Chronotopia
«Αντηχήσεις / Echoes»
Electronic music composition artistic lab by Akis Sinos and Anke Eckardt
TYPE: Open Plan for Artists
NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 6
TIME FRAME:
November – December 2020
PERFORMANCES & PRESENTATIONS:
June – July 2021
APPLICATION DEADLINE:
25 October 2020
Description
For the first time in its history, the Festival expands its programme during the autumn and winter season through a series of research initiatives and collaborations available free of charge and aimed both at professionals of the performing arts (Open Plan for Artists) and the public (Open Plan for all).
Chronotopia Αντηχήσεις / Echoes is a music lab addressed to sound artists and electronic/experimental music composers, focusing on the archives of the Athens-based Contemporary Music Research Center (CMRC). The lab is realised as part of the collaboration between the Athens & Epidaurus Festival, Berlin’s CTM Festival and Goethe-Institut Athen.
Watch more about Open Plan
Chronotopia is an initiative by CTM Festival and Goethe-Institut Athen that highlights connections between experimental music and research present and past. Points of contact between past and current music, sound, and media practices are explored, for instance via re-articulations of pre-modern musical forms and practices, media-archeological research, or archives amongst others. Avoiding a linear perspective that constructs time as an indication of progress, Chronotopia adopts and explores cyclical and spiralling ideas of history and time, narrative folds, parallel cultural transmissions, as well as temporal collapses where past and present fall into each other to arrive at a new dialogue. Sound, music, media practices, and speculative activities allow for alternative temporal spaces and histories.
Chronotopia Echoes / Αντηχήσεις will engage a group of sound artists and composers of electronic or electroacoustic music, selected via open call, who will be invited to interact with the vast archives of CMRC under the guidance of Anke Eckardt and Akis Sinos, aiming to create new works that will be presented in concert in Athens by late June / early July 2021. Guest scholars will conduct public webinars to offer insights on techno-cultural significance and condition of archives in the digital age.
The live events that had been originally scheduled for Chronotopia in 2020 will coincide with the presentation of these new works.
Chronotopia Echoes / Αντηχήσεις seeks sound artists and composers of electronic and electroacoustic music or sound artists with an intermedia approach from all over the world. Rather than purely theoretical and academic engagements, we seek artists who are engaged in hands-on experimentation and hybrid sounds and technologies. Artists should be interested in engaging with the sounds and recordings of the CMRC archive as much as with the concepts and histories stored therein, though this interest can assume a broader sense; it is, for example, not mandatory to work with the archival recordings themselves, as they could rather be used as inspirations for brand new works and original sound material.
A series of six intensive online labs with artists selected from an open call (see below) will explore points of contact between the materials and ideas expressed within the CMRC archive, and current contemporary practices. The goal is to imagine and seek possibilities of reworking the archived materials, for example via re-interpreting scores, concepts, compositional methodologies, and personal/ historical narratives. Beyond the respect for the archived works, it is the understanding of the existing material as processes which took place in the past that might offer potential starting points for novel transformative processes in the present.
Six selected artists will be granted a commission fee of 700 euros for the creation and presentation of a new sound work. Artists are encouraged to accompany their final artworks with additional materials that document and depict their artistic process (e.g. scores, spatial & temporal instructions for an installation, performance instructions, etc.).
The commissions will premiere as a showcase event at the Athens & Epidaurus Festival around late June / early July 2021 in Athens. The exact formats and details of the presentations will be decided together with the organisers, and are dependent on the COVID regulations at the time of the event. The selected artists will be brought to Athens for a paid stay, at which time they can visit CMRC and meet their fellow artistic lab colleagues and mentors. If in-person visits and presentations are not possible due to COVID restrictions, presentations will be staged remotely/online.
While we encourage applicants from everywhere in the world, please keep in mind that the online sessions and webinars will take place during the day time in central European time. Artists should consider their home timezone and scheduling accordingly.
Please also note that all activities will be conducted in English. Applications should likewise be submitted in English.
Application deadline: 25 October 2020
Winners will be notified by 4 November 2020
Programme
Weekly sessions will take place Wednesday afternoons (16-18:00 GMT+3, 15:00-17:00 GMT+2) and are each two hours long.
Applicants are expected to attend all 6 sessions
MEETING #1
11 November 2020
MEETING #2
18 November 2020
MEETING #3
25 November 2020
MEETING #4
2 December 2020
MEETING #5
9 December 2020
MEETING #6
16 December 2020
Mentors
Akis Sinos studied social sciences in Athens and digital media in London. He has been an active member of the athenian music scene over the last decade. He is a founding member of Romvos, a collective platform for the promotion of contemporary creative production in experimental and exploratory art and music. In 2015 he co-founded Hypermedium, a record label and production team that has so far amassed a diverse roster of international artists. Since 2016 he taught at the Sound Synthesis and Electronic Music Workshop, which operates at KSYME. In 2018, he took part in the creation of Ubique, where he also led a series of seminars. Ubique acted as a platform that examined technical and aesthetic issues relating to modern sound-making such as digital audio synthesis, aesthetics and philosophy of contemporary art, phenomenological and ecological approaches to sound, sensory interaction, online music applications, and other relevant issues.
