Audio Art Festival
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Data:
2009-11-20 - 2009-11-29
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Impreza biletowana:
Bilet normalny: 0 Bilet ulgowy: 0
Sounds coiled round like the staircase of a minaret, images like those in the visions of Paul Klee, instruments like something straight out of the lab of a mad demiurge. Sounds great, right? But it’s even better when seen! The 17th Audio Art Festival is two weekends (20-22 and 27-29 November), during which our eyes and ears will become one sense. A sense fit for the 21st century.
Audio Art is postmodern creation at the turn of the century and at the same time an encounter between creators operating at a point where various art formulas meet. Between virtuosos of sound, visualisation and the word who use instrumental setups reflecting the latest technology, as well as those that are home-made.
The dominant strand at the festival is improvised music, often composed “on the eyes and ears” of the audience. Real music without boundaries which the artist maps out during the process of creation. Performers kitted out with laptops, experimenters with the equipment commonly labelled lo-fi electronics and self-taught designers of the strangest instruments supply us with their peculiar synthesis of senses. This year familiarising us with their private perceptions of sound will be guests from the furthest corners of the world: from Lima, Tokyo, New York, Istanbul, Barcelona, London, Paris or The Hague. In Kraków’s Academy of Music and Contemporary Art Gallery, there will of course be no shortage of homegrown breakers of musical conventions.
This is not the mainstream music played at parties or inside shopping malls. This sound stands in opposition not only to the deluge of commercial pop culture, but even to the academic avant-garde. Such niche playing does however have its advantages. We never completely know what to expect from a performance. We will also never see so many original music machines and their creators trying to tame them. At what other festival would we hear a composition based on the clopping of horse hooves or witness the laying of a mandala in a synagogue (to ritual quasi-organ sounds) made from earth gathered from lands engulfed in conflict?
Nature gave us two eyes and two ears but only one tongue, so that we would see and hear more than speak. So look and listen carefully!
(Artur Jackowski, „Karnet” monthly)
Detailed programme at www.audio.art.pl