Philadelphia 2017
September 16, 2017
Playing the Victim – Phoenix Lio(n)
Time: 10:30 AMLength: 90min
Location: United By Blue (144 N 2nd St)
Free Admission
Playing the Victim, a mask that plays audio narratives about rape culture & queerness is joining a larger realm of audio/visual artifacts known as Bodyhood. Using augmented reality & physical computing, Phoenix Lio(n) builds sculptures & physical images which connect to their digital & remembered self. These objects can be used to trigger audio & show visuals that reflect their experiences. As an installation, the objects can be touched & held to trigger audio or visuals to begin playing from speakers & monitors. As a live demo performance, Phoenix invites audience to watch as they manipulate their memories themselves.
Phoenix Lio(n) (NYC) engages technology and artistic practice to disrupt the ways in which the physical world is invoked to justify oppression and marginalization. They rebuild their mind, their memories, and the world around them by layering media and mediums. By engaging their experiences and identity as tools for art they rework the heaviest, hardest parts of themself like pigments dragged across canvas. Find more of their work @TinyLionRoars on Soundcloud, Vimeo, Instagram, Tumblr, & Patreon.
An Urban Mushroom Forage – Elana Gordon & Katya Gorker
Time: 10:30 AMLength: 90min
Location: Begins at PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
A sound walk/reflection that presents a conceptual and sonic spin on a mushroom forage with themes of identity, transglobal movement, community and fragmentation. Katya, a Russian born artist who has spent years exploring how the practice of mushroom foraging connects with identity and meaning among the Russian diaspora, will be our narrator. She’ll introduce participants to fellow immigrants, foraging for mushrooms and their own sense of place in this new world. We’ll hear from John Cage and others on the art, philosophy and science of foraging. Via prompts and creative sound design, we’ll guide listeners on their own personal forage through Philly’s urban forest.
Elana Gordon (Philadelphia) is a reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia and a founding member of the station’s weekly health and science show, The Pulse. Katya Gorker (Philadelphia) is a Moscow-born filmmaker working on a feature length documentary about mushroom foraging among the Russian diaspora in Philadelphia.
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Voltage is Sound, Voltage is Drawing – Tim Nohe
Time: 11:00 AMLength: 60min
Location: PhillyCam community room (699 Ranstead St)
An event encouraging people of all ages to become active creators of live technological art and mathematically derived music and drawings. You can directly shape electronic drawings on a hot-rodded Vectrex game box from the 80s by controlling an analog modular synthesizer. You will interact with wireless infrared controllers, iPad apps and touch sensors to shape the sound and kinetic drawings. This hands-on workshop is rooted in expressive drawing, fascinating mathematical discoveries of the 19th century, and the “switched-on” synth music of the 1960s.
Timothy Nohe (Baltimore MD) is an artist, composer and educator engaging traditional and electronic media in civic life and public places. His work has been focused upon sustainability and place, and musical and video works for dance and live performance.
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Stalking Wild Sounds – Lexie Stoia & Toby Kaufmann-Buhler
Time: 12:00 PMLength: 120min
Location: PhillyCam commons (699 Ranstead St)
Free Admission
This work will imagine a future where nature has reclaimed our built environment and foraging for food reigns. Participants will use a provided audio player and fold out field guide on a self-guided 30 minute walk. The walk will start at Philadelphia Community Access Media (Philly CAM), go through the formal landscaping of Washington Square Park, and return to Philly CAM. Taking the form of a real-time science fiction, with the sounds of “alien” flora and fauna, the audience will find themselves moving through the city accompanied by the sound work that maps onto their surroundings.
Lexie Stoia (Columbus OH) teaches at Columbus College of Art & Design and builds interactive exhibits that connect science fiction and utopian ideas about living. Toby Kaufmann-Buhler (Columbus OH) explores sensory perception, identity and memory through his work in image, sound and space that includes video, film, found/composed sound, text and installation work.
Makin’ Radio Ravioli – Olivia Bradley-Skill
Time: 1:00 PMLength: 90min
Location: PhillyCam studio (699 Ranstead St)
We’ll talk about the nuts and bolts of cut-ups and collage in radio/sound art and discover how different sounds marinate together to tickle the ears and echo the extremes of our subconscious. By combining sound effects, cut-up speech, and music, nonsense will turn from goofy to maniacal, organic to robotic, and the other way around. Together we’ll explore how tactile sound can be, through clips and theorists alike. At the end, participants will build their own collages that create new meanings and flavors.
