Location: Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin on Pearse Street in The Naughton Institute.
Presenters: NIGHT VISION: Andrew Fogarty [IE] (Boys of Summer, Weil Rats) and Gavin Prior [IE] (United Bible Studies, Deserted Village label) both graduated from the University of Limerick Masters in Music Technology course in different years. Since then they’ve both gone on to explore more primitive home-made electronic music-making. Gavin first heard Andy play solo as Bullets in 2003 at the end of a marathon swansong concert for Dublin’s Blackfort Gallery. There was very little happening noise-wise in Dublin then so it was something of a revelation.
In autumn 2004 they formed Toymonger when Andy was asked to open for Zillah and Black Sun. Since then they’ve played Dublin’s Rock and Roll Motherfucker festival and both Guantanamo Noise Festivals in Limerick. They’ve toured Ireland with Chris Corsano and Talibam! as well as surviving a UK/Ireland tour with Birds of Delay. Dublin percussionist David Lacey also played in Toymonger for a while but recordings from the trio era have yet to surface. The Nightvision was recorded entirely live in mono in one afternoon and is similar to a Toymonger gig in that it was entirely improvised. The ‘monger play amplified sheetso’steel, harmonic guitars, drum machines, circuit bent cheap keyboards; the usual detritus. In any case the equipment is constantly breaking down and is never fetishised – The atmospheres created are always more important than mere experimental tinkering. “The Nightvision” proffers up four anxiety-ridden, dread-fueled creepers of scraping metal, white noise, and dripping feedback; the amplified creaking of attics, basements, vacant warehouses, and every other haunt that harbors ghosts and phantom monsters
Dave Young aka HendersonSix [IE]
Dave Young is a new media artist currently based in Dublin, often working with electronics, sound and architectural ideas in order to create generative and interactive events. He is currently in his final year of study at The National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and has completed writing a thesis titled Generative Systems: Authorship, Obsolescence and Production in Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings. He is a member of the Dodo Collective, an international arts group dedicated to exploring the relationship between media and obsolescence, exhibiting with them at the Darklight Film Festival; the inaugural Jabberwocky 1 art/poetry event; and at ExchangeDublin. He has also partaken in Darkroom: an exhibition of young new media artists in Dublin, and the Breizh Entropy Congress – an exhibition of open source media in Rennes, France.
About Radius Music: Radius Music combines ideas of cartography and graphic scores as a means to produce sound, and interrogates the role of the body-in-space in the performance of electronic music. The device itself is an autonomous revolving machine that reads a distance value in real-time between itself and another object. As the machine slowly rotates and scans the room, it takes this radial distance and outputs it as a relative sonic frequency and a corresponding visual score.
TRAFFIC: Rachel O’Dwyer and Roberto Pugliese [IE/IT] By coming to Science Gallery you are participating in and contributing to an ever-changing soundscape. Sensors positioned inside and outside the gallery monitor your movement through the physical space, while software monitors the virtual presence of activity on the gallery’s network, turning these parameters into sound. As the motion of people, objects and information in the space ebbs and flows, so the soundscape reacts, channelling your movement back into the space. You’ll also be able to see where the two layers of traffic, the visible and the invisible, show parallel patterns of activity, self-organisation and emerging behaviours.
L.S.D: Light to Sound Device. Benjamin Gaulon & Patrick Cashin [FR/IE]
Research and recent innovations have led to an amazing increase of types and uses of visual displays and screens; indeed, in our predominantly visual culture, they are everywhere. A typical person carries at least one device with a screen, is presented with them in public places, uses them at work and in many leisure activities. They are so ingrained in our everyday acts and habits that we don’t even notice them anymore. L.S.D invites its users to engage in a new perception of their daily environment. In ecology this class of relationship is called commensalism. L.S.D feeds on light via two LDR (light depending resistor) mounted on a suction cup, allowing the sensors to be mounted on any screen surface. An analogue synthesizer converts the light input to sound waves. This device can be used in many different configurations and feeds from any light sources. Even if L.S.D can be controlled by any light source, its design is aimed at screen reading/listening.