Signals Festival

/// Installations

Unique, site-specific and immersive audiovisual installations will be available to experience throughout the duration of Signals Festival 2020 - at our facilities in the Funkhaus.

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> 20 kHz

> 20 kHz is a contemplation on how humans and other living beings are affected (if at all) by the ultra high frequency noise which constantly surrounds us in modern high technological societies. In the form of an interactive sound installation, visitors are invited to use electromagnetic pick-up devices to sonify and aurally absorb frequencies normally beyond our hearing range.

/// About the artist
Swedish sound artist and electronic music producer Henri Falk explores different formats and contexts across a broad spectrum from techno and minimal dub, to ambient, sound art and installations.

A driving concept behind his work is to present familiar sonic landscapes and objects in a way which plays with our perception. By processing and often ‘zooming in’ on sounds, a micro-universe of hidden textures and rhythms can be unveiled.

Born in Finland 1984, grown up in the Swedish countryside and lived all his adult life in urban environments, he feels at home in and inspired by the sonic and visual landscapes in both of these contrasting habitats, from which he continuously extracts audio recordings and footage.

He is an alumni of dBs Music in Berlin, co-creator of the experimental performance event Das Schalllabor and works at the spatial sound art venues MONOM Sound and Geoff Stern Art Space in Berlin.

SoundCloud / Instagram

Fragile Ecologies

’Fragile Ecologies’ creates an energetic space which reflects on the impact of continuous ecological flux on language and expression. The immersive transitory work explores semantic shifts and communication patterns between entities inhabiting an ever transforming surrounding. In which ways does the imminent technocratic noise obstruct and reduce potential to receive and transmit across species and cause singularity? Which new hybridity and transmutations arise in the dynamic between interfering atmospherics and coalescence?

/// About the artists
Collaboration between intermedial artists Vito Willems, Tamas Marquetant and Robin Koek. In a search of perceptual symbiosis of hybrid virtualities and tangible realities they construct multi-sensory spaces of experience with no clear boundaries. Their work investigates non-linear autonomous systems and its emergent behaviour fusing a vast experience of spatial sound, interface- and visual design.

https://vitowillems.com/works.html
https://robinkoek.nl/

The Networked Wind Organ

Immerse yourself in the resonant hisses of a choir of Imacs. Catalyst tutor and sound artist Robin Koek converts a class room and turns into an instrument creating a space to breathe and tune in.

/// About the artists
Robin Koek (Netherlands, 1987) is an enterprising sound artist who aspires to nurture a new cognitive understanding of the world surrounding us mediated through art and education. His work reflects on the environment integrating field recordings and site-specificity in composition and installation practice, researching the spatial nature of sound in both the physical and virtual realm. Koek constructs immersive experiences at the intersections of these worlds merging analog, digital and acoustic phenomena. These augmented realities are sculpted out of code, sensing devices and media projections developed in interdisciplinary teams.

SoundCloud

BIOMIMIKRY

For many people technology is still very separate from nature, but like everything we perceive and use technology comes from it. This installation will materialise that link; the structure that connects nature and technology. By entering the matrix using a natural portal, you are invited into the festival.

/// About the artists
Vinzenz Hangler and Frank Peroni are interdisciplinary artists whose research and art is strongly linked with the natural world and the ephemeral structure of life. Their immersive creations bring together different media aiming to give the viewer a portal on society-related issues. Previously the two artists presented an installation for Acud Macht Neu in October 2019. This will be their second piece as a duo.

Instagram Vinzenz / Instagram Frank

The Biowar Project

Our senses have the ability to convert real-world information into electrical information that can be processed by the brain. The way we interpret this information --our perceptions-- affects our cells and microorganisms inhabiting us; Cellular, nuclear microorganisms that react, disintegrate and transform. Information is captured and transferred, micro creations are produced and the truth inside our cellular and atomic functions are in constant change, movement, decodification, process of death and regeneration. The ability of microorganisms to evolve and adapt to an environment that outpaces the speed of science is both surprising and disturbing. Technology gives us the possibility to perceive the inner and abstract micro-universes and translate them into fascinating aesthetics, which is the source of inspiration for the Biowar Project.

/// About the artists
The Rasa, composed of Raphael Faure and Sofi Martina, are multi-faceted artists who thrive on music, video, photography, live performances and installations. Through sound and visual landscapes, their art proposes to generate a reflector of sensations that allow them to transport their audience on a journey of questionings. Their quest lies in the generation of a sensorial experience in which the limits between reality and fantasy are blurred. The artists are interested in interdisciplinary practices, especially the crossover of visual arts and musical experimentation, diverging between mystical practices and scientific researches, under the cover of trickster’s personas.

Soundcloud / Instagram / Facebook

The Metamorphosis Project

Signals Festival is excited to present the two winners of the Interface Project – a collaboration between Catalyst and Manchester's Spirit Studios, which facilitated creative exchange between the two music production schools during COVID-19 lockdown.

The Metamorphosis Project is an audiovisual experience by Deckster, an Electronic Music Production student at Spirit Studios, and Parallel Processing, a Creative Audio Production & Sound Engineering student at Catalyst. Showcasing their music, and the visuals they created within their team, the installation will travel through an eclectic array of styles – from ambient to techno, bass music to glitch. Prepare for a visceral, mind-tripping experience.

Soundcloud Deckster / Soundcloud Parallel Processing

d’os et de sorts (of bones and spells)

D’os et de sorts is a tactile sound installation by ceramicist Myriam Perrot and sound designer Jamie Thomas. The installation is composed of hundreds of porcelain bones in reference to the cultural practice of casting lots. In between still life and archeological findings, bone arrangements act as a witness of past attempts to cope with the uncertainty of the future. Both sensory and reactive, the installation invites the visitor into an act of contemplation and action, left alone to decipher the various abstract formations or act upon through re-arranging them anew.

/// About the artists
Myriam Perrot is a French-Swiss artist based in Berlin since 2015. Her work is informed by a multidisciplinary engagement that finds its roots in an original training in set design and anthropology. Driven by an obsession for aesthetic refinement, her installations (ceramics) and illustrations inquire into the nature of spaces and materialities, often exploring a threshold found between rationalised space and imaginary worlds.

Jamie Thomas is an interaction designer, sound artist and musician exploring the relationship between physical objects or tools and their potential in sound production.

Myriam / Jamie

/// About Signals Festival

Exploring art and technology, Signals Festival is an annual showcase of Catalyst Berlin’s emerging and diverse creative communities. A non-profit, educational event with live performances, installations, screenings, workshops and in-depth dialogue