Olivia Bradley-Skill (NYC) likes digging up old sensations to find new meaning. Her radio work is a live collage, which warps, overlaps, and extends sound and language, so as to intensify the medium’s interactive and elusive qualities.
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Blinks, Bleeps, and Bits in the Wild: Breaking the boundaries of littleBits – Ed Bear & Monty Kim
Time: 1:00 PMLength: 120min
Location: Community College of Philadelphia (1700 Spring Garden St.)
littleBits makes a platform of easy-to-use electronic building blocks empowering everyone to create inventions, large and small. Going really large with littleBits does, however, take some experience with higher power circuitry, tools, and safety. Exactly the experience this workshop provides. We will introduce basic programming, soldering, and design skills, while surveying the numerous ways to connect the littleBits modules to the high power world. Learn how to unlock the powerful control, audio synthesis, programming, and connectivity of littleBits to build large multi-channel sound systems, interactive LED sculptures, Bluetooth controlled motors or generators, and whatever else you can invent. No experience necessary.
Ed Bear (NYC) is an American performing artist, engineer, and designer at littleBits committed to an open source world, researching and practicing material reuse and as a civil responsibility. Monty Kim (NYC) is a product designer at littleBits who has run workshops at several Maker Faire events and facilitates beta testing sessions at littleBits HQ.
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Sonic Mapping of Chinatown: a soundwalk across cultural borders – Amanda Gutierrez
Time: 2:00 PMLength: 90min
Location: Begins at PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
This workshop is open to participants, interested in the sonic territories of Chinatown in the city of Philadelphia. This soundwalk will highlight the collective memory and the symbolic significance of the urban soundscape of the immigrant enclaves. The context of the workshop will open a conversation about the significance practice of walking, minding the concept of the acoustic ecology. The workshop will take into consideration the significance of the cultural codes embedded in the soundscape, its oral history as well as the richness of its acoustic territories. The participants will be prompted to draw a subjective map, taking in consideration their acoustic experience walking in the space. These maps and personal narratives will be created and shared at the end of the soundwalk, taking in consideration important sound landmarks in their itinerary.
Amanda Gutierrez (Mexico City) has worked in the field of performance and sound art for over 12 years, fusing the two disciplines in installation projects. She has been exhibited internationally in museums and contemporary art galleries such as The Windor Gallery in Madrid, Spain, Khiasma Gallery in Paris, France, Move Forward Festival in Halle, Germany, Liverpool Art Biennale 2012 in the UK, Ex Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City, Mexico, and Action Art Actuelle in Montreal, Canada.
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Tel-choir – Meg Cramer & Carl Adair
Time: 3:00 PMLength: 90min
Location: FringeArts beer garden (140 N Columbus Blvd)
Stop by the camper in the FringeArts HQ beer garden at the scheduled time to meet the artists and to call in, or call the number on your own time.
A group singing experience that anyone can participate in, one phone call a time. Each time you call, you will be prompted to sing one note. (We will help you stay in tune.) At the end of the event, everyone’s contributions will be collected into one song — much like a bell choir, where each musician holds a tuned bell and chimes in one note at a time.
Meg Cramer (NYC) is an audio producer for BuzzFeed Audio working in participatory and crowd-sourced storytelling through projects like the Public Insight Network and Sandy Storyline and podcasts like See Something Say Something, The Tell Show, and Another Round. Carl Adair (NYC) is a choral singer and composer who plays with music theory and with language to create musical structures that reveal themselves through the completion of the piece.
BUY EVENT TICKETMulti-Sensory Map Making – Jocelyn Frank, Emily Cohen & Jay Gregory
Time: 3:00 PMLength: 90min
Location: PhillyCam community room (699 Ranstead St)
Audio artist and producer Jocelyn Frank, ecological designer Emily Cohen, and GIS lead Jay Gregory team up to push the bounds of traditional map making by introducing the concept of multi-sensory maps. They lead participants to explore the limitations of traditional maps and then (through a series of mini-exercises/projects) expand the thinking of attendees about the potential for the maps of the future. The session shifts to a hands-on production project, as small groups work together to use creative tools to generate (meaning”compose”) a map of their own and present (perform) it.
