab

From Februari 17 to Februari 21 2016, as part of Artefact, STUK organizes MusicMakers Hacklab around the festival’s theme ‘Up in The Air’. MusicMakersHacklab is an open collaborative lab hosted by Darsha Hewitt (CA-Bauhaus University) and Peter Kirn (US-Createdigitalmusic) from Berlin. They invite musicians, sound artists, inventors, designers,… to work with sound in the airspace. MusicMakers Hacklab wants to build bridges between a diverse range of artistic and technical backgrounds. On the last day of the festival there will be a public presentation. We launch the open call for 15 participants, more info below.

MusicMakers Hacklab will be organized in English
 

MusicMakers Hacklab - ARTEFACT 2016 

The heard place: Hacking perception through sound

How can we explore airspace through sound? This question gets at the heart of the politics of space and noise. The surveillance state can transform the airspace by violating it, listening across distances and invading private spaces, flying drones overhead that are heard but unseen. But the same shifts of perception also afford the freedom to navigate to new perspectives and explore new spaces.

We often imagine sound as grounded, on the horizontal, conceived from the position of a still, static listener. But just as the "bird's eye" view of a plane or spaceship can make us see differently from above, so, too, can we hear differently by shifting perspective.

Microphones don't simply give us access to making a record of reality. They also let us transform location -- they can transport our hearing.

We're looking for:

• Sound artists
• Sculptors
• Media artists
• Musicians
• Inventors
• Designers
• Acousticians

...and more, to try working with ideas like:

• Microphone making
• Performance interventions
• Surveillance device fabrication
• Dirigibles and drones
• Acoustic instrument building

 We want to join you to play with notions of space, perception, installation, and performance. The end result: make an evening of sound experiences and live music and sound that can change the way we perceive space and sound.

The open laboratory format

Hosted by Peter Kirn of CDM (createdigitalmusic.com) and artist Darsha Hewitt (www.darsha.org), the week-long MusicMakersHacklab is an open, collaborative laboratory. It allows practitioners from a range of disciplines to connect with ideas of sound from an alternative perspective.

 As with all MusicMakers Hacklabs, the emphasis is working together. It’s a chance to discover how can you combine what everyone brings, to exchange skills and teach one another, in order to explore new ideas. 

The course begins with hands-on workshops, talks, and skill "boot camps" before proceeding to intensive free-form collaborative development, concluding with a series of public, self-organized performances at the MusicMakers showcase at the end of the STUK Festival 

Participants will also have the opportunity to work with some of the high-caliber international artists presented in the 2016 ARTEFACT festival. 

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

The MusicMakers HackLab aims to bridge a diverse range of artistic and technical backgrounds.  Artists and developers from various disciplines are encouraged to submit project ideas to become Hacklab Fellows, learning and collaborating with master artist/technologists. 

We welcome, artists, students, coders, makers, composers, musicians, dancers, designers, engineers and scientists. Not everyone needs to be technically-minded, and not everyone needs to have the same skills - it’s far better to have a mix.

In a spirit of sharing and community, the Hacklab will also be open to walk-ins from both hackers and the general public. 

Submission Deadline: 05.01.16
Response By: 15.01.16
Hacklab Runs: 17.02.16 - 21.02.16

PARTICIPANT INFO 

Selected participants will be named official Hacklab Fellows and be provided with a free ARTEFACT Festival Pass; Highlighted profile on stuk.be and createdigitalmusic.com  websites; and the oportunity to present your work at the live showcase as part of the ARTEFACT 2016  programme.

Darsha Hewitt is a Canadian artist teaching at Bauhaus University (de). She makes sound installations, videos and performances with DIY electronics. Her artwork grows out of a curiosity for the physics of electricity and an interest in demystifying the invisible systems embedded throughout domestic technology. Her recent project ‘A SideMan 5000 Adventure’ saw her restore the world’s oldest drum machine for the internet. She has presented at Elektra Festival (ca), Modern Art Oxford (uk), WRO Media Art Biennale (pl), CTM Festival (de) and LEAP Berlin. She was nominated for the Marler European Sound Art Award (de) and awarded an International Production Stipend from The Edith-Russ-Haus (de). Her work has recently been reviewed by Make Magazine, Hackaday and CreativeApplications.

Peter Kirn is an American musician and creative technologist living in Berlin. Classically trained in composition, his work now encompasses a range of the ways in which technology can be expressive. He is the founder and editor of CDM (http://createdigitalmusic.com), and co-developed the open source MeeBlip synthesizer. He has presented as a technologist at TED@BCG, OFFF, SONAR, NEXT, FIBER, South by Southwest, Reeperbahn Festival, and re:publica. As an artist, his music, visual performances, and visual installations have covered the gamut from techno to experimental, including collaborations with Robert Lippok (raster noton), Nerk/Kirn (Snork Enterprises) and others.

