We will have Sound Artist Peter Lenaerts in our next colloquium held on 22 Nov 2016 (Tuesday). The talk will be started at 5:00 pm in M6094 Future Cinema Studio.
Date: 22 Nov 2016 (Tuesday)
Time: 5:00 pm
Venue: M6094 Future Cinema Studio, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, 18 Tat Hong Avenue, Kowloon Tong
Topic:
The Music Before Music Becomes Music: The Sound Of An Empty Room
Abstract:
“She was telling me how every room has a note. You just have to find it.” (Richard Flanagan)
We are surrounded by sound all the time. Some of it we hear, some of it we choose to ignore. Most of it passes us by unnoticed.
No building or room is ever silent. From its structure to its surroundings, buildings hum and drone, shriek and hiss. Every space resonates.
Sound always orginates somewhere. But no matter where it comes from, it’s always inside our ears as well. We don’t simply perceive it, we mold it, shape it, interpret and absorb it.
Peter Lenaerts has been obsessed with the sound of empty rooms ever since he spent the night in an underground motel room in the South Australian desert. He has since collected sound recordings in theatres, concert venues, a new city in China, and the Sydney Opera House. These recordings shape and make up his work. In this public talk, he will share some of these sounds and stories, and the concepts and the ideas that guide them.
About the Speaker:
Peter Lenaerts is a Belgian sound artist active in the fields of performance, contemporary dance, & film. Lenaerts is fascinated by empty spaces and invisible or acousmatic sound. Sound that doesn’t scream for attention but sneaks into the listener’s ear unnoticed. Sound without ego, pure sound, with a focus on the medium rather than the maker.
Recent work includes Phantom Opera (2016) & MicroSleepDub (2015). Phantom Opera is a radio piece that explores the room tones and acousmatic or phantom sounds of the Sydney Opera House. MicroSleepDub is a durational sleep performance built around a sound composition of room tone and field recordings from a new city in China and the Sydney Opera House.
Apart from his own work, he has created soundtracks and composed music for choreographers and performance artists like Mette Ingvarsten, Andros Zinsbrowne, Salva Sanchis, ao. He strongly believes that in a culture dominated by visuals, nothing is as powerful, intense, and rewarding as simply listening.
He lives and works in Sydney and Brussels.
To find out more about Peter Lenaerts, you can check out his pages.
Performance
Besides, Peter has a performance in Hong Kong (not counted as colloquium), please refer to the introduction and link below:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1730795580580189/
http://www.wingplatform.org/peter-lenaerts/
MICROSLEEPDUB | 《微睡眠混音》演出
Performance: Free entrance / RSVP Required
19 November 2016, 20:30 @ WING
11月19日 晚上8時30分 永天台
免費入場，敬請預約
Description:
MicroSleepDub, The First Hour
WING is delighted to invite sound artist Peter Lenaerts for a residency from 17 to 27 November.
For his performance in WING, the artist will perform the first hour of MicroSleepDub, a sleep performance that usually goes for 8 hours.
The sleep performance MicroSleepDub is about micro sound, architecture and urbanism. It’s a durational performance built around a sound composition for dub plates. In MicroSleepDub, Peter Lenaerts listens and looks for sounds that are too quiet, too vague, or too low. By using the microphone as a microscope, he zooms in and amplifies these neglected, underexposed and discarded sounds. MicroSleepDub is an all night performance, where listening and sleeping are both encouraged.
In preparation for MicroSleepDub, Lenaerts spent a week recording in Nansha, a so-called State Level New Area in China. 15 years ago it was rural farmland, now it’s a rapidly developing city with high-rise apartments, office buildings, shopping malls, hotels, and a dilapidated entertainment park. It’s a city built for one million, but the current population is around 300,000. Nansha is not a ghost town, because no one left, but not many people have arrived yet, giving the city an eerie and empty feeling. Nansha is caught between a rural past and high-tech future, the present that lies in between is out of sync with reality, and already slowly but surely falling apart. Lenaerts also collected sounds during two nights alone at the iconic Sydney Opera House where he recorded its empty theater spaces, rehearsal and dressing rooms, and concert hall. With these recordings, Lenaerts creates a live soundtrack for four dub plates – LPs without a protective layer causing the groove to wear itself out and making the sound disintegrate over the playing time.
In addition to his research in Nansha, Lenaerts will explore the city of Hong Kong to challenge the way people experience the urban environment and discover how architects and urban planners take sound into account. By focusing on sounds usually ignored or filtered by what we see, the artist questions our perception, which nowadays is largely dominated by vision.
SM2703 - Creative Media Colloquium 