Jocelyn Frank (Washington DC) is an award-winning audio journalist, media consultant and audio artist with clients including CBS, Slate, Smithsonian, and The Guardian. Emily Cohen (Washington DC) is an ecological designer focused on addressing social and environmental challenges in the landscape. Jay Gregory (Washington DC) is a GIS jack-of-all-trades for a small software development company, where he spends his time tracking down data and creating maps for emergency planning and response.
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Tristate Synthesizer Coalition
Time: 3:30 PMLength: 90min
Location: Community College of Philadelphia (1700 Spring Garden St.)
Members of the The Tri-State Synthesizer Coalition will be exhibiting its modular instruments to showcase the sights and sounds of modular. Coalition members will answer any questions about getting started with modular and integrating modular equipment into the artists’ workflow. Participants will get hands-on interaction with modular gear. Session will culminate with a demo performance of modular synthesis by the Coalition.
The Tri-State Synthesizer Coalition consists of modular enthusiasts from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and beyond. They connect with synthesizer enthusiasts and artists in the area to organize performances and structure events geared to everyone interested in the modular experience.
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Radio Atlas
Time: 5:00 PMLength: 90min
Location: WHYY (150 N 6th St)
Radio Atlas presents a screening of some of the best foreign language radio works in the world, subtitled in English. Among other sonic surprises, this event at Megapolis will premiere a Belgian radio story about a residential home for the senile where music is an important form of occupational therapy; patients who can’t remember their children can remember songs of their youth in perfect detail, a frivolous way of conjuring a merciless deterioration.
Radio Atlas features inventive audio documentaries, dramas, and works of sound art that have been made in multiple languages. The project has received a Special Commendation at the Prix Europa in 2016; been featured at film and audio festivals around the world; and been written about in The Observer, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, and Poynter. Radio Atlas is facilitated by Eleanor McDowall, a senior producer at Falling Tree Productions in the UK.
“Opening a door into another world…” – Pete Naughton, Daily Telegraph
“Beautifully designed” – Fiona Sturges, The Financial Times
Brought to you in part by Transom.org – visit their website for a special Megapolis preview of this event.
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Blevin Blectum, RADIO WONDERLAND
Time: 8:00 PMLength: 120min
Location: WHYY (150 N 6th St)
An evening of performances by two visceral artists of uniquely awesome styles headlined by Blevin Blectum.
Blevin Blectum (Providence) combines sound, imagery, and costume to create eccentric and mesmerizing performances that explore topics from science fiction to ornithology. She has performed and toured extensively since 1998 with releases on Aagoo, Estuary Ltd., Tigerbeat6, DeluxeRecs, Praemedia, Vague Terrain, Phthalo, and the Parisian label Darling Dada.
Joshua Fried aka RADIO WONDERLAND (NYC) turns live radio into recombinant funk, with a boombox, Buick steering wheel and four old shoes. “Rather like Negativland remixed for a house party…undeniably fun.” —Robert Barry, The Wire
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Dance Explosion
Time: 10:30 PMLength: 120min
Location: Megapolis / Fringe HQ (140 N Columbus Blvd)
Free Admission
Dance party hosted by Rachel Camp and Emcee Elroy, sponsored by FringeArts. It’s the 21st Fringe Festival and we’re finally old enough to drink, so come dance with us because this party is gonna be the bomb!
Rachel Camp is a Philadelphia-born actress, singer, dancer, musician, and teaching artist. She graduated from Montclair State University with a B.F.A. in Theater, and since graduating has proceeded to work regionally in musicals, contemporary dramas, devised original work, classical comedies, and shows for young audiences. She is an established performer and teaching artist, a joyful collaborator, and a dedicated community member.
Emcee Elroy a Philadelphia-based party DJ here to meet all your celebratory party needs. Whether it’s getting down and dirty with friends at a house party, dancing in the street with strangers at an outdoor festival, or shaking it out with your extended family and your new in-laws at your wedding, he brings the music and the fun. Genres I play a lot: pop, alternative, indie, hip-hop, electronic, Milli Vanilli. Genres I don’t play very often: doom metal, baroque, industrial, calypso, country that isn’t hilarious, elevator music.
