default x iii
default x iii
default den haag is a sound series hosting events with a focus on experimental music and sound art performances, for this edition they are collaborating with iii.
default den haag curates an evening with three performances that evoke specific listening modes. Through sound and image these challenge our (often limiting) perception of our everyday environments. Adomas Palekas explores organic processes beyond our sonic perception, working with electronic circuits and waterdrops to bridge molecular, electric and sonic bonds. Roc Montoriol and Katarina Kadijević combine bioacoustics, sonic ecology, and performance to investigate geo-biological entwinements between plants, humans, and places. Nika Son explores how our senses adapt in different states, observing the realms of sleeplessness, flickering between fatigue, restlessness and yearning.
The artists and their work
Adomas Palekas
Adomas Palekas is a sound artist, engineer and biotechnologist who works at the intersection of science and art. His current focus is creating sound devices’ that invite biological and nonbiological worlds to enact upon the music making process. With these interfaces, Adomas explores processes beyond our sonic perception: microbial metabolism, (in)organic bodies or chemical reactions become the primary compositional forces in the emergent sound works. His creative practice involves design of musical instruments and environment sensing interfaces, performance, field recordings, sound collage, and work with recycled/upcycled materials.
Rehydration : for four electro-organic circuits – Aerials
With four electronic circuits, waterdrops, sound and video projection Adomas emits the idea: For sound to grow, water must flow. As the drop lands upon a node, organic and inorganic matter dissolves, seeping into the dehydrated pores and cavities, bridging molecular, electric and sonic bonds. Like life on earth, Aerials exist in relationship with water – water that dissolves reagents, conducts reactions, hosts microorganisms and completes the oscillating circuit. The liquid intersection invites environment, both biological and nonbiological to act upon their vitality, whether it’d be temperature, humidity, chemical species, microbial life and it’s residues or even gravity. Fragile, vulnerable and exposed they oscillate.
Roc Montoriol & Katarina Kadijević
Roc Montoriol and Katarina Kadijević are two artists currently based in the Hague and studying at the Institute of Sonology. Their performances combine plant bioacoustics, sonic ecology, and performativity to investigate geo-biological entwinements between plants, humans, and places.
Plants, Speaker Cones, Solar Cells, Lasers, and Bluetooth Speakers
Plants are often regarded as silent, however they engage with sounds in many different ways. What stories of listening do vegetal encounters entail? Roc Montoriol and Katarina Kadijevíc have tuned their ears to various hearing membranes. Drawing inspiration from sound artists and bioacousticians, they craft DIY vibration sensors and microphones, by modifying piezo components, ultrasonic microphone capsules, or solar cells. In this sound performance, they create listening spaces engaging different plant recordings, and other vegetal soundings. By means of speakers, exciters or transducers, vibration motors, or daily objects, Roc & Katarina enact stories of plant listening, and perform vegetal encounters
Nika Son
Nika Son works as a musician, artist, film composer, DJ and curator in Hamburg. In her compositions, video- and soundworks she examines multi-sensory perception, its boundaries and interaction, but also forms of manipulation and illusion. Influenced by Musique Concrète and the outer space of electronic music, she plays with modified and fragmented concrete sounds, interwoven with digital and analog synthesis, broken rhythms, voices and modulated tape, translated into a very unusual musical language, as if one watches the audible. She has released albums via labels such as Entr’acte, VIS and Futura Resistenza
Scatter
multi-channel sound performance with video, objects, and light
Nika Son observes the realms of sleeplessness (insomnia), flickering between fatigue, restlessness and yearning. The piece explores how our senses adapt in differing states, probing the distinctions between hearing and truly listening. In a world of constant stimuli and information, the artist plays with shifts in perception, memory, coincidence, and the varying sense of time, while blurring the distinction between what is audible and what is actually visible. Tones, noises, rhythms as well as voices, languages and ways of speaking interact with surrounding darkness and forced incidences of light.
About default
default den haag is a non-profit curatorial initiative focused on the presentation of creative contemporary sound and performance in the Hague, curating and organizing their nomadic sound series with an international focus on experimental music and sound art performances since 2022, next to occasionally hosting accompanying talks and lectures.
On the 11th of October, default will present their sixteenth instalment as part of iii’s hosted program.
default x iii is supported financially by The Creative Industries Fund NL and The Municipality of The Hague.