www.hypermedium.org
Anke Eckardt is a sound and media artist based in Cologne, Germany. Her work includes cross-media installations, teaching, and research. 2017-2020 she taught as Professor of Sound at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. 2019-2020 she additionally was Visiting Professor of Sound Art at the Mainz School of Music, Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany. In 2019, together with Karin Lingnau and Lilian Haberer, she conducted a research project at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne on an artistic archive that focuses on the processuality of artistic action. Since 2014, she has been a member of the transdisciplinary platform BUILDING ART INVENTION, it is dedicated to the development of innovative materials systems at the convergence of art and science. In her own installations Anke Eckardt explores spatial theories and aesthetic approaches to theories of consciousness using sound, light, architecture, kinetic objects and text as material. Eckardt’s works have been presented internationally in exhibitions at Ars Electronica, NEMO, Steirischer Herbst, CTM, Skanu Mesz and the European Media Art Festival, among other events and conferences. Her multi-sensory installation work “Between | You | And | Me“, received an Honorary Mention in the “Digital Musics and Sound Art” category of Prix Ars Electronica 2012.
www.ankeeckardt.org
Partners
CMRC was founded in 1979 in Athens by Iannis Xenakis, Giannis G. Papaioannou, and Stephanos Vassileiadis, with the aim to support the research and development of electroacoustic music in Greece. Since then CMRC has been actively engaged in the fields of research, education, publications, music creation/composition, dissemination, and exchange of ideas on art and technology, as well as with the curation and production of music events. CMRC’s staff consists of collaborators thoroughly trained on the use and instruction of technological systems, and inspired by common aspirations. CMRC also engages guest collaborators for the implementation of its programmes.
A Few Words About KSYME’s Archive
CMRC’s Sound Archive consists of more than 2500 objects (sound tapes, cassettes, DAT, CD, hard drives). Its content is chronologically situated between 1950 and today and includes recordings of contemporary, electronic, traditional, and classical music, as well as documentation of music and educational events (lectures and seminars) that were curated and presented at CMRC.
http://www.ksyme.org/
Berlin’s CTM Festival supports an open, networked, mutually-collaborative, global music culture through its yearly 10-day festival as well as countless collaborative and research initiatives, co-commissions, concerts, and other constantly-evolving formats. The 20 year-old festival stands out for its conscious pairing of daring artistic content and adventurous club experiences with an in-depth discourse programme, framing today’s sounds and music cultures within a shifting, hybrid global society.
https://www.ctm-festival.de
The Goethe-Institut is the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany with a global reach. We encourage international cultural exchange and seek to nurture international artistic partnerships, developing project ideas involving close collaboration between Goethe-Instituts and local institutions such as festivals and educational establishments as well as individual directors, musicians, choreographers and others in the performing arts. The Goethe-Institut conveys an up-to-date image of the diversity of music in Germany and initiates dialogue and exchange between artists at home and abroad.
The Goethe-Institut Athen is the oldest Goethe-Institut worldwide – it operates in the heart of Athens as a vibrant center of education and culture.
www.goethe.de/athen
Participants
Working with sound, listening, memory, and environment, the artist is active in field recording, musical composition and performance, film sound design, choreography, interactive sculpture, and sonic interventions.
www.alyssa-moxley.com
https://soundcloud.com/alyssamoxley
Facebook: /alyssa.moxley/
Twitter: @AJMoxley
Instagram: @alyssa_moxley
Born in 1992 in Belém, Brazil, Cohen produces texts, images, sounds, and spaces amplifying the relational aspect of an experimental urbanity. Cohen’s works are formatted as unstable concept-driven systems, which address the city from its thresholds of augmentation and dissidences. Also known as 130_IVXX, the artist seeks alternative interfaces for expression and composition, critical publishing formats, performance and installations that exert the politics of noise and error.
www.130-IVXX.com
Instagram: @gasp130
Twitter: @gaspcohen
Electroacoustic composer and researcher. She is mainly concerned with the organic nature of sound and the development of textures combining concrete and synthetic elements. Her works range from electroacoustic music to sound installation, music for theatre, performance and video art. Space is key to her work, the matrix that shapes the music as well as the sounds she composes. Through her research she explores “space” as a concept in various contexts, such as architectural, urban, technological, and compositional. She is currently focused on different methods of spatialisation and 3D audio diffusion.
Intermedia artist from Baltimore, Maryland, UDA. He studied computer music and cinematic arts while maintaining an active touring schedule. Through a number of different groups and projects, he works with conceptual and intuitive compositional systems that square the circle of the raw moment and the controlled display of an outcome. He has presented works in various galleries, clubs, museums, and basements all across North America, Europe, and Japan.
Instagram: @guess__newmodel
Musician and sound artist who works in the fields of experimental music, field recordings, and modular synthesis. His music has been released in multiple labels such as the Granny Records, Orila, Glistening Examples, More Mars, Cronica, Phinery, Galaverna, Coherent States, and Falt. He has performed at numerous concerts hosted at experimental art spaces, museums, galleries, and venues. His latest album, SVL, was released in 2020 from the Neologist Productions label. In 2008 he co-founded Granny Records, focusing on releasing works by contemporary electronic musicians, covering the range of free improvisation, noise, electroacoustic composition and contemporary electronica. His other works include the creation and composition of sound for installations and site-specific performances and short movies. He has also run workshops for high school students.
Facebook: /Savvas-Metaxas-297521763605578
This Athens-born artist seeks a non-narrative form to help her unfold her stories and thoughts. Theatre is a recurring element in her artistic pursuit. At the same time, she draws on an audiovisual language and uses technology as her tool for creation.
The Athens & Epidaurus Festival has made sure all necessary measures against COVID-19 will be strictly observed during the workshops. In case of emergency measures, the meetings will be held online.
Participation in all Open Plan events is free of charge.
Athens Epidaurus Festival is funded by the Ministry of Culture & Sports
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