September 17, 2017
Politics of Storytelling – Karen Werner
Time: 11:30 AMLength: 90min
Location: PhillyCam studio (699 Ranstead St)
We’ll listen to some of the most profound radio features that illuminate political topics (militarism; legacy of slavery; environmental toxicity in a global context.) Radio producers such as Gregory Whitehead, damali ayo, Jens Jarisch, and Meira Asher transform both the listener’s and the producer’s engagement with political topics through creative uses of narrative, sound, assemblage, absurdity, rhythm & humor. What analysis of power do they present? What are underlying assumptions about the role of a radio documentary as a force for justice –is radio storytelling an intervention, a form of bearing witness? A listening session with facilitated participatory discussion.
Karen Werner (Montague MA) is a radio producer & sociologist who teaches at Goddard College.
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47 Stories Audio Bus Tour – Laura Deutch & Shira Walinsky
Time: 11:30 AMLength: 120min (extended ride to South Philly optional)
Location: Begins at PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
Bring $3.25 (more for snacks) and take a ride with us on the 47 bus to explore Philadelphia’s diverse cultural history. As we ride north and cross the Boulevard, you will listen to a series of sound collages compiled from interviews and reflections from bus riders, drivers, local business owners, students, artists and immigrant communities along the route. Participants will hop off on N. 5th street to sample Colombian and Caribbean specialities and learn about local initiatives. We will ask riders to reflect on their experiences on public transit, and the changing landscape of Philadelphia. Please bring headphones.
Laura Deutch (Philadelphia) is an artist and educator committed to using media as a tool for social justice, creative expression and community organizing. Shira Walinsky (Philadelphia) is a multi-disciplinary artist and teacher whose murals can be seen throughout the city.
BUY EVENT TICKET Stalking Wild Sounds – Lexie Stoia & Toby Kaufmann-Buhler
Time: 11:30 AMLength: 90min
Location: PhillyCam commons (699 Ranstead St)
Free Admission
This work will imagine a future where nature has reclaimed our built environment and foraging for food reigns. Participants will use a provided audio player and fold out field guide on a self-guided 30 minute walk. The walk will start at Philadelphia Community Access Media (Philly CAM), go through the formal landscaping of Washington Square Park, and return to Philly CAM. Taking the form of a real-time science fiction, with the sounds of “alien” flora and fauna, the audience will find themselves moving through the city accompanied by the sound work that maps onto their surroundings.
Lexie Stoia (Columbus OH) teaches at Columbus College of Art & Design and builds interactive exhibits that connect science fiction and utopian ideas about living. Toby Kaufmann-Buhler (Columbus OH) explores sensory perception, identity and memory through his work in image, sound and space that includes video, film, found/composed sound, text and installation work.
Fear of Missing Out – Alex Lewis & Steve Teare
Time: 2:00 PMLength: 60min
Location: PhillyCam studio (699 Ranstead St)
A one-time collaborative performance piece that will explore the relationships and discrepancies between identity, interconnectivity, memory, and impermanence. Artist Steve Teare will live illustrate an audio piece by independent producer Alex Lewis comprised of interviews with people vividly describing their favorite places to be in the world, stitched together with the goal of constructing one shared ideal paradise. Teare will attempt to make this fictional paradise come to life through a large-scale live illustration. In the end, Teare and Lewis will present an uncertain world that reflects the things we may – or may not – want, individually and collectively.
Alex Lewis (Philadelphia) has produced radio features and other sound works for public media outlets and podcasts and has “performed” radio stories at the Third Coast Conference & Festival, Tape Festival, and the First Person Arts Festival. Steve Teare (Philadelphia) is an illustrator and art teacher who has illustrated for VICE, Philly Voice, WHYY, Philadelphia City Paper, Apiary Magazine, and various educational websites and children’s books.
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Driftwood – Fereshteh Toosi
Time: 3:00 PMLength: 120min
Location: Begins at PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
Driftwood is a contemplative, guided walk informed by environmentally-focused healing practices such as shinrin yoku (forest bathing), horticultural therapy, and ecotherapy. Participants will explore the acoustic ecology of the area while engaging in a series of sensory experiences focusing on reflection and deep listening.
