Outlands #1 ‘Matana Roberts and Kelly Jayne Jones’

The internationally renowned US composer, saxophonist, mixed-media practitioner and sonic voyager Matana Roberts (perhaps best known for her acclaimed Coin Coin project, ongoing and unfolding via Constellation Records), and British sound artist/improviser Kelly Jayne Jones, undertook a new live collaboration – the first in a series of special live shows programmed by Outlands.

Roberts and Jones are two artists from disparate backgrounds, finding affinity in practices charged by fiercely personal philosophies on sound. Both artists embrace improvisation, resist accepted narratives of sound, are community-minded and believe in democratic, shared, free-music making that erodes barriers. In other words, they perfectly embody what Outlands is striving for.

Roberts and Jones weave their own approaches into live collaborative works informed by deeply expressive playing, tactile electro-acoustic interplay and a broader shared politics of resistance/defiance.

WORKSHOP > Experimental Music Workshop with Kelly Jayne Jones

The internationally renowned US composer, saxophonist, mixed-media practitioner, and sonic voyager Matana Roberts (perhaps best known for her acclaimed Coin Coin project, ongoing and unfolding via Constellation Records) and British sound artist/improviser Kelly Jayne Jones, undertook a new live collaboration – the first in a series of special live shows programmed by OUTLANDS.

Roberts and Jones are two artists from disparate backgrounds, finding affinity in practices charged by fiercely personal philosophies on sound. Both artists embrace improvisation, resist accepted narratives of sound, are community-minded and believe in democratic, shared, free-music making that erodes barriers. In other words, they perfectly embody what OUTLANDS is striving for.

Roberts and Jones weave their own approaches into live collaborative works informed by deeply expressive playing, tactile electro-acoustic interplay and a broader shared politics of resistance/defiance.

TALK > PAC Home Talk: Mike Ballard

Mike Ballard gives a talk at Plymouth Art Centre on his practice and how working at KARST will develop this.

Mike Ballard will provide further insight into his practice, and open discussion into his ideas and developments during his residency.

Ballard’s practice is inspired by the abstract compositions found in the urban environment, as well as the territorial gestures that divide public and private space.

CONFERENCE > OPENING > The Research Stomach

13 International artists have gathered at KARST for 3 days, to develop an exhibition on the processes of their artistic research, as part of ‘Artistic Research Will Eat Itself’ the 9th Society for Artistic Research conference.

The group digested each other’s ideas and worked to produce an exhibition.

TALK > Bitesize Talk

Hannah Slogget and Wendy Hart from Stonehouse Action Group.

Stonehouse Action are a group of local residents volunteering together to celebrate and improve the local area through activities such as the annual Union Street Party.

CONFERENCE > Postgrad with Lizzie Lloyd

Lizzie Lloyd is Associate Lecturer at the University of the West of England, and co-founder and convener of the Art Writing Writing Art research cluster at the University of Bristol. Her PhD enquiry is entitled ‘Subjectivity and Art Writing’.

 

WORKSHOP > Syllabus III > Southwest

A workshop with artists who bring forward ideas for the Syllabus III programme.

Syllabus III is a peer-led alternative learning programme supporting ten artists across ten months. Alongside staff and artists working with each of the partner organisations, the artists selected to participate brought forward ideas to the programme and actively contributed to its delivery.

LIVE PERFORMANCE > Be Your Dog

Featuring: (Dogs) Dave, Zebadee, Lucy, Polly, Barny, Obi plus their counterparts James, Verena, Monica, Phaedra, Paul and Beth.

In partnership with the Live Art Development Agency, ‘Be Your Dog’ is a project that aims to transcend the hierarchies of pet and owner. The project sees humans and their dogs aim to demonstrate a connection with each other based on mirrored actions that demonstrate empathy and equality.

This public event is a result of workshops, and you may see pairs sitting or laying together, looking in each others eyes, or involved in small reciprocal actions. Of course this might not happen, as all are collaborators and the dogs will bring their own contribution to the work, but whatever happens you will see collaborating pairs being responsive in whatever way they deem right.

LIVE PERFORMANCE > Space Interface II i-DAT Redux

Live Immersive Visual Audio Jam at the IVT (Immersive Vision Theatre).

The IVT is a transdisciplinary instrument for the manifestation of material and imaginary worlds.

Collaboration between Eberhard Kranemann/Mathew Emmett + Mike Philips/Luke Christison explores poly sensory immersive reality for the fulldome architectural experience.

OPENING > LIVE PERFORMANCE > Space Interface II

Kranemann and Emmett synthesise hybrid space through mixed reality performance.

Kranemann and Emmett act cooperatively to acculturate the audience’s perception of physical space by creating a multi-level immersive environment in which the performers and audience are encouraged to simultaneously occupy multiple points on the mixed reality continuum.

Among Remote Lost Objects

An acoustic relationship that unsettles the relationships between our senses.