Pascale Barret is a Brussels based visual & performing artist. Since 2003, installations, performances, virtual and interactive creations have been her primary expressions of solo and collaborative work, in flesh as well as online. She also works with labs on specific projects (LIMSI-CNRS, LARAS, iMAL) and uses tangible and virtual, scientific and historical media to address issues of identity. She’s a graduate of Bruno Latour’s Science-Po Experimental Arts & Politics program (Paris). In 2010, Barret was laureate of Banff Center (Canada) for “Interactive Screen Beautiful Lives”. Last selected places: Casa Da Musica (Porto, Portugal), Festival Nouveau Cinéma (Montréal, Canada), Palais des Paris (Takasaki, Japan), Esc Kunst Labor (Graz, Austria), Les Abattoirs (Toulouse, France), Sogang University (Seoul, Korea), Duboisfriedland Gallery (Brussels). www.pascalebarret.com

Wolfgang Kick

'I have been trained in a combined sound engineering and music course at the UdK in Berlin and have been working in all sorts of fields, recording of classical orchestras as well as music documentaries, playing piano in musicals and jazz bands or composing for film. Lately I have been more interested in interactive sound art and started a course in media art, also at the UdK, studying generative art with Alberto de Campo. Currently I am working on a project dealing with spacial orientation based merely on an acoustic level. My work has been shown at Abandon Nondigital Devices (Liverpool), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Gold & Beton (Cologne), CYNETART (Dresden), Signal Festival (Cagliari), Porsgrunn Festival (Norway), amongst others.'

Arvid Jense
'A natural born musical instrument maker.' Hans Leeuw
'I see [someone] who clearly knows where he wants to go, and is very capable of going there.'Panos Markopoulos

As a Dutch product designer and developer working in the gradient of art and technology, I take cutting edge technology and have people experience it. I take concepts from art and use them to bring technology closer to man. My work is tangible. My work is fun to use. My focus is on musical instruments, but I'm driven by new experiences.

Augustin Soulard
I am 23 years old, I have a background in audiovisual techniques, after a graduation and one year of working I started studying again in the field of art. I am now a student in sound art focused on programming and digital matter. For the moment my work is develloped on generative music, I built some patches with max/msp. I'm also conceiving installations, some space compositions questioning sound perception and his non-reliability to time. 

Those practices led me for example to a performance in the nef of the 104 with the Ircam, building a composition confronting a digital space to a physical one, for 16 speakers.

Kacper Ziemianin
Kacper Ziemianin has background in classical music and a lot of adventures in sound. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sonic Arts from Middlesex University and Master’s degree in Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in Den Hague, the Netherlands. In the meantime, he also studied at the Cracow Music Academy with Marek Choloniewski, at STEIM in Amsterdam, and at the University of Arts in Berlin with Alberto de Campo. Sound designer, circuit bender, improviser, producer, vagabond, audio-hacker, instrument designer, radio presenter, workshop leader, nomad. His audio installations and sounds have been shown/played in many places around Europe.

María Arnardóttir
María Arnardóttir makes objects that you can poke, click, twist or turn. Her often concept based works are inspired by her endless list of fascinations: natural sciences, food, sounds, music, mechanics, fauna, flora, microbes, weather, stupidity, intelligence, flaws, things that fit perfectly into other things, diseases, drugs, gravity, space, the art of googling, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, health, robots and computer programming. María Arnardóttir will graduate from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2016 as a designer/artist. Her work is sharp, personal, witty, poetic, visionary and even quixotic.

Josefin Lindebrink
Josefin Lindebrink is an acoustician, teacher, and researcher primarily concerned with perceptual studies of acoustic environments. Through virtual acoustic modelling (auralization), spatialized sound composition and binaural field recording her body of work aims to explore the connections between auditory sensation and the experience of space. She has produced pieces for installations, concert and dance performances, and have collaborated with artists, musicians and choreographers.

Lori E Allen
Lori E Allen (born 1975, St Louis, MO) lives and works in London and Berlin. Her work focuses on the excavation of theoretical bodiless objects lodged in the mind via consumption of incorporeal two dimensional forms of popular and forgotten media. Using found images and audio to form new composites, Allen’s work reconstructs notions of memory, identity, experience, and surveillance as hyperreal cultural objects as syndicated loops outside the mind. Allen received an MA from The Institute of Archaeology, University College London in 1999 and a BA in Anthropology and Classical Studies from New York University in 1997. She is one part of the duo Tears|Of and has a forthcoming  release on the Tapeworm later this month.