Fereshteh Toosi (Chicago) designs participatory experiences and hybrid objects such as oyster mushroom sculptures, audio portraits, films processed in mint tea, and guided walks about lithium. Fereshteh is an active member of the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy and faculty at Florida International University in Miami.
BUY EVENT TICKET Playing the Victim – Phoenix Lio(n)
Time: 3:00 PMLength: 60min
Location: United By Blue (144 N 2nd St)
Free Admission
Playing the victim, a mask that plays audio narratives about rape culture & queerness is joining a larger realm of audio/visual artifacts known as Bodyhood. Using augmented reality & physical computing, Phoenix Lio(n) builds sculptures & physical images which connect to their digital & remembered self. These objects can be used to trigger audio & show visuals that reflect their experiences. As an installation, the objects can be touched & held to trigger audio or visuals to begin playing from speakers & monitors. As a live demo performance, Phoenix invites audience to watch as they manipulate their memories themselves.
Phoenix Lio(n) (NYC) engages technology and artistic practice to disrupt the ways in which the physical world is invoked to justify oppression and marginalization. They rebuild their mind, their memories, and the world around them by layering media and mediums. By engaging their experiences and identity as tools for art they rework the heaviest, hardest parts of themself like pigments dragged across canvas. Find more of their work @TinyLionRoars on Soundcloud, Vimeo, Instagram, Tumblr, & Patreon.
Radio’s Art – Joan Schuman
Time: 3:00 PMLength: 45min
Location: PhillyCam studio (699 Ranstead St)
Ten polyphonous essays were curated this summer at Earlid, an online sound-art space. These mini-provocations offer a bit of static surrounding who is best-suited to consider the resonances among dispersed vibrations of radio, narrative artistry, and medium. This virtual panel launched without pin-pointing who might join the conversation. Session participants are invited to ‘sit’ on both the panelists’ side and lurk in the online space ripe for listening. We contemplate ethical dimensions of artistic practice; listener-critics and branding; advocacy for fellow artists; and the subsuming of podcasting devoid of legacies and context. Will it be a post-mortem or birth?
Joan Schuman (Watsonville, CA) once made documentaries (1980s) and now create hybrid narratives that air in festivals, cyber worlds, and on the radio. She teaches sound production/theory (the New School’s online MA courses) and curates sound art online at Earlid.
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The Art of Making a Podcast – Jeff Towne
Time: 4:00 PMLength: 60min
Location: PhillyCam studio (699 Ranstead St)
Want to collect sound in the field but not sure what you need? Have recordings but don’t know how to put them together? Want to create a podcast, but don’t know where to start? This workshop will share tips on gear and techniques for recording, editing, mixing, and distributing audio of all types.
Jeff Towne (Philadelphia) is an audio engineer who writes and teaches about audio production. He is the “Tools Editor” for Transom.org and the co-producer and engineer of Echoes, a daily two-hour music soundscape distributed by Public Radio International to 130 radio stations.
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Brotherly Love, Where Art Thou? – Victoria Estok
Time: 4:00 PMLength: 45min
Location: PhillyCam community room (699 Ranstead St)
A public audio intervention – a micro radio broadcast and performance using a portable micro-transmitter, a hand held radio studio, and a collection of radios. The current national climate around politics and culture is tense – talk radio has played a significant part in escalating tension, increasing confusion, resistance and rage. This project aims to reclaim radio, on a smaller scale, to bring people back together. During our time together you will both listen to and then have the opportunity to be part of a contemplative roving micro-radio broadcast that is a mediation on, a quest for, and an experiment in brotherly love. Come as you are.
Victoria Estok (Beacon NY) is a conceptual artist who teaches sound in New Media at SUNY Purchase. Driven by a deep seated need to uncover intentions behind everyday actions, she favors community work and public interventions because they underscore and align with her value for genuine interaction.
BUY EVENT TICKET Tel-choir – Meg Cramer & Carl Adair
Time: 4:00 PMLength: 60min
Location: FringeArts beer garden (140 N Christopher Columbus Blvd)
Free Admission
Stop by the camper in the FringeArts HQ beer garden at the scheduled time to meet the artists and to call in, or call the number on your own time.
A group singing experience that anyone can participate in, one phone call a time. Each time you call, you will be prompted to sing one note. (We will help you stay in tune.) At the end of the event, everyone’s contributions will be collected into one song — much like a bell choir, where each musician holds a tuned bell and chimes in one note at a time.
