£5 per ticket | 10 places only. Please email divfuse@gmail.com for ticketing and bank transfer details.
Douglas Benford plays various idiosyncratic instruments, objects and toys accompanying a soundscape created from household debris, objects and including autotuned vocal snippets. Spacious audio collisions of the human and the found, and the discarded.
Douglas Benford, composer and sound artist, has been involved in various audio genres and monikers since the late 1980s, performing at institutions in the UK (Bristol’s Arnolfini, London’s Science Museum, Tate Modern, The Roundhouse, ICA and Glasgow’s CCA, The Vortex), festivals worldwide (Mutek, Synch, Transmediale) and has had installation work in numerous UK galleries (London, Swansea, Stroud and Essex). His pieces and performances have been aired on the radio internationally, and regularly on BBC Radio 3’s Freeness programme and on Resonance FM.
29 July 2022 Friday 6-9pm. Talk by Andrei Rogatchevski, Professor of Russian Culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Trømso will be on at 7pm.
30 & 31 July Saturday & Sunday 2:30-6:30pm
Duration : 38 minutes. Free Entry
Svalbard Soundtracks (2019 – 2022) is the collective name for three new soundscape works inspired by documentaries about the titular Norwegian archipelago: A Trip ToSvalbard (1930, Norway), Spitsbergen (1958, Poland), and Further North, There Is Only the North Pole (1976, USSR).
These new scores evoke the sublime beauty of the archipelago’s landscape, flora and fauna, while at the same time highlighting the human presence on the islands. Svalbard’s geographical location and natural resources (e.g. fishing and coal mining) have contributed to its unusual political status, codified in the Svalbard (Spitsbergen) Treaty of 1920. As the Arctic climate shifts, Mute Frequencies asks how these environmental changes will affect the interrelationships of the world’s northernmost inhabitants.
Andrei Rogatchevski, Professor of Russian Culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Trømso will introduce and contextualise the soundtracks in his talk ‘Svalbard on the Multinational Screen’ (29 July 7pm).
Solo live performance (saxophone) 6 August Saturday 5:30 – 6:30pm | £5 ticket | 10 places only – Please email divfuse@gmail.com for ticketing information.
7 August Sunday 2:30 – 6:30pm.
Running Time for the Exhibition : 12 minutes Total. Free Entry
Wartime in Discovery Park (2022)
Driving, talking. Conversing. Listening, but only casually. We make a daily trip to the park together.
Discovery Park. Home to cougars, coyotes, bald eagles, grey seals… rabbits… bold birds… quotidian communion.
Sky, sea, streets, trees. War in Ukraine. The very familiar sound of a voice, of mother tongues.
Two voices, each using two languages, each replicated with saxophone sound.
Taking A Life For A Walk x48 (2002 – 2006)
This audio piece consists of 48 live recordings of Kraabel’s weekly Resonance 104.4FM radio series, which ran from Jan 2002 to autumn 2006.
For each half-hour of live radio, Kraabel walked through the streets (usually of London) pushing her infant child in a pushchair while playing the saxophone (one-handed) along with all the ambient sounds and differing acoustics. She also invited listeners to create live audio feedback by phoning her in telephone boxes and holding their phones to their radios.
This audio piece uses 48 recordings of the live Taking A Life For A Walks, and differentiates them from the liveness of the original TALFAW by combining them so that we hear them all simultaneously.
£5 per ticket | 10 places only | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for ticketing information
This event is an exhibition of Livia Garcia’s film scores based on her geometric and line drawings, with Steve Beresford improvising to the visuals by playing with a selection of objects.
Livia Garcia founded Project DIVFUSE in July 2021 and has been curating exhibitions on digital and sound art since. She is a visual artist as well as a civil engineer in the railway. She obtained her MA(Fine Art) from The University of Leeds with a full scholarship that was co-funded by the University and The Arts Development Council of Hong Kong. Garcia’s film scores are often minimalistic that encompass geometries, lines, numbers and alphabets as inspired by engineering draughtsmanship. With her art practice, she has worked with a number of musicians such as the London Improvisers Orchestra, Adam Bohman, Sue Lynch, Caroline Kraabel, Dave Tucker etc.
Session 1 – 30 September Friday 6-6:45pm | Session 2 – 30 September Friday 7-7:45pm
Session 3 – 1 October Saturday 4-4:45pm | Session 4 – 1 October Saturday 5:30-6:15pm
Session 5 – 7 October Friday 6-6:45pm | Session 6 – 7 October Friday 7-7:45pm
Session 7 – 8 October Saturday 4-4:45pm | Session 8 – 8 October Saturday 5:30-6:15pm
£5 | 8 places each session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for ticketing
The Venus Smiles sculpture at DIVFUSE will display a minor diminished 9 chord materialised in copper tubes which ring like church bells. In the evenings there will be musical performances on the instrument by the inventor Tabita Cargnel and other musicians coming from classical and experimental backgrounds. Also viewers with and without musical education, especially children, are very welcome to play and join the performances as verbally announced before each piece. The resonating copper tube system – a phenomenon called ‘tensegrity’ – can be played by using your hands, a bow, mallets or your voice. People can experience actively, but intuitively, how sound can make us feel and that regardless of their level of musical education they create immersive music that can initiate a somewhat non-judgemental but healing state of mind full of expression and flow.
The first sustainability focused Venus Smiles sculpture was opened to the public in 2021 with a musical premiere in Schwerte, Germany. Its sound is designed to transition from the newly built, sleek and harsh metal sound to a more warmly coated sound of rust and patina. Sound samples, improvisations and musical pieces played on the German Venus Smiles sculpture will be played through the speakers in the daytime of the exhibition days.
This Open Call is now closed. Thanks to all the artists who took time to make a submission. Selected pieces will be announced in the second week of November 2022.
***Open Call*** for sound work that is based on field recordings. Deadline for Open Call No. 4 is 27th October 2022
We are thankful that DIVFUSE Sound Archive Open Call No. 3 and 4 are supported and funded by the Arts Council England through the National Lottery Project Grants. For more information on ACE, please visit www.artscouncil.co.uk.
WHAT TO INCLUDE IN THE SUBMISSION:
1) Text on the each piece (250 words maximum). This shall include the name, year and duration of the work, together with brief descriptions on ways of presentation (for example, 2 channels audio through speakers/headphones etc)
2) Artists’ bio (200 words maximum).
3) A link to the work. It could be a link to Soundcloud for example but please do not send us the file to download.
4) Send the submission through by email to divfuse@gmail.com on or before 27th October 2022.
OTHER CONDITIONS:
1) Up to two pieces of work can be submitted by each artist (or group of artists who work together).
2) Each piece shall be at least 12 minutes long and can be made up of different parts.
3) Examples of work include pure sound from field recordings and compositions based on the recorded materials. Visual and other elements may be included if they are part of the work. The work itself should still be primarily sound based.
4) Selected pieces will EACH be exhibited for a weekend (Friday to Sunday) for free in November/early December 2022 at Project DIVFUSE micro digital and multi-media art gallery, London. There is no payment to the artists but Project DIVFUSE will offer the following:
* micro gallery space (5m x 3m) to carry out the exhibition.
* basic equipments for use during the exhibitions inside the gallery, including 4 x small Genelec speakers on stands, a Genelec subwoofer, a projector and a laptop to play the file(s) from.
* management of the exhibition including invigilating the space and promotion on social media.