Andrea Mancianti
Andrea Mancianti is a composer and performer. He studied composition and electronic music in the Conservatory of Florence and participates in the IRCAM's Cursus in Paris. He's part of the Helsinki Sound Electronic (HelSE) hack-lab. He is interested in exploring the social and aesthetic boundaries between popular and contemporary music questioning the roles of composer, performer and public. In the music he seeks for an ecosystemic relationship between instruments, technology and performative space and an intersection of improvisation and writing. His last projects investigate complex feedback networks and gestural controlling devices from a DIY and DIT instrument building perspective.

Elvire Flocken-Vitez
I am an art student in Reims, France. I'm mainly interested in Space and science-fiction and I like to work with sound, video, drawing and installation. I did a three months residence at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands where I made a vinyl record representing the Solar System (aesthetically and acoustically). With my work I try to express these things we can't see or feel physically (like gravity, vacuum, distance...). 

Stijn Demeulenaere
Stijn Demeulenaere is a sound artist with degrees in sociology, cultural studies and radio. He started out as a radio journalist but his fascinations with sound led him to explore sound outside the airwaves. Stijn is attracted to  sound because  of its  directness, it’s malleability, and it’s mystery. In sound he tries to unravel social structures, personal history and the unconscious imagination of people, exploring the relationship between identity, sound and listening.

Demeulenaere builds installations, creates soundscapes and collaborates with dance and theatre makers. He researches the spaces between sounds, the phenomenology of listening and the interpretation of sound. He was artist in residence at Overtoon and currently is associated artist with the Pianofabriek Arts Lab. His work was exhibited in Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Italy, Germany and Portugal. Stijn lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Amine Metani
Amine Metani is a French-Tunisian electronic music producer and physicist. He works on advanced spinal-cord injured patients rehabilitation (brain-machine interfaces & functional electrical stimulation) and makes live electronic / acoustic performances ranging from noise ambiant to techno. His work focus on establishing links between ancient animist possession ceremonies, mystical enlightenment and modern electronic trance. Besides, he works on bringing back a performance-based approach into electronic music gigs, bridging it with video synthesis, dance and contemporary theatre. He runs his own records label, Shouka, and is the founder of the Arabstazy collective. His work has been reviewed by Ustaza, l’Ingénu and Noisey.

Vicky De Visser
Vicky De Visser (°1991) is a Belgian art historian (KULeuven) and graphic design student currently completing her master in graphic design at Sint-Lucas Antwerpen. She volunteered as an event organizer, and later as sound technician at club Kamikaze, a small venue in Mechelen. 

In 2011 she co-founded the multi-media art collective Lait Deux. Her main occupations in the collective were curation and organisation. In her artistic practice she focuses on combining conceptual design, performance, music and coding.

Inne Eysermans
Inne Eysermans is frontwoman and musician of the Belgian band Amatorski. In the past five years they released two albums and one EP and created several soundtracks. She makes electronic soundtracks for text-sound performances together with one of Belgian's most finest and successful writers Saskia De Coster. She is also composing music for audio documentaries and other audio related projects of radio producer Katharina Smets.  

Chelsea Bruno
Electronic music composer Chelsea Bruno, now a London resident from Miami, FL, is a 2nd year PhD researcher in music composition at Royal Holloway, University of London. She earned a Masters' degree in Music Technology from Florida International University and a Bachelors' in Studio Art from University of Miami. Inspired by dub, electro, ambient and techno music, she has released several albums under her artist alias Eden Grey since 2009 and has had tracks included on several artist compilations. She is now researching modular synthesis and interdisciplinary methods as a basis for new works.

Zoë Mc Pherson
Zoë Mc Pherson is a French Northern-Irish vocalist and producer based in Brussels (BE). Her compositions reveal influence from “electronic” as well as “folkloric” music. She bases her work on anthropological explorations about specific cultures and places (Inuit people, Pygmy people, Vodun cult, Middle-Eastern area) which lead her to call her music ‘Indigenous electronic’.

She started project Empty Taxi three years ago and released debut EP Irizajn which was notably selected in The Quietus top 2014 list. She has participated in collaborative residency Reitir in Iceland last year and is now related artist of the Beursschouwburg (BE). '2016 is a very exciting year for me since I’m open to new input: working on fresh material, developing new collaborations and a first art-video clip is to be released beginning of March.'