Meg Cramer (NYC) is an audio producer for BuzzFeed Audio working in participatory and crowd-sourced storytelling through projects like the Public Insight Network and Sandy Storyline and podcasts like See Something Say Something, The Tell Show, and Another Round. Carl Adair (NYC) is a choral singer and composer who plays with music theory and with language to create musical structures that reveal themselves through the completion of the piece.
Xiu Xiu, RADIO WONDERLAND
Time: 7:00 PMLength: 120min
Location: Johnny Brenda's (1201 Frankford Ave)
The Megapolis Audio Festival, Fringearts, and WKDU Present:
Xiu Xiu (New York / Los Angeles), officially pronounced “shoo shoo”, also “zoo zoo,” “zhu zhu” or “schwee schwee”, is a critically divisive group is influenced by noise, modern classical, the dance floor, post punk, experimental, minimalism, Asian percussion, and American folk music; the films of Todd Solondz, Shohei Imamura, David Lynch and Seijun Suzuki; and the books of Elfriede Jelinek, V.S, Naipaul, Yukio Mishima, and Ingeborg Bachmann.
Joshua Fried aka RADIO WONDERLAND (NYC) turns live radio into recombinant funk, with a boombox, Buick steering wheel and four old shoes. “Rather like Negativland remixed for a house party…undeniably fun.” —Robert Barry, The Wire
Brought to you with support from the Public Radio Exchange (PRX).
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Installations
Philadelphia Embassy of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland (KREV) – Mike Bullock & Linda Gale Aubry
Length: UnannouncedLocation: A Surprise Location
Free Admission
The Philadelphia Embassy of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland (KREV) are proud to welcome Megapolis Festival to our city. To celebrate, Ambassador Mike Bullock and Minister of Ornamentation Linda Gale Aubry will appear unannounced at some point during the festival, contrabass in hand and with appropriate pageantry, to give renditions of the multifarious KREV National Anthem. The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland (KREV) occupy all border territories as well as liminal states and virtual territories. They were founded in 1992 by Swedish artists Carl Michael von Hausswolff (King Michael I) and Leif Elggren (King Leif I, who performed at Megapolis-NYC in 2013).
Mike Bullock (Philadelphia) is a composer, intermedia artist, and writer performing around the world since the mid 90s at venues such as Fylkingen; Instants Chavirés; Café OTO; ISSUE Project Room; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and EMPAC. Linda Gale Aubry (Philadelphia) is a multimedia artist and musician whose creative methods encompass hand-formed and hand-painted porcelain, large and small scale painting, graphic design, dioramas, video performance, and electronic music. In October 2016, Mike and Linda opened the KREV Philadelphia Embassy at Icebox Project Space, supported by a grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Filtered Ears – Scott Allison
Length: 11a-5p Saturday and SundayLocation: PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
Free Admission
A mic’d-up window acts as a filter to bring life to overlooked sounds. Tiny speakers powered by handmade 1-watt amplifiers encourage participants to closely hear tiny filtered sounds from the other side. The wires appear as graphic lines hovering in space, and the circularity of the plates echoes the shape of each speaker and the piezo element. Unwanted sounds become delicacies.
Scott Allison (Northampton, MA) is a freelance graphic designer and sound explorer. Scott spends a good amount of his free time making field recordings of various spaces. Scott performs solo with electronics as well as in free rock outfits Kohoutek and Sunburned Hand of the Man.
Fascists, Lovers, and Other Lonely Ghosts – Brian House
Length: 11a-5p Saturday and SundayLocation: PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
Free Admission
An installation about synchronicity, conflict, and transmission. A collection of small entities beep and flash like fireflies — they are “listening” to each other, and will fall into unison based on proximity. The audience can disrupt their relationships by moving them around, creating a cascade of rhythms.
Brian House (Providence RI) is an artist whose performances, installations, and interventions address our relationship to technology through rhythm.
