Obviously Unthinkable #3
Obviously Unthinkable #3
24/06/2022
Doors at 19:30
Event starts at 20:00
iii workspace
Tickets HERE
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Obviously Unthinkable # 3 featuring the world premiere of Stereodrome.
The capacity to entrain brainwaves with flashes of light was discovered in the 1930s by neurologist and cybernetics pioneer William Grey Walter. Brainwave entrainment is a method to stimulate the brain into entering a specific state by using a pulsing sound, light, or electromagnetic field. The pulses elicit the brain’s ‘frequency following’ response, encouraging brainwaves to align to the frequency of a given rhythm.
Bas van Koolwijk’s Stereodrome is a minimal VR system that directly controls optical brainwave entrainment by a stereo audio signal. A soundtrack is all it takes to produce content for the device. By presenting each eye with a colourfield interpretation of the corresponding left or right channel of the soundtrack, it offers an absolutely minimalistic experience of binocular vision.
Robert Curgenven and Kathleen McDowell’s SPECTRES is composed entirely of in-situ recordings with tone generators in 9 post-Communist architectures. It presents an interrogation of contemporary society across the threshold of the architecture from a former, but recent, epoch. A statement at that epoch’s inception, “alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft”, is often poetically translated as “all that is solid melts into air”. The live presentation of SPECTRES will include live lighting driven by the sound.
Video and audio artist Bas van Koolwijk uses both sound and image, be it analogue or in numerical code, as interchangeable data. He produces visual and acoustic compositions in which both manifestations powerfully interact.
To perform these interactions Van Koolwijk develops his own hardware and software applications. The results of which are presented in variable projects such as live performances, installations and single screen videos.
Robert Curgenven produces albums, performances and installations which emphasize physicality, our embodied response to sound and its correspondence to location, air, weather and architecture. His recorded output includes Tailte Cré-Umha (Bronze Lands) and SIRÈNE, pipe organ works, for his Recorded Fields Editions; Oltre and Built Through for LINE imprint; and Climata, recorded in 15 of James Turrell’s Skyspaces across 9 countries. Curgenven has produced works and installations for National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Poland (Krakow), Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw), Palazzo Grassi (Venice), Transmediale (Berlin) and the National Film and Sound Archive (Australia). He has presented live performances at festivals including Sydney Festival (Sydney Town Hall), Maerzmusik (Kraftwerk Berlin), TodaysArt (The Hague), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Cork Midsummer and was an artist for the EU’s SHAPE (Sound, Heterogeneous Art and Performance in Europe) platform in 2019.
Kathleen McDowall‘s work embraces the abstract and the physical in equal measures and in a very concrete approach. She has undertaken solo physical performances including Performance Art Oslo as well as residencies in Forte Marghera (Venice) and Oxford Art Factory (Sydney). In 2019 she collaborated on international festival performances with Robert Curgenven on their live light and sound performance, AGENESIS at festivals including Insomnia (Tromsø), UHFest (Budapest), Gamma (St Petersburg), and OSA (Sopot).
