Sunday 7th of August 2022 | 7pm
Harvestworks Art and Technology Program. Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island
Live outdoor performances with Ben Owen, Solar Return and the Horspiel Machine.
A Festival of emerging digital cultures and free electronic practices, Electropixel is part of an international network of electronic arts festivals. The festival opens a singular space allowing the meeting of artists (audiovisual, musicians, visual artists, intermedia, performers, etc.), theorists, programmers, tinkerers, and inventors of all kinds and of the factories of the everyday.
For this new edition of the Electropixel festival, we plan to deepen the relationship to the collective and to shared creation through a network of international exchanges. The festival continues to imagine and think about the new modalities of artistic creation during the pandemic and in particular the disintegration of the idea of commonality and sharing. We need to find links in creation, new ways to explore new writing together rather than being isolated, confined, separated. How to build creations that represent multiple and delocalized collectives.
For Governor’s Island Electropixel 12 proposes an evening of sound art and live cinema centered around the idea of Nature and cities with performances that includes the sounds of nature (water, insects, stratosphere, trees…) and listening in different cities around the globe.
http://electropixel.org | http://apo33.org
• BIOS
BEN OWEN
Ben Owen works with sound with various approaches, improvised, recording, listening and scored pieces. His instruments are simple electronics; played, mixed, open to their own trajectory of small sound, broken and accidental. His interest is in the sustained, immersive, minimal soundscape which interacts within a space as well as as a part of an outside environment. Over the past few (pre-pandemic) years he’s found more interest in presenting works, performing and recording in outdoor spaces.
“Ben Owen is an investigator, explorer and illustrator of the physical properties of the world we inhabit. His work across multiple media, including sound, video and, importantly, stone litho printmaking, is motivated by a desire to more deeply understand the inner life and character of the materials he works with, rather than an impulse to control or implement them. While Ben doesn’t shy away from the use of the computer, he is much more interested in the rich dynamism of the structures and forces he investigates — electricity, light, ink, spatial acoustics, field recordings — than in the power and precision of software-driven techniques.” – Morgan Packard
http://benowen.info/ | https://ben-owen.bandcamp.com/
SOLAR RETURN
Taking electromagnetic phenomena as a starting point for their audio creations, Solar Return have produced various scores for dual audio synths/oscillators/DIY electronics etc…which reflect patterns and electromagnetic events such as solar flares and inner city mobile phone masts, hidden sonic environments as well as the unfathomable audio world of kitchen appliances. Through their performances the duo tunnel deep into the world of frequency, static and sound as a physical experience, where they mix environmental recordings from the cosmos to pylons to Nuclear power plants with Live electronics and various antennas as instruments. They were the first to perform Live using the huge VLF antenna as an instrument with the performance Cosmic Power Lines at the HAB Galerie / Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in 2013 and then with Solar Return playing the physical space, the audience and the architecture of the venue through a movement.
https://www.facebook.com/solarreturnmusic