Lucid Spheres – Jenn Grossmann
Length: 11a-5p Saturday and SundayLocation: PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
Free Admission
A six-channel modular sound sculpture that re-embodies sonic memory through physical objects. Reminiscent of a snow globe that historically depicts a representation of an idealized life scene or a crystal ball that holds our future, the transparent spheres reveal the multisensory, emotive, at times subconscious side of lived experience through a diverse collection of “memory triggers” or “sound scenes” re-interpreted by the artist. The spheres themselves become extended perceptual amplifiers, vibrating a collective past in the present space.
“Memory is not a matter of past, but recreates the past each time it is invoked” -Karen Barad
Jenn Grossman (NYC) is a sound/experiential media artist and composer who reimagines unconventional spaces and objects as acoustic vessels and architecture and materials as sculptural molds for ephemeral interventions.
Digital Works
Civil Disobedience in E Minor – Richard Hamilton
Length: 10 min (audio)Location: PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
Free Admission
A soundscape/found audio collage piece that reflects the turbulent times we live in, made from a place of fear and anger intended to envelope the listener in an immediate and visceral experience. The listener will hopefully be compelled to consider his or her actions in making the world a better place.
Richard Hamilton (Austin TX) is a production sound mixer, sound designer, re-recording mixer, and fledgling composer for commercials, movies, and TV with clients including Men’s Health Magazine, Google, and the US Army. He has been nominated for an Indie Series Award for Best Sound Design.
Disobedience – Jean-Michel Rolland
Length: Software (Mac/PC)Location: PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
Free Admission
A visualized generative music artwork where the computer plays the role of the performer. Over four octaves, it decides which notes to play at the right moment. The resulting music, based on algorithms, has never been played before and will never be played again.
Jean-Michel Rolland (Marseille, France) is a musician, painter, and visual artist who has been melding his two passions – sound and image – in digital arts since 2010. In each of his creations musicality influences image in a symbiotic relationship.
Strange Radio – Karen Werner
Length: 10 min (audio)Location: PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
Free Admission
Strange Radio is a series of live assemblage radio broadcasts on Radio Orange 94.0 FM Vienna, Austria. Part radio documentary, part Holocaust memorial, part performance ethnography, Strange Radio is an ongoing collection of experimental radio episodes exploring themes related to Jewish Viennese exile, displacement, loss, and the intergenerational legacy of the Holocaust. Episodes are not traditional narrative arcs so much as sonic assemblages or collages with recurring themes and threads, weaving together field recordings, narration, occasional interviews, a therapy session, archival clips, live phone calls, and the background participation of two choirs.
Karen Werner (Montague MA) is a radio producer & sociologist who has been an artist-in-residence in Vienna at studio das weisse haus (Fall 2016) and at the Museum Quartier/Tonspur (Fall 2017) where she produced episodes of Strange Radio.
The LiteraryMix – Seth Guy
Length: Website (text only)Location: PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
Free Admission
Access it here. Consists entirely of excerpts from works of fiction which describe sound and sonic events. Similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure series in which readers are offered choices as to what to read next, readers are asked to consider listening to the sounds they read and imagine.
Seth Guy (London) appropriates, reconfigures, and juxtaposes materials to create playful performative works which propose a discourse into the cross-modal correspondence of auditory and visual perception.
Misophonia – Carlo Patrao
Length: 10 min (audio)Location: PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
Free Admission
A recently discovered and little understood chronic condition that is characterized by highly negative emotional responses to auditory triggers like chewing, breathing, sniffling, coughing, or slurping. This radio collage explores the world of extremely annoying bodily sounds and media coverage about Misophonia juxtaposed with sound practices that transform intrusive body sounds into music and performance art.
Carlo Patrao (NYC) is a Portuguese radio artist who makes documentary features and sound collages exploring the fringes of science, sound, and music. Carlo’s background in the field of clinical psychology also informs his radio work on themes linking sound and the human psyche.
Flood Blowing – Coppice
Length: 10min (video)Location: PhillyCam (699 Ranstead St)
Free Admission
A user’s off-screen soliloquy in the summer. Fueled by an emulation of a 1960’s Rhodes Bass Piano, physical modeling synthesis, modular synthesis, custom instruments, impossible objects, and images by Coppice.
Coppice (Chicago) is interactions between the capture and generation of sound and music from custom designed and prepared instruments and devices. It draws from its glossary of study in bellows and electronics, and in digitally-seeded air from physical modeling and modular synthesis. Founded in 2009 by Noé Cuéllar & Joseph Kramer.