Among Remote Lost Objects is an acoustic installation that unsettles the relationships between our senses. A sound-deadening ‘room within a room’ occupies KARST, creating the feeling of being within and underneath. The inner surface of this chamber is made from recycled wool textiles, resonant with memory and primal association. The chamber oscillates between total darkness and light, unsettling and disorientating the viewer, yet surrounding them with warmth. Outside, KARST is flooded with echoing sound, light and air.

 

The blind opera singer Victoria Oruwari will perform a score written by composer John Matthias in response to this work. Andrews, Matthias and Oruwari have collaborated on a vocal score first generated in the anechoic chamber at UCL, exploring loss, resonance and non-resonance through voice and violin. Matthias has developed this piece through a ‘neurogranular sampler’, a digital processing programme that mimics the action of neurons in the brain to produce music rich in memory and texture.

 

Oruwari will perform with the work on the opening night and every afternoon on the half hour between 12.30 and 4.30 pm. The performance lasts approximately three minutes. At other times you are free to experience the chamber for as long as you wish, numbers permitting.

 

Among Remote Lost Objects was first built at ROOMartspace in London during May 2015.

COUNTER

Counter draws together artists, collectives and book works to make friends, sell books, buy books,share work, share knowledge, learn something new, start conversations, ask questions, try to find answers and exchange ideas.

Counter is run by an independent band of Plymouth based artists. We are keeners, fans, and D.I.Y enthusiasts.

The Counter Programme consists of:

Ladies of the Press are a London-based performative publishing duo, performing on and off the page. Past gigs include Tate Modern, ICA, Science Museum. LOTP* will be documenting the event with their Live Press and creating a zine which they will freely distribute at the end of the day.

AMBruno – an alliance of artists brought together by a common interest in the medium of the book in 2008. Previous exhibitions and fairs include Leeds Artists’ Book Fair 2015, Berliner Liste 2014 and NY Art Book Fair 2009. Marco Cali from AMBruno will present a performance lecture during Counter.

Maria White – independent artists’ book specialist, previously Chief Cataloguer and responsible for the artists’ book collection at Tate Library. Maria is presenting a small selection from her private collection of artists’ books and will talk about the works she’s brought to Counter and how she has developed her collection.

Please visit the website at: http://www.counterplymouth.com/

SCREENINGS > Artist Film Screen 2015

Showcasing a selection of international contemporary artist films

Developments in digital technology during the last decade, in particular, have greatly advanced the aesthetics, accessibility and distribution of artist film and video. In response to the subsequent surge of interest in the medium, the screening programme celebrates work by artists working with moving image. Films have been chosen by a panel of specialists, (Jordan Baseman (Artist, Filmmaker), Francis Gooding (Film Historian, Writer), Erika Balsom (Writer, Lecturer) and include a wide-range of single-screen films, including short films, performance, and artists video.

 

LIVE EVENT > VestAndPage

‘A Morphologic Journey (On the Borders of Our Bodies)’ Chapter 2

This durational performance takes James Joyce’s Ulysses as an inspiration; the protagonist’s journey and encounters with a variety of women. These staged meetings with archetypal characters explore the behavioural patterns of people on the run; men and women in search to forget, with a longing for union and permanence. The piece questions intimacy and trust in moments of solitude, fragility, exclusion and rejection.

Noah Angell – Crying in the Ethnographic Field Recording

Noah Angell’s film work involves a close engagement with the language of montage and the limits of this language, exploring the repurposing, re-editing and re-soundtracking of both archival and commercial film footage. In doing so it seeks, through both edit and sound, to release latent or unconscious content in existing material.

Using meticulously careful cuts and repetitions, Angell opens up the footage that he selects in ways that allow hidden grammars of gesture, shot and frame to come into focus. The secret relations between intention and accident that are always captured in the discrete film image, but which are glossed over by the continuous and rapid change of the complete film, are here allowed space to unfurl.

In Morteau, Angell’s concentrated deployment of the edit acts as both a precision tool for the dissection and re-stitching of the image, and also as a resonant sounding device that draws from its fragmented source an abyssal echo. This resonant ghost-space is already present within the image, and it is the montage that taps into it, revealing what already dwells there. In each die I dawn, the edit folds fade-ins and fade-outs together into a quick, shifting sequence. Reduced to an array, this standard cinematographic technique has its familiarity stripped away, and begins to look deeply strange; in Angell’s hands, it is transformed into a compulsive, exhausted blinking that seems signals a deep ambivalence toward the filmic image itself, as though in fact the camera’s true desire was to close off the light and look away from its subject.

Re-soundtracking performs a related function, as an alternative and sometimes apparently incongruous sonic message gently interlaces itself with the visual sense of the film material, allowing the potential messages that had lain dormant in both sound and image to emerge as original meaning. The works sometimes comment on the material they utilise, while in other places they are angled toward broader concerns; sometimes they subvert the original footage and drive it to make statements it never intended, while at other times they work with it to sharpen and deepen it, making a spectral poetry of its prose. – Francis Gooding