CYLAND presents
CYBERFEST 2014 SOUND ART MOSCOW
Featuring: Ken Butler & CYLAND's Audio Archive
Curated by: Katya Bochavar, Sergey Komarov & Vlad Dobrovolskiy
Dates: November 18 — December 7, 2014
Venue: Ground Moscow (Khodynka)
Address: Irina Levchenko Street 2, Moscow
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November 18
8 p.m. – opening of Ken Butler's Hybrid Visions exhibition
9 p.m. – Voices of Anxious Objects performance by Ken Butler
November 19
8 p.m. – Ken Butler' Sound Invention workshop
November 20
9 p.m. – Sonic Sculpture lecture by Taras Mashtalir
November 28
8 p.m. – live performances by the artists of the Archive: «Kurvenschreiber», «Brinstaar», Stepanov + Dobrovolskiy, Xi Zhuang.
December 7
8 p.m. – lecture by Sergey Komarov and Vladislav Dobrovolskiy. Problems with the archivation of sound. The collection of CYLAND medialab.
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The CYBERFEST MOSCOW SOUND ART program presents Ken Butler's exhibition «Hybrid Visions» as well as a performance and workshop by the artist alongside an exhibition of select work from the CYLAND audio archive.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS & ARTWORKS SELECTED:
KEN BUTLER
“HYBRID VISIONS”
Exhibition, Performance & Workshop
KEN BUTLER is a renowned sound artist known for his “Hybrid" instruments. He is internationally recognized as an innovator of experimental sound which he creates from diverse materials including tools, sports equipment and household objects. He has exhibited and performed extensively throughout the USA, Canada, South America, Japan and Europe including at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Lincoln Center and The Metropolitan Museum among other important venues.
Butler's works have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, Smithsonian, and Sculpture Magazine and have been featured on PBS, CNN, MTV, and NBC, including a live appearance on The Tonight Show. Awards include fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pollack/Krasner Foundation. Exhibiting in Russia for the first time, Ken Butler’s free performance kicks off CYBERFEST. Butler will also lead youth in a special, hands-on sound invention workshop.
Ken Butler’s hybrid musical instrument sculptures, performances, and other artworks explore the interaction and transformation of common and uncommon objects, sounds, and altered images as function and form collide in the intersections of art and music.
Created primarily from urban detritus, the hybrid instruments express a poetic spirit of re-invention and hyper-utility as hidden meanings and associations momentarily create a striking and re-animated cultural identity for common objects. String instruments become body, tool, weapon, toy, symbol, machine, phallus, creature, sculpture, icon, and voice. Pianos and keyboards become cybernetic and symbolic architecture. Anxious objects speak in tongues...
The artist-musician performs mesmerizing world textures and driving melodic grooves with passion and purpose on an amazing arsenal of amplified hybrid string instruments made from household objects and tools. Duchampian Dada meets Hybrid Hindu Hendrix as function and form collide in an environment of hyperactive hardware. Musical influences include Indian Raga, Middle Eastern, and Roma music mixed with a noisy «downtown» improv aesthetic all held together by African-American jazz and blues?
Virtually indescribable and unclassifiable, Butler mixes high and low technology and audio-visual antics to create an ancient/future music that forms a provoking cultural portrait of human/machine adaptation and transformation.
(single session, adaptable from K — 8th grade) For up to 30 students, perhaps more.
Using demonstrations and simple materials, artist/musician Ken Butler explores the basics of how sound is produced by vibration, how to describe it, and how it can be amplified and processed with microphones. The artist shows how simple instruments can be created from readily available household objects. Participants in the “hands-on” demonstrations discover the relation between sound, noise, and music and hear their voices altered with electronic effects. Various objects like scissors, paper, and rubber bands are amplified and played as the nature of musical instruments is discussed.
In longer workshop residencies students make drawings of imaginary instruments and create their own simple string instrument from a coffee can and other simple materials.
CYLAND AUDIO ARCHIVE
“SELECTED WORKS”
Curated by Katya Bochavar
CYLAND AUDIO ARCHIVE (CAA) explores the archival posterity and possibilities of Sound Art as a medium. CAA has created a platform to allow free, publicly accessible listening for Sound Art online as well as producing tangible records of Sound Art works in limited editions. The published editions of Sound Art records are made of the contemporary polycarbonate – a durable and historically established means of storing sound works in context to the digital files of these works available online.
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ABOUT THE VENUE: GROUND MOSCOW (KHODYNKA)
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Ground Moscow (Khodynka) exhibition hall presents a broad range of local and international exhibitions and projects, artistic events and programs to residents of